(dreamy guitar music)
- Hey, there.
We're here in the spring of the year, it's 2018,
and it's May the ninth.
We've been through our hives a couple of times already,
but we're now out cleaning up dead hives,
my least favorite job of the year.
But we gotta do it.
I wanted to talk through how to deal with dead hives,
how to diagnose some of the issues that you might see,
and how to clean up the colonies.
We're gonna make the best of a bad situation, here.
We're going to be able to renew combs, fix boxes,
and make this dead hive an opportunity to kind of,
refresh things a little bit.
So, first Stephanie's gonna unwrap the hive over here.
Just to back up a little bit, two weeks ago we came along
and we took these wraps off.
Go ahead, Stephanie.
So, the lid comes off the hive, and then these wraps,
that are made by the Wellington County
Beekeepers Association come off.
I like to flip them upside down on the ground,
to let any bees out.
And then, this is our inner insulation here,
that keeps the hives nice and warm
and prevents condensation.
Some of our hives aren't that strong this year.
We've got about three frames of bees there, in this hive,
and that's what we've marked on the lid.
Marked May first, three frames.
So, that's one got a ways to go,
but everything's kind of, variable this year.
It was a tough winter, and we've had more losses than usual,
and our colonies are a little bit more even,
in terms of strength this year.
This is a dead hive here.
You can see some bees getting in there
to rob a little bit.
We're trying to get these colonies put away
before that happens, because that could be
potential to transmit American foulbrood.
But, we're gonna check the hive over,
and make sure that's not a problem.
So, lid off there.
Inner cover off.
And, you can see some dead bees there.
But, what we want to do is clean this hive up.
We'll flip it over, and on the bottom we have
screws that hold our bottom boards on.
We'll just unscrew those.
And, then, we're going to clean out any dead bees
that we have.
There's our bottom board there.
There's our screened inner cover.
All this, we're going to clean off in a wheelbarrow,
over here, so we're not spreading debris
all over the bee yard.
For biosecurity reasons.
To get the frames out of the box, I find the easiest way
is to drop the box like that,
pick it up like that.
Then, we got the empty box.
That makes it kind of easy to go through,
and clean up the comb, and the bottom board.
So, we use a wide scraper.
Clean up the bottom board.
The screen itself, pretty much tap that off
to clean it up.
Most of our hives have a wooden slide in there
that we put our roll of sticky papers on.
This one happens to have a metal one.
Again, the reason we're keeping all the debris contained,
is so that there's not risk of spreading disease
from all the gunk that we're spreading
all over the place here.
We can then take frames, and brush dead bees off.
Oh.
I see, actually, right away what the problem was
with this hive.
We've got really uneven looking comb here.
If I hold it from the side.
You can see some drone pupa in worker sized cells.
So, we know there was some kind of a queen problem.
That was a real significant problem last year,
the mating was really terrible.
Very often the queens were mated with just one or two drones
so they petered out, in the fall of the year,
and that means the colony has no chance of surviving
Because, they don't have a queen going into the wintertime.
We can see that on that comb there.
The frames just go into here, and we keep brushing them off.
Some hives have more dead bees than others in them.
With these, there's not much to brush off there.
But, we'll see.
I think we'll come to a bit of a cluster.
There's some bees there.
Lots of pollen, inside the cells.
You can see lots of pollen in there.
They weren't able to use any pollen,
because they weren't rearing much in the way of brood.
Can see some queen cells there, where they've
tried to raise a queen.
A few dead bees inside the cells down in here.
This is old comb.
That's probably a frame we'll get rid of.
Just brushing the bees off, cleaning things up.
If we leave dead bees in there, like you see there,
they're just gonna mold, and stink.
So, we'll get rid of them right now.
Can really see that uneven comb there.
That's definitely a frame that we're going to get rid of.
It's all got holes chewed in it, there's a real mish-mash
of cell sizes in there, there's a wire sticking out here.
It's time to renew that, and replace it with a new frame.
Okay.
We're gonna take these boxes inside, and sort
through the comb, and scrape them,
and check them over for other disease.