How Have The Bees Survived In This Abandoned Apiary?

my friend called me up the other day said that he'd located an abandoned apron that's not been touched for five years in this video we're going to take a look inside each and every single one of those hives see if there's bees inside there see what they're looking like see if we can identify any disease and then come up with a plan to take these bees away so on first glance the beehives are definitely active you can see the bees coming in can see the bees going out there's pollen going in there as well my friend's already coming out a look and open some of these hives and i can confirm there is definitely bees inside there some really big strong colonies as well and he reckons there's some really aggressive bees down here as well so what we're going to do in this video i'm going to get my bee suit on we're going to get the smoker on first thing we're going to do is we're going to take a look inside the colonies see what the bees are looking like and then we'll come up with that plan going forward but the big risk that we're looking out for here and what we need to prepare for in this video is the fact that there might be foul brewed disease here so we're looking for efb we're looking for afb and we're putting in place all of the measures to make sure that we don't transfer that to anywhere else across all of our apiaries the final thing to say is we need to get in and do this intervention now my recommendation here is it's the middle of december at the moment i said best to keep these bees in situ until so middle of april get in there do a full inspection without moving them identify if there is any disease but the landowner is not willing to do that need to get these bees out as soon as possible so in order to assess the disease nature of the colonies we're going to have to get in here it's the wrong time of the year but luckily it's a relatively mild december shouldn't do too much damage we're going to assess to see if they've got disease before we move them on so i'll get my bee suit on i'll get my lighter lit i'll get my friend to come and help me and we'll get inside to take a look at these bees right you might notice a slightly different bee suit to normal and that is all part of the disease control i'm not going to come in here with my normal bee suit because even if i go out and clean that bee suit afterwards there is a risk if these colonies do have afb you can transfer it back to the car back to your house back to somewhere else and then it can be transferred to your colonies chance of afb though it is very very low but in this video we are going to go through we're going to break the seals look at the bees take out some frames see if we can see some brood although it's highly likely at this time of year we're not going to see much brood but you just can't take too many risks when it comes to disease so let's get in take a look at the bees so these are the first two hives we've got what looks like a bit of a bodged 14 by 12 on the left with a couple of supers on and then a standard national deep with either a super one or an eight to bring that up to four in by 12. the hives look a little bit battered but wooden hives they look like cedar hives they're designed to stay outside they're not rotten so pretty good health in fact the hives there you look over there though over the top and there's a few battered bits some plywood nukes that didn't make it as well so my friend's been here before he's taken a look and got all the rubbish and stacked it in a pile over there quite a good advert really for for cedar hives you look at this one here this is a plywood nuke and that's been outside for say five years now and that's rotten away and then you look at the cedar nukes over here and they're in really good condition they're bleached because of the sun and obviously there's a bit of wear on them as well but they're solid and there's no rot so really good advertisement for c2b hives so coming up to the next beehive here nicely dotted around again this one here looks like a 14 by 12 box a little bit of wear on it still got a super on it so we might find some honey in there lift it up off the ground still got the brick on everything in good condition three beehives so hard hopefully we're gonna find some really good colonies of bees in here on to our next colony here and you can see something a little bit surprising down here which is they've built wax underneath the box there really interesting to see what is actually going on there i'm so excited to see this one i'm going to leave this one till last because this really is going to be so interesting you can see the wax there they're completely open to the elements but take a look there's bees in there so is that colony there as a result of a separate colony underneath the floor or is that just one big colony that's got a hole in the floor you'll have to wait until the end of the video to see this one we'll do this one last and then the final colony here is just a polynuke and there's no roof on the polynoc my friend found this one before and the roof was all over the place we're going to take a look in there as well but if you pop this open really really interesting look how much they proper lies that roof up don't like the light coming in from the top this one's second to last so if you want to see if there's bees in there make sure you watch to the end of the video so whenever you're working with colonies that you're you're not aware of the temperament really good idea to bring a smoker bring a new hive tool or a hive tool that you can segregate don't use your normal hive tool obviously everything needs to be cleaned afterwards if we do find any foul brood give them a really really good puff of smoke though john this is my friend here he says they're going to be an aggressive colony anyway so i know you all like watching me get stung but we're going to do our best to limit the amount of stings that we take we use a lot of smoke to do that so we're just puffing that entrance there