Ep 4 Making Splits From One Colony

In this video, I'm going to show you how many splits I can make in a single season. So we had a little bit of a false start with this one. Got 3 episodes in and then the colony turned into a drone layer. So I parked it for a little bit, but we're right back at it now. What we're going to do, we're going to take one single colony of bees and we're going to see how many splits we can make throughout the whole season. Previously, I was targeting 40 nucs, but I've left it a little bit late this year, so I'm going to reevaluate that target and I'm going to go for 20 nucs out of a single colony of bees. I'll show you the colony of bees in a little bit. First off, I'm going to talk about a couple of strategies that I'm going to use just to make sure that I can get aggressive growth and make as many nucs as possible. First one is I'm going to be using all drawn comb, so I'm not going to be adding any foundation in. I'm not going to be giving the bees any additional work in terms of drawing out that foundation to give the queen additional space to lay. The second one is I'm going to always constantly feed the colonies, not to their detriment, not to block that brood area, but just to make sure they never actually have to go out and forage. And all of that nutrition can be kept within the nuc. And then the final one is all the splits that I'm going to be making, I'm going to be introducing a mated queen as opposed to letting the colonies go and requeen themselves. Those 3 techniques should give me really quick aggressive expansion to go from a single colony into 10 nucs into 20 nucs, and then we'll see, maybe we'll get up to that 40 number at the end of the year, but we just need to see how we get on with this first split. So I'm here today, I'm at an apiary that I'm closing down this apiary because The bees are really angry here. They don't like it at all. I don't like it here at all because there's loads of trees that fall down on the hives. Pretty much crushed one of them last year, and the forage isn't the best either. So I'm using this opportunity as opposed to moving a single colony away. I'm going to break open a double brood national deep colony of bees, and I'm going to split that up into 10 nucs. Now there's going to be 20 frames in there because they were on a double brood configuration, and I think it's the Suyenti boxes I'm using. It'll either be 20 frames or 22 frames, and I'm hoping that I can split that out into 10 nucs with a frame of brood and a frame of stores and a small portion of bees. And then I'm going to fill all of that excess void in each and every nuc up with drawn comb, take them to a new apiary, get the feeders on them, get some syrup into them, introduce a new queen after day 8 after I've knocked down all of the cells. I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail on it on this video, I'll link you out to another one if you want to see how to requeen a colony. In this video though, you are going to see every single step and stage all the way through this nucs expansion, starting with a single colony. First step, 10 nucs. Then we're going to split into 20 nucs. Maybe we'll get up to 40 nucs. I'll get my bee suit on. I'll show you the colony that I'm going to split the bees from. So this is the colony I'm going to take my splits from. You do have to excuse the bees in this apiary. Like some of my apiaries, they are a little bit angry. I'm working my way through them. This colony here though is on a national double deep system and they're covering over 10 frames of brood. So I've just been in there, had a double check, we could definitely do it with this colony. I'll give you a quick snapshot of it now just to show you the strength of this colony and then we'll start splitting it out into 10 separate nucs. So this is what the colony looks like, as you can see double national deep using a Suyenti roof as a floor so they're on a solid floor. They've overwintered really well. Let's get inside, see how strong they are over both of those boxes of National Deeps. So here's the colony from the top. They are well and truly attacking the camera, and I'm glad I've chosen this colony because it's got a good balance of stores and brood. I want to make sure that every single nuc has got a frame of stores and a frame of brood and enough bees in order to sustain it for a short amount of time. So first thing I've done, I've found the queen. Brood looking a little bit suspect, I have to say. Not overly happy with this queen anyway. I'll stick her off in one of the nucs though. She can go off on her own. And then I need to add 9 additional queens in. So as you can see, horrible, horrible bees in this apiary. I really do not like it under the trees, and the genetics here are not good. They are swarming all over me, not happy at all. But I'm gonna go now and go and get the nuc boxes that I've set up. All of them are completely full with drawn-out comb. And then all I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take a frame of brood A frame of stores, shake in some bees, close the box up, and then we'll go off to another apiary. So these are the nuc boxes I'm using, Payne's Poly Nucs, and as you can see, all of the frames in here are completely drawn out. I'm going to be removing 2 of these frames. I'm going to replace them for 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores, and then we'll take them to the new site. Right, so I've got my nucleus all set up here. I've taken out 2 frames to leave a gap for a frame of brood, a frame of stores, And then I'm not going to shake in too many bees. I'm just going to take what's on the frame. If you start shaking in bees, you're only really going to get 5 splits. You need to try and split the bees as evenly as possible and then hope that the brood is going to emerge, and that's what's going to boost them over the next few weeks. So this is the first frame going in. This is the frame with the queen on it. I'm gonna get that one done first, make sure the queen's in there, she's out of the way, and then I can work through the rest of the colony really easily. So, got a frame of brood in there now. This is the first frame of stores that I'm going to put in there. Always want to make sure they're not going to starve out when you're making little splits, and by doing it early in the year, you shouldn't have issues with wasps. So you can put in a frame of food like this, take it to a new apiary, and hopefully the bees won't get robbed out. We just have to play that one by ear though. So I'll take my frame of stores, I'll put that off into the nuc, and that is it. That is my split complete. Doesn't look like a lot of bees in there, and it's because there isn't a lot of bees in there. The queen's in this one as well. One frame of brood, one frame of stores, 2 frames worth of bees. I'm going to close them up now, take them off to a new apiary, and then we'll see how they expand over the next few weeks. So I just gotta do that 9 more times now. I won't bore you with all the details. I'm going to go through each and every one. Frame of brood, frame of stores, no shaking of the bees. I'll see you at the next apiary.