When You Must Let A Colony Die - Failing Queens, Disease Risk And Apiary Health

Right, in today's video, we're gonna go inside the angriest colony of bees that have covered the box full of wild comb, and we're gonna try and find and kill the queen. That is the only way to sort out this colony of bees, but this is a requeening video like no other, because it's a requeening video in a Zest hive that they have backfilled completely with wild comb. Wild honeycomb, wild brood comb. There is gonna be bees absolutely all over the place, And it is gonna be so, so difficult to find that queen. It's gonna be messy, it's gonna be sticky, there's gonna be a huge amount of stings, but we need to requeen this colony because they are vicious, as you would've seen on previous videos. Not acceptable temperament. Clearing out all of the horrible colonies to make these YouTube videos a little bit friendlier. So today we're gonna go through this colony and we are gonna try and find that queen, but it is gonna be probably the biggest beekeeping challenge to date. So I'll get my beekeeping suit on, I'll get the smoker lit, I'll get my gloves on, Let's go and check out the world's angriest beehive. Right, I'm really, really not looking forward to this. This is a colony from hell. Probably the worst colony of bees I've ever had in terms of aggression. I've got my gloves on, I've got my BB Wear Ultra Suit on, I'm protected, but I know I'm gonna get battered, absolutely battered. And what makes this so difficult and a real challenge for me, you will see this straight away, is that the frames are not drawn out correctly. Complete beekeeper error on my behalf. I've neglected this colony here and I didn't think that they were going to twist the frames around the way that they did. I thought they were going to extend them down nice and straight and I can just pull them out. Definitely didn't do that. They put a 45-degree slant on it, which meant that when you pull it out, it's just detached the base and I've just got lots and lots of wild comb. So this is going to get sticky, this is going to get messy, this is going to be a real biosecurity issue. But I need to get in there and kill the queen. I went through it the other day, no chance of finding the queen because they were just all over me. I thought, okay, this is going to be a good video because you'll get to see how horribly aggressive these bees are. And it's a real challenge as well to see if I can actually see that queen. If I find the queen, I'm going to kill her straight away and then I'll show her to you when she's dead. Otherwise, I try and show her to you, I lose her, and I've got no chance of finding her again. Let's get inside. Hopefully they don't batter me. Hopefully we can find that queen. Straight away battered by these bees. Horrible, Horrible colony. You can see them straight away going for the equipment. They do not like this equipment. I'll get a close-up of them though and show you just how well they filled out the Zest Hive. So even though they're horrible, they're definitely a very, very big strong colony. Got up to about there, maybe the 5th or 6th plastic frame. They've built that out really, really nicely. It is a very big cavity for them here. Lots of honey, lots of brood, huge amounts of anger. Problem I've also got with this colony, this angry colony, is that the queen isn't marked. Makes finding her so much more difficult. So already you can see what I mean. Wild comb being drawn on the bottom. I've pulled it out and it's just broken off. So now I've just got random wild comb underneath this brood area. What a nightmare to try and manage. So same with this frame here. I'll give you a close-up into the colony in a second and show you where it's all stuck down. Oh, I've really set myself up for a really difficult ride here. This is going to be such a challenge to find this queen. Right, so hopefully you can see down there right at the bottom, all that wild comb. Got the gap in there, but you can see if I can zoom in a little bit. There we go. We can see at the bottom there, huge amounts of wild comb, random angles, all broken off. No way of getting it out. Queen's clearly just going to be lurking down there. This is going to be so awkward. So I'm praying really that I get lucky and she's just on a frame, because almost certainly she's going to be downstairs in the wild comb. That's where it's safe. If I was a queen and someone came into that colony, I'd just be going as far down as possible. But you never know. We're going to persevere. We'll go through the frames and Hopefully we find her. So another frame there. Again, you can see where it's all cut off. I'm just going to continue pulling these frames out. Still haven't found the queen. Oh, I'm really annoyed at myself for letting it get so bad. And it was definitely very foolish to think that they were just going to observe my frame spacing. So you can see on this frame here, they've kind of respected a little bit of the spacing, but it's just made such a mess downstairs. I'm going to get in there now and give you a close-up. The further I go into this colony, the more I'm thinking I've just got no chance of finding So if the first shot below didn't show you what the problem was, this one definitely will. Completely wild comb all the way over, left to right, rubbish angles, not connected. The queen's just got to be down there somewhere. Oh, can't believe that I've let it get so bad. How on earth am I going to fix this one? Pretty bad state of affairs, isn't it? I'm gonna persevere. Maybe she'll be on the frame. I can't see her being on the frame though, so I'm just going to get as many frames as I possibly can out. And if we can't find her, we'll have to start taking the wild pieces of comb out bit by bit, get them into a bucket, shake the bees off, and just see if we can clear this colony up a little bit. So this is definitely what the frame should have been looking like. Really, really impressed with these frames and how well the bees have taken to them. No wax was put on there. It's completely wild and the bees have just made that all themselves. So here's another frame where they've kind of respected the spacing a little bit, but the plan here was always to get them onto plastic frames. Just left it too long in between the checkerboarding to get them to do it properly. Should have been a little bit more aggressive in the beginning and it would have made my life so much easier. All right, so