entrance block is in so the first thing we're going to do is just take that entrance block out might get a few bees come out here this is probably going to be really difficult to get out really well properlized in and i'm going to abandon that idea straight away because it is just way too proper eyes so i'm just going to get in there puff the smoke in as much as i can give the bees a chance to get nice and calm so first off really interesting look inside the roof i do think this is interesting this has not been touched for five years look how wet it is up here this is a really good indication of what's going on inside this colony you can see there we've got a crown board with holes on the top there's gonna be a lot of heat coming out there a lot of moisture that's condensing on that roof and it's showing that you've got liquid water sitting in that roof really good idea for you to get those closed up make sure that none of that water can come up to the top gives the bees good insulation so let's get inside then see what we can see first thing we've got a very friendly spider so nice spider there but look at the quality of that equipment loads of proper lifts on it really good and solid still so no rot at all right so look down into the colony then first super we've not seen any bees yet i'm just gonna lever this one down i can hear the bees though they're getting grumbly inside these are so well properlized but there we go that's the first super off and it's a really heavy heavy super what's really interesting here and what you can see is crystallized honey at first i thought maybe that would have been some drone brood or some lava but it's not it's definitely crystallized honey that's been there for a long time and then obviously what you can see there as well is that is some bees and you can really hear the noise building on this colony now i think when we take this super off we're going to see a big strong colony of bees right next super off same that's full so we've got two full supers of honey and then we've got a colony of bees as well right so we've got bees in the first one that's really good nothing worse than coming and doing these videos and blanking so we've got one out of one i'm just gonna puff these bees though because we don't know the temperament they don't actually seem that bad some of my bees doing this you'd be getting hammered by now already but the smoke really really does help right so this is the first colony here really nice big strong colony covering one two three four five six seven eight nine ten ten frames of bees that's about as strong as you're really going to see them at this time of year nice local dark bee they've been here for five years they've not been touched looking at the bees though can't really see any varroa on them no deformed wing virus but obviously that's not to say there isn't varroa chances are it's going to be a high varroa load in here the bees are fanning we're going to take out a couple of frames probably going to get a little bit grumpy because they're going to be so well propolised in but we need to do this in order to check to see if there's foul brood here leaving them here isn't an option and i'm not willing and my friend's not willing to move them away to another aperi at this time of the year if there's any risk of foul brood relatively warm today though you can see the bees they're not tightly clustered they're moving over the frames we can get inside here take a look see what we can see so as you can see look how tight these are really proper lines together if you were to go in there and just level that out almost certainly going to break the lugs so you need to be getting in there and doing it like this there's not much space to do it but you've got a much better chance of breaking a seal like that than doing it on the lugs if you need to get in there as well you can chisel down into this bit here this is the kind of thing you need to do in spring but just look how tightly packed those frames are just need to take your time on it don't go in here and do it you need to get these frames out right we're in the business so there is the first frame that we've managed to get out can't see anything sinister on there i know around here does look a little bit dodgy but this is just pollen this is just cat stores no brood in here can't see any eggs in here either right so i've been through all of this colony now pretty much all the frames in the center i'm not going to go to the outer ones because it's quite clear that there's no brood in here what you're seeing here though it does look a little bit alarming but it is just a mixture of pollen and crystallized stores they're going to work their way through that obviously this is an area a little bit of concern here but there's definitely not any foul brood in there this here is just honey you can see really nice honey um so we're going to put this colony back together again unfortunately there's no brood in this one so we can't sentence it either way we've done the minimum we've gone in we've checked we've not identified foul brood but unfortunately we've still not ruled it out right so what we're going to do with this colony then not really a huge amount we can do we've gone in we've tried to find some brood there's no brood at this time of the year i'm going to put everything back together again and i'm going to advise that this colony here isn't moved until the spring until they start rearing some brood and until you can identify if there is an actual risk of foul brood until then i'm going to treat this colony as if there is foul brood just take all of those biosecurity measures i'm not going to burn my suit but i'm going to go and give it a really really good wash definitely get that hive tool get that clean as well the gloves are going to get thrown away much easier to er on the side of safety than to risk anything nasty like i said just for clarity we've not identified foul brood but we've definitely not ruled it out so just a little tweak that i'm going to make to this colony