In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey outlines the most common reasons beehives fail over winter and offers practical mitigation strategies for hobbyist and small‑scale beekeepers. He begins by describing queen‑related failures – poorly mated, aging, or late‑inspected queens that become drone‑laying or die, and recommends checking queen health in August‑September and replacing queens before they reach two years old. He then discusses starvation, distinguishing between insufficient stores and inaccessible stores, and advises regular weight checks, feeding 6–8 kg of fondant directly onto the cluster, and using queen excluders if needed. Varroa mite infestations are presented as the leading winter killer, with a call for timely treatment. Dysentery and Nosema are covered, noting that dysentery can have multiple causes and that Hive Alive (a registered thymol‑based treatment) is the legal UK option for Nosema, alongside strict hive cleanliness and isolation of affected colonies. Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus (CBPV) is mentioned as an emerging UK problem, though Edwards has not personally treated it. Over‑feeding syrup is warned against, as excess sugar can suppress brood rearing and lead to rapid collapse, especially in cold spells. Moisture combined with low temperatures is identified as lethal, with advice to avoid tunnel entrances that promote drafts and to ensure condensation drips away from the cluster. He stresses the importance of matching colony size to the appropriate hive box, using dummying and good insulation for small colonies. Common beekeeper errors – closed entrances and lack of mouse/vermín guards – are highlighted as preventable causes of winter loss. Throughout, Edwards emphasizes regular monitoring (weight, entrance status) and proactive interventions (fondant feeding, queen management, varroa control) to give colonies the best chance of surviving winter.
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In this video, I'm going to tell you why bees die in winter. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about all of the different ways that bees can die in winter. So pretty much everyone who's had bees for maybe 2 or 3 years will have experienced this. Go to open up your colony in the winter and they're dead. And there's either no bees there or there's a small dead cluster of bees. Loads of different ways that it can happen. Your beehive has failed. I'm going to talk to you in this video about the different reasons why your beehive can fail over the winter, and I'm going to talk to you about the methods that you can use in order to control some of the elements that you are in control of. Right, so the first method we're going to talk about is a failing queen, and this will happen all of the time. This happens so, so much. Where you think you've got a big strong colony going into winter, you think your queen is okay, and she's not. So there's either something wrong with the mating of the queen, you might be looking in and she's laying good quality worker brood, and then what happens is over the winter she effectively turns into a drone-laying queen. What that means is over the course of the year, over the course of the winter, the colony is just going to dwindle and dwindle and dwindle, and you would generally find a A single queen in a tiny little cluster somewhere random in the hive, frozen, like they're not moving anywhere and they're all dead. That is indicative of a drone-laying queen. You don't generally find lots of drones knocking around when you come into spring. The colony just can't keep up with the production of worker bees, and that means that the colony is doomed. So that's the first method that the colony can die out over winter, is that the queen is not correctly mated, she turns into a drone-laying queen, And the colony dwindles to nothing. Now, what can you do to prevent that one? Very, very little actually, because all you can do is go in around August and September and validate that the queen is well mated at that point in time. You can't look into the future and say, well, I think she's going to be good for another 3 to 6 months. All you can do is go in in August and September and say, I think she looks pretty good here. Good amount of eggs, good amount of worker brood, no patchy brood, no excessive amount of drones knocking around in the hive or drone brood. You put a tick in the box and you say, okay, I think my queen is okay. In between September and say March or April, they might try and supersede that queen. So that's kind of the first mode of queen failure, is that they say there's something wrong with that queen, we're going to supersede her, and they try and supersede her in October. And then the virgin queen doesn't mate correctly, and then you're left with a colony that's got a virgin queen that's failed to mate. She will effectively become a drone-laying queen. Another method is that the queen just runs out of juice. In between that last inspection and spring, she just turns naturally into a drone-laying queen. Both of those scenarios there, you have very, very little control over. The only thing you can really do is identify when a queen is getting old and say, right, every couple of years I'm going to replace my queens. I'm not going to let them get into their 3rd or 4th or 5th year, which is quite a long time for a queen, because then the chances are the older they get, the more likely they will fail over winter. So that's the only real mitigation that you've got there. Make sure that your queens aren't older than say 2 years going into winter, and it's going to reduce the chances