it's not going well. This is what I'm going to have to start looking through now to see if we can find a queen. How incredibly difficult is this going to be? Going to be messy, going to be sticky, going to be near impossible to find that queen. I'm hoping and guessing she's not going to be over here now because there's not many bees left, but I'll continue just flicking through those frames before I start to go in and see what we can see over here. Right, that is all of the frames I've taken out. No other way of doing this. I know this is not a good place to be. I don't want to get frames all over the floor. This is why I'm doing it late at night with the other colonies not flying, and hence why the bees are so aggressive. Come and take a look in here now. Really interesting to see. Look at that propolis lining they've put in there. When I started it off, it was all like that inside, beautiful and gray and clean, and the bees have lined the inside of this cavity with pure propolis. Look at that, absolutely incredible. Really good to see. But this is what I'm left with. This is what I've got to deal with now, and I need to go in here and find a single queen. Oh my God, this is going to be difficult and this is going to be sticky. Right. I keep on looking in there thinking I'm just going to see her. I'm going to start getting in there and cutting out all of those combs. I'm going to place them from one side over to the other side to try and confine everything in here, see if I can find the queen, and then I can make a decision on how to put it all back together again. When you're doing this kind of work, it's never easy. There's no guaranteed way to do it. You just need to keep your eyes peeled, try and work methodically, try and keep things as clean as possible. And just try and work from the beginning to the end. Sounds like really straightforward advice, but don't just kind of like dive in in the middle. Just make sure there's a little bit of a plan. I'm starting at the back. I'm going to work forward to the front. Hopefully we find that queen. The other tip I would give is try and get the combs out in as big a piece as you possibly can. Work down the sides, detach those first, get underneath, detach those, try and pick out a piece of comb. Likelihood is the queen's going to be on a piece of comb here. And the beauty of this is that I don't really care if I kill the queen because I'm trying to requeen this colony anyway. Not just I'm not going to say I'm going to rush because I want to get an ID on that queen, but just do your very best to try and get the combs out as intact as possible. So almost impossible to show you. I'll bring it up there. This is how I'm going to try and find the queen. It's good light there. Maybe you see it on the back and I'll miss her. What I'm going to do though is just give it the once over on both sides, shake off the bees, put the comb back onto one side, all stacked up on each other, and then hopefully the queen will reveal herself. Another tip is to regularly wash your hands. Just get the stickiness off. It makes it so much easier trying to deal with the next comb. So as suspected, they start to put some brood down there. That's what's been keeping the queen down there as well. Still not found her though. I'm gonna shake these off, see if she's on the next bit of comb. Little bee just starting its life there, first few seconds and it's me ripping its colony apart. So sorry about that. So maybe you can see they're very sticky, taking a huge amount of stings. These gloves are great though, not many go through, although a few definitely do go through. Right, I've got this to a point. I've stacked up all the bits, all the brood, all the honey. Can deal with that at the end. Highly likely the queen's going to be over in this direction here. Talk about needling a haystack, but I much prefer to deal with it in the way that it is now rather than having it with all the combs in the way. Got no chance with the combs there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start sliding all of those bees onto the floor, and I'm going to watch that floor area and watch the bees scuttle away. So all I'm doing now is I'm looking on the wall, seeing if I can see that queen. And all I'm gonna start doing is start taking my hive tool and scraping down the walls to get the bees to drop down. As they do that, I'm looking on the floor, seeing if I can see the queen anywhere. I wanna do like a section at a time, otherwise it just becomes too much for your mind to even take in. And then I'm just gonna repeat this process again and again and again. Hopefully one time I'll see that queen and I can just nip in and kill her. So you can see they just repopulate the wall really, really quickly, and as they walk up, that's the point in which you're going to have a chance to see that queen. She will just follow all the bees up. They'll kind of push her up. She's got no other choice. You can see now how quickly that is. All of the bees are back up on the wall, so you just go through it again, keep on knocking them back off, and hopefully in the end you should find your queen. Right, that took me about 25 minutes, I reckon, and I have found the queen. There she is. I'm going to kill her quickly now because I don't want to put her in any more pain. Just wanted to show you her first though. I found the queen. That's a really good method for finding her. Very, very difficult to find. So there's my queen. You can see her there. Hopefully that's in focus. Gonna kill that queen. Right, queen's now dead. And you can see we found the queen and we've killed the queen. Mission accomplished. That was very, very difficult. Well, that was a massive relief. All that's left to do now is put everything back together. I'm going to get rid of all of that excess brood, going to get rid of all of that excess honeycomb. This really is going to be a job for next year. I don't think they're going to put too much more wild comb in there at the moment. I'm going to try and intersperse in some more plastic frames. I'm going to get rid of all of the national deeps at the moment. And just leave them with the 14x12s and the plastic frames, condense everything back down together again, requeen the colony, see if we can get them through the winter. If you enjoyed this video, definitely hit the subscribe button. We'll do more videos on this colony, and wait until you see the transformation once I get a new queen in there.