Untouched For Over 10 Years - What's Inside Will SHOCK You!

Today we're looking at an abandoned hive in someone's garden. So I've been given a call by someone to say there's an abandoned hive that needs a new home. So what we're going to do in this video is we're going to open it up and show you what's inside. So whenever you're looking at abandoned colonies, the first thing that you need to check for is disease. That's the main risk here. You don't want to take a colony that's got any disease and put that into an apiary where you could risk contaminating all of your own colonies. So the main thing we're looking for here is we're going to check through each of the brood frames one by one. We're going to shake the bees off and look for any signs of disease, so that's any of the foulbroods. If you find any foulbroods, be sure to kind of contact your bee inspector straight away and report any findings that you have. If we can look through it and we can identify no diseases whatsoever, then we can kind of put in place a bit of an action plan as to how to get this colony out of the garden and then into one of your apiaries. Obviously, the main objective here is to kind of try and get all of the bees possible out. The person who lives here doesn't want any bees left, so you don't just want to kind of package them up in the middle of the day and take them away, because then all of the flying bees will come back and congregate and cause a bit of a nuisance. So we're going to break this video down into like 2 or 3 steps. The first one is going to be we're going to inspect the colony, and check to see whether there's any disease, and then we're going to kind of put in place a clearer board, try and condense that hive down a little bit further so we can transport it suitably, and then we're going to leave it until dusk. Once all the bees are in the colony, then we'll seal it up and then we'll take it to our new apiary. So let's get inside and take a look. Okay, so we're going to take a look inside the hive. So first thing, they're all the way up to the top. We've got absolutely tons of wild comb all the way up the top. So there was a void there and they've already kind of gone into there and started storing honey. So the chances are that they're going to fill all of these boxes. So again, when you're treating with a colony, working with a colony that you're not too sure about, always use plenty of smoke. You want to make sure that you kind of limit the disturbance as best as you possibly can. And protect yourself as well, so make sure you've got a really good sting-proof suit on. Now at this point, it's always best to make sure you've got your hive tool with you. And as expected, these are really, really stuck down together. This colony has not been looked at for about 2 years, so I mean, the varroa load is going to be high. There's going to be lots of kind of comb all stuck together. The boxes are going to be difficult to take apart. We don't even know if there's frames in here at this point. So just ease it off as gently as you can. And yeah, that top box there is full of wild comb, so the chances are the whole way down is going to be full of wild comb now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down one by one super at a time, and I'm going to break that off with the hope that we'll find some frames a little bit lower down. So yeah, so we've got one super down and I can see some frames. So what I'm going to do to make it a little bit easier is I'm just going to take this top super off and just place it down there, and we know that this is full of wild comb. This can get really messy, this job, so you don't want to make it very messy at the beginning. Like I say, the prime objective here is to get into that brood box and see if there's any disease within the colony, so that's going to be what we do first. What you can see here though is lots of drone brood. So frustratingly, there's going to be brood all the way throughout this now. There's probably not a queen excluder that's been put in there, so she's dotted kind of brood all the way around. But it's still a really, really good colony, lots of useful resources in here. And we'll give them a bit of a puff and try and tidy things up. So whenever you come to see an abandoned colony, always bring a bucket or 2. There's no way of doing it kind of without a bucket. You always expect to find a lot of wild comb, and with the fact that this has got drone brood in it as well, it's just going to go in here and I'll probably melt it down and just reclaim the wax. I don't want to have to go through and pick out all the larvae to use the honey. So give them a good smoking again and then just clean the frames off one by one. Try and shake off any bees. So you just need to bear in mind all of this honey here could potentially be contaminated, so make sure you're using clean equipment. But more importantly, when you move on to your next place, you need to sterilize everything. So sterilize your gloves, sterilize your hive tool, your boots, everything. Can't take the chance of spreading any disease around. So these bees aren't too bad though, the temperament's like pretty good. Um, I've had colonies in the past where you do this to them, some of my own colonies even, Where, uh, they'd be flying all over you at this point. So it's a, it's a gentle colony. So let's see what's in the box down. So we've got some more frames down there and we've got some more wild comb as well. Very strangely spaced. So what we will do is get another hive stand. So whenever you're doing these