of them failing. The next mode of failure that's queen related is going in too late in the year, doing inspections, and killing your queen. This happens quite a bit. I see people going in in October and November and pulling it out and saying, I've not got any brood, I've not got any eggs, there must be an issue. And I just think you shouldn't be going in and inspecting at that time of the year in the UK. There's no benefit to it. And you've got the danger of killing your queen, squishing the queen. You might break her leg, they might reject her. You're much better off just leaving them alone once you've done your checks in August and September and praying that your colony gets through. The next mode of failure is starvation, and I'm going to split this into 2 different modes as well. So you've got one where the colony does not have enough food to get through the winter, so they fail, and then one where they can't access the food that they have And then they fail as well. Both of those modes of failure are very, very annoying, and they're the two modes that you really do have the power and the control, to a certain extent, in the first one particularly, to manage that. So what you need to be doing, you need to be trickle feeding, building the colony up, making sure they're at a sufficient weight come September, come October, and then also going back in and doing those checks in January, February, and March in the UK or wherever the spring buildup is in your area of the world. Most colonies will starve kind of February or March. Once they kick back into real strong brood rearing, that's when you're going to generally get the good healthy colonies starve because they consume so much food. You can mitigate that so easily by putting a big slab of fondant directly on the cluster. You can put a queen excluder over the top of it as well if you don't want it to drip through. That pretty much mitigates both of those modes of failure. Big slab of fondant, I mean like 6 to 8 kilograms of fondant placed directly on the cluster. November, December, January, February, it doesn't matter. You need to go in, constantly monitor the weight of your hives by hefting. As soon as you think they're light, big slab of fondant directly onto the cluster, touching the cluster, and that will stop them starving because there's no food left, but it will also stop them starving through isolation. Bees work upwards throughout the winter, They start at the bottom, they work their way to the top. So if you put a nice readily accessible food source right at the top of the colony, by the time they think they're out of food or they are out of food, they'll be at the top, they'll touch that fondant, and fondant will keep them going all the way throughout the winter. Next method of failure is varroa-related. Colonies will die due to varroa disease throughout the winter if you haven't treated them in time. And this is the one generally when you open up your hives and they're gone. There's no bees to be seen, and you think, where did my bees go? They must have swarmed in January, and they've definitely not swarmed. They've probably absconded. Now, that's not to say that every single colony that fails through high varroa load will abscond, but that generally is what happens when they abscond that late in the year or in winter. But high varroa load is number one killer. It really probably is the biggest killer of beehives, definitely within the UK or any other countries where varroa is present. If you don't treat for varroa, you stand a higher risk of your colonies dying throughout the winter due to varroa. The next mode of failure is dysentery, and this isn't always related to Nosema. So Nosema generally has the symptom that the bees will have dysentery, and you have issues with them maintaining the colony size and maintaining colony growth when it comes to it. Bees can have dysentery anyway, so if you're seeing lots of dysentery, lots of streaky poo, Inside or outside of the hive on the frames, that doesn't necessarily indicate the bees have Nosema, but it is something that can kill the bees. So they might be eating something that they don't really agree with, they might have dysentery for another reason, or there may be Nosema present within the colony and that's what's causing the dysentery as well. So Nosema spores, if it is Nosema, they'll spread throughout the colony really, really quickly, and it just affects the bee's ability to live, shortens its lifespan considerably, which means the bees can't keep up the numbers. Spreads really, really quickly, passes on the dysentery to all of the other bees, and it's just a general indicator of bad hive health. Not a huge amount you can do with Nosema as well. One of the treatments that I definitely do not recommend, because it's not a legal treatment, is to give them a thymol feed. So in other countries where this is allowed, you feed them a thymol feed, and that can help the bees combat Nosema, and they can make a full recovery as well if you start to spray it on the bees. Really does work very well, but you cannot use that in the UK, not a registered medicine. Hive Alive is supposed to be very good at tackling Nosema as well, and that is a registered medicine and it is thymol-based. So if you do have issues with Nosema, you can give your colony some Hive Alive, and you can also pre-medicate it as well. So maybe the last syrup feed of the season, if you put some Hive Alive in there, should help to combat against Nosema. That's the only way that you can really mitigate that within the UK. Good hive cleanliness is a good way of tackling that as well, and just making sure if you