Laurence Edwards inspects a small-cell bee colony in late January with no varroa treatments applied, following advice from a mentor named John. The hive shows a healthy cluster, good stores, and no signs of deformed wing virus. He plans to move it to a double-brood system on small-cell foundation to test whether this setup improves varroa tolerance.
Last season, I was very kindly gifted a colony of small cell bees. In this video, I'm gonna give you an update, talk to you about why I'm not doing any varroa treatments. More importantly, see if we've still got bees inside, and then talk to you about what I'm gonna do with them for the rest of the season. So for me, there's nothing more exciting than going around your colonies back end of January, early February, opening them up, real quick 10-second glance, seeing the state of the colonies. I'm hefting, I'm checking for weight, I'm feeding if necessary, But don't worry about cracking them open, just taking a quick look at them, seeing how they're doing. Don't want to pull any frames out. There's absolutely no need to pull frames out. But it's always nice to see that the colonies have got this far through the winter. By no means it means they've got through winter, it just means they've got to January. Lots and lots can happen between February, March, and April. Although by the look of some of my colonies here, we're looking for a very, very good overwintering success. Let's get inside this colony here, see if we've still got some bees, see if I can see any deformed wing virus, if there are some bees in there, and then we'll close them up and hope for the best. Right, there's definitely some bees inside here, 'cause when I took the lid off, got a few flying out trying to go for me. Not in a super aggressive way, but I'm still gonna open the lid up and see what that cluster size is looking like. Very, very promising though, opening it up and there's bees flying out. Always a good sign. I got a lot to live up to. If Erica Thomason can go into massive buildings with hundreds of thousands of bees and do it without a beekeeping veil, Surely I can do it as well. Not taken many stings so far this year. I'm a little bit concerned. We are going to persevere. Right. And that's the first sting of the year. There we go. Ow! I honestly, I don't know how Erica does it. Got battered there. 6 or 7 stings, some in the chest, couple by the eyelid. But I don't mind. I've been trying my best to get my bees to behave. I've been removing angry genetics and I've been replacing them with nice genetics. But colonies like this where I'm kind of doing a little bit of an experiment and someone's gifted them to me and they're on small cell foundation, we're trying to do tests for varroa, they might not be the friendliest bees. So yeah, I've definitely taken a few stings and I'm definitely a little bit nervous. Mm-hmm. But they're alive, which is like, I'll give it a 9 out of 10 for being alive. Got another one going for my eye there. Let me get inside, give you a close-up, and try and stop myself getting stung in the face. So as you can see, we've got bees covering maybe 6 or 7 frames in total. That's a really nice cluster for this time of year. It's about 8 or 9 degrees C here today, so it's interesting to see that they're not totally clustered up still. And as you can see over this side here, we've got lots and lots of stores. So these bees are very frugal in In terms of their stores, and I'm happy that they're not kind of roaring through them like some of my Buckfast colonies are. Oh, right on the lip! Wow, that is going to be really painful. Just trying to zoom in a little bit, see if we can see any damage on those wings. Going to be difficult to do it at this point of the season, so we will follow it up, but nothing at the moment. They look like nice healthy bees. Not going to pull any frames out because it is just too early in the year to do that at the moment. But I'm happy with what I'm seeing. We've got bees, they've made it through to January. I'm going to close these back up again now because I don't want to get hurt any further. So really good to see that the bees have made it through to January. Doesn't look like any major varroa issues yet. That is going to progress as we go through the season. My plans for this colony here, I've got another pack of small cell foundation and I'm going to run them onto a double brood system just to give them additional space and mean that I've got more flexibility when they try and swarm. But I want to always keep these brood on small cell foundation. That's what I've been told to do by John. Keep them on small cell foundation and that will mean that they can tolerate varroa better. I don't know if that's true. I'm just following the guidelines that I've been given and I'm going to feed back and see how far we can get with these bees. They've not had any treatment though. No oxalic acid, no Apivar. They're little gits because another one's just stung me in the eye. And to make it worse for them, they're in an apiary with other colonies where there is going to be like a high varroa load as well. But John said this was okay and he said that that's the challenge that he'd like me to give them. Hope I'm doing okay, John. The bees are still here. If anybody's got any questions about these bees, there's a link— ah, shit! If anybody's got any questions about— ah, ah, fucking hell! If anybody's got any questions about these bees, stick it on the Ask Me a Question link in the description and I'll do my very best to answer them.
