Laurence Edwards feeds a starving, aggressive honey bee colony a kilogram of fondant to help it survive winter. The bees are defensive because they're running low on honey, a problem he's seeing across multiple hives after a pre-emptive split earlier in the season.
Today we're going to check a colony to see if they've got enough stores to get them through winter. Right, so we've been around the apiary. I've got a helper with me today, first day that Richard's here helping me on the hives. I'll show you a little picture of him in a bit. We've been around, done some hefting, I've fed a couple of nucs, but this colony here is very, very light. The bees chased us away, so we've got our suits on. I'm going to get inside here now, put some fondant on, some hive alive fondant that was given to me for free, just to keep the bees going over the next couple of months. But I thought this would be a good video to take a look inside because not only is it a big strong colony of bees, but they're also a little bit feisty as well. So I'm going to get my veil on, we'll get inside, take a look at this colony. Right, so I'm going to open these guys up, they're going to come out, they're definitely going to ping me in the face. These are horrible bees. I'm going to do it as quick as I possibly can, flip that feeder over, put the fondant on, but I'll give you a few nice close-ups of the bees just so you can see what they're looking like. Right, so there we go. First look inside a colony. And I'll tell you what, they are super, super aggressive. That is the first colony we've opened when Richard was here. Hopefully that doesn't scare him away. I promise, Richard, they do get a lot calmer than that as we go through the season. But that's it. Look, they're calm now. We've got the fondant in there. That's gonna see them through. Only about a kilo of fondant there, so I'm gonna have to come back and check on these again. I think they're a little bit touchy because there's not much stores left, and I think that's probably contributing to how aggressive they are at the moment. Other colonies in this apiary, not too bad, but when a colony goes so low on stores, they will get a little bit defensive like this. Now, if you want to see how this colony was formed, I did a pre-emptive Demerara split earlier on in the season. That's how I formed this big monster colony. Check out this video here.