here really simple just going to take an old battered piece of plywood just going to break that off into two bits place them over the holes like that that should stop any moisture coming up and rotting this board anymore this roof here is getting up through it is making a little bit damp that should stop it keep the moisture down below in the beehive right next colony then we're going to get inside this one no supers on this one but we're going to get inside take a look see what the bees are looking like maybe get some frames out of this one as well just to check for brood but if they're all showing no signs of brood i'm not going to go through all of them and disturb them because my recommendation is going to be that they need to stay here for a few more months until they're all back into brood season so interesting this one here they've had some fondant at some point you can see the leftover package in the roof and then you go over to the roof and you can see they've started building some comb up here as well you can see life down there so i'm going to pop this one open see if we can see some bees in here as well same again a little bit of smoke top and bottom and this one here looks so so much smaller doesn't mean there's not a big cluster of bees and what i'm going to show you with this one is if you're seeing this in your colonies you're seeing not many bees here the first place to look see if you can crack the floor and you lift the floor up like that and that is where you're going to see a colony it's always good just to take a check underneath this one here much much smaller maybe a late season super seizure let's get inside see what we can see now whenever i see colonies like this on my own i always get concerned no visible clustering considerably less bees a little bit more tetchy if these are my own bees i'd hazard a guess that they've probably not got a queen in there or they've got a drone laying queen but you really can't tell until you get in there and take a look now see if i can get a couple of frames out again see if they've got any brood in there maybe we'll see the queen hopefully we don't find any foul brood so just because my friend this hive here was actually completely collapsed when they first came along and saw it fallen off the hive stand it was in pieces and that makes real sense from what we're seeing here much weaker colony probably didn't have a watertight warm hive in order to build up but how resilient are these bees if we go in here we see some brood we actually see some bees maybe the queen they've had to live in a very substandard hive for a number of years with lots of water ingress right first frame out really looks very very odd you don't often see this in here this looks to me like crystallized stores like i say you don't often see this in a hybrid you get so much kind of crystallization of stores like that shows that they've been working it a little bit down there but up here it's getting more and more difficult for them to work so chances are the stores are going in there they're crystallizing the bees are going out they're foraging more and this stuff up here just nice capped liquid stores it's so much easier to work and they're just neglecting the crystallized stores down here nothing sinister though it's definitely just honey i'm going to scrape a bit of it out just to show you that now because this is present on all of the hives we're seeing at the moment just better to be safe than sorry take a look see exactly what it is i'm pretty sure it's just crystallized stores so it's really hard rock solid so you can see here now much much smaller colony nothing kind of to the right hand side here so we've got one two three four five maximum of five frames of bees here it's about a nuke's worth of bees and still nothing i can see in the way of brood lots of cap stores over here again solidified cap stores the bees aren't working very well no sign of any brood wouldn't expect it really at this time of the year anyway especially with local bees they do tend to go through longer broodless periods and there we go there's the queen so you can see the queen in the middle there not the biggest queen don't want to say she's a runt queen but she's definitely not a very very big looking queen like you look at that if i was looking at that in my own colony and i saw that over winter i would probably say that was a runt queen the fact that there's no brood in here as well the fact that it's a very very small colony if i had to make a guess i would say that this queen here is a runt queen not mated and this colony here may well fail going into winter so john if you want to mark this one if you want to give it to someone else that'll be good keep the good ones for yourself but that is a very small queen like i said i reckon she's not mated late season super seizure which you do tend to get a lot in wild colonies because they need that break in order to keep the varroa levels down i can't even see that queen i can't see it even though you're pointing out to the queen to the queen's there so i'm going to put this one back together as well no brood in this one we found the queen much smaller colony again my advice will be the same don't move this one until april until you see some brood and you can confirm that there's no disease right so that's two hives down two hives with bees in it no afb no efb nothing sinister found yet let's go and take a look at some of those other colonies up there see if we can find anything interesting right we're on to hive number three then let's get inside see if there's any bees in there see if there's any honey in the super see if we can see some brood or the queen again very very heavy roof you can see it straight away look at all that moisture that's coming up into the roof sodding with water because the crown board vents are left open and it's not coming out the side so you can feel that in that roof already absolutely soaked and you can feel it in the crown board as well the crown board's really light because it's gone through that