Beekeeping Is Easy, Right?

Something very, very cool is happening in this apiary. I've got a colony over there that is about to swarm. The bees are up in the air, but what is amazing is that I've got capped swarm cells in the colony that are emerging as we speak. I've got 3 hives here that are queenless, got an issue with them, need to add a new queen. In this video, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and harvest ripe emerging queen cells, and I'm going to pop the virgins directly into the queenless hives Straight away, 10-second old virgins straight in, and we're going to get these colonies queen right again. So this is my colony here that is riddled with swarm cells, absolutely tons of them in there. I'm going to go in there, I'm going to harvest one of these swarm cells, bring it out, and I'm going to put it into a queenless hive, and it is as easy as that. So here we go, one perfectly ripe queen cell. I'm just going to get my hive tool in there, remove that as carefully as I can. And then we'll take it over to the new colony. We'll open it up and I'm going to let the virgin walk in just so you can see how fresh these cells really are. Hopefully you can see that there, little tiny head poking out there. I've just given her a helping hand. Got a bee coming to check her out because she's probably making some noise saying, come on, give me a little bit of assistance. See if we can get her out live on camera. You're nearly out. There we go. She's coming now. And there we go. One virgin queen. Right, I tried to give you a close-up on the camera there and she flew off twice. And she could have just flown away there, but she didn't. She decided to let me finish the video. So I do have her in my hand here. I'm just going to really gently put her down into this colony. Got my gimbal and camera in hand, hopefully to give you a close-up of her going in. And I don't think I've ever had such bad luck in my life there. My memory card was full just as the queen was going in. What an absolute nightmare. Luckily for you though, I've got more swarm cells over there, emerging virgins, and I've got another hive that needs a queen. So we're going to do it again, definitely going to get the camera set up a bit better this time. Let's go and find some more emerging virgins. Just the hive that keeps on giving, this one. Perfectly ripe emerging virgins. Let's get this one out and see if we've got another beautiful F2 Buckfast queen inside. Well, I've opened a couple of these swarm cells up now and the majority of the rest of them don't seem to be ripe. This one here, I've cut it out and I'm just going to wedge it in between 2 frames and let it emerge naturally. Both ways are perfectly acceptable. You can run virgins in as soon as they're hatched, or you can put a ready-to-emerge cell or a cell that's got a couple of days left to go in between the cells. Either way, really good to requeen a queenless hive. So what you want to do with this is make yourself a little bit of space in between so you're not cramming the queenless cell in, and you just naturally drop it into position like that. There you go. You see how that just fell into position? I'm not squeezing it, I'm not pushing it. That has just fallen in naturally, and because of the crack in between the frames, there's not going to be any chance that I'm squishing that queen cell. The bees will just stick that in place now and she will emerge naturally. Look how interested those bees are. They are hopelessly queenless, absolutely no chance of creating their own queen, and I have just given them a ripe, ready-to-emerge queen cell. They are very, very happy indeed. So there we go, 2 queenless nucs, 2 separate ways to requeen them. One running in a virgin from a colony that's about to swarm, and one cutting out a ripe swarm cell, placing it in between the frames. Both of them are gonna requeen naturally using those swarm cells. I love beekeeping at this time of the year. Nothing goes right, but it is all good fun.