In this No Nonsense Beekeeping episode, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey walks viewers through the rapid assessment of four colonies he has adopted from a deceased beekeeper. He performs brief, targeted inspections focused solely on checking food stores, adding large slabs of fondant to colonies with low reserves, and leaving well‑fed colonies untouched. Edwards explains why supers are premature this early in the season, outlines the upcoming two‑week cold spell, and emphasizes the importance of ensuring sufficient stores before colder weather. He also mentions installing a couple of bait hives to capture prime swarms expected in mid‑May, and provides practical tips on minimizing disturbance during winter‑time checks. The video concludes with a call to subscribe.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. As you can see, really, really busy here today. We're going to take a look at this— the deceased beekeeper's colonies that I've adopted for this season. They're looking really nice and healthy. The sun's out, the dandelions are out, and we're going to take a look at the colonies and just make sure they've got enough feed. So we've got kind of like a 2-week cold spell coming up, so although they look busy today, we want to make sure that they've got enough stores to kind of keep them going through that period. Not going to think about putting supers on them yet, definitely way too early in the season where we are. Down south, you're into supers territory already. So yeah, we'll get in. I just want to make sure there's enough food on them. I'm going to give them a little bit of a top-up of fondant, and we're going to wrap them back up for the next couple of weeks and And then we'll come back and hopefully they'll be ready for a super. So, doesn't always work like this, but I have caught these guys just in time, just in the nick of time. Can you see how much fondant's left there? We're talking maybe 50 to 100 grams of fondant, nowhere near enough. We're going to give them a nice big fat slab of fondant to keep them going. If you lift up the box, there's a little bit of weight in it, not a huge amount though. There's probably some stores in there. I'm not going to bother doing any inspections. This is a healthy colony. You can tell they're expanding. I'm just going to stick a bit of fondant on there, then we'll come back in a couple of weeks and we'll see how they're getting on. So as normal, we don't mess around when we're putting fondant on. Nice big slab, got 4 kilos there. Wind back the blue plastic. Place it over the hole, and we're done. As you can see, that was a really, really quick manipulation. I know now that that colony's got enough food to last it for at least kind of two or three weeks. Big strong colony. It's going to go really, really well for the spring flows. Last thing I want it to happen though is to grow up too big and then die through. Kind of starvation before it can reach those flows. So we're happy with that one. So this colony hasn't got through its fondant anywhere near as quick. There's plenty of fondant there, no action required from me. Quite happy with that one. Much smaller colony, that one. Everything's good, we don't need to do anything else. And then the final colony Very similar situation to the first, hardly any fondant left. So we're going to stick another big slab of fondant on here just to make sure they've got enough. If you heft them, there's a reasonable amount of stores in there, but what I can do is I can take the fondant away once I'm finished and I've made sure they've got through the winter and there's a good strong flow on. And that's it, we're done. Like I say, we don't mess around with the bees at this time of year. We do it really, really short, really, really quick inspections. We come here with a view to what we want to find. Today we're looking for stores. This one really low, that one was really low, this one was okay, so we just topped up the 2 that required it. And that's it, we're done. Ratchet them back up and we're on our way. So no messing around, we're not looking in the frames, we're not looking for queens or eggs or any of that. We're just checking to see if they've got enough food to get them through because, you know, it's going to get a bit colder, they're not going to be able to get out. What we're also doing here today is we're going to stick up a few bait hives. You've seen my video about bait hives, it's always good every apiary to kind of have 1 or 2 bait hives just up a tree. So we're going to stick a couple of them up now as well. I won't do the video, you've seen that already on a video, but it's a good time to get them out. Prime swarms kind of happen around here, maybe middle of May. That's a really, really good peak for the prime swarms around here, so you can't have them out too early. Get them out, get them up, and catch some swarms. So that's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell, and I'll see you next time.
