Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey lost 12-13% of his colonies by mid-February, on track for 16-17% by spring. He blames his own mistakes: aggressive splitting that made weak nucs, a faulty feeder system, and delayed feeding. He shows how to spot starvation, poor queens, and Nosema, then explains his sterilization protocol and plans to slow expansion and build stronger colonies instead.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No-Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to talk about deadouts, colonies that have died over winter. So it's a really kind of optimistic time of year for me. I love seeing the new flowers coming through. I have all my plans for the season, I have them written down. I think about where I'm going to sell my honey, I think about what I'm going to do to my colonies, am I going to split them, what swarm control techniques I'm going to use. Like I say, it's a really kind of nice optimistic time of the year, each day gets a little bit longer, but there's one really horrible thing that you have to deal with at this time of year and it's inevitable, you'll deal with it year in year out, and that is the death of colonies. Now over the last kind of 6 years I obviously tracked the amount of colonies going into winter I use my cutoff dates as I've described in a previous video. I track the colonies going into winter and I track the colonies coming out of winter. We've not yet got to the 1st of April, we're not actually anywhere near the 1st of April yet, but it's quite apparent when you go and kind of look at some of the colonies to check if they've got enough stores. It's apparent where the deadouts are, and when you've got quite a lot of colonies, there's no point not taking action on those deadouts there and then. You want to get them out of the line. And I've got them stacked up behind me here, and they're on either side. You want to get them out of the way, and then that way you're not kind of going in and checking them each time. You're not wasting your time. And this year has been particularly bad, and I think I know a few of the reasons why, and I'd say 90% of those reasons are my own fault. So this is the one, one big thing with beekeeping, and one thing you'll never kind of see me hiding away from. I make mistakes. And I'm always happy to hold my hand up and say I've made a mistake there, and that's either cost me a colony or that's cost me a honey crop from that colony for the year, or kind of any other output that may happen. So purpose of this video is I kind of want to show you some of the numbers I'm experiencing this year. I want to give you some of the reasons why I think I've lost so many colonies this year, how I plan to get those colonies back up to number, and just kind of generally talk through what I'm going to do. So the first thing is to give you kind of a feel for the numbers of the losses that I've experienced. So previously I sit around kind of between 5% and 10%, so in a good year, in a good year hopefully no losses, but when you have between 100 and 150 hives you're always going to kind of get one or two at least. So like I say, in a good year you're talking around 5% losses, in a bad year you're talking around 10% losses. This year And bear in mind, it's kind of only middle of February. I'm sitting at around 12 or 13% losses already, so 100% guaranteed I'm going to lose more colonies. The numbers that I've got now, I'm going to lose more because some of them are weak. I've put fondant on them, I've done everything I can, but I can't go in there, I can't give them any brood, I can't boost them. There's nothing I can do. I just have to kind of sit tight and wait, see if they're going to make it through. So I know that number is going to go up, so I'm probably forecasting maybe 16, 17% losses. Which is huge. Like, that's— I mean, nearly a fifth of my colonies are going to have kind of passed away over winter, and that's way above my average, and that's probably way above the national average as well. That's sitting closer to a beekeeping average where you don't actually do any treatments on the bees. So what have I done wrong? And I can kind of split this up into a few distinct categories. The first one being I was overly ambitious. And somebody gave me this advice a long time ago, and I wish I'd listened to it. So if you're getting this bit of advice now, really, really, you need to listen to it, I think. And that is, don't count, um, your bees by the number of colonies you have. Yeah, so don't think if you've— if you split 2 or 3 hives and put them into 50 nucs, don't say I've got 50 nucs, because you don't. You have 2 or 3 colonies that you split up into kind of little tiny colonies across 50 nucs. So don't get carried away by the number of colonies, get carried away by the number of bees, the number of frames and seams of bees that you've got. That is a much, much better and more accurate way of working out, A, how many bees you've got, but B, and more importantly in the context of this video, how likely they are to get through winter. So the first mistake that I've made is I've probably got a bit greedy and I tried to catch up on last year's poor weather by making late splits. So I'm talking kind of August and then trying to feed the colonies up to get them through the winter. So I had colonies going into winter kind of on 2 or 3 frames in a nuc, and there's nothing to say that you can't get a colony through the winter on 2 or 3 frames in a nuc, but I don't think the chances are going to be as high As having a colony on say 10 or 11 frames going into winter with sufficient stores around it. The chances kind of are far greater with the large colony to be able to go through winter than a smaller nuc. So that's the first one. Definitely for me, I got greedy and I tried