inspections, always good to carry some additional supers, additional brood boxes. Just bring some additional kit, makes it a lot easier. Um, so we're just going to take this super now and place it on a makeshift stand so then we can access the next bit. Give them another puff of smoke. Unfortunately, this colony's got some more, uh, wild comb in it, so they've left a gap in the middle like that. So all I'm going to do is just pop this one on here. Take off the wild comb. Shake off all the bees. It's a nice worker comb there. And then we'll see what's underneath this one. Mm-hmm. Some more wild comb. So very strange spacing of frames in here. Uh, each box had like 2 or 3 frames missing, which is just a bit odd. As you can see, Bee's becoming a little bit more irate now. So what we need to do now is we need to get this colony and build it back up into a suitable position that we can condense the bees down into a suitable format for me to transport them and take them away. What we're also going to do at the same time is try and check through all of the frames to see if we can see any diseased brood. Unfortunately, it's going to turn into quite a Quite long day. Yeah, it's a going to be a long big day. job because there's no queen excluder in place, so the brood could be absolutely anywhere amongst the colony. So we're going to go through all of the frames, check for any brood diseases, we're going to try and identify where the queen is, put the queen in the bottom box, queen excluder over the top, and then we're gonna condense that all down into one unit and try and take them away. Okay, so what we've done up until this point is we've gone through Each of the boxes where there's actually frames in them, we've taken out the best of the frames and we've condensed that down into 3 supers. I haven't found the queen yet, but each of the frames within these 3 supers here contain brood in them. We've gone through every single frame of brood and we've checked it for disease, and I'm confident there's no disease here. So we'll still take adequate precaution and we'll put it into a quarantine apiary, but we will— and we'll monitor it over the next few weeks, but I'm comfortable that we can package this hive up now and take it somewhere safe. So what we're going to do is we're going to try and get all of the bees back into the box now. So we've got kind of a selection of boxes, some wild combs, some other boxes. We're going to shake everything back into this box and get them to try and cluster around, and hopefully we get the queen in there as well. So we've got lots of empty boxes like that now. All I'm going to So what we're going to do is just try and shake these in, as many as you possibly can. You might as well clean them up just as you're going through. So then we're going to put that box on here and we're going to use that to shake all of the other bees into. We're constantly trying to find this queen. It's obviously going to be quite difficult, so we're just going to hope that we've captured her in there. You don't want to spend your whole day looking for queens. Um, I mean, if we can't find the queen or she's damaged, the bees will let us know. They'll raise cells, and we can either let them kind of create their own queen, or we can give them a new queen or a new cell. So then the frames in the original brood box are an absolute mess. They're not worth saving. There's There's no brood in them, so all we're going to do is we're pretty much going to discard them, but we're just going to shake them in one by one. So what we're going to do now with this box is just try and shake off as many bees as we possibly can and then scrape off the, the wax and The honey into a bucket. Worth a bit of a shot. It's always nice to see wild comb and how they kind of, uh, put that together. So we've got some really nice pieces of honey there. Look at all that honey. Like, I'm covered in it anyway, so let's get a little bit more sticky. Um, we'll take that home, we'll have that for our breakfast. Really, really good quality Welsh honey. So we're getting there now. Like I say, it's a long-winded, sticky job, absolutely covered in it, but the main thing is it's disease-free and we're going to save this colony and we're going to give it a nice new home. So persevere with it, use plenty of smoke, and just take your time and have that plan in the back of your mind throughout all the stages. So we're getting there now, we're trying to condense that colony down, check there's no disease, make the area safe. Probably my favourite cell of the whole endeavour. They've just drawn that down and put a little queen cup on it, so might have swarmed later on with that one. Okay, so now we've got the colony to exactly where we want it to be. So at the moment it's 5 supers high, but only 3 of them have got frames in. We've got a crown board at the top that's completely clean, so we can take that away now. And then any bees that you've got resting, you can safely tap them into the colony. Now we can take that super away. The same with this one, um, be a little bit more gentle with this one, but you just want to tap the bees in. This is an empty box. And now we've got that down to a manageable size, so all that is is a We're going to put the brood board back on the floor on a stand with 3 supers on it. What we're going to do is let those bees— give them a chance to go down onto the frames. They'll be attracted down by the smell of that brood. Um, the colony is still in exactly the same place, so all of the flying bees will know exactly where the colony is. We're