In this Bite‑Sized Bees episode, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey walks viewers through a failed nucleus colony he kept in his forest apiary over winter. He opens the hive, identifies severe dysentery, a tiny dwindling bee cluster, and a mix of open and capped stores, including fermenting syrup. Edwards explains that the colony likely failed due to disease and poor health, noting that despite abundant stores the bees could not recover. He shares his apiary loss metrics (under 10% loss is acceptable; his current apiary sits at ~3%) and stresses the importance of rapid biosecurity actions: block the hive entrance to prevent robbing, seal or remove the hive, and thoroughly sterilize frames and boxes using steam, bleach, and soda crystals before reusing them. Throughout, he adopts a transparent, no‑vanity approach, showing both successes and failures to help other beekeepers learn from mistakes.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping and a super short Bite-Sized Bees. So I'm in the forest apiary today shooting loads of videos. I've gone through all of my colonies up here, got 34 colonies. I'm going to do a snapshot video showing you the state of all of the colonies here, but I've got one nuc up here. And I brought this nuc up here because I didn't like the look of it, and I wanted to be able to have it somewhere close by to keep an eye on it over winter. When I put fondant on it, it wasn't looking very good. It's now the 21st of February, and it's dead. So we all have to deal with colonies that die. It's never nice. If you look at it on the scale that I've got 35 or 36 colonies here, I have lost count, and I've only got one that's failed, and it's the one that I thought was going to fail. I'm very, very happy with that. I had huge losses in this apiary last year. I'm looking around now, the bees are flying, it's fantastic. So I'm going to show you the state of this colony inside, just give you an indication of what we have to deal with with colonies that fail. So when you take the roof off this one, it's a really interesting sight. The second I took the roof off and I was looking directly at the crown board, I knew the colony had failed, and you'll see why when I open the lid. So as you can see, major, major dysentery. Like not healthy bees at all. You look at that, that's just not healthy, it's pretty disgusting. I knew as soon as I saw that I'm going to kind of find loads of dead bees, because they weren't strong when I looked at them a couple of months ago when I added that fondant on, and then coupled with the dysentery, there's pretty much no hope. So I thought as soon as I saw that, these bees have got no chance. So you lift up the lid, look at the frames, tiny, tiny little cluster. They've dwindled away to nothing, Whether as that's a result of the distant tree, whether it's Nasima, I don't know. I don't really kind of like fret too much over that. It's a colony that's failed. It's a colony that I wasn't sure was going to do too well, so I just cut it off as a loss. All I'm going to do with this, I'll get it out, I'll show you the insides of it now. Just need to be careful that you're not transferring over any disease. So this is the last video that I'm doing here today. I'll block this colony off. Everything here will get a real thorough clean. All of the frames will get melted down. So we'll take a look inside and I'll show you what the frames are like. I suspect there's going to obviously be no brood, it's going to have dwindled away, maybe it's gone drone laying. There's going to be a fair amount of stores I would imagine left because these got fed up until they were nice and healthy. So very interesting to see this, you've got not capped stores and you've got fermenting stores as well. So the bees, they seem to be doomed from the onset here. They've clearly taken down syrup and it started fermenting before they've capped it over. It's not gone crazy fermenting, but it's got that tang, and there's a few air bubbles in it as well. So on this frame here, capped stores, capped pollen, capped bee bread, just a dwindled colony. Not too much dysentery on that frame, a little bit though. Again, plenty of stores, they've not starved. Loads of stores there, both open and capped, loads of pollen. They just dwindled down. So sadly, it does happen, you lose colonies. I always work on the average that if my total losses are less than 10%, I'm happy with that. Can get them down to around 5%, I'm ecstatic. This apiary, we're sitting at around 3%, so really, really happy with that. I'll do some stats and some figures on all of my apiaries and give you some snapshots of the other hives later on in the year. But what I'm going to do with this colony here, or with this box here, is I'm going to take it home, I'm going to sterilize it, complete clean, soda crystals, bit of bleach. I'm going to render down all of those frames. Obviously the honey is just going to get chucked in the bin, The wax is reusable, but make sure it's all steam sterilized and then you can reuse the frame, reuse the boxes. Some people don't do that. I just think, why bother with the risk? There was something wrong with that colony. Doing a big steam clean with some bleach, with some soda crystals, getting rid of all of that wax that could have pathogens in it. Just have a fresh start, start again. I'm not going to take this one home today because I've got other things to do. Really important with this year, if you identify a colony like this, no matter what time throughout the year, Block the entrance up completely. Block it up. Make it rat-proof, rodent-proof, but especially make it bee-proof because I've got bees flying here today. 21st of February, really mild day. The bees are starting to come out and fly now, and they're looking for food sources. So they're looking for early pollen. But if they find this hive, they're going to rip that apart and they're going to rob out every last little bit of stores in there. They're going to take it back to all of their colonies. And if there is something wrong in this hive, It's going to be so, so easy to spread it. So keep on top of any colonies like this. Best off to move it, deal with it straight away. If you can't, seal it up so it's completely sealed and it's not a risk to the rest of the apiary. As always on Black Mountain Honey though, this isn't a vanity project. This isn't me saying, look at all my bees, they're massive, they do so well. I will show you all of the rubbish stuff. I'll show you the dead colonies. I'll hold my hands up and just say, look, there's a colony that's dead. There's nothing that you can do about it. You just have to chalk it off as a loss, try and learn from your mistakes. So that's probably quite a long Bite Size Bees. I hope you found it enjoyable. I hope you found it useful. 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.