wet and dry cycle onto the super here no bees in the super but you can see a couple just popping up now you can see the water damage on these frames here these dark edges that's showing all the moisture is sitting in here making it dark but it looks in relatively good condition right we've got a bit of honey in this one as well not full probably six or seven frames all really nice equipment though wooden framed wire queen excluders my favorite and then again we've got some bees over here so like i said i'm not going to go through every single one of these now because it's quite clear that all of these are the same bee they've been here for five years there's no point me going through and disrupting them this one again quite small not as big as the first one two three four five call it six frames of bees you've got all of this crystallized honey probably as a result of all the himalayan balsam around here as well but very very similar what you're seeing on all of the other colonies here i wouldn't say it's an overly small colony but i'd say it's probably about average for the local strain of bees around here and they're not too aggressive like i've not taken a single sting yet i've got a couple of rips in my gloves as well i've been ripping things open they're not too bad these bees at all but i'm going to close these ones back up see if we can go to those exciting hives at the end see if we can find any bees in those right this is the one that is so packed away like i just can't believe the brambles and stuff getting to this one and as you can see it's a payne's polynuke and the roof has blown off so unfortunately the bees have only had this clear plastic poly board to work with let's take a look though see what they've done underneath this poly board see how much proper this is underneath it now you've got to feel a little bit sorry for these bees look at the level of propolis that they've put in there just to try and give themselves a little bit of respite from that sun that's coming in there bees like dark places like tree cavities they do not like roof lights or light coming into the hive at all and you can see that from the copious amounts of propolis that they've used to try and seal that up now i'm not going to be unfair on these bees and start opening them up because i really do think that could wreck them we're going to have to give them a little bit more time than that the benefit that we're going to get from checking is very minimal considering that there's no brood in the rest of them this is just a very small colony you can see it over in that corner there my recommendation for this one is get a nice solid roof on it and assess it again in the spring but just check out all of that propolis absolute goldmine in terms of the amount of propolis in there right here's the one that everyone's been waiting for including me looks like a big colony maybe it's two colonies we're gonna take a look underneath first and see if there's any connection between that colony underneath and the colony in the brood box maybe there's just a gap there they ran out of space but they're doing so well it's been really mild this autumn going into winter but they have no protection down there they're living with the rain they're living with the wind very very hardy bees i'm not going to go in there and start breaking the frames open but i'm going to get in and try and get a real close look to see what they're looking like right here we go let's take a look at this colony here it's a national deep box with an econ top turning it into a 14 by 12 it's got two supers on it looks in really good condition this one here probably the best condition out of all of them but what really interests me about this colony here is the fact that there is comb sitting underneath there now i don't know if this comb here is connected into the brood box and it's just an extension down i'm going to try and get under there now and have a look with the camera it's a little bit difficult though to get in there so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to tilt it up and see if we can see anything when we tilt it right as you can see i've tilted it up and that colony underneath is completely separate it's a separate colony so there is a wild colony living underneath the beehive middle of december and there's still bees underneath it i think that is amazing so i'm going to take this colony off here i want to get down and have a look at that colony whilst doing as minimal damage to it or disruption to it as i possibly can but i'm just so interested to see how that colony is surviving without a beehive in the middle of wales in the wind and the rang right how interesting is that it is two separate colonies i want to take a look inside so i'm going to lift this whole beehive off the floor is essentially the roof of the colony below so i'm going to leave that i'm going to take the roof off contain the bees in the top hive move it off to one side and then we'll have a look at the colony underneath right so what is so interesting here lifting up that that is a national deep with a 14 by 12 eek two supers and i've lifted it straight up really not very heavy at all so what i'm thinking here is that we're not going to find a colony in there the colony is underneath they've swarmed they've attracted all of the bees down underneath my guess is now we're not going to find a colony in there but do stay tuned to the end of the video because we will check in that one see what we can find but now we're going to take a look at this colony down here see how they're surviving in the wild right so there's lots going on here really really interesting on the floor of the colony we've got sawdust really fine sawdust absolutely loads of it got lots of rotten wood knocking around as well and then to the left over here we've got what is clearly a badger set so again what i'm thinking here is the badgers have come along they've attacked the beehive the bees have gone away the queen's maybe come out the badgers gone in they've eaten all the honey