so today we're going to revisit the long langstroth horizontal hive that
died during the winter of 2020-2021 somewhere about mid-january so it's open
we're going to look on the inside here and see what's going on
and evaluate the bees let's see why they died what do we think is happening here
taking off these one-inch red oak cover boards there's dead bees there on top there's a drone and
we're going to of course pull this follower board out and it did have openings in the bottom there
so the bees could access this open space this is a five foot long long lengths round hive that i
built myself here's another drone interesting enough and that's going to be a very telling
sign later on the goo that you see here on the top board is silicon grease i will not be using
that again to stop wind from blowing through the joints and the bees you see that are alive in here
are just foragers are looking for something to eat now look what's on the bottom boards here
varroa destructor mites not everything of course is a varroa destructor right there but there's
plenty of them laying around and this was a saskatras package of bees it was installed
early last year also this is a sensor that i put in there humidity and temperature
all it does is tell me if my colony is alive and of course the temperatures dropped after
this colony died out we have r10 two inch rigid foam board in the top of this hive the hive
is made out of inch and a half thick material sides top and bottom so they were plenty warm
now we're gonna look at the first frame we've come to and look at these white
sugar crystals in here that's because late in the season we gave them two to one sugar syrup
common to do just before things start getting cold in the fall and look at the little transition
holes they have here just under the top bar so they can move from frame to frame
here's another little forager there that wants to rob this colony out
again white sugar crystals left over from two to one sugar syrup looking at the bottom board
here though they had no problems with moisture control this has a single entrance no top venting
cover boards follower board and they were doing really really well that's why this is such a big
disappointment and again there's another drone there i'm also going to show you the bottom
closely eventually but i'm going to suck these up because i like to collect the dead bodies
from the bottom and of course suck up those drones not drones for road destructor mites
drones too but i want to see what their condition is under the microscope later but look at this
capped honey that's what they get from the environment and then the lower uncapped
areas with white sugar crystals and i'm are from the two to one syrup pretty distinctive
this is uh better comb pre-drawn synthetic beeswax i used this hive as part of that test last year
the bees took to it right away and used it there's better comb right there and
look at it capped honey top third we're gonna go frame by frame until i find
the cluster and then we're gonna talk about what we think happened to them
more capped honey looks good notice there's not a lot of mold or condensation evidence
in here so i'm very happy with that today by the way the temperature is in the mid
60s we're opening this up propolis sticking those things together there look at all the
capped honey here so these bees did not starve for sure again look at the holes along the top board
there just underneath they have transit holes they can transfer through you couldn't do this
with plastic foundation that's why i went with all foundationless and better comb exclusively
next frame look at all that kept honey lots of it that's why my hopes were so high that they
were going to do well that's going to come right through winter just perfect that's why it's such
a puzzle a lot of people lost their bees this year now my other colonies are doing really well
but i saw so much capped honey in here that i decided i'm going to get this
i've butler towed out i'm going to put some of these frames in there i don't want to feed
this back to the beast until i know for sure what's going on with colony but i definitely
want to uncap this spin it out and use it for myself nothing wrong with spring harvested honey
looks good each of these frames averages about seven pounds of honey a piece
so why waste it you could just put it out at a feeder station somewhere and let bees rob it out
if you wanted to but i prefer to harvest it plus we can get the wax out of it and everything else
look at that all capped honey again this is on the better comb frames with the wire reinforcement
and that one bowed out a little bit so actually i'm going to move it over one space there
you can also drop silica packs in here just to make sure no condensation forms
and you're stored honey and look at all these dead bees on the bottom
more varroa mites down there there's some capped honey here's the beginning of the cluster of
dead bees look they're spread out all over the place as if they were suspended in animation
this hive has a single entrance we're going to show you that in a little bit too i'm going to
take my time go nice and slow because we really want to look at things here so it does look like
a little dysentery there on these top boards the bees could move freely over the top of the frames
around the sides of the frames and of course they could travel freely through the bottom
under the frames there's another cluster there
