Best Hive Upgrade Needs Some WORK

Today I'm transferring my bees over to my insulated wooden hive that I insulated with cork insulation. I said I'd do this video. I said I'd put some bees in here. I've got a really nice strong nuc there that's outgrown its nuc box. I'm going to get them into here. Straightforward transfer. The nuc was in this position. I've taken the nuc off elsewhere. I put the insulated cork hive in its place so all the bees look like they're flying into the entrance there. I'll start them off on a single brood box and then we'll just keep on adding the brood boxes on. National Deep. And we will see if the bees like it in their insulated cork hives. Now I had a few people message me about whether the cork was going to be suitable for the outside environment, and I said I'd follow that up on this video. And I have to say it's not worked perfectly well. What's happened with the cork is that it's bowed a little bit around the edges. So the way that I would have got around that is put more screws in, but I do think there's a little bit of a water ingress issue as well. So what I'm going to do with these, I'm going to do a further modification which is pinning that cork back on the exterior of the hive. And then I'm going to overlay it with either a piece of plastic, a piece of Correx, something that's waterproof that's going to stop the moisture getting in. And I'm going to do that on a really nice dry day once all of that cork insulation on the outside is dry. I'll get the nuc transferred over and I'll talk to you a little bit about what's gone on with this hive over the past few months. Right, so this is the nuc that I'm transferring over. I had a colony that was going to swarm the other day, so this is the nuc that I took from it with a 2020 blue-marked queen. But she is a really, really healthy queen, very strong, prolific colony. So I thought I'd give her a little go in here. They might try and supersede her, they might try and swarm again. If they do, we can fix that. But I've got 6 nice strong frames of bees, brood in all stages, got the queen in there as well, and I'm just going to transfer that over now to my insulated cork hive. So here's my insulated cork hive. If you've not seen it before, We're insulated on the recess of the wooden national. I'll talk about that in a little bit once I've got the bees in. And then we're insulated in the middle as well with fixed pieces of insulation, and then I've battened it all off with pieces of ply and pieces of pine to make sure that the bees can't get in there and eat it. Got an underfloor entrance in there, so the bees go in the front and then they come up that entrance. And as you can see already, the bees are really keen to start getting into that entrance and working out where everything is. As soon as I get the brood in there, get the queen in there, they will find their way in. So whenever I'm transferring things over like this, I always like to find the queen before I start putting frames in there. Sounds a little bit weird, but I've done it so many times. You start putting the frames over there, then you get to the last frame, you can't find the queen, and then you don't know which box she's in. At least I know at the moment she's definitely in the nuc. So what I tend to do is I'll pull out the first frame, see if she's on it. If I can't find her on it, I'll shake all of the bees off here back into the nuc, Give myself a little bit of space to work, and it makes finding that queen so much easier. So I can't find her on this frame. I'm going to shake it back into the nuc. I then know I've got no bees on that frame. That is just an empty frame of brood. I can put that in there to start off with, and then I can go back there and find my queen. There we go. I found my queen. I've got the dates wrong on this one. This is actually a 2021 queen. I get my nucs mixed up so easily at this time of year when you're making splits. 2021 queen, Buckfast queen. Really, really nice looking queen actually, this one. She is clipped, so she's not going to swarm. In fact, I found her when I went into a colony and they had capped swarm cells, absolutely loads of capped swarm cells, but the queen was still in there because she can't fly. So she probably went out, had a go, and then realized she couldn't. Or she might have even not got that far because she was actually still within the hive. When you've got a clipped queen like that, they tend to fly with the first virgin So as long as you find the swarm cells before they're open, you're generally okay. So there's my queen. As you can see, really nice looking F1 Buckfast queen, white marked 2021. I'm going to put her in there now and I can transfer across all of the other frames. Right, so there we go, that's the nuc on board. I got the numbers wrong again, it wasn't an 8-frame void, it's a 10-frame void. Need to get these numbers right, don't I? So I've got a 6-frame nuc in there and it's a 10-frame Frame void on a national deep that will take sometimes 12, sometimes 11 frames. You'll always get 12 frames in there at the beginning, but you have to properly jam them in. I'm going to fill that void now with another 4 frames, and then I'm going to put another brood box on top of that because I want these bees to have sufficient space. They will expand like crazy at this point of the year, so I don't want to restrict them for space. Right, so I've got my 10 frames in. It was a real squeeze getting those 10 frames in, so I might need to trim down those dummies a little bit more next time. But there we go, I've got my 10 frames in. I'm gonna double it up now, one extra box on top, and then we can close it up. Right, so that's the colony set up. I've got it on a double deep system, crown board's in position, and then I'm just gonna stack the additional boxes above the crown board empty, just to keep them out of the way and just to keep them in the same position. So don't think I've put a single nuc into 4 National Deep boxes. They're on a double deep system, and I'm just stacking the other 2 on the top. Right, so there we go. We've now got bees in our cork insulated beehive. I'm just gonna show you now how that hive has kind of stood up to the test of the North Wales winter. These have just been outside. They've not been stored inside at all because I wanted to give them a real rough ride just to see how they performed for a really 3 damp months in winter. And I think they've actually performed okay. I'll show you now some of the defects and then I'll talk about how I would probably remedy them on a new design. So there's a couple of different designs that I did here. One which is putting in like a solid piece of cork all the way along like that. I only put 3 screws in. And as you can see in the middle, it's actually done quite well. What has happened though, a little bit of water's got in and it means that it's bowed a bit there. So straightforward fix, I just need to get another screw in, just pin that down. But you can see like a little bit of movement, but not too much. But I just think now that they're going to be open to the water, I'm really not too happy about that. And I do think they'd probably degrade quite quickly over the next few years. The other design you can see here is where I just ran out of cork, so I've chopped it up into bits. I'd say in terms of insulation it's exactly the same, but it's definitely more warped. You can see here, got a bit of swelling where the water's got in there. I wouldn't do that again. I would stick to like a single piece of cork all the way along like that. In terms of the design going forward, what I would do is I would go with a slightly narrower piece of cork So I think this one here was 20mm. I'd go down to 15mm. I'd put a lot more screws in it to make sure that it's completely pinned down and not going to bow. And then I would get either like a piece of sheet aluminium or a piece of Correx or something cheap, something that you can get for free out of a tip, but something that you can silicone down onto this cork. Maybe you can pin down over the front if you're happy to lose your handholds. I know we're trying to do this as a kind of really nice natural beehive that's going to compost, So I would probably go with something like sheet metal over the top of that. I'll have a think about it and maybe do another iteration, but I just wanted to show you, give you the update, show you how that hive's getting on. These bees are happy now, they're going to be going into their underfloor entrance, and I reckon they're going to be very, very happy inside this hive. It's going to be nice and snug and warm. So there we go, we're done. Insulated cork beehive, not been a perfect success. I think the bees will like it though. If you want to see how I put together this beehive, check out this video here, which shows you the exact process of how to build an insulated cork retrofit wooden national hive. Bit of a mouthful. And I'll definitely do an update showing you how I fix the problems that I've had with that first iteration of design that most people did point out on YouTube for that matter, just to make sure we're blocking that water ingress.