This Tiny Colony Didn't Survive The Winter

I found a dead colony of bees in a stack of boxes. Let's go and have a look. I'm going to do a full autopsy. So I was moving out these boxes over the Christmas period, having a little tidy up. I peeked inside and I found a dead colony of bees. But before I show you inside, Let's talk about this configuration because it's a right old mess of a configuration. I had some frames here, some boxes that I left outside completely sealed up to process in the winter. Came back to process them in the winter and the boxes must have slipped a little bit and I've got this gap here where obviously a colony has come in. So this setup here is obviously not set up for the bees, they just found their way in, but it's a really bad place for them to have found their way in. It's got a thin metal sheet roof, that causes a huge amount of condensation to form directly underneath it, which is where the bees go to cluster. You honestly couldn't get a worse environment for the bees. I'm gonna take this down over to the fire, warm up a little bit, and we'll do a full autopsy and see what we think happened with this colony of bees. So just as I was walking through here to get to the nice warm fire, I noticed how wet those boxes were there. And you can see the condensation. I can feel it there, but the drips all coming down the side, It is the perfect setup here to attract the condensation. And it's interesting because it is the exact reverse of what I teach people, which is keep it nice and insulated up at the top and less insulated on the sides, and then all of the water can track out. What this one here is doing is just attracting all of the condensation up to the top. And then when you combine that with cold, look at all of this water coming out here. When you combine that with the cold, it kills the bees very, very fast, especially if you have little small colonies inside big towers of beehives like this. So I've taken that top box of 3 off and I put it over there, and that is where the majority of the bees are. But it's left this little pile of bees, and then underneath here there's nothing, there's just foundation. What's clearly happened here is a swarm has found its way into this beehive here, made its home there, but because it was such a small colony, or maybe the virgin queen failed to mate, they have perished very early into the winter. So you can see if we go any further down, we've just got frames of foundation or frames that have not been drawn out. Let's take a look what killed this colony. And as I say it, I can see the condensation dripping off of them. So it was just a box of foundation, but the bees have clearly come inside and drawn a lot of that out. And even on that first frame there, you can see the foundation has kind of buckled from where it should have been, and the bees have started drawing it out. Very cold at the moment, so the wax is brittle. So this is no ordinary swarm, this is no prime swarm, this is a tiny cast swarm that's come at the end of the season. I only put these boxes in there kind of middle of August, so it's a late August or early September swarm. And because it's just a tiny cast swarm, probably with a little virgin queen, this explains the tiny size of the colony inside. I'm 2 frames in now into a 5-frame box, and they've drawn a bit out, but we've not come across any dead bees at all just yet. Even as I go over to the 3rd frame in this 5-frame box, you can see not that many bees at all. The first one or 2 dead ones there. This was a tiny, tiny swarm that really didn't stand much of a chance. So I'm onto the 4th frame in this 5-frame box, and as you can see, we have got a cluster of bees. Not a big cluster at all. There's only 2 frames like this, and they're not even covering this single frame. And the fire seems to be crackling away nicely down there, but it's quite clear to me what has happened here. This little mini swarm has taken residence in my box full of frames, and it honestly is one of the smallest cast swarms I've ever seen. All of the bees combined in this box are less than half a frame, and without that thermal mass, that generation of heat inside the cluster, setting them up in a big cool vertical tunnel like this with a nice condensing metal roof, These bees here never stood a chance, and I only realized they were there when I came to clean out the boxes and thought that I'd kept them completely bee-free. So what do you do with these frames? What do you do with these bees if you find something similar? The easiest thing to do, the most hygienic thing to do, and the strangest thing to do is actually to burn them. So that's what I'm going to do today. I'm going to scrape all of the dead bees off straight into the fire, sterilizing any of that wax and stuff that comes off. And then I'll go ahead, melt these down, reclaim the wax, refresh the frames once they're sterilized, and start all over again. So I'm going to knock these bees into the fire, and let's take a look and see what is underneath, if anything at all. So this here gives the best indication as to what has actually happened. All of these bees have died with their heads down into the cells trying to scrape any remnants of honey. It's very clear that a swarm has taken residence with not that many bees at all. Tried to set themselves up and they have failed. They've drawn out as much wax as they possibly can. They've probably gone out and foraged a little bit. The queen's maybe tried to go out and mate. She's probably failed. But even if that queen had gone out and successfully mated, this colony wouldn't have stood a chance because there's nowhere near enough stores to get them through. Starvation definitely got them before the cold did because I can see it with the way that the bees have got their heads down into the cells. So I see people doing this a lot. They'll take out a frame like this over winter and they'll say the bees died because of the cold, where In reality, it's quite clear here that the bees died because they starved, and then the cold makes it look a lot worse. It gives you the, the moldiness and the rancidness and the dampness on the bees, and people say, well, that's what killed the bees. But quite clearly it's not. Quite clearly it is the starvation due to the fact that the bees are orientated with their heads down into the cells. So I could reclaim all of the wax in these frames, and that's what I said I was going to do earlier, but I spotted a little bit of brood in there that I don't like. There's also some mouse damage here as well, so I'm not even going to bother trying to reclaim these frames. I'm just going to burn the lot of them. So there we go, a little swarm that didn't make it, didn't have enough food, definitely wasn't warm enough to get through the winter. Tidy these boxes up and we go again in the spring.