In this solo beekeeping video, Laurence Edwards conducts a detailed end‑of‑season inspection of a Layens (lay‑on) hive that contains a 6‑frame nuc alongside national frames. He walks through each frame, noting how the bees have drawn out the foundation, the distribution of honey and brood, and the orientation of frames to avoid crushing the queen. Edwards discusses practical options such as cutting or pressing honey from heavy frames, extracting honey from national frames, and creating a nucleus colony (nuc) from brood frames. He highlights the challenges of locating the queen within the dense comb and introduces the F1 Buckfast Maltese queen present in the colony. Concluding, he reflects on the advantages and disadvantages of using a Layens hive for a nuc, decides not to harvest honey or brood this season, and outlines his plan to treat the colony and prepare it for overwintering.
Chapters
Right, it's been a good few months since we've been into the Lion's Hive. I gave them the national frames wedged in between, and I have just left the bees to it. Time of the year now where we need to get inside, see if they produced any honey, get them ready for winter. But I thought it'd be a really neat opportunity to get in there and give you a snapshot of what the bees have done on those frames and how they filled out that colony. So get my bee suit on, let's go and do the Lion Hive's update. I'm so excited to get inside the Lion's Hive. I honestly have no idea what we're going to see inside. So you can see they've Still not completely drawn out all of those frames, and if I did this again, I'd probably use a slightly different method. Not to say that this one doesn't work, but you know, this was an experiment to show you how you can get your national frames in there. But the bees do start working it out, they're drawing them out straight, and that frame there gives you a good indication of just how well they start to draw things out. So there's the next frame along. You can see again, they draw it out really, really nicely. You have to make sure that you're putting the frames back in in exactly the same order though, because they're not the same distance in terms of thickness. Really easy to squish your queens like this. I think next year I'm going to scrape these out and probably start them again and do it on more of a top bar style foundation. But as you can see though, as we progress closer into the center of this cluster, you're getting more and more honey. Really good amount of honey here. You can cut out the frames, you can press that out, you could take the frames out, those national frames, if you want to extract national frames as well. That is actually a massive benefit here. I hadn't even thought of that. You can cut the frames out, crush these bits out around the edges, and then use those national frames in your extractor if that's something that you want to do. Here we're getting into the business side of things now. So this is an incredibly heavy frame. You can see they're starting off at the top, they're drawing it down, and there is a lot of honey in there. I'm gonna have to put it down. That is a super, super heavy frame. I'm just being mindful each and every time I put it back, I'm putting it back in exactly the same slot But I'm also putting it back in exactly the same orientation. You can see on this frame here, we've got a little bit that's jutting out. If I switch that around the other way, I'd have real issues with crushing bees, maybe crushing the queen. At the moment, it's working quite nicely. So again, another really heavy frame. Fresh nets are coming in. There's a nice heather flow at this apiary here. You can see the center of that frame. I reckon that's been previously brooded as well. At least one round of brood in there. Gives you lots of options though, this setup here. You can cut out some of that honey, you can press it down, but you You can still extract those frames in an extractor and then start it all over again next year. Right, we're onto some brood frames now, which is really good to see. Very nice, good-looking brood. Definitely contracting it down for winter. You could take a nuc out on here as well. That's another thing that I haven't thought about. You could cut a couple of the frames out, take a couple of brood frames out, make yourself up a nuc, and then put the frames back in, new foundation, and let them build it back out again. Quite versatile, quite a flexible system. If you're insistent on using a layon's hive, so another nice frame of brood there. Quite like how this colony's turned out. Very nice and gentle. Nice to work with. Let's see if we can find that queen. So still no sign of the queen. Good amount of brood though. Be interesting to see how the bees overwinter in this format. I'm not taking any honey out of this this year. I'm not taking any brood frames out. Just going to get them treated and leave them to it. So another nice frame of brood there. They're starting to merge that one all together. Very difficult to find queens with all the nooks and crannies in here. Definitely not saying this is a perfect system. As I said, this is just for me to introduce a 6-frame nuc into a lay-on hive. Some benefits, but more disadvantages, I would say, from using this system. So there's my queen, F1 Buckfast, one of our Maltese queens. And you can see just how nice and calm and gentle this colony is. See if I can get you a close-up of that queen there. She's a beauty, she's done really well in this colony, built them up from a very small nuc into a big, strong, healthy colony. I'm excited to see what she'll do next year. So there we go, that's the lay-on hive update complete. Really happy with how they've got through the year. I'm going to get my treatments on later this week, we're going to close them up, and we'll see how we get them through the winter.
