In this episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey documents a late‑season inspection of a nuc colony in North Wales that appeared to be preparing to swarm in late October. He describes his routine winter‑preparation checks, his concern over a valuable German Buckfast queen, and his decision to open the colony despite his usual advice against October/November inspections. Inside, he finds eggs and no swarm cells, confirming the queen is still present and the swarm alarm was a false positive caused by overcrowding and unusual autumn foraging activity. Laurence reflects on the odd climate conditions prompting bees to cluster at the hive entrance and forage on ivy, notes the risks of opening colonies late in the season, and emphasizes best‑practice recommendations for feeding, space management, and protecting high‑value queens through winter.
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It's a few days until it's November and it looks like my nuc is going to swarm. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I cannot believe it, I am doing the very last checks in the apiary, and when I say checks, I'm going around to make sure that I've collected all of my kit and everything's strapped down for winter. I've got to this apiary and it looks like the nuc is swarming. Cannot believe it. It is literally a couple of days until it is November and my bees are swarming. I have no kit with me. I've not come here to film today. I've got my phone though. I'm going to get inside this colony. I'm going to take a look and see if they are swarming, but I honestly cannot believe it. Right, so here's my nuc. I've got 7 nucs in this apiary, a few colonies here as well, and I've been trickle feeding them Throughout August and September. In October, I moved over to heavy feeding, and now we are literally a few days away from November. It's 28th of October, I think, today, and it looks like they're swarming. So I'm gonna have to get in here. I want to take a look if they're trying to swarm. I want to go through that little bunch on the front, find the queen, squish any cells that are in the center of this nuc, and put them back together again in a last attempt to try and merge that colony back down. It's November. There is no possibility that any virgins that emerge from these cells are going to go out and get mated now. So the colony will be doomed unless I do that. So I might as well get in there and try and do this manipulation. I'm gonna get my bee suit on, I'll get the gloves on, I'll get inside, I'll see what's going on. Hopefully it's just a really big colony that's not got enough space. Right, so I've got my bee suit on now. I'm just gonna take a look, see if we can find that queen. They're not going to be very happy with me, but it's better to do this than to go in unnecessarily. Just going to see if she's hiding around anywhere, clustering up. They look like they've spent a night out in the cold because they're a little bit lethargic, a little bit tired. So that is the best that I could have hoped for really, in that the queen isn't there. So hopefully they are just clustering up out the front. However, they could have just flown off. The queen's gone. She's left some pheromone on the front of that hive. The remaining bees in the swarm are clustering up out the front. I'm going to take a really quick check inside this colony. I'm going to pull out one or two frames just to double-check that there's not swarm cells everywhere. A couple of frames in the center, there's no swarm cells. Then I'm just going to assume that they haven't swarmed and they're just running out of space. Maybe we'll even see the queen as well. Very, very strange behavior for the beginning of Right, so just looking in here now, bees up in both sides of the feeder. Big strong colony, so it could be a clustering issue. They may have run out of space. We're gonna get in though, pull out of frame, see if we can see any swarm cells. You might wonder why I'm so nervous about this colony. This is one of my German breeder queens for next year. Paid a lot of money for this queen. I don't want her swarming in November, so I need to get inside, double-check, make sure everything's okay. If I need to give them a little bit more space, I will do. 2 bits of really good news on this frame. One, we've got eggs. Always a good sign when you think your colony's swarmed and you open it up and you find eggs. Really good. And the second thing is that there's no swarm cells. I've not been into this colony since I placed that queen in and I opened the tab. So I'm just gonna have a quick check through just to make sure I get a sighter on that queen, and I'm gonna close them up for winter. And there she is! There's the queen. So I'm really, really happy about that. That is what you call a nervous beekeeper and a false alarm. So that is a German buckfast island mated queen. She looks really, really nice. So I'm going to put this back together again. There's no swarm cells, it's just this queen has taken this nuc into overdrive and there's not enough space for all of the bees. So it was a false alarm, and I'm going to put this video onto the channel for a couple of reasons. The first one is I just want to show you what I've done going into November, what the bees are looking like, the changes that we're seeing in the climate. It's crazy. It really is quite strange going into November and having colonies clustering out the front, foraging on the ivy, foraging on the nectar. It's definitely unusual for us in North Wales. Maybe not further south as you go into the UK and other places across the world, but for North Wales, that is odd behavior. The second one is, is that I tell you all the time not to go into your colonies in October and November, and I just caught myself doing it. So I just want to show you that I suffer from the same issues that you do. Curiosity and wanting to open them up to check that they're okay. I say it on all of my videos, you don't need to go in and check them, it's the wrong time of year to do it. But I get caught up in that as well. I want to make sure that my breeder queen's okay. I want to double-check that she's not flown off, because if she's flown off, I'll go and have a look around. It's quite cold, the swarm probably not going to have gone that far. I'm trying to protect my resources, and that's what everyone who's got one or two beehives in their back garden is trying to do as well. And I'm going to leave this on the channel because I'm in the wrong again. I probably shouldn't have gone in there, but I'm really, really glad that they haven't swarmed. Would have been a very expensive swarm, that one. So hopefully they will settle down now. There's nothing to say they won't swarm next week or the week after, although the weather does look like it's getting much, much colder. I don't think the bees are going to swarm when it's single figures. So I hope you enjoyed that video. Sorry if the audio was that bad. I didn't have my wireless mic on. As always though, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