to split down into too many nucs going into winter thinking that I'll be able to build them up into either production colonies or nucs for sale later in the year. So I'm not going to do that again. And I'm I'm just going to limit the amount that I grow my colonies going forward. So I'm not going to count the colonies by the boxes that they're in, I'm going to count the colonies by the seams of bees, and I'm going to do that kind of on a grand scale as well. So I'll be calculating the amount of seams of bees I've got going into winter and the seams of bees coming out of winter. I'll still count the colonies as well because it's a, it's a different indication, and if they're strong colonies, it's absolutely fine to count it that way. So that was the first mistake I made. The second mistake I made was I did, I got an IBC, so I got a really big IBC and I brought all the colonies in to a certain apiary to feed the bees, thinking that this is going to be a lot easier for me than trying to take the liquid feed out to the bees in various locations. I thought I'd bring all my colonies here and feed them here, and I've had, that's caused me 2 really big issues. One is that we're quite high here, so So you probably see a little bit in the background, there's still snow up here, whereas just down the road it's a nice warm day. So there's probably like a 3 or 4 degree temperature difference, but that really shouldn't cause too much of an issue. But again, I mean, all of these things do add up. But the other thing is where I got this IBC to do the feeding here, and I only realized this kind of back end of last season, is that there was a hole in the top of it and the bees were getting in. Oh no! And they couldn't get back out again, and it was pretty catastrophic in terms of the numbers that had gone into that. And at the time I kind of thought, okay, that's a shame, the bees are going to be depleted, and I don't think I'd have even kind of put two and two together had all of my colonies got through the winter. But you know what I mean, having lost this many colonies is kind of making me think, well, why were they so weak going into winter? Like, I've never experienced losses this high before, so I'm kind of tracking back and trying to think kind of all of the other areas where I potentially made mistakes or had errors, and this was a big one. So I mean, there was like probably hundreds of thousands of bees in this IBC when I ended up tipping it out, and I can only think that, I mean, that significantly weakened the kind of foragers going into winter. So the colonies were depleted going into winter. The third one is not necessarily a mistake for me, but it's we had the worst season, the worst season I've had on record in terms of kind of honey crop and the weather. I mean, last week was— last year, sorry, was absolutely atrocious. I've never seen weather like it. It just rained and rained and rained and rained. And the mistake that I made on the back of that poor weather was that I wanted a honey crop and I kept on delaying and delaying and delaying feeding them to keep my bees alive and to keep them growing and to keep them stimulated. Because I didn't want to taint my honey with sugar. And obviously, I mean, no one wants to get honey in their supers— sorry, no one wants to get sugar in their supers. But in the grand scheme of things, I wish I'd just sacrificed my spring crop and said, right, I'm just going to feed the bees, feed the bees, feed the bees, get them really, really nice and strong, and then just focus on the summer crop. And it turns out the summer crop wasn't particularly good either, but the heather crop would have actually been okay, but the bees weren't up to strength. to kind of take advantage of that. So you can see how these problems kind of compound on one another, but ultimately I think all of those come back to me as a beekeeper and as a bee farmer potentially being a little bit too greedy. So I'll take it on the chin. We definitely have to learn from this, and I have to learn from this, and like I say, I'm only too happy to hold my hands up and admit my mistakes. And not only that, but kind of Broadcast them so other people can potentially learn from those mistakes. So what else we're going to do in this video is we're going to have a look at some of the colonies just to kind of give you a bit of an example of what's happened. There's probably 3 main reasons that they've failed. I've had a couple that have starved through isolation, that being there's not— there's food, there's sufficient stores within the hive, They've moved somewhere else and they haven't been able to access it, so that probably happened kind of over a cold snap. There's nothing you can do about that one, so my conscience is clean on that one. Like, that's just the bees' fault. Sometimes that happens. The second one is they've starved, so they've run out of food. That's completely my fault, and going forward I'll have to make sure that they're sufficiently fed going into winter. The third one is poorly mated queens. So where I'm kind of rushing later on in the season, and I'm thinking, well, shall I split this colony, shall I split this nuc and give them a new cell and try and get that virgin mated going into the winter? I've probably left that too late, and then the conditions haven't been right to get mated, so the colony's dwindled or become a drone laying queen. So that's 3, and then the fourth one, and what I'm going to focus in on a little bit more in this video, is Nosema. Now the colony that I'm going to show you is not guaranteed to have Nosema, but it's highly, highly likely, and I'll show you why in a little bit. So let's have a quick look at this hive, show you through kind of the Nosema and dysentery that I think they've got, and we'll have a look at a couple of