This Beehive Hasn't Been Opened In 10 Years...Until NOW!

Oh, the frame spacing is just wild here. Proper, proper wild. Probably my favorite type of video doing this. And that patio slab is ridiculously heavy. Wow, that's probably the heaviest patio slab I think I've ever picked up. We'll toss that to the side. Wow, let's go. Right, we're going to take the roof off first. And nothing fancy about the roof. You can see very, very moist though, very damp. We'll stack everything over there. Old, old crown board. You can see, look at that, just flaking away. This has been here for a very, very long time. The roof is on, but that moisture has just got in. I expect, or I estimate, probably 10 years, I reckon, this has been here as an absolute minimum. Like, there is no point me taking this. Look at this crown board here, just— oh wow, I didn't even mean to do that, but just flaking away. So the landowner said I can, I can leave whatever I want here. And look at that crown board, that is about as old as you're gonna get. So we'll just crumple that up. We're in a woodland setting with kind of like wood chip on the floor, so this is gonna be absolutely fine. But look at that, look how ridiculously rotten it is. Right, so next step, castellated supers. Always find it interesting with stuff like this, the kind of last beekeeper who came here, what was his reasoning? Why is frame number 2 and frame number 10 missing in here? Got one bee, that's the first bee coming up. But let's have a look at these combs, see how old they are. Obviously struggling for food here, there's not much food in there. And I very, very foolishly I've actually left my hive tool at home. I thought I had it with me, but I've not. If you're doing stuff like this, hive tool number one. Not so much smoke. I'm not a massive fan of smoke when doing stuff like this. Right, first few bees you can see are starting to jump up. Look at how they've propolised that queen excluder. That is absolutely wild. So for some reason over the years, they've just decided to fill that in. They've obviously got cold at some point and they didn't want the draft going upwards. But we have got bees in here. There's definitely bees. You can see them flying up. This is the super. So there's a queen excluder, they're on brood and a half, and then there's a super underneath and a brood box. So I'm guessing that there's gonna be a relatively good-sized colony in here. Now in terms of the type of bee, it does look like some sort of hybrid, I would say. Definitely not Welsh Blacks, but a bit of banding on this bee here. But we'll be able to tell a bit more once we get them out. Are you as excited as I am? 'Cause I am very, very excited at this point. So you can see just how old that is, flimsy and fragile, but in perfectly usable condition, covered in propolis. I love that. And then we're into the brood and a half super. And again, look at this incredible wax and propolis structure that you've got here. So I can already see the bees kind of like coming and going for me. You can see they're trying to sting me through the veil there, and I've not really even got into the colony yet. So there are going to be angry bees, they're going to be aggressive. I do tend to find with local mongrels, they are You know, I'm used to calm Buckfast bees. They're dead calm and dead nice. And local mongrels are bred for survival. They're doing it themselves. They're self-selecting for survival. And it tends to be the angry ones that do better than the ones that aren't so angry. You can see all of that detritus over the years and then all of the wax that they've built up and all of the really cool propolis and propolising structures that they've put together. You can see how wet it is over in that corner as well. The darkness that's happened as a result of damp. Oh, I absolutely love going through colonies like this. That's a good indication, or I should just say it's a bad indication, that there's gonna be some sort of kind of decay maybe going on in here. You've got woodlice knocking around and the bees don't seem too bothered by that. The bees are kind of covering just this section here, although we do have some bees in this corner here. So this could be a reasonable-sized colony. And I'm guessing that the majority of them are gonna be up here and maybe not that many down in the brood box. But if they're in the brood box as well, that is a very, very decent-sized colony. Right, so first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try and take this super off. As if I forgot my hive tool. That was schoolboy error number one. And that is glued shut like I've never felt anything glued shut before. I might need to get like a makeshift hive tool. How am I gonna get this? Right, I've just got in there. I've cracked the seals. As I suspected, all of the frames underneath are sticking to the top box as well. So we're gonna need to twist it round. The good news is there's lots and lots of bees in there. Huge, huge amount of bees. You can see there now bees coming in and out of the entrance. And I have to say, they do look quite dark, these bees. So these are probably some sort of Welsh black local mongrel, but the majority of the bees are relatively dark. So these will be kind of like a high percentage of Apis mellifera mellifera, but with some kind of local mongrelization as well. You can see just where I'm trying to kind of like manipulate that box, the bees are really going for me. These are not nice bees. And as soon as I get in, they are going to properly, properly go for me, I think. So I'm just going to continue trying I want to break up that box as best as I can. As I said, the bottom brood frames are stuck and probably completely glued to the underside of the top super frames, and the bees will just kind of naturally do that to secure their home. There's lots of bees, there's lots of honey, and hopefully there should be some brood as well. Okay, it's not a hive tool, but I've got my Leatherman Raptor here, which is for cutting people out of seat belts. You know, I've got one in the car. You've got to have everything. But this will work as a really good hive tool. