What Happens When Bees Get Hot? Overheated colony AUTOPSY - How to Transport Bees Safely

Hi, I'm Lawrence Ederson, Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to show you how to prevent this happening: colonies overheating in transit. So I'm absolutely devastated about this. This has only ever happened twice in the history of sending out nucs, and it's entirely on me. So I feel really bad because I'm the one to blame. And as always with No Nonsense Beekeeping, I don't shy away from mistakes, and I want to hold my hands up and say I am at fault here. This is what I did wrong. This is how you can prevent this happening to your bees. So we send loads of nucs out every year, and we tend to start off around the middle of March, and we send the overwintered ones out until around the middle of May. Throughout that period of the year, you have to deal with very, very different temperatures. And I stand here early May, and it's about 8 degrees Celsius, so the temperature isn't normal for this time of year. But when we're sending our first batch of overwintered nucs out in The temperature is very, very cold. So the way that we send the nucs out is we tend to go with a ventilated floor and then a solid roof. And that's the format that we generally use for the first couple of deliveries. And in the past, it's not been too bad. This colony here that I want to show you though is a colony that was collected from my house, and it was collected by someone who was driving about 3 or 4 hours away. And I say that it's my fault, and I say it's my fault for 2 reasons that this colony overheated in the back of his truck. I didn't give him clear guidance for the conditions that the bees should have been kept during transit, and we'll discuss those later on in this video. And also, I didn't use a ventilated roof. So in this video, I'm just going to break down exactly what is the best practice for transporting bees to avoid them overheating. We're also going to do a full autopsy of this hive to show you the devastating effects of colonies overheating In transit. So first off, I'm going to show you this colony. It's heartbreaking. And like I say, it's completely on me. I'm holding my hands up and I'm going to do this video to try and avoid it happening to other people's colonies. So you might be thinking, why do I have this colony back? The guy traveled 3 or 4 hours with it and they were dead on arrival. Obviously, we fully replaced it. So we see it as it was our fault. They weren't set up properly for transit and we replaced the nucleus for him. And sent him away with a ventilated screen. And the guy's got his bees at home now, so everything is okay. But it really is devastating looking into this colony, and he's preserved it exactly like he opened it. He's not taken any frames out, and it gives me a really good opportunity to show you what has happened when the colony has overheated. So as you can see from the colony, all of the bees have clearly been desperate to escape. They're all around the edges and they're all piled up in the feeder. They've been doing whatever they can to get out of that box 'cause they realized that it was too hot for them. Then when you start to look at the frames and the first frame you pull out, you notice what's going on here and you can really feel it. It's the honey and it's the stores that kills them and it kills them quickly because they can't keep the temperature correct. So what happens is the frames melt out and it's not necessarily the wax that's melting, but it's all of the stores and all of the honey that's in the frames that melts out, and it means that the bees can't fan their wings effectively to keep the colony cool. So what happens is exponentially bad for the bees in that the frames start to melt, the honey comes out, the bees get sticky, and then they just go into shutdown mode and everything melts. So then you can see it's quite dramatic. It's not so much that the wax is melting, but it gets to such a high point within the hive That its structural integrity is gone and it just collapses in on itself. This is why it's called a melt-out. And it's just, it's really hard doing this video because this is my fault, and this was a really good, strong colony of bees, and it's my fault that they're in such a bad way. So I'm doing this with a bit of a heavy heart, to be honest. But hopefully by me doing this video and showing you how to prevent this happening, it will save quite a lot of nucs and colonies in the future. Another frame there where the wax has just gone. Completely collapsed in on itself. A lot of syrup in this frame, so that could have contributed as well to the fact that there was not ripe stores in here, and the bees are just struggling to keep that at the correct temperature. And then as soon as it starts to drip out of the frames, they're fighting a losing battle, and then you can get real catastrophic effects. At this point, I just want to show you inside the nuc, like the amount of bees in here, it is crazy. And it was a very, very strong nuc. We always send out our nucs quite strong, maybe a little bit too strong in this instance. There's a huge amount of bees in this nuc, and asking them to keep themselves cool in the back of a car journey with so much stores is maybe asking a little bit too much of them. So then the next frame, again, lots of brood. This would have been such a big, strong colony by now because it's got 3 or 4 really big frames of brood in there. And as you can see, it's just completely failed. The brood frames don't tend to melt down as much, it seems. And there's another frame of brood, pretty much all emerged in there. It was such a strong nuc, so many bees, and they've overheated really, really easily. And then the final frame, a mixture of brood and stores. And you can see it's the areas where there's stores that's collapsed in on itself, and the brood manages to keep itself going a little bit longer. So now that's all the frames out, you can really get an impression of the devastation that's caused. The bees die and they die really, really quickly and they pile up, and then you can kind of see how it gets worse and worse because you start getting a few that are dead on the floor piled up and then it blocks the mesh. These would have died very, very quickly. That doesn't offer me any sympathy though at all, and I do feel really, really bad about this. So as I stand here doing the video, I feel worse and worse for these bees because they just didn't stand a chance. And although I always give the advice to people to say keep them in a well-ventilated position in the car, obviously don't put them in direct sunlight, I give them all of the advice, but really a 3 