them and just show you kind of what to expect when you're looking at a dead out. But my advice is you kind of, you can't get too disheartened And I'm saying that kind of through gritted teeth because the last 3 or 4 days I've been really disheartened. I'll show you another thing that's happened in this apiary. We've had severe storms over the last few days. I've had trees come down, I've had trees come down and hit hives. I've lost 4 hives that way as well. It's absolutely kind of gone through the middle and just completely smashed them. And then kind of coming up to check on the colonies, I've noticed that I've got a lot of other deadouts as well. So it's a real double hammer blow, and like I say, it's difficult to not get disheartened. But bees are incredibly resilient, and they are designed to be able to recoup those losses in the summer. I mean, they're incredibly good at it. But what I need to bear in mind, and you will not catch me doing this this season, is that the aggressive expansion that I've been used to is just not sustainable. There's no point kind of Expanding and expanding and expanding if you're not meeting your target goal. And this year, my target goal is to kind of produce X amount of honey. The amount of honey that I'm producing has been going up year on year, but the demand for that honey has been going up year on year as well. So I need to make sure that I can satisfy both the nucs that I'm selling and the honey that I'm selling as well. So I will not be doing the aggressive expansion that I've done in previous years, and I'll just be focusing on building up my production colonies into good kind of strong colonies and trying to target and hit those flows as and when they arise. Okay, so when I looked at this hive for the first time round, I immediately knew something was wrong. You could tell by the way that the fondant had dripped down and they hadn't cleaned it up that there was a problem. Obviously, when I knocked on the hive, you couldn't hear anything, but then when I took the queen excluder with the fondant off, I immediately knew there was something major wrong. Obviously, the lack of bees tells you that it's dead, but this one, I pick it out because there's something particularly unusual about it. That I think it's worthwhile just kind of like zeroing in on, and if you see anything like that, you know what I mean, you may— it's kind of a bit— you need to be a bit concerned and kind of monitor them a bit stronger. And that is around this area here, you can see dysentery. So the bees have clearly had dysentery. There's a lot of feces, and the color of the feces indicates that it's kind of not a healthy feces, so Where you might have your bees kind of doing some cleansing flights early in the year over your neighbour's washing with that nice kind of mustard-coloured poo that we kind of find over everything. This is much, much darker. This is dark, this is a deep brown, and it's not streaky. Do you mean it's real splodges? You take a look at that frame there. It doesn't look healthy at all. So kind of all along here. I mean, that is dysentery. You can see in here as well there's evidence of stores, so they've not died through lack of stores. And if you check through kind of all of these frames in here, you can see the fondant dripping through there. But I mean, these are really weighty frames. You can see stores, capped stores all through there, uncapped stores all through there. You can see the kind of feces and faecal matter kind of dripping down onto some of the cells. And again, I mean, you've got stores all through there, but they're obviously not in a very healthy condition at all. So I would imagine the bees would have been clustered over here. There's not so much kind of action over that side. Again, I mean, you can kind of see the remnants of the dead bees there, but again, lots of stores. That's where the brood would have been. That's empty. And you've still got— I mean, it looks a bit like isolation starving, but it's clearly not because there's so much stores there. And I say that because you've got the bees kind of with their heads into the cells, and if I found a colony with no other indication of stores or fecal matter with heads in cells, then I'd say, yeah, they've starved. But I don't think that's what's happened here. Like I say, that's probably about where the end of the colony came to. So just get another look at that. Do you know what I mean? You can see the kind of dysentery and the fecal matter across there. That's what I'd be looking for if I was going to identify it as being Nosema. Now there's nothing to say that that is Nosema, just because you've got evidence of kind of fecal matter and dysentery, that doesn't mean you've got Nosema, but it's highly, highly likely that that was the cause. I didn't have a chance to kind of look at the behaviour of the bees, so if I was noticing kind of a real lack in honey production, or the bees were displaying kind of tendencies to be lazy or not collecting enough pollen, or Or just kind of acting very, very odd and weaker than normal, then I'd suspect Nosema, potentially without the dysentery. But in this instance, obviously they've died, the dysentery's there, so that would be my kind of guess as to what's happened to this colony. But ultimately it doesn't matter, they're dead, so we'll leave it at that. What would I do with this hive now? So the frames, I would clean them all up, and what I would do is I'd scrape all of the rubbish off them And then I would melt them and I would discard all of the wax. So I don't want to get anything out of this hive. Obviously the stores, not touching the stores, they're going in the bin. Um, all of the wax, I'll keep the frames, but I'll sterilize them first. So I'll maybe boil them in a lye solution or completely, um, melt them