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this as a hive tool, starting to pull some of these frames out now, and I'll show you each frame one by one before I put it back in. So frame number 1, honey and an unmistakable smell of ling heather. Oh, that is absolutely delightful. Really, really nice. A big, strong, gelatinous ling heather. I am going home, taking a frame of that home. We are gonna taste that. That looks amazing. So you can see there, bees not happy at all, and understandably so. There might be something in here that's gonna stop me actually eating that. I think we've just got an old— wow. That shows how properlised down everything is. Obviously not using the right tools for the job here, but I'm pretty certain down there I can see like an Apiguard lid, which is like a thymol treatment, so probably won't eat any of that honey. There we go, got that one out. But another beautiful frame of honey or stores there. You can see down there we've got an Apiguard treatment, so none of this honey is going to be good to eat, unfortunately. Right, next frame. Interesting, that frame has just completely broken away. So they've obviously braced that up in some very unique style. It's annoying. Ah, this is what happens when you have frames that are like fully propolised together like this. It is an absolute pain. You just get bits keep on breaking off. Very, very annoying. Right, let's give it a couple more goes. I'm not going to break all of the frames here though. I'd prefer to leave the bees to it, and if we can get access to that bottom brood box, just to do a brood check. That will make it a bit easier. I'm not going to lie, that fooled me a bit. I thought just kind of at first that was brood. It's not, it's just capped stores. Really looked like brood because if you can look kind of in the middle there, you'll see that there is granulated stores as well. So the granulated stores was white, thought that was larva and capped stores, but it's not. Closer inspection is quite clear that that is just capped stores of a different color and then granulated stores, open granulated stores in the middle. But look at that for a frame, completely wild. I reckon what's happened here is some of this foundation has kind of come out or it's been eaten, probably eaten away by a mouse or something. And then the bees are trying to build it all back together as best as they possibly can. And you can see it's making a little bit of a mess down there, which is, well, I say slightly annoying, very annoying for this kind of inspection here. Again, similar thing on that frame there. It's crazy, isn't it? You think that was brood. It's definitely not though. I am going to uncap a bit of it just to see what's kind of on the inside of it. But very strange. You don't often see that color differentiation like that there where you've got Like, that's capped stores. Looks to me like this is capped stores as well, but from afar it really does look like brood. So let's just open it up and just kind of confirm that. Yep, so it's definitely capped stores, and the reason it's gone such a strange color is it is just so incredibly granulated. Look at that. I know you're thinking it's lava, it's lava. It's not, it's definitely not. It's something very hard. Yeah, it's sweet as well. It smells sweet. Confident that that is just really dried old granulated stores that they've capped over in a very strange way. So while we've got access to this, let's get this Apiguard tray out. That is going to be main reason I think that they're gluing stuff together down there. So that there, for anyone that doesn't know, is just a tray that you have some thymolated gel and then you use that to try and kill varroa. So what would be really, really good is if there was some sort of date on here, but I don't think there is. Look at all that propolis in there. Brilliant amount of propolis. I love that. That is super, super Oh, I just love the smell of propolis as well. It's one of my favorite things. That is pure propolis there. So looking inside, you can see that is a big, strong colony of bees. They're covering all of the frames. The supers are there. And you might be thinking, well, just leave them, put them back together again. I can't take this colony of bees until I've done this check. Okay. It's the end of November today, but it's flying weather. The bees were flying when I got here. It's about 11 or 12 degrees. It's quite nice and warm in the sun. These bees are all gonna go back in, so there's absolutely no problem doing the inspection today. But how cool is that? This is a proper, proper abandoned beehive full of bees, not been touched for 10 years at least, I would say. Could be 20, could be 30, could be 5, but I reckon by the state of the frames, the fact of how old and propolised everything is together, we're looking at double digits here for years. Bees all the way down there on that bottom surface. Top box is full to the brim with honey, lots of stores. Even though it's granulated, the bees will be working that consistently. This is a really cool find. So you can see the bees there flying in, flying out. They are like a little bit angry, but they're not that bad. I've seen much, much worse colonies, especially abandoned colonies, than this. So we will persevere. Remember, the reason that we're doing this— we want to try and find some brood, and we want to assess that brood to see if the brood is healthy. We're