going to put the crown board back on, we're going to clear up the roof, put that back on, and then we're going to leave them. Cool. We're going to come back this evening once all of the bees have come back into the hive. Hopefully there won't be any stragglers outside. And at that point we can put a foam bung in, put a ratchet strap on, and safely move the colony. So although this is still pretty much full of honey, I'm just going to tap all the bees out onto it, probably with quite a bit of honey as well, and then I'm going to put this on the hive. There's enough space for them to all crawl down into the hive, but it just stops them kind of congregating on the front. If you leave a honey-covered roof there, They're just going to go and mess around and it could attract robbing as well. So we've got the hive where we want to be now. All we're going to do is we're going to tidy up, take away any empty boxes, buckets of honey, absolutely everything we can apart from the hive, and we're going to make sure that the bees go back there. If you leave boxes or brood or anything elsewhere and you've left the queen potentially in those boxes, then that might attract other bees. And what we want to do is we want to be kind of, um, as responsible respectful as possible. Yeah, so we're going to take the queen box out. to the owners as possible and take away every single bee. So all we want to leave is a single hive and try and get the bees to attract themselves into this box. Right, so it's 8:30 PM now. We're back at the abandoned hive, and unfortunately the bees haven't played ball and they haven't got back— gone back into their hive. Now, the reason for that might actually be a good reason. Might be that there's not sufficient space within those 3 supers that we've given them to capture all of those bees. So they need more space. I mean, they were over 5 supers and a brood box, and I've just given them 3 supers. So probably underestimated it by maybe, maybe by 1 super. Um, so it's easy fix though. All I'm going to do is I'm going to go away and I'm going to get a spare nuc box. I'm going to take away what I can take away with me now, and I'm going to put a nuc box back in its position, and I'll collect all the stragglers tomorrow. Like, where I am, I'm only about a mile and a half away from home, so it's no additional bother for me. I mean, I want to make sure that I get all of these bees away so the owners don't have to put up with them anymore. That's what we're trying to do today. So the plan is I'm going to go away, I'm going to go and get a nuc box, I'm going to knock all of the bees off the hive here, I'm going to strap them up, and I'm going to take the hive away. And then I'm going to put the nuc box on the stand, and I'm going to collect all the straggler bees within the nuc box. Right, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take the hive with all the bees off it off the stand. Just place it off to one side, um, and then we're going to put the nuc that's just got some drawn comb in it, nothing else, no brood or anything like that, and we're going to place that back onto the hive stand to catch all of the flying bees. Just makes the manipulation a lot easier doing it that way around. I'm going to ratchet the hive up to make it easier to move. I'm going to take my nuc, make sure the wheel is open. I'm going to place the nuc where the hive was on the hive stand. Then I'm just going to get the hive and give it a good shake in front of the hive stand and try and dislodge all of the bees on the front, try and get them to go into the nuc. I'll then take a foam bung and I'm going to put that in the entrance hole. I'm going to brush off any excess bees that I can, try and get as many of them off the front of the hive. I'm going to bung it up with a foam bung. Once you've got it bunged up, you want to get as many bees as you possibly can off the front of the hive. Good way of doing this is using just a leaf or a branch if you take them from a tree. Then you need to move the hive, the existing hive, out of the way. If it's within kind of 3 or 4 feet, they will find it, they will still go back to it. You want to keep them away from that, you want them to go back into the nuc. So you can see now they're starting to make a real kind of fuss of that nuc. Hopefully they won't just cluster up on the front of it and they actually will go in. Still a significant amount of bees on the floor where I knocked them off. I mean, they know this location, they are eventually going to go back inside there. I'm hoping the reason they didn't go back inside the other one, or all of them anyway, is the fact that they were too crowded in the 3 supers that I left there. Them. Um, so hopefully, you know what I mean, we'll get them all in there. If it means going back a 3rd day and doing this again, we can do it again, you know. But looking at the bees there, they should all easily fit within a nuc, so we've got no issue here. Another thing to say though is that when you're moving these colonies, you know what I mean, these are big heavy colonies absolutely full of bees. It's warm, the weather's really warm today. If you did this in the middle of the day and you didn't use a screened bottom or a screened top You could really, really risk the bees' health and they could die by overheating during transit. So you want to do it late in the evening, which is about 9 o'clock now. It's a lot cooler. And this floor here has got a slotted bottom, so an open mesh floor. So that should help to keep them really, really cool during transit. Make