Laurence Edwards inspects a new nucleus colony and finds an exceptionally even brood pattern with only tiny uncovered areas. At 3-4 frames of brood now, he predicts it will reach 6-7 frames next week, ready for summer nectar flows in North Wales.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. We're up to episode 11 on the My First Nuclear series. I'm going to stop talking now, bee suit on, smoker on, we're going to go and check out those bees. Right, we'll jump straight into it then. The purpose of this series is to give you a snapshot every single week, so I'm really going to try and limit the length of these videos going forward. Nothing to look in, in the top boxes. Full of bees, full of honey. If I need to add space, I'll bring it up in the next video. At the moment, I don't need to add space, so I'm just going to take all of the supers, which are national deeps, pop them onto this one here. I'm going to look in the brood nest. That's all we're interested about when we're doing our weekly inspections, once we've assured ourselves that there's enough space up in the supers. Right, so we've got 3 boxes of various stages of honey. They're definitely not full, they're off to one side. Let's get into the brood nest, see how the colony's getting on. So it doesn't look like there's a huge amount of action down in the brood nest, and you often find this with the Demerara because you're splitting the brood and taking it all over the place. You're splitting that brood nest, so you're still going to have bees up in that top box, probably more bees than in this lower box here. But all you want to see is week on week, Expansion. I think we were on 3 frames of brood last week. Let's see if we're up to the 4 or 5 frame of brood mark this week. That's what we're interested in. So I'm going to pull out some frames, see how we get on. So we've still got frames of brood, they're building it up. Got lots of eggs, nice amount of bees, brood in all stages. Let's go and see if we can see some other frames. Next frame along, plenty of capped brood, they're working to expand it, pollen over in the corner, not a huge amount to see, no swarm cells, move on to the next frame. Now I've shaken off all the bees off this frame because wow, what a nice frame. Not the best, best brood pattern, but wow, if all of my colonies had a brood pattern like that, I would be very happy indeed. There is not A single part of that frame apart from that top left-hand corner there where she hasn't gone and laid. That really is a superb brood pattern. Can't argue with that. Once all of that brood on that frame has emerged, you're talking around 3 frames of bees. So I would expect, like I said before, it's a 3 or 4 week rule in beekeeping when it comes to expansion of colonies. Didn't look like too much of an expansion this week, and that is due to the fact that she's busy laying eggs that turn into larvae that turn into capped brood. And then it's after all of that capped brood emerges, that's when you see the big expansion. So I'm predicting next week we're going to see maybe 6 or 7 frames of bees downstairs in this brood nest. And there we go, another frame of brood. Just look at that brood. I know people don't like the adverts, but hey, these are the F1 Buckfast that we sold earlier in the year. And you can't argue with the brood pattern on that frame there. So there's my queen. Got a little bit of drone brood on this frame, but that's only because that's the original frame with the drone brood in. Queen's busy doing her job. Really, really top quality queen. I'm very happy with what I'm seeing on this frame. Just want to give you a sneak peek into this top box here. Still got a lot of bees up in that top box, so if it looked like there weren't many down in the brood nest, it's because they're scattered all the way throughout the top of this box here and all of the boxes in between. That is what you end up getting with a Demaray, is the bees are scattered round. Serves the purpose though of reducing the congestion down in the brood nest and giving the queen space to lay, which delays the onset of swarm preparations. And as you can see, this is a frame pulled from the top box here. You've still got that little bit, that last bit of capped brood that's emerging. Boosting the number of bees in the colony, they'll all get drawn down to where the open brood is downstairs where the queen's laying it to further bolster that brood nest. My prediction is next week that brood nest is going to be nearly full and these bees are going to be ready for all of those summer flows. So there we have it, much shorter video today. Summary: top box is looking really good, full of bees, full of honey, last bit of brood emerging in that top box. Down in the brood box, the nest is expanding at a really good rate, covering 4 or 5 frames of brood now. Really good top-quality laying pattern from that queen as well. Give it a week, let all that brood emerge, and this colony is going to be in a perfect place to take advantage of the flows that are just beginning to begin here in North Wales. So that's it for today's video. I hope you enjoyed that one. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. And I'll see you next time. Bye.