out and then sterilize them with a blowtorch. The poly boxes I will clean via, um, in some soda crystals. That's kind of the way to clean that and sterilize that, and then we can use the boxes again. Right, so this colony, 100% operator error. This is completely my fault. This is a result of me being too greedy and trying to get a colony through the winter that just couldn't make it through the winter. And when I put this in, it was on about 3 or 4 frames. So the first thing is that it was in the incorrect size box, should have been a nuc. I'd run out of nucs though, so I tried to put it in this box, tried to give it excess feed to get it built up. You can still see the queen cage in there where I'd released a mated queen, but I just hadn't given them enough bees in order to build up to get them to the point where they can make it over winter. So what's happened here is they've just died. The colony wasn't able to produce enough bees in order to keep themselves warm during the cold snap. That's what's killed them, and that is 100% my fault. So You could probably get a colony that size through, but you're looking at maybe an Apidea. Like, you need a very, very small kind of box to get, I mean, what is effectively a handful of bees through. So learning from that for me is make sure that the number of frames, and again you come back to the number of frames, the number of seams of bees matches the box that you put them in. So don't put a 3 or 4 frame nuc into a big box like this. These are two hives doubled up here, so it was on a single brood, but still it was probably a third of the size needed to go into a double— a single brood to get it through the winter. And look, that's what happens, do you know what I mean? Barely, barely Apidea size. It's absolutely puny. So they've died through what looks to be isolation starving. So it's too cold to get through, but you can see you've got a bit of stores up there. Because they're so small, they've clustered in this corner here. You can see kind of like the remnants of a little bit of brood there. They've obviously abandoned that. But I mean, there's no surprise here. This is 100% my fault. Stupid thing to do. I got greedy. I tried to get a 3 or 4 frame nuc through the winter in a brood box, and it wasn't ready. It wasn't ready for it. The colony didn't have enough time to build up. So that is classic, classic isolation starving there. So this can happen on a good-sized colony as well, highly, highly likely to happen on a small colony like this though, because they can't risk breaking the cluster to go over to there to get that small amount of stores. And you'll see this on some of the other frames as well. Kind of even more so on that one, you know, you've got a whole frame of stores there And this small kind of tiny little ball shape of bees is over there. They couldn't get over here, and they certainly couldn't get to another kind of frame face. So they passed away. Right. So why am I telling you all this? The reason is, is I don't want you to make the same mistakes that I've made. Do you mean let's all have a good laugh? That was absolutely stupid from me. I take 100% of the blame for. So putting small colonies into winter, that's pretty much indicative of the colonies that have gone. And let's be frank, I'm not even going to call them colonies. They're failed attempts at me getting a handful of bees through winter in the wrong size boxes. I mean, that is essentially what's happened there. So whether you can call it a dead out or a colony failure, I don't think you can. I mean, that's completely down on me. And the reason I'm kind of giving you this video and showing you these colonies is so that you don't make the same mistakes. They're very easy mistakes to make. It's very easy to think that you can just expand, expand, expand with bees, and you can. You can get 1 and 2 frame colonies through winter, but they need to be in the correct boxes, they need to be correctly fed, they need to make sure that they're strong going into winter, you've got a mated queen, they need to have sufficient stores. I mean, all of these factors that I try to kind of keep on top of, I've obviously missed out some crucial ones, and that's resulted in the issues that we see here. So I'll leave it at that. I've gone into quite a lot of detail on why the colonies have died. I've gone into further detail as to why I think I'm mostly responsible for all of these deaths, particularly that one. Yeah, we'll leave it at that for the time being. It's quite a miserable topic, so I'm going to focus. I'm going to be optimistic, and I'm going to kind of look forward to the upcoming season. Which really isn't that far away. On a positive note, I mean, I've looked around the apiary today, there's some really nice strong colonies. Not every colony is over like 9 or 10 frames, there's very few like that, but I mean, my average are probably over 4 or 5 frames, which I'm happy with. So we can start looking into kind of maybe giving them some pollen sub, we can start looking at getting them built up for the winter, we start looking at getting them back out to the apiaries, getting them down to a kind of warmer climate. So that's all to come. So I really hope you've enjoyed these videos. Like I say, I mean, I won't shy away from any criticism. So if you want to come back and tell me I'm stupid for doing that, I'll hold my hands up and say, yep, you're 100% right. And I'm doing this video so the beginners who are watching it don't make the same mistakes that I've made. So I really hope you're enjoying these videos. Please hit the subscribe button so you keep up to date with all the latest videos. Please hit the bell so you get notified every time a new video comes up. We've got plenty more coming up in the seat, so stay tuned and I'll see you next time.
