Why Did My Bees Die Over Winter - Full Colony Autopsy
Laurence Edwards performs a full autopsy on his dead winter colony to show how to diagnose what went wrong. He finds uncapped stores, excess drones, and no queen, concluding the colony died because the queen became a drone-laying queen, a common and unavoidable winter loss.
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Not all colonies make it through the winter. In this video, I'm going to show you my first dead out of 2022. You have to trust me, when a colony dies, it gets easier and easier the more you go through your beekeeping journey and the more beehives that you keep. When you've got one hive or two hives and that beehive dies, it is so hard to be upbeat about it. When you've got 100 hives, you kind of brush it off and say, well, as long as I'm in between 5 and 10% losses, I'm happy with that. I'm going to do a full colony autopsy of my first dead out of 2022. So how did I know this colony was a dead out? I only knew because I've been moving my colonies over here from the previous orchard apiary to my new orchard apiary. Why did I think there was something different about this one? I bunged up the entrance just like all of the rest of them. What's stood out to me was the fact that it was so, so heavy. Middle of January at the moment, all of my colonies are working their way through their stores. This one was like it was nailed to the ground. Whenever they're that heavy coming out of winter, I always get a bit worried, and I always open it with a little bit of anticipation. Enough of me talking, let's get inside, see why that colony died. So this is the colony here. I'm going to open it up, and you will immediately see there is a dead colony inside. Before we get down that far, this is always a giveaway that there's something wrong. Syrup in the feeder. Bees don't tend to leave syrup in the feeder unless you've massively overfed them. If you've got a dwindling colony in the autumn, then they're much more likely to leave that syrup alone. Always a worry if you open it up and they've not taken that syrup down. And there we go, doesn't get much more dead than that. We're going to go through this now, we're going to take a look, But I think it's straightforward what's happened to this colony here. If you want to take a guess before I get to the end, stick a comment in the video. We'll go through it frame by frame though. I've got a good idea what killed this colony. First thing I always like to do when I find a colony that's dead like this, before I start pulling out the frames, just going to lift the box up and see what's on the floor. Don't want to see a big pile of dead bees. Big pile of dead bees, like a big colony, leads me to believe something sinister is going on. Is it poisoning? Is it some form of disease? If you get a big pile of dead bees at the bottom of the beehive at any time of year, and I'm talking like 2 or 3 inches deep, you've got a little bit of a problem. Maybe you blocked an entrance, maybe they got poisoned, maybe there's something worse than that going on. I'm hoping what we're going to find in here is just a minimum amount of dead bees. So this is what the bottom of the floor is looking like, and there's a lot to analyze down here. In terms of the number of bees, That hasn't got me worried at all. That is a perfectly natural amount of dead bees. Even in a healthy hive, it wouldn't be too bad to see something like that. Quite a lot of drones down there though, probably more than you'd expect to see in a healthy hive, 'cause the hive kicks them out later on into the year. What we're also seeing down here as well is, I'd say, a mild to moderate infection of chalkbrood. Wouldn't worry too much about that, 'cause a healthy colony will just take care of that chalkbrood. But you can see the mummies down there. Just taking a look around, can't see the queen anywhere. Probably going to find her on the frames. In terms of disease risks, so far so good, nothing really to worry about. Right, next up let's take a look through some of the outer frames, see what the store situation was like, just to rule out starving. Like, it's clearly not going to be starvation here, you can see the stores. Let's just have a look at some of those outer frames though and show how much stores is available in this colony. So this is the second frame in, really interesting to see this. We've got a heavy frame of Uncapped stores. Bees don't leave uncapped stores when you're feeding them in September. Big strong colonies, they put that in, they get straight to capping that over. This colony was dying early, early autumn. This isn't something that's just happened. The bees were struggling with numbers, and that's the reason that they haven't capped these stores. No signs of any feces on any of these frames either. Don't think we're going to have an issue with Nosema in this one, but you can never really rule it out. Let's go in a little bit further, see some of those other frames. So a couple of frames in, we've got some capped stores. This is going to be the easiest diagnosis in the world. See if you can spot it. But we have got drone brood, bits of drone brood, spotty drone brood, bits of pollen over there as well. Let's open up a little bit closer to where that cluster died, see if we can find the queen. But like I said, I've got a pretty good idea of what killed this colony. So here is the last couple of frames with that last remaining cluster inside. Tiny little cluster, similar size to a fist like that. Probably 100 bees in there, no more than that. Really small, tiny cluster. You can see some drones in it as well. Let's open it up, see if we can find the queen, see what those frames are looking like. So these are the 2 central frames. Tiny cluster of bees there. I've looked through it, can't see any queens. There's the other side over there. Again, I've looked through it, can't see any queens. That is a dead giveaway though, absolute dead giveaway. Same over here. This colony died because of a drone laying queen. So really simple identification there. They've either superseded late on in the season, or the queen has just turned into a drone layer without me expecting it. One or the other, no way to tell. What can I do about it? Absolutely nothing. You will lose colonies due to drone laying queens. Happens to everyone. Happens to the best breeders in the world, happens to kind of like average breeders in the world like me. It happens to everyone. You can't get away from it. How am I going to fix this colony here? I'm going to scrape off the dead bees and I'm going to use these frames to show you a swarm management technique that is guaranteed to make you lose no swarms in the season. Check out this video here.
