Laurence Edwards checks seven nucleus colonies a week after moving them to a new apiary, assessing their strength by counting frames of bees and brood. He removes emergency queen cells, installs queen cages, and feeds them fondant, noting which splits are strongest and which need further division.
So it's been 7 days since I last came here. I'm here today, I'm going to take down all of the emergency queen cells. I know I should be doing it on day 8, but I need to come down here today. I'm going to take a look at all of the splits as well, just to give you a snapshot of what they're looking like. This is one of the stronger ones, some of them nowhere near as strong as this, but as I said, when you move them to a new apiary, you do end up getting a little bit of variation. It's quite hard to shake in an accurate amount of bees. This one here though, really good-looking size, covering 3 frames. I'll open up a few more of them now and just show you just the variation between the different nucs. So you can see on this one here, considerably smaller, only covering barely 2 frames, but they've got a frame of brood in there. That frame of brood will emerge, they've got enough bees to cover that frame, and then after that brood's emerged, they'll get bigger and bigger really quickly. Another one covering maybe 2, 2.5 frames worth of bees. You can see they're really interested in that queen. This one here I would say is about average size. Back on a smaller one here, barely covering those 2 frames, but just enough bees just to keep that frame of brood warm. As soon as that emerges, these will look a lot better. Another smallish one here, they've got lots of frames of drawn comb though, so all these bees need to do is just keep that brood warm, do a little bit of foraging, and they'll be well on their way. This one here, slightly bigger again, nice-sized colony here. Really looking forward to how quickly these are going to take off. This is probably the smallest one I've got, but still covering a good frame of bees. Poly nuc's going to keep them nice and warm. They've got enough food, they've got a mated queen, just need a little bit of time. Then I don't know what happened with this one, they got a lot of bees. I think this is probably the last one where I was catching them all. This is like a full-size nuc, this one, so might have to split this one down a little bit. They're going to be way ahead of all the rest of them. And then finally, back to another one that's just about average. So as I said, I'm going to go through all of these now, take down all the emergency queen cells, shake off the bees, pop those cages, give them some fondant, and then I'll leave the bees to it.