they've eaten all the wax in the beehive that we'll take a look in at the minute and then the bees have just come back and clustered underneath made themselves a new home down there and the badgers gone off tummy full of honey and left them to it obviously can't prove that that's happened that's just what i'm thinking really keen to get in here have a look at this colony because it does look really nice and strong right and there we go a wild colony of bees take a look at that that is absolutely fantastic take a look at that a wild colony of bees not been touched for five years surviving in the wild in north wales we're not going to move these because we think it might be a disease risk but we're definitely going to make their home a little bit easier for them over the next few years but how about that you do not see that every day these are fantastic incredible creatures right so what we're going to do with this colony i'm going to put this one back down i'm going to go and have a look into that hive and see if there's anything in there i'm guessing there's not going to be anything in there and if there's not we're going to somehow transport these bees into there just to keep them a little bit warmer over winter just to get them through right what an amazing video this is turning out to be we're going to take a look in this final beehive now see if there's anything in here could be wasp could be asian hordes who knows going to be a real mystery box this one my guess though is there's not going to be any bees in there but you just never know let's take a quick look down and see if we can see anything right so an empty super lots of damage real weird smell in this one it's not foul brood it's the smell of fermenting honey so the bees like i said they could have abandoned it at some point definitely got some sort of damage in there whether it's mouse whether it's badger something's had to go at that one so i'm gonna pop that one over to the side again next super lots of damage really light nothing in it some things had to go at that one as well or the bees have abandoned it and then what we're seeing here is really really interesting you look closely at this this is drones drone bees and they've been able to not get through that queen excluded but just look how well they preserved themselves five years since anyone's been in here these drones are just sitting there lots of wasps something's happened to this hive something's killed it very very quickly maybe we can see what it is when we open into the brood box so you can feel this one really has struggled with the moisture very wet very fragile a lot of rot in it and i'm just going to take open a couple of frames here right so this tells me everything i need to know on this frame here look what we've got we've got a cluster of dying bees you see this happens when a queen supersedes late in the season like we've got this cell over here whether this was last year year before we don't know we've got a couple of cells on there you've got a small cluster of bees leads me to believe what happened is late in the year the queen superseded herself realized there was nowhere to go came back underneath the colony maybe she was a clipped queen that often happens with clip queens the new queen that was in the hive didn't mate the cluster dwindled over winter and then you get this little cluster of bees and the new colony underneath that's what i reckon happened to this colony right so what am i going to do only thing i really can do with this one here is i'm going to move all of the frames out of the brood box i'm going to put the brood box back onto the existing location where the bees are i'm going to transfer them over just lifting up that floor hopefully they fit in the brood box that's going to give them the best chance of getting through winter and then we'll cut to the end and i'll tell you what i recommend for all of these colonies right well you can see there looks like a wax moth lava that's what you're expecting to see not going to be a small hive beetle because we're in the uk but that is what a live wax moth lava looks like be very very surprising not to see something like that here nothing to worry about though obviously if you're going to use these beehives again i'll be recommending that all of these frames are burnt or the very minimum melted down get all the wax out clean them in caustic soda completely start again this here though wax moth lava nothing to worry about right so all i'm going to do i've got the wild colony here i'm going to place this brood box on there i'm not going to worry too much about finding that queen i'm not going to put a floor in there i'm just putting that brood box on and then we're just going to try and rest this colony directly into that brood box right i know that's not perfect but what i'm going to end up doing with this colony and i'll do it with my friend john later on in the year is we'll cut those frames apart we'll bungee them into some real frames we'll put them into a beehive but you're not going to do that in the middle of december it's just too disruptive for this colony and again i know i've got a big vent up here not good for the bees i'll cover it up as best as i can but if you look at the way they were before compared to how they are now this is going to see them through give them a little bit more protection from the wind and the rain hopefully we can see them through until spring

Channel: Black Mountain Honey

Views: 91,822

Keywords: where do wild bees live, can bees live in the wild, abandoned apiary, wild bee hive relocation, wild bee hive removal, wild beehive in garden, wild darkness beehive, abandoned beehives, abandoned bees, beehives for beginners, foul brood, afb, efb, bee diseases, quarantine apiary, bee disease spread, what killed the bees, what kills bees, why do bees die, save the bees, how to save the bees, beekeeper saves bees, bee rescue, beehive rescue, cut out, bees

Id: YToIw__jJUM

Length: 25min 52sec (1552 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 24 2021