In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards outlines a systematic response to discovering a dead‑out bee colony in the spring. He begins by completely sealing ("bunging") the hive entrance to stop robbing and limit disease spread. He then recommends moving the hive to an isolated location, treating the situation as a worst‑case foulbrood scenario, and removing all frames. Edwards advises burning the frames (or optionally melting wax and sterilizing with caustic soda), but personally prefers burning everything. Next, he details cleaning and sterilizing the hive components away from the original apiary: wood parts are scraped and scorched, while plastic boxes are soaked in a strong bleach (sodium hypochlorite) solution for 24 hours and then low‑pressure jet‑washed. Finally, he stresses monitoring nearby colonies for any signs of disease, taking rapid action if needed, and concludes with a typical YouTube call‑to‑action.
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In this video, I'm gonna tell you what I do if I find a dead-out colony in the spring. So the very first thing that I do if I find a dead-out colony in the spring is I bung up the entrance. Don't care how many live bees are in there, I wanna restrict any access or egress to that hive, either by bees that are already in there or bees that are gonna go in there and rob it out. First thing I do, completely seal it up, and then it gives me a little bit of time to deal with that colony. My worst fear is that that colony's died through AFB or EFB, I just don't know at this point, but by bunging it up, taping around the joints if necessary, make sure the bees aren't getting in any other way. You're isolating that disease risk and you're stopping it spreading throughout the apiary. Now there's a couple of ways to move on from here. What I would recommend is taking that hive away somewhere completely isolated, opening it up, and then if you want to, you can try and assess what's gone wrong. 9 times out of 10, I would say it's going to be a failed mating Or you might have a starvation issue on your hands. Finding foulbrood is basically impossible at that point because you don't have any brood to assess. But in my view, you should treat that as the worst possible scenario. So I assume that that's got foulbrood in that hive now. I don't assume American foulbrood because I think that would be a little bit too hard-hitting with no evidence to say so, and I don't want to burn the entire hive. So my advice from here on in is to take the hive, separate that, Take the frames out, burn all of the frames, completely obliterate them. If you want to melt them down to recover the wax, you can do that. And if you want to put the frames through some caustic soda solution to clean them and sterilize them for reuse, you can do that as well. My personal take on it now is I don't do that. I don't recover the wax. I don't clean them up. I burn everything in a pit and I close it up. What you have left is an empty beehive, your roof, your queen excluder, and your boxes. At this point you can move on to step 3, which is clean and sterilize the beehive. Now don't do this in the same apiary that the colony was in. You'd be amazed how easy it is to get cross-contamination just by moving things around in a single apiary. Do this in an isolated space, preferably away from any other colonies of bees. So if it's wood, really, really easy. You're just going to scrape it down and scorch it. Once you've scraped it and scorched it, that's going to be good again to use. And if it's poly, I use a sodium hydrochlorite solution, effectively really strong bleach. Submerge the boxes in that, and once they've been submerged for 24 hours, you can just jet wash it off. Really nice low pressure on the jet wash, and they're good to go. You can reuse the boxes again. The final thing I would do in that situation is just monitor the other colonies around that dead beehive. I wouldn't take any further drastic action, but you just want to make sure there's nothing nasty spreading about in that apiary. And if there is something, you need to take action fast. So I hope you found that video useful. Please give it the thumbs up, hit the subscribe button. We've got loads more videos just like this.