looking for signs of EFB, which is European foulbrood, and AFB— both incredibly contagious diseases that will spread across all of the bees in the local area if not kept in check. So very, very similar frame, that one. We won't go messing around with that one. I can see another Apiguard tray down there. I keep on saying Apivars because what I use all the time is Apivar, but what a lot of people like to use is Apiguard. Not a fan of Apiguard myself. Taints your honey supers. Gutted. And also not the most effective. But how good do those frames of honey look? Look at that. We're gonna have to have a taste at some point. At some point, even though that thymol has been in there, I'll be able to detect if there's kind of any taste going in. Those trays could have been in there and emptied way before they collected this honey, so it might be okay. Lucky I brought my Leatherman with me, wasn't it? This is going to have to have like a deep clean afterwards. Bought that Leatherman just in case I was ever in like an accident or saw a really bad accident and thought, you know, I need to cut someone out of a seat belt. I never thought I would be inspecting a colony of bees and using it as a hive tool. Right, so let's lean in. Oh, they're so stuck in. Right, there you go, there's another Apiguard tray. So if you just look down there, hopefully you can see, you can see where that frame is like connected into it, and that's why I couldn't get the boxes off. Okay, it would have been easier with a hive tool, but I would have still had this problem. The frames are just so poorly spaced and stuck to each other, and the boxes are stuck to each other, that I wouldn't have really had a chance getting that off. But I do now, so this is all going to be free. All right, so there we go, that is every frame out. I'm just going to take that top box, which you can see comes off really easily now, and I'm going to pop it directly down there. Queen could be down there, so I'm just kind of isolating her if she is there. Look at this! That is a quality, quality brood box of bees. Very interesting spacing though, and this is why everything's gone a little bit crazy here. They're using wide spacers in the brood nest, which is just like the worst thing in the world that you want to do. You want to use Standard DM4s in there. Basically all of the frames should be nudged up a bit closer together and you wouldn't have this wild comb everywhere. It looks super cool though. Whenever I'm doing these videos, I do always think about the last person who was looking after these bees, and I always picture it maybe like it's an old man in his 80s and he's been keeping bees for years and he's like a really good experienced beekeeper and knows exactly what he's doing. And then, I don't know, he gets, he gets a bit older and the dementia sets in maybe, and he just starts forgetting things and Before you know it, it's an abandoned colony of bees that isn't in the best condition. But I don't think that's necessarily the case here. There were 2 Apiguard strips in there, and that means at least that they were trying to kind of combat varroa, trying to treat the bees and kill the varroa mites that were in them. Don't know how long ago that was. I definitely question the spacing down here, but apart from that, everything else I would say is relatively standard. He's gone for a brood and a half configuration, good standard wooden nationals. Everything's set up nice. He's in a wonderful location. Definitely interested about going back there and seeing if we can find any more at the end of this video though. But let's get into the brood box, see if we can find some brood, and more importantly, see if we can find that queen. Right, so this is always the fun bit. This is the bit where they go for you if they're going to go for you, because I'm going into their brood nest and they do not like people going into their brood nest. Look how much everything is stuck together there. That is wild how much it's stuck together. You can see as I go like that, look, Everything's just moving kind of all at once. The bees do not like it, but there's no real other way of doing it. I need to break these frames apart in order to start getting them out. Because the spacing is just not right in this box, the bees are going to get really angry with me. You can see here how all of the combs are kind of extended out within the other combs, so they just become like one homogeneous piece of bee comb. Very, very difficult to take apart. Once I've got the first one out, Which should, I'm hoping, make it just a little bit easier to work. Right, let's get that first one out. No, it's exactly what I thought. We're going to have to do this in sections. So we're just going to have to take out that whole section there. Can't see any brood in here. That's really, really annoying. I wanted some brood down here because brood means that I can move them today. See what I mean about the spacing's wrong? So everything's just kind of like falling apart. Be really, really careful. I don't want to drop the queen anywhere here. But you can see as I'm opening that up, it's incredibly sticky. Oh, the frame spacing is just wild here. Proper, proper wild. You know, if I was a queen, I'd be going underneath here. That would just be the easy place to hide. And I'm reluctant to start breaking everything up just at the moment. What would be very, very nice is if we just found the queen quite early on. So I'm just going to rest that there, give myself a little bit of space to work, and we're just going to kind of carry on, persevere, and just hope that the queen is over there somewhere. So you can see very, very old dark frames there. No sign of any brood. Oh no, tell a lie, there is a sign of brood and there is a sign that those Apivar