Clearing Bees With A Rhombus Escape - Fast Way To Empty Honey Supers

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how to clear bees using a multi-purpose crown board clearing device. So you would have seen, hopefully, my previous video where I showed you and talked to you about my multi-purpose crown boards. Clearing bees is one of the things that I use these for. I have actually moved over to fully clearing bees using a petrol-driven Makita blower now, but I know a lot of people do use clearing boards and clearing devices, so I thought I'd do you a video just to show you exactly how to use these boards, make sure you've got them set up correctly. So I'll stick up a card if you want to see kind of the construction of these. I'm going to do a construction video later in the year showing you exactly how to make these. I've done a previous video showing you kind of the composition of them and talking to you about the various uses and benefits of them. And in this video, all I've done is I've added a single rhombus clearing device in here, and then obviously from this side you can see it as well. So all we're going to do in this video is I'm going to show you how to clear a beehive of its honey supers using this clearing device. So what you need to make sure, and it's really, really important, and this is kind of the reason that I Designed this multi-purpose crown board in such a way, you need to make sure you have sufficient depth in there to enable the bees to be able to cluster in here. Otherwise, there's not enough room for the bees to go out of the supers. So you have your brood box, you'll have your queen excluder, and then obviously you've got all of your supers above it. What you want to do is you want to take everything away. If there's loads of supers, so say you've doing 4 or 5 supers at once, you need to give them somewhere else to kind of locate all of those bees. So you can either add a second brood box underneath the queen excluder, or you can add another super just to temporarily keep those bees. Once you've got that super on, you need to put the crown board on that way, so the bees will come down into here, filter out these holes like that. So basically, from a big space Down to a small space, and then they can't get back up because they just want to go through here. They don't work out how to get through. Now, what needs to be said about this though is after about 24 hours, or even before that, the bees do work these out quite quickly. Not as quickly as a Porter Bee Escape, which is rubbish in my opinion because they just get clogged full of dead bees. These clear bees very, very quickly, but they do work them out eventually. So you just need to be careful that you kind of work in quick enough that they don't work it out. What's good though is you want a big hole there, so you've got a nice 4-inch hole. The smell of the brood underneath here attracts all of the bees downwards, and then they just can't get back up. So it is a good effective use of a multi-purpose crown board, and it does work really, really well. You do get left with a few bees, so you can either use a little handheld blower, or you can just use a bee brush, or you can just kind of brush them off with your hand to get any kind of straggler bees off at the end, and that's what I used to do. But now, like I say, I just use the blower. I find that a lot easier and a lot quicker. So let's go and stick it on a hive and I'll show you how to clear some bees. So this is the colony that we're going to clear today. Like I say, make sure it's not a cold rainy day. There needs to be a bit of a flow on. The bees need to be moving in and out, otherwise it's not going to work. So you can see plenty of bees in there. We're going to clear all of those bees down into the 14 by 12 brood box. I'm only clearing one box here, so I'm not going to add any supers or anything underneath. I'm just going to clear them all down using a crown board clearing device. So it's a really, really simple manipulation. Just take your box, which is hopefully heavy, full of honey like this one, Move that to one side. Take the queen excluder off, give that a shake. Take your crown board and make sure it's the right way. So the good way to remember is that you want the single bee space on the top, and you want the cavity where you want the bees to cluster. So normally you would put it that way up if you were using it just as a crown board, You want it the opposite way. And that's it, it's set up. All you do now is you put this box back on, put it all back together, and you want to leave that now for 24 hours, and all of the bees are going to make their way from this box Down into the brood box, and they're not going to be able to get back up. So we'll come back in 24 hours and I'll show you how well that's cleared it. So after 24 hours, you come back, you take a look inside, and there'll be very, very few bees up in that top brood box, and they would have all condensed downstairs, which is where you want them. So it's worked really, really well here. Got a few bees left in it, but you see what I mean, you know what I mean? You've got a few bees, but the majority of the bees are gone. That's worked really, really well there. Get it straight in your truck, out of the way of the bees, because they can smell it and you can see them already congregating on it. So when you get to this position here, you want to take this box off and give them a good thump on the way down, and you'll see all of the bees because they've all been congregating in there. You just want to get them all out, and then you can go straight on with your feeder. You might get a bit of bearding, you'll almost certainly get a bit of bearding, but that's not the end of the world. You're going to protect really, really well from wasps at this time of the year. If you were doing 4 or 5 boxes, you might want to give them an additional brood box or an additional super, but a little bit of bearding really isn't the end of the world. So that's it, that's how you clear using a rhombus clearer board. Now depending on what the state of players in the brood box. These guys, they're buckfast. It's pretty much wall-to-wall brood. You've just taken all of their food, so you need to top it up with some good 2:1 syrup. And you're not looking to fill the box with syrup. I'm going to give them probably 5 or 6 litres here, but I want to make sure that they're going to kind of— it's going to boost the brood and it's going to give them enough food. So I've half filled that. It's probably about 5 or 6 litres. That's plenty. That will fill up the brood box a little bit, get the brood rearing going a little bit more, build the number of bees, and then I can come back later in the season, September, October, and do some heavy winter feeding. So that's it. It's as simple as that. It's a quick manipulation, but it does require 2 visits to the apiary. So you want to go up there, kind of, you want to make sure that there's a flow on. That's the idea behind this, is there needs to be movement between the colonies. This wouldn't work on a rainy day, going in and doing it at 9 AM in the morning, coming back at 6 o'clock at night. You need to time it while there's kind of bees moving. So what I like to do is I like to give it basically 24 hours. I'll go up late at night, just kind of like say 8 or 9 o'clock in the evening, put the clearing boards on. I'll then let them have pretty much a full day of foraging. All the bees go out, forage, they can't get back up, and then maybe 5 or 6 o'clock the next day, That's when I like to go back up, take all of the honey away, and you get a few bees left in there, but there really, really won't be that many there. So that's it for the video. Hope you've enjoyed this one. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.