In this video Laurence Edwards revisits his 8‑nuc long hive ten weeks after the previous update. He has removed the internal dividers, allowing the various queens – including some drone‑laying queens – to battle. The hive is now organized as two separate colonies split by the central divider. Edwards inspects both halves, noting massive bee populations, abundant comb, and heavy honey stores, indicating strong colonies ready for winter. He observes that one half appears queenless, with an emergency queen cell suggesting a virgin queen may emerge (potentially an F3 Buckfast). The other half shows brood at all stages, confirming a mated laying queen. He outlines his wintering plan: keep the two colonies as they are, possibly requeen the queenless side by killing any virgin and introducing a mated queen, or let an emergency queen develop. He praises the flexibility of Hyde Hives equipment for creating and consolidating nucs. The video serves as a status report on colony strength, queen dynamics, and his decision‑making process for overwintering.
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Right, it's been about 10 weeks since I did the previous video on the 8-nuc long hive. I've taken out the dividers. I let some of the queens battle it out because there were some drone-laying queens in there as well. In today's video, I'm gonna show you how I'm setting them up for winter and just show you how many bees are in the colony at this time of year. I wanna overwinter these in a configuration of just 2 colonies with the central divider split still in place. And this colony is chock-a-block full of bees. I've not been in since I took that divider out, so we might be in a situation here where there's not actually any brood. There was brood available though that if the queens needed to, I could create emergency queen cells and requeen that way. That would take us down to an F3 Buckfast, and then I can requeen if I want to next year. If I find unmated virgins in there today though, I'm definitely going to squish them and I'll just add a mated queen to make sure that we get the colony through the winter. Let's open it up though and show you just how strong these 2 colonies are. So you can see from the entrances, really good activity on all the entrances. We'll close them down as we get throughout the season, but at the moment, not got to worry anything about wasps because these colonies are just So strong. You can see that on all the entrances there, the bees are using them all because they're used to those entrances from where I took the dividers away. Let's get inside though and see if we've got mated queens inside. So the bees have gone a little bit wild in here. They've drawn out lots of comb. Gonna have to clear that out at some point. But you can see there, huge amounts of comb, huge amounts of bees. Bees are doing very, very well in this configuration. And I have to say, by far and away, this is my most favorite product from Hyde Hives. So much flexibility in terms of the different nucs that you can create. And then I love the fact that you can get them back to a point where you can overwinter them as one or even 2 colonies. Really happy with these hives. Whoops, we left a little bit of a gap in there for some reason, and they have drawn out a beautiful semicircle of wild comb there. That is absolutely beautiful. So it's kind of chaos here. We've got all those colonies that used to be separate nucs, and now it's 2 separate colonies with a central divider in the middle. Really nice to see just how strong these bees are though. Interested to see if we've got mated queens still inside. So as you can see here, massive colonies, really big and strong, loads of bees up flying in the air. This is what I like to get my colonies like when we're going into winter. So first frame out, very clear this colony here has not got a queen at the moment. You can see an emergency queen cell at the bottom where the virgin has emerged. So these will be coming into F3 Buckfast. We'll take a look at those next season. That'll be an interesting one. Maybe we can find the virgin. I'm not going to break my back looking for it though. I always knew it was going to be a bit risky leaving drone-laying queens in there alongside mated queens, but you know, I had to take a decision on this one, and my decision was to take the dividers out and let the queens fight it out. So you can see the same on this cell here as well. Maybe some cells that they have taken down. Does look like some virgins have emerged though. I'll keep on going through, see if we can find a virgin, see if we can find any eggs anywhere. So we've got some beautiful frames of honey in here. Very, very heavy, packed full of honey, some of these frames. Definitely won't need to do any sort of feeding on this colony. So I can't find a queen in there. Almost certain there's going to be a virgin in this half of the colony due to the emergence of virgin queen cells. I'm not going to dwell on it. I'll sort it out on another day. If I find that virgin, I'll kill her. If not, I'll come back in a couple of weeks and see if we can see any eggs. Let's go on to the second half of the colony now and see if we can find a queen. So the second colony looks so much calmer, and I'm going to hedge my bets and say that's indicative of the fact that we've got mated laying queen in there. This half very lively, this half here very calm. Let's see if that's right and let's see if I can find the queen. And my prediction proved right there. We've got brood in all stages, but also we've got eggs, so we know we've got a mated queen in there. Always interesting to see the differences when a colony has got a mated queen and when they haven't got a mated queen. So there we go, that's the update on my 8-nuc long hive. One half of it is queen right, the other half of it we're queenless, but we've probably got a virgin in there. I'll give it a couple of weeks because it's still nice weather, there is still drones around at the moment. Hopefully come back in a couple of weeks and we'll see eggs. If I do that, no action required. If not, I'll have to find that virgin, kill her, get a mated queen in there. Otherwise the colony will fail over winter.