and these numbers are way down you would expect to find a lot more dead bees in a dead out like this
also i'd like to point out that it doesn't stink usually when you have a bunch of dead bees on the
bottom the moisture and the decomposition causes them to smell just like a dead animal so we're
going to take a closer look here i'm also looking for the queen or evidence of the queen and i think
what actually happened here with this colony queen died either she died or there was a
late season swarm for some reason and they never replaced her that explains why there are so many
drones in here and look at the cells this is critical see the little bits and pieces
little remnants little crystal chunks in those brood cells that is varroa destructor
mite feces so we had a mite issue no secret though so many mites on the bottom board
saskatchewan's last year required mite treatment this colony received a mite treatment as well
so they don't hold their own with mites very well in fact they had the largest
number of mites of any bees i've ever kept and you can see that uh they weren't starving so it
really was a dwindling away of numbers so the bee population just fell off that's why through
winter even mid january they were actually making drones that's your first sign we got a problem
very disappointing because of course we had the one warm day in january and the bees were flying
out of this colony they were doing cleansing flights but of course there's no way to tell if
you had the queen and i did look through this pile of bees here to see if the queen was present and
i could not find her anywhere there is a kind of long looking b there around the one to two
o'clock position but that's just a worker b that was not the queen and uh look lower right there
we've got some of those what's referred to as bullet cells which is evident of a laying worker
making drones so it takes a while for a worker to become a laying worker and the queen has to
be absent for an average of three weeks before those pheromones kick in and they activate
their egg laying capability and there's a drone right there in the middle
so they were raising drones and of course in the drone cells they were reproducing mites so the
varroa destructor mites are evident all over they really see-sawed back and forth last year they had
a high mite count treat them the mites fall off the numbers are low the mites bounce right back
so we have what looks to be a dead out due to
the queen either missing or just dying looked through it all could not find her
and again there's another drone cell see at the top of that when it's upside down
so we have a lot of waste now what looks like drone
cells at the top here that's just stretched a little because this better cone was sagging some
nice fat drone right there why would we have drones in the middle of winter the only way
is that the brood that is being raised is drones exclusively so the workers were just
running out the end of their lives here look there's honey in the top left capped this is
after i scraped everything away we've got bees in the cells as if they were starving
they shoved themselves right in there and of course the cluster was over the top of it and
that's how they were all staying warm and then you would expect to find another cluster on the
opposite side of the same frame and again we're looking at those drone cells to the right and
we're looking at the piles of varroa destructor mite droppings right inside those cells so
this was a mite bomb sad news is that probably facilitated taking out these bees the good news
is it was winter time and they couldn't spread the mites around to other colonies and we'll
be doing mite counts of the other colonies as the nectar flow really kicks in and they strengthen up
but it looks to me like i'm going to use this horizontal hive again we're going
to try again this year because with all the resources and i see these transit holes and
i see the condition of the hive itself had the queen survived i think they would have made it
i'm just going to evaluate the rest of it all the way to the end here and see
how much honey was stored see what their situation was resource wise
again just a spattering of dead varroa destrectomites on the bottom throughout the
length of it there i get tired of vacuuming them up there were absolutely too many mites more than
you would count and then of course this is where the brood frame was through the year why is it
located here because that's where the entrance is top of your screen there half inch tall entrance
so the design worked the insulation was adequate the queen either disappeared in a swarm
or something just happened to her
these bees would have made it i think they would have continued to move down the frames initially
i was thinking uh they just didn't move and that's why they died out but that's not the case
they just weren't reproducing look at all that honey these are some deep frames and look at how
warped the better comb is on this one that's because
this particular better comb frame with the better comb in it was held in there with toothpicks
we don't do that anymore i run wire reinforcement through all of them
any of these frames that had brood in them i'm going to get rid of
so we're going to pull everything out anything that the bees died in
and i'm just going to destroy it and i'm going to start fresh we're going to reinstall a swarm
