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Laurence Edwards inspects his checkerboard hive and finds strong brood boxes with moderate activity above. He adds an extra honey super to prevent swarming, preferring extra space over the risk of losing the colony.
Laurence Edwards inspects his checkerboard hive and finds strong brood boxes with moderate activity above. He adds an extra honey super to prevent swarming, preferring extra space over the risk of losing the colony.
Everybody is so obsessed with this checkerboard hive. I am so obsessed with this checkerboard hive as well. It's probably the most interesting thing I have ever done. What I'm going to do in today's video is just give you a really quick snapshot inside the hive, check that they've got enough space on the top, and show you kind of what I'm doing in terms of my weekly inspections. Not supposed to be doing inspections, but I just can't stop myself going in there to see what's going on. So I'll get my bee suit on. Let's give you an update with the checkerboard hive. Right, let's get inside the checkerboard colony. Just going to take a peek in the top, see where the bees have got up to. If they're up there, I'm adding more space. Right, this is what the top of the box looks like. As you can see, not a single bee in sight. So my imagination always runs away with me whenever I see this. Is this a good thing because I'm keeping up with them and making sure they've got enough space, or do I need to go further down and see if they swarmed? I think we both know the answer to that. Let's take off the top box, see what the next box down is saying. So that top box there was completely empty of bees. Tiny amounts of nectar in there. Let's take a look down on the second box and see if it's any better. Right, this is what the second box is looking like. A lot more bees in here. Good to see they're up this high. I might pull out a couple of frames and see how the bees are getting on, but I'm just a bit wary. This checkerboarding is supposed to be don't do any inspections, and I'm probably inspecting this one more than the rest of them because I'm just so curious. I'm also having really good fun playing with my new camera as well. So let's pull out a couple of frames, see how the bees are getting on. So that second to the top box is actually quite heavy. Not a huge amount of bees in it, but the bees have definitely been up there at some point because it's kind of maybe 50% full of nectar. It's got a nice amount of weight in it. And then this is the third of the brood boxes. Shouldn't really call them brood boxes. This is the third of the deeper boxes that aren't shallows. And we're back into quite a lot of bees down here. So as you can see, this is the top box. Got one national deep, two national deeps, and then we've got the 14 by 12 underneath. Just looking at this colony now, I'm going to say I don't think they've swarmed yet. Not a huge amount of growth from last week, but I only take one crop each year, so these bees have got plenty of time to go into ultra-performance mode. I'm not going to go any further down. I'm confident the bees haven't swarmed. I'm also confident they've got enough space in those 2 supers to last me at least a week or so. I'm going to close everything back up again and we will leave the bees to it. So I'm new to checkerboarding in this fashion here, and I don't know what really I should be doing on a week-by-week basis. The manipulation was sold to me as you do it once in February or January, And then all you need to do is just keep on putting the boxes on top and making sure the bees aren't at the top. So when I open the top of this one up, I could have said, right, the bees aren't at the top, I'm just going to leave them to it, I'll put the lid back on. Or if I peek down and I see they're kind of 3 or 4 inches from the top, that's the time to put another box on. I think this top box here is completely empty, and the second box down has got maybe like 50% in terms of weight, so I don't want to stack too many boxes up on it. But I also really don't want to get caught out by not having enough boxes on, and then the bees hit the top and then they swarm because I haven't given them enough space. So I'm going to err on the side of giving these bees too much space, and I'm going to add another super on, even though this super at the top is not really being used yet. Things change so quickly when you're in the height of the season like this, and a colony of bees that's this strong can easily fill out a super in 1 week, absolutely no problem. They could probably do it in a couple of days given the right conditions. And the weather looks okay. We've got a nice amount of rain, nice amount of warmth coming up as well. So I'm going to err on the side of safety. It might not be the best thing for the bees to give them that much space, but this is the manipulation that I'm trying to test out this year. So I'm going to add one more super on and then I'll leave the bees to it. Definitely hit the subscribe button though if you want to see what happens with this colony. We'll give you regular updates throughout the season. If you want to see what the manipulation was like at the very beginning, check out this video here, which gives you the full details of how to checkerboard your colony in December to February.
