Laurence Edwards makes ten nuc splits from one colony, putting each in a frame of brood, a frame of stores, and shaken bees. The splits must move at least three miles away or the bees will abandon the weaker nucs. He introduces mated queens on day zero and plans to release them eight days later after destroying emergency queen cells.
Right, so here we are at the new apiary. I've got my 10 splits in the car, and the reason that I brought them to a new apiary is because they're such small splits. One frame of brood, one frame of stores, shake full of bees. You need to get them at least 3 miles away from the original location. If you try and do this manipulation in the same apiary, what will end up happening is you'll come back and all of the bees will be in one or two of the nucs. Always happens. You can't butcher up a colony like that, take 10 splits out of a single colony, Leave them in that same apiary and then expect them all just to orientate to their new spots. Doesn't matter if you turn them different ways round, doesn't matter if you stick grass in the entrance, you're always gonna end up with all the bees ending up in one or two of those nucs. So I've taken them to a new spot 3 miles away, and the reason I've taken them to this one here is because the flows continue all the way throughout the year. Amazing spring flows, amazing summer flows, and then the reason that we're even here in the first place is because the Himalayan balsam goes very, very late here. So it gives me the best possible chance of building these 10 nucs up, getting them to the point where I can split them into 20 nucs, and then hopefully just gives me that little outside chance of doing a final split late on in the year to get them up to 40 nucs. So all I'm gonna do, I'm gonna offload them out of the truck, line them up on a pallet, and then I'm gonna open up the entrances, let them fly for a couple of hours, and then I'm gonna introduce the queens straight away. We're effectively on day zero of a split today, so I'm gonna introduce the queen in a sealed cage, 8 days later, I'll come back, knock down all the emergency cells, pop the tabs open, give them a feed, and then we're good to go. Can leave them to it, leave them to build up. So I'll get my hood up, offload the nucs, and see how small they are just to give us that baseline. Right, that's the 10 nucs into position. I'm going to go over now, open all the entrances. You'll see a little bit of orientation on the first day, but after that journey, 15 miles, the bees are going to be shaken up. They're probably going to be hiding in the feeder. I'll open up the entrances though, give them an hour or so, and then I'm going to introduce my mated queens. Right, we're going to have to do something about this apiary because the bees have just taken to attacking me and the camera equipment. Not happy with the temperament here at all. So game over for this one being a mating apiary and game over for the queens here because the bees have got a horrible, horrible temperament. So please excuse all of the horrible aggressive bees in this apiary. I brought the 10 splits here. I've given them about 30 minutes to orientate. They open up, and I know when I open up now the nucs, there's not going to be many bees in there. They're going to be a little bit disorientated as well, but I just want to get in there before I leave, put the queens in, day 0, and then I'll come back on day 8, knock down the cells, release the queens, give them a feed, and then I will leave the bees to it. These bees here want me to get on with it. Let's go and add some queens to our splits. So as I said, I won't bore you with all the details on what I'm going to do with these, but here's my queens. 10 queens going to go into the 10 splits, minus the one that's already got the queen, and then we'll leave them to it. So this is what the split's looking like. Doesn't look like there's many bees in there, does it? Don't worry, the bees will be hunkering down. They have not got a clue what's going on. We'll put the queen in there, wedge it in between that frame of brood, and when we come back, everything will be looking fine. So I won't show you all of these, but this one here, a little bit more active. You're never going to get the split perfectly balanced, but it doesn't really make a massive difference. As long as you got one frame of brood, one frame of bees, a queen, and enough bees to keep that brood warm, they will expand and they will sort themselves out over the next few weeks. So again, just going to pop my queen in, in between the cage, going to leave the tab sealed, and we'll come back in 8 days. There we go, we got 10 nucs, 10 splits. They've all got a mated queen, they're all orientating to their new spot, They're all going to draw emergency cells over the next 8 days. We're not going to feed them just yet because we don't want them going and robbing each other, but we should have mitigated that by bringing them to the new apiary. And then 8 days later, we'll come back, knock down the cells, release the queen, give them a feed, and then we can leave them to build up.