into the same horizontal hide this year and i'm going to try this again
because for all practical purposes that's the entrance by the way
the one that someone was asking about why it's off the floor and it was about the dead bee piling up
issue more capped honey more honey than they ever would have used
so i'm impressed i'm impressed with the resources they were only making drones which means of course
the fat bodied winter bees would have been the longest lasting they ultimately just
eventually die out on their own when they're not being replaced
with the small brood patterns that would normally be developing during this part of the year just
before spring so mid-february going into march you would have seen a population build up and
they would have been consuming this surplus honey here i did not feed them over the winter we took
away that rapid round feeder because i knew they had a lot of resources i just decided to start
looking at these drones drones if you don't know are male bees you would expect to find
varroa destructor mites on them but the mites of course were all laying dead on the bottom
again because bees are dead the mite has nothing to benefit from its
host anymore and then we're back at these frames so these are going in the fire pit
just going to get rid of them looks like it could have been the beginnings of a super seizure cell
at one point but that would be of no use if they hatched out a replacement queen an emergency queen
if they had eggs and larvae to do that she would have had nothing to mate with in the middle of
winter you also can't buy in a queen and fix things another drone right there no big surprise
because notice the cells these are not normal drone cells which are large these are worker cells
so what they did is they took existing worker larvae and uh the quit well worker cells
and then the laying worker put our eggs in there and that's why we get these
bullet cells that are out absolutely kind of normal size except for that really bulbous
convex surface there which tells us they were hatching drones not a lot of them either
but the workers just died out on their own they just sat there
so high veroa load no queen normal mortality at the end of their expected life drones with
nobody to feed them really if the workers start to die out drones don't feed themselves
that's a drone cell right there that's a drone cell
so i am going to try again i'm satisfied that this is due to the loss of a queen
combined with of course disease that's conveyed by the varroa destructor mites so it's a double hit
so i don't think it's necessarily due to the long lengths roth hive horizontal configuration
i think if we had a stronger population they would have ultimately just kept going
that is pollen stored there right next to the capped honey standard kind of brood frame layout
so i'm going to vacuum all this up remove all the frames leave two frames with capped honey in them
just for kicks because i hope within the next few weeks we'll catch a swarm and install them
in the same horizontal angstroth hive and maybe have better luck going into this coming winter
bro destructor mites all over the bottom here you can spot them you don't need a magnifying
glass they're just so obvious against this pine and again the bottom is uh inch and a half thick
two by twelves two of them married together five feet long the sides are two by twelves
the top is formed out of two two by twelves and a two by four down
the center and then that insulation board there's a drone right there
yeah drones are all over the place so i think that's what happened we ended up with
the loss of a queen and they did the best they could and the workers after about three weeks
activated their ovaries and started laying their own eggs as that last ditch effort
to survive and they made a bunch of drones and then they all just ultimately died out
the cluster is too small to survive and without reproduction there's no new worker bees coming out
and that was the end of things so i'm just gonna clean it out remove the frames close it up
and get ready for this year's swarms these are all some of the workers that i vacuumed up off the
bottom i like this little handheld battery-powered vacuum because i can just drop the bees in there
and then wash them out rinse them through a screen let the varroa mites wash out these are all drones
and then dump the baromites onto a coffee filter so i can get some good contrast try those out
with desiccant packs and then put them under a microscope so i can see if their feet are damaged
but i guess i'm going to have to tell you that the saskatras bees
do not handle bro destructor mice at least none of the packages that i
received and others in my area that got packages last spring the spring of 2020.
uh they had some of the highest row mite counts i've ever seen so i'm going to leave this hive
tool in here i've decided this year that for biosecurity i'm going to keep a hive tool in
each hive and i won't be transferring from one to the next so we're just going to close this one up
and let the bees inspect it it has not been unheard of that i've had an empty box here and
had a swarm just move in on their own not counting on that but not saying it couldn't happen either
so at least i got quite a bit of honey out of it
not a total loss but it is actually a total loss when it comes to the bees so anyway we're
going to do this again i'm going to keep working with this long laying straw thanks for watching
you