In this instructional episode of the "My First Nucleus" (No Nonsense Beekeeping) series, Laurence Edwards demonstrates how to prepare a bee colony for transport to a heather apiary. He begins by swapping the hive floor to an under‑floor entrance, explaining why this design is superior for moving colonies (secure mesh, easy foam‑bung sealing). He then shows how to insert a furniture‑foam bung to fully seal the hive, stresses the need to move the hive a few metres away immediately to prevent bees from congregating at the entrance, and walks through strapping the hive tightly in a pickup truck while maintaining ventilation. After a short 10‑minute journey, he removes the bung, lets the bees re‑orientate, and observes their initial confusion before they settle. Throughout, Laurence discusses timing (evening moves, cool temperatures), the importance of capturing every forager for heather flow, and provides seasonal guidance on optimal dates for moving colonies to heather. The video ends with a preview of the next episode, which will inspect the brood box and assess honey flow.
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Episode 