or 4 hour journey shouldn't have been done with a solid roof. Should have had a ventilated roof on, and that was my poor decision to do that. So the purpose of this video is to show you how to avoid this happening to your bees. So here are my top tips. For stopping your colonies overheating in the post. So the first tip is make sure that the ventilated mesh underneath isn't propolised up. And that was the main issue with this colony here. And this is the thing that I missed. So this is really important because we send out so many nucs and I didn't check every single one to make sure that the screen wasn't propolised at the bottom. And it's really interesting because when I come to do this video, the first thing I looked for was this screen. And it's because they've got so hot that all of the honey that's melted out of the bottom has taken away the propolis here. And this is the main reason why this colony failed, because there was no way for it to ventilate itself. We've sent out about 70 or 80 nucs in this way this year, early in the year, with the solid roofs and ventilated floors, and they've been fine. But going forward, we are no longer taking that risk, and we're going to put a ventilated screen on every single nuc regardless of the time of year. And that is my second tip. If you're moving a colony any amount of distance and it's a warm day, my recommendation is get a ventilated screen to move that colony. Really simple. All the major nuc suppliers have them. Just pops on the top like that, and then you get really good airflow through the top and through the bottom. You're giving the bees every possible chance in order to keep that colony cool. The next tip is when you're transporting them, try not to make them too strong. And I speak from experience here. When I'm sending these nucs out, I always want to give people the strongest nuc possible. So we build them up and we say we're not going to let them go until they're on 6 frames of bees and really, really strong. And I think going forward, we're going to have to slightly adjust that because when they go out and they're that strong as this colony here was, it was over nearly 5 frames of brood and there were lots and lots of bees in there. You can see from this pile here. Here. It's a lot of bees, and I think it was probably a little bit too overstocked for the size of container. Obviously it was way too overstocked with the, with the solid roof on as well, but even with a ventilated roof you might have some issues. So my third tip is make sure the colony is strong, but make sure it's not too strong. And that tip especially applies to swarms as well. So if you're transporting any swarms that you catch, make sure they're in a ventilated box, but make sure they're in a big enough box as well. Because swarms can overheat really easily. The next tip is, and I give this to people all the time, is that when you're transporting bees, you should hear some sort of noise. So if they're in the back of the car, you want to make sure that there's a— it sounds like an air conditioning unit, and it is the bees effectively reducing the temperature of the colony. So listen out for that sound. If at any point you don't hear that sound, something is wrong and you need to take action. The next tip is when you're transporting them, the best place to transport them is in the front of the car with you, as in either in the passenger seat or in the back seats of the car. The back of pickup trucks is by far and away the worst place that you can store a colony like this because the ventilation is so poor and they can get really warm, especially if you're stacking numerous colonies. Even better than that, the back of a pickup truck that doesn't have a roof on it or anything like that, so a trailer out in the open with a ventilated roof, that is the perfect place to transport bees. Obviously, when you're driving with them in the back seat of the car, All of the windows down as much as you can possibly bear it. Bring a big puffy coat to keep yourself warm. You want to make it as cool as possible so the bees have every chance to not overheat. The next tip is a little spray bottle of water. So whenever you're coming to collect bees or transit them, a little spray bottle of water, and you can just spray that on top of the bees like that, and they can use that moisture to evaporate it, and then that really helps them keep the temperature of the hive or the nuc stable. And my final tip is try not to transit them in the middle of the day. Do it as early as you possibly can in the morning, do it as late as you possibly can at night, and do it when the temperature is cool. So in the middle of a hot summer's day is the worst possible time to move them. You really need to do it first thing in the morning, last thing at night. A couple of other tips that aren't related to overheating, but just transport in general. If you're transporting big colonies and you're using foam bungs, You can soak those bungs in water before you put them in the holes. That gives the bees another source of water to keep them cool. Another thing is the orientation of the hive. So the frames should be parallel to the direction of travel, not perpendicular. That means that when you break, if you break in this position here, you can rock the frames around. If you break in this position, they're less likely to mush up against each other and damage the queen. Another one is try and leave the colonies in situ for a good few days before you transport them. And that is not to open up the colony before and start breaking open the frames. You want them to propolise it down a little bit together, and then that stops things shaking around. I hope you found that video useful, and I do fully appreciate it's a bit rich me telling you how to transport bees to stop them overheating standing in front of a dead pile of bees that have died from overheating. But this is what this channel is all about, and as I've said before in this video, I'll hold my hands up when I've done something wrong. And I'll tell you when I've made mistakes because I want to do that to help me talk it through and get it off my chest. But much more importantly, I want you to see the devastating effects of my stupid mistakes, and I want to talk to you about the best practice to avoid it happening for your colonies of bees. So I know you won't have enjoyed this video, but I do genuinely hope that you found it useful. I hope you see the devastating effects of overheating in transit, and I hope you can use some of the tips in this video to avoid it happening to your bees. So as always, thanks for watching. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. I'll see you next time.