Sad news I am afraid. I went to visit the bees over Christmas to check on food levels and hive health, but sadly the colony had collapsed. I describe what I think has happened in this episode. There are signs of spring in the countryside though, so there are optimistic moments to be had including wonderful birdsong.
00:08
Welcome back to a Beekeepers Diary podcast. It's been a while since our last chat. We are at, what is the date? Let's have a look. It's the 8th of February.
00:23
As I speak there's a red kite flying over.
00:31
Blue tits in the trees, crows overhead and the song thrushes are giving it some welly. You can even hear skylarks in the sky to my left.
00:45
fantastic sounds. The earth is waking up once more, preparing for spring. Everyone's claiming their territories and letting the world know they're about.
01:00
quite hopeful. A hopeful sound, unlike the sound of my bee colony, which I'm sad to say has failed to get through the winter. I noticed just after Christmas that there was a problem and it's irredeemable. So a couple of weeks later I came and...
01:30
came to see what had been going on. So I've opened the hive up and sure enough all the whole colony is dead, I'm sad to say. My hopes for doubling my colony this year are dashed. I'm back to the beginning again. I've kept bees for over 10 years now and went maybe a...
01:58
eight, nine years without losing any colonies and then the last two winters I've lost them. But I definitely know what's happened this year. I've opened up the hive and looked through all the frames and there was no brood whatsoever and I found three queen cells on one of the central frames. So it looks very much like just at the end of
02:27
the season, hear a horse running off near me, made itself jump, the end of last autumn for whatever reason my queen failed, be it the Varroa treatment that we gave or a failed supersedure or maybe she was squashed during my last manipulation.
02:54
All of these things can't be ruled out, but for whatever reason, the queen was lost. The bees tried to raise a new queen and did not do so. Maybe it was too late for there to be any drones for a new queen to mate with. Maybe when they hatched they killed each other and they didn't, they failed to leave one queen behind.
03:19
Maybe the Varroa treatment killed her? I don't know. So all the summer bees reached the end of their life and collapsed and there was no second generation to take over for the winter. So here we are. I've just emptied the hive and swept out all the dead bees. I'll leave it in situ until I can bring myself to remove all the...
03:48
boxes here and clean them up and start again. I've got a nuke, I've got half colony of ordered for the end of May so I'm not giving up. I'm going to dust myself off and have another go and try and get back to my preferred number of two colonies and get in my cycle of two big colonies, split them for nukes and select my best nuke to take us through the winter.
04:18
system which was previously working. I'm a bit all over the place with my thoughts at the moment. Thank you Mr. Pheasant. The reason I came in winter to check them was obviously to check the stores which they've got plenty of. The boxes are still extremely heavy so they have plenty of food and I was going to do the winter varroa treatments.
04:47
They'd already gone by the time I'd come to do that. Then I was looking back to the end of season last year where around the varroa treatment periods, the bees were especially grumpy, uncharacteristically grumpy. Looking back, that was probably a clue that they were queenless at the time. They even were grumpy to the extent they released that very distinctive pineapple-y pear drop smell.
05:17
when you know they're really mad. But I thought it was just end of season grumpiness due to the weather. But on reflection, they were probably queenless.
05:30
Lessons learned. Not that I could have done much about it, but there was a clue there I think. So, yeah, sad news, I'm afraid. But we will dust ourselves off, prepare over the next few weeks for the new season, get a new box of bees and start again and see where we go.
05:56
Thank to all the new listeners that have joined. I think last time I looked I've been listened to in 111 different cities which is mind-bending for a bloke standing in a field in Hertfordshire waffling on near the M25 as a bit of an audio backdrop which is a circular motorway around the outskirts of London if you're not from the UK.
06:23
Yeah, welcome. Thank you. I hope to keep you entertained for next season and with hopefully a more upbeat news. We can just cheer ourselves up, listen to the song thrash that's calling beside me.
06:43
can generally identify them. They've got a massive range of calls, but they generally do them in batches of two of the call that they're doing and they sort of cycle through their repertoire and they're quite loud and they're quite good impersonators as well, so sometimes you can hear them doing car alarms and the like.
07:10
Right, I'll stop listening to the sounds around me whilst indulging your attention. I'll leave you for now, be back in a few weeks with some more news hopefully. I'll catch you next time. Bye.