Laurence Edwards inspects a swarm captured ten days earlier, showing how to check for a laying queen without seeing her. He stresses using clean equipment, waiting three days before feeding to reduce disease, then feeding light 1:1 syrup. The colony shows vigorous wax draw, pollen stores, and plenty of eggs and larvae.
About ten days ago now, I went out and caught a reasonable-sized swarm. I put it into this plastic Payne's poly nuc with plastic frames and feeders frames. Left it for about six days, and then I came back and gave it a little feed. In this video, we're going to take a look inside, see if the bees have drawn out the frames, see if we've got brood, see if we've got a queen, and just take a general look at how this swarm is getting on ten days after capture. So really important with swarms that when you catch them, put them onto brand new equipment. Or freshly scorched equipment. New frames, new boxes, or at least a very minimum cleaned boxes but new frames. Don't put them onto old brown, black, diseased combs, even if they're yours. Much, much better to get them onto foundation, because what it means is that the bees can empty their stomachs and use their stomach energy to turn the wax foundation into comb. It's a really good way of purging the bacteria in the bees' stomach. So if there is any disease within the swarm, you might be able to eradicate it by not feeding them. If you just put them straight into the box and feed them straight away, all they do is they empty out the stores that are in their stomachs into the cells, and then the disease risk remains. Really, really important— don't feed them for a minimum of 3 days. Try to get away without feeding them at all. I left this one here 6 days before I came back in and gave them a very light 1:1 So you can see that there, nice-sized colony of bees. Remember, these are on a 14 by 12 frame, probably about 3 frames of bees there. You can see them there just creeping down in between those frames and feeder frames, and you can see that they have started to draw out wax, which is always a real positive. So fresh set of gloves in a quarantine apiary, gonna get inside now, see if we can see the queen. Well, first observations is they are really drawing out these frames very nicely indeed, And also we've got lots of eggs and lots of larvae. Give you a little close-up to that camera there. You can see just how well they're drawing out those frames. I know some people, including me, have had some issues getting these frames, pre-waxed frames and feeders, plastic frames drawn out, but give them what they need, which is a swarm of bees, and they've made very light work of it indeed. So 2 good things here. One, they're drawing it out. Two, we're seeing a natural amount of pollen and stores coming in. But 3, and the biggest one, is that we've definitely got a laying queen. Hopefully she's not a drone laying queen. Can't see any capped brood just yet, but we can definitely see eggs and larvae. So very nice looking frame. You can see that. Look at that pure white cappings and the eggs are so easy to see. That is one of the real benefits with this frame is that you can see the eggs because they're on a nice black background. Really easy indeed. Still no sign of the queen, still no sign of worker brood. So let's shake this frame off and see if we can find the queen inside. Before we do that, let's get a little close-up of all those eggs and larvae in there and the wax draw out. Really, really good. You can see very prolific starting from the center. We've got the larvae and then she's gone round with a really nice ring of eggs. Very, very happy with this swarm. Nice calm temperament as well. Definitely want to see that queen though, just to be on the safe side. Right, so next frame, we've got some lovely pollen going in there. Doesn't that look nice against the black frame? You can see over here we've got the waxed plastic, and as you move closer to the center, the bees are working it out, drawing it out really nicely. Very pleased with how they're getting on with that. So I've just taken a couple of bits of gnarly comb off there. Didn't quite work it very well on that side, so all I've done is I've scraped it back and I'll give them another chance. So no sign of the queen. I'm just going to leave this colony now. We've got eggs, we've got larvae. Hopefully we'll come back in another few days and we will see capped brood and find that queen. Up until now though, this is a very good-looking swarm. We'll see how they progress throughout the season.
