Laurence Edwards compresses his honey bee colonies into a single brood box for winter, which he says improves mite treatment and survival rates. The dense cluster spreads Apivar mite strips more effectively across frames, and the tight insulation eliminates cold spots. He reports overwintering survival jumped from 20-30% loss to a high success rate using early mite treatment, light feeding, and minimal space.
In this video, I'm going to tell you why I condense my colonies down to the point where they're bearding outside the front of the colony. So I've had so many comments on this one, and I've showed you it in previous videos. I will take a single brood chamber colony that's got 6 or 7 supers on, and those 6 or 7 supers are full to the brim with bees. I'll take all of the supers away, and I will leave that single brood box to house the bees that were in 8 boxes. Now, when you do this, it's chaos, and when you do it, you always get a little bit of bearding outside the front of the colony. I try my best to time the honey extraction with a really nice week of weather so that the majority of the bees that are bearding outside the front can survive for as long as they possibly can. Now people have said this is cruel, people have said this is unfair, and I have to say I don't agree with this comment at all. So bees in the summer generally live between 4 to 6 weeks. Around this time of year you will see a massive churn of bees, and a lot of the summer bees that are up in those supers, forager bees, are reaching the end of their life. So they will die naturally anyway. By the time you've got into kind of August and September, All of those bees are naturally dying. What I find amazing though is just how well the bees can compress themselves down and they leave minimal amount of bees outside the front of the colony. So I would estimate in that beard you're talking between 5 to 10% of the bees in that entire colony are left outside. I do find over a couple of days as well they seem to create more room in the colony and after 3 days I don't see any bearding whatsoever. So they do manage to fit in but it takes them a couple of days to do it. So you might be thinking, well, why don't you just give them a double brood and give them plenty of space? Now you could do that, and I've done that in previous years, and on some apiaries and some colonies, you really do have no choice but to give them a little bit more room. But what I really like about condensing the colonies down for winter is that I think it gives you 2 massive benefits that really do benefit the bees over winter. So the first one is that you're keeping the void in which the bees overwinter very small. This means you don't get cold spots, but most importantly, it gives the bees the best possible chance of keeping that void at the correct temperature in order that they can go all the way through the winter And come out of the spring with a nice healthy colony. Now you can definitely do that in a double brood configuration if you're putting the insulation in the correct place, which is directly above the cluster. I don't think that makes a massive amount of difference. The second reason though, and this is the big benefit for me, and I've seen it, and maybe it's anecdotally from my own experience, but talking about my process, I'll go in, I'll take away all the supers, I'll blow the bees out using a blower, I condense them down, single brood box. I go away on that day, extract the honey while it's still warm from the hive. But on the The next day I come back round and I put my Apivar strips in. I get my polyashworth feeder in place. I'll give them like a little dribble of syrup just so they know where that feeder is, and then I close them up for winter. All I'm doing after that is going in and feeding them. The massive important benefit that I personally see from that is that when you put your Apivar strips in, Apivar strips work on the basis of the bees walking over them, picking up the amitraz on their feet, which is the active substance that kills mites, And depositing that all over the colony. Now, if you've got like a loosely packed cluster of bees in a big void, you're much less likely to get a good spread and distribution from that Amitraz around the brood frames versus if you have a heavily congested colony where they're really struggling a little bit for space. They're going in, they're coming out, they're taking their turns in different areas of the hive. Since I started using this method, my overwintering rate has considerably improved. I used to be around the 25, 20, 30% mark. I'd lose a lot of colonies each year. I used to make really small splits. I used to count the boxes, not the bees, but I didn't condense them down anywhere near as much, and I didn't get my mite treatments on at an early point. Now that I do that, cutting my losses, getting my treatments in early, condensing them down, getting that good distribution of Amitraz around the colony, around the brood frames, I found that when the bees are in the position to start rearing those winter bees, the mites have taken such a knock back that the winter bees come out really, really healthy, which means it extends their lives, which means that come the winter, you've got big, massive boxes of healthy bees. People comment on this all the time saying, wow, your bees look amazing in April. They're big, they're strong. Like, you can add a super kind of come the middle of April. My bees look nowhere near as big, nowhere near as strong. How do you get your bees to be boiling like they are like that? I think that's the key. Cut your losses, condense them down, mite treatments early, little bit of trickle feeding, not too much, make sure you leave the space. They're my tips, they're my tricks for condensing colonies down for winter and getting a really good overwintering rate.