strips, Apiguard strips I should say, have not been effective. Right, so look over here. That is not a good sign. So what we're seeing there is signs of capped brood, bees with their tongues out, spotty brood. To me, very, very clear indication there. Heavy, heavy varroa load and I'm talking severe, Heavy varroa load there goes all the way round. Just trying to see if I can see any eggs. Can't see any eggs, but it might just be because I've not got my phone. Let me run and get my phone, get a light on it. So no sign of any eggs in there. I thought that would be the case. But another sign here. Let me get this one in. Get that to focus. Deformed wing virus there. Quite a lot of bees with deformed wing virus I'm seeing now. Again, that's another sign of a virus that is carried by the varroa that is causing all of this damage over here. So it's not looking good for these bees, I'm not going to lie. Although there's a lot of bees here, I would say that this is a relatively recent swarm. So probably a swarm in 2024. It's come in here, and what bees do in the wild is they'll tend to use swarming as a mechanism to cope with varroa. It catches back up with them really, really quickly. So even though we've got the Apiguard trays in there, I'm discounting those. I think they're probably from 10 years ago, something like that. And the bees are just kind of coming in here. Swarming, dying, getting robbed out, and then going again, and another swarm comes back in. So I don't reckon this swarm has been here for that long, but they are not in a good state at all. So as I said, look at that brood there. You can see the tongues coming out. Patches of brood like that, not a good indicator. Not thinking it's AFB or EFB, but it could be. Just because we're not seeing the obvious signs of that doesn't mean it's not here. But what we 100% can see Is varroa, dead bees inside with their tongues hanging out. That is classic varroa. And then deformed wing virus, that is another classic varroa sign. So without a doubt, we've got super, super high varroa load. I'm not sure whether I'm going to take these bees back. Like, to me, there's no value in these bees. To other people that I know, there is value in these bees. They'll like the fact that they're feral stock. They'll like the fact that even though there's high varroa, they're not dead yet. So I'm potentially going to give this to someone who can get more value out of these bees here. Look, if we turn that over, we're seeing exactly the same thing again. High mortality rate in that brood. Very, very unhealthy bees here. There's no way that I'm taking these home. There's just way, way too much risk involved here. Way too much varroa for my liking. You can see it here, decomposing bodies. That's just a surefire sign to me that the varroa load in this colony is way too much for the bees to be able to cope with. If I left these bees, what would ultimately happen next is that they would realize that they cannot manage that varroa load on their own. And they would just abscond. And then if there's any EFB or AFB in this colony, it stays in the honey. The bees will come and rob it out from somewhere else, and it will spread that disease. So it's always a good idea to do this. You might be looking at this and thinking, what are you doing? Just leave the bees, just leave them to it. I'm potentially nullifying a very, very dangerous cycle that can spread disease across hundreds of thousands of bees, millions of bees in the local area. This is the responsible thing to do. Very, very difficult. You see, I've just squished a bee there, and you can't really do anything else because it's The spacing is just not correct in this hive. Very difficult to take frames out without kind of agitating the bees and without squishing them. Again, those 2 frames there are just completely stuck. Like you see, if I pull one out, the other one next to it's just coming along for the ride. Let's try and separate it a bit. Let's get these ones out. There's not much in these ones over here, even though they're completely stuck together. Wow. It's just carnage. Look, you can see we've got old ones like that, and this is what almost certainly would've happened. That frame there, good indication of what this is probably like 6 months ago, because the bees swarm in, the varroa gets too much, they abscond, leaving behind everything— the brood, the honey, anything that's left. The mice come in, they rip everything down, they leave it like this, and then the bees come back in and they draw everything back out again. But it's not neat, the spacing's wrong, you've got these random kind of wired frames like that, and the bees just do what they want. And you end up with— perfect example here, look at this frame. And you end up with a frame like that, which is just impossible to inspect. Kind of, could you get a frame that was more all over the place than that? I don't think you could. Like a 3-layer frame, really, really deep. Cool, but a nightmare. Right, so it looks like we're out from where the majority of that brood is. I'm just going to move that frame. We'll just open up these last 2 just to see. Oh, again, they're stuck badly together. All right, there we go. Again, look at that. Wild, absolutely wild. You can see in there crystallized stores in there again, more crystallized stores. So a right old mess, I'm not going to lie. Lots and lots of issues with this hive. The spacing is wrong, the spacers are making the frames incredibly difficult to manage. There is a high, high varroa load, probably like in the top 1% of varroa loads. And varroa is just a little mite that lives on the bee, travels around from kind of colony to colony on the back of bees, spreading viruses and making the bees very, very sick. So it's not the varroa mites that kill