do identify a colony that has Nosema, take it off somewhere isolated because it can spread from colony to colony. Right, next mode of failure is Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus that you might see written as CBPV, and this is something that's really taking over the UK quite a lot at the moment. Speak to a lot of bee farmers in the UK and they say this is getting worse and worse and worse every year. Now, I've never even experienced— I've never had a single that's had CBPV. You'll notice it, you'll get shiny black bees, very bald bodies. The bees look smaller, they go a little strange color, and it can really impact a colony quite bad. I'm not going to put a mitigation activity against CBPV because I've never had to do it myself. I'm going to speak to some bee farmers though, and I'm going to see what they do because I know there's been a bit of a change in tact in terms of the treatment, and what they used to do they think is nowhere near as effective as what they do now. So I'll go and speak to some bee farmers, maybe that's a video for next year. Right, a really surprising reason why colonies can die in winter is that you feed them too much syrup. If you feed a colony too much syrup and you just keep on pumping it in throughout August, September, October, November, you just keep on going, the colony gets to a point where it's just not got anywhere to lay any brood and you get this dramatic collapse in numbers. And then if you get that followed by a really cold spell, the queen might go off lay, and you just get this real wipeout of a colony really, really quick. So you need to ensure that all the way throughout winter, from autumn into early winter, late winter, and spring, there's always somewhere for the queen to lay so that you can maintain colony numbers. So you need to feed them up to weight, but don't overfeed. Make sure they've always got a little bit of space. Next reason bees die in winter: there's too much moisture in the hive, and the damp kills the bees. Now that's the most general statement going. Really not as simple as that. Cover this in separate videos though. Bees can cope with cold very, very well. They can cope with an element of damp quite well as well. But what you really don't want, 2 things that can definitely kill your bees, is the combination of moisture and excessive cold as well. So I'm really not a massive fan of tunnel entrances where you have an entrance at the bottom, an entrance at the top, and then you have this flow of air going through the colony. Couple that with really cold temperatures, that can kill small colonies. Also, if you've just got a really bad setup and your colony is just getting lots of condensation constantly dripping onto that cluster, it definitely can kill colonies. You need to make sure that the condensation is forming on those sidewalls so it can drop out of the colony, and that way they can regulate their temperature a lot better, keep it up to the place where they need to be to get themselves through winter. Right, next mode of failure: small colonies going into winter in the wrong size box. I've covered this on so many different videos. Your bees going into winter need to match the size of the box that they're in. If you've got super weak colonies, you need to dummy them down, put them into the smallest box possible. Don't have a 3-frame nuc in a double national hive. You're asking for trouble by doing that. Make sure the size of the colony matches the size of the box and use really good insulation to give them the best chance possible of getting through. Now there's a couple of reasons why colonies don't make it through the winter. Where it's just plain and simple beekeeper error. I've done this before and it is the most annoying thing in the world. So the first one is make sure your hive entrances are open. You can put your mouse guards on, you can put your protection on, but if you've got nucs, make sure that you pin the entrance disc into the position that you want. The wind can blow it, close it, and if you don't give the bees the opportunity to come out when they want to, they Panic. They really do panic, and it can kill a colony very, very quickly. You might think everything's fine. You might go and do a check in December. Really good-sized colony, loads of stores, good weight. The entrance disc is closed. You come back in another month's time and the colony is dead. That's happened to me. It is the most annoying thing in the world. So make sure their entrances are open. Right, next one, mouse guards. Mice can definitely kill a small colony. Way to mitigate that is get your mouse guards on or use an entrance that's going to limit the access for vermin. They can definitely get in there and wreck things, and I've seen it on a number of occasions kill colonies as well. So make sure you get your mouse guards on, limit vermin access. Right, there's almost certainly a couple that I've missed off there, so if I've missed any off, stick them in the comments below and let's get all of the modes of failure on a single video. Biggest risk that we're going to have this year, I think my prediction is going to be starvation. I'm up here today checking some of the colonies, I'm checking them for weight. A lot of them are really, really Light, so I'm putting fondant on, but I'm going to do regular checks. We've had a very good autumn, big strong colonies, but it means that you do need to be on top of starvation because they can starve very quick in winter. I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. I hope your bees don't starve or die over winter. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
