Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates how to clip a queen's wings with a diagonal cut across both wings instead of the traditional single-side method. The clipped queen can't fly during a swarm, which lets him extend inspections to every 10 days instead of seven, though it doesn't replace proper swarm management.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I'm in the truck today and I'm out clipping queens, and it's not something I normally do, clipping queens, but I'm struggling a bit this year with timings. I don't have enough time to get around to my apiaries every 7 days, so I'm trying to buy myself a little bit of time by going down the route of clipping queens. So in this video, I'm just going to do a really quick demonstration of how I clip queens. And I don't do it all the time. I was taught to do it where you clip just one side of the bee's wings, but the method I use, I actually take a little bit off both sides. So I take a diagonal cut across both of the bee's wings, and I'll show you in this little demonstration here. The only reason I do that is I find it a bit easier just to get the scissors underneath the bee's wings when there's both of them. You can pick them up, but it's fiddly and it's slow. I like to just pin them down really gentle, they can't move, and then I just take an angled cut across the back of both wings. And all you're aiming to do there is unbalance the queen. I've cut queens' wings before and they've swarmed and they just fall to, to the front of the hive, so they can't get away with this cut. So I know that's fine and I know that it works. So there you go, that's it for the video. I told you it was going to be a quick one. Really simple method to clip queens' wings. If you don't want to pick them up. The only thing I would say is when you're doing this, make sure you've got some sort of tight glove on. You can't do this with a thick glove because you don't have the, the feeling in your fingers to appreciate when you're squishing the queen and when you've just got her pinned down. You can see when I release that queen, she just walks away like nothing's happened. It doesn't hurt her at all in terms of the squeezing that I'm doing on her because I'm just holding her into position. And I believe that the clipping of the wings doesn't hurt the queen either, any more than say cutting a hair or cutting a toenail. Certainly helps lengthen those days out, but it's no substitute for good swarm management. Don't think you can just clip your queens and they're not going to swarm, because they'll just swarm with the first or second virgin that comes out anyway. Does give you a little bit more time though, so that's why we're doing it this year. We're going to go around a couple of select apiaries that are a bit further away I'm just going to trim those queens' wings, get around them every 10 days, and continue with my inspections. So there you go, that's the video. I hope you enjoyed that one. Hope you found it useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