the bee, it's the viruses and the buildup of the viruses that they transmit that ultimately goes ahead and kills the bees. They're doing okay for food. That's something that they definitely thrived on, and they've gone out. There's ling heather up here. They've obviously taken the ling heather, and they're doing very, very well on it. So they're not going to die through starvation. But I'm almost certain that they are going to die through absconding due to a high varroa load. Potential AFB, potential EFB, so I'm not touching this colony of bees. There's no way this is coming back with me. I'll leave all of the boxes here and I will give them to someone. I'll put a little advert out there and say, who wants to come and get these bees? You need to responsibly manage them though. The first thing that they would need to do with responsible management is to use some oxalic acid or apibioxal as a sublimation. There's no brood Here at the moment, so that's the most effective treatment that you could use to kill all of the mites. The bees will still have to live with those viruses throughout the winter, but hopefully they can get them through to the spring. Plenty of food in order for them to be able to do that. If they get through to the spring, I would recommend a shook swarm, which means taking every single frame that you can see here, all of the boxes away, basically just leaving just the bees. Put in those bees, every single one, onto new frames, new equipment, new foundation, new everything, and then feeding them after 3 days once they purge their stomachs. And then, and only then, they've got a chance of kind of getting better and getting out of this really bad condition. So here's the plan. I'm going to try and put it back together as best as I possibly can. I know that was quite invasive, and ultimately the bees would have been better left on their own, but if I'd have taken these bees into my apiary, I would have potentially spread that varroa around and taken down way more bees than are in this colony. So let's say there's 5,000 bees in this colony. If I took it to my apiary and it wiped out 5 colonies, I've lost 50,000 bees. So don't hate on me saying that I've killed bees in this video. A lot more bees would have died had I not done this investigation. Now the investigation has showed me that these bees are a disease risk, a pest risk, particularly for that varroa. They put it all back together again. I'm going to ring up someone else, they're going to come and get it, and then I'm going to go and have a look over there and see if there are any more colonies in this You can see I'm trying to put everything back together in like the same order. You can roughly see, roughly see where things go. Get the spacers back together again. I'll keep an eye out for that queen if I can see her, but I don't think we're gonna be able to see that queen today. Like these frames here, there's no way that I'm gonna get them back in properly. So I'm just gonna take off some of that comb and we'll just kind of squeeze that in where we can. And that means I've got half a chance of getting the majority of these frames back in here. Then we'll take the super back. I have to say, if I was going to guess where the queen was, I reckon she's going to be on this frame here. Just the most amount of bees on it, and it was in a really nice warm part of the colony. How much of a setup does that look like? She's not there yet, but I did think she could be on that frame if she was going to be anywhere. Right, so I know this is a little bit wild. I'm not going to be stupid enough and take my veil down. I know people will be urging me on at home to do that. I want to taste the honey. I'm not going to take a frame away. I think that would be bad form, giving them to someone else. I'm just gonna have a little taste of the honey, see what it's like. So you can see there all of that honey with the wax on it. Let's give that a go. Absolutely incredible, that frame. It's not ling heather, that frame, so there must just be a bit of ling heather somewhere else. That's actually lime honey, like really predominant lime, very tangy, really, really nice. Wow. Probably have a taste of this one as well. Suspect that's going to be the same. Try not to eat any bees. That's going to be more difficult than it It was. Well, delicious honey. Some of the nicest honey I think I've ever tasted. Really, really nice lime honey. Wow! Oh man, that there is some of the purest Lingheather honey I have ever tasted in my life. Dark, treacly, thick. Look at that. You see it there? That is going in my mouth. Exquisite tasting honey. So the bees are going back into their entrance now. I know that was disruptive, but I did what I needed to do. I did it as quick as I possibly could. I've not taken a huge amount of honey out. I've got the bees all back in there, and we will get someone else to come and collect them. Now there's a couple of spare frames just because I've not been able to get everything back together, so I will just take those home and burn them because they are a disease risk as well. Right, so before we go, let's go and have an explore and see if there's any other hives in this apiary. So we found another roof, a very, very rotten roof. So there's 3 roofs, so you never know, we might find some more. So overgrown here, it's ridiculous. Try and go through another way. Just noticed in that time as well, I got stung in the ear. Very nice. Does look like it could lead somewhere. No, it's a dead end. Oh well, at least we tried. An abandoned colony of bees, not looking good. Hive aroa. Lots of stores, potential disease risk. If you enjoyed that and you want to know the next update on this colony, definitely hit the subscribe button. We've got loads more content at Black Mountain Honey.