sure that as soon as they get to their new location, though, you take out the foam bung and let them kind of get some air and ventilation into the hive so they don't overheat. So it's 10 o'clock in the evening, and luckily they've all gone into the nuc, barring just a few of them. Um, you can see why this landowner really wasn't very happy with them, that even at 10 o'clock at night they're kind of bombarding me, trying to sting me. Um, it must have been horrible for him when there were kind of 5 boxes stacked up of these bees. They're really quite a menace. So we're going to wait until completely nightfall, and hopefully the rest of those bees will go in. And then we'll take them all away. Right, so we've got the abandoned hive back now. We've done a full check in the existing location to check there was no disease, absolutely fine, so I'm confident that we can move it into a good apiary. So we've got this here now, I've gone through each and every one of the frames again, tried to find that queen, managed to find her, which is really, really good. I've now reconfigured the boxes, so I've got a brood box at the bottom, With the queen excluder and the queen underneath, and then I've got 3 supers worth of brood, and then I've got the roof on top. So what I've also done is gone through and thrown out kind of any manky rubbish frames. There were loads of frames that were kind of stuck together, no good for me. I've also separated them out to 8 per super, so I want that brood to emerge and then I want them to draw them out into big fat chunky super frames. So I'm just going to give you a quick view view inside the hive, see if we can see that queen, see if we can see some eggs, and then we'll leave it there and we've got another production colony. So if you remember when we put that in there, that was drenched, and I mean dripping with honey. They've cleaned it top to bottom and that's dry now, so they're really, really efficient. This is only 2 or 3 days after I moved them here. And the same with that crown board, you know what I mean? That was soaking wet with honey. They've cleaned every single drip of it off and they've put it back in the supers. So then I've got my supers spaced like this, as you can see. Do you know what I mean? There's plenty of brood in all of these top supers. I've got the spacing like that. I want them to— I want the brood to emerge, and then I want to get them to draw them out into nice fat chunky frames. Much easier to go through the uncapping machine then. But like you can see there, do you know what I mean? Got a brood box here, 3 supers, absolutely full to the brim of bees, and I've taken a big nuc out of it as well with the remaining bees that didn't come back to the original colony. So there's loads of weight in here already, do you know what I mean? There's a lot of honey mixed in with all that brood. We're going to give it 3 or 4 weeks, let that full brood cycle go, and hopefully these will be nearly full with honey. Give it 5 weeks, they definitely will. Even more bees down there, really, really working those honey supers, but they're tending to the brood in them as well. So there's the queen. I feel really, really bad with this queen because I marked her in the dark and I put a big splodge of paint on her and it went all over her wing. So as always, more than happy to admit my mistakes. And I'm really sorry, Your Majesty, but you've got paint all over you. Doesn't seem to mind it though. It's a nice fetching color of blue. She seems quite happy enough. It's just a smudge on her wing. But note to self, don't mark queens in the dark when you can't really see them very well. But really happy though, we found the existing queen. That was a big one for me. Always like finding the queen because then you can keep the genetics going at that same level. All I did was pop a single frame of brood down there, a couple of frames of drawn comb, and then filled it up with foundation. Good flows going on. They'll draw all of that out. Gives them something to do. Keeps them busy while all of that brood's emerging. But you need to make sure there's enough resources down there for the queen. Queen to start laying immediately, and there's a bit of food down there as well. So we'll put this hive back together again now. I think this colony is well and truly sick of me now, do you know what I mean? That's a week that I've been pestering them pretty much non-stop. I'm going to leave them now. There's no reason for me to be going in there for the next 3 or 4 weeks. They've got tons of foundation to join the brood box, they've got loads of brood, no sign of any queen cells, loads of space on top of them. I'm going to put another empty super on top now because there's a little bit crammed in there, and then that's it, they're good to go. So hopefully we'll come back in 3 or 4 weeks, might do an update video and show you all the honey they've collected. So that's it for the video, I really hope you've enjoyed it, I certainly have enjoyed this one. I love going and seeing kind of abandoned hives and looking at how they manage on their own. It's effectively a wild colony, like I don't know if this was the colony that was originally installed into this location a couple of years ago or if that one died and a new swarm has moved in. But it's always really, really fun going and kind of seeing these essentially wild colonies and then taking ownership of them and then seeing them thrive later on in life. So hope you've enjoyed it. I have. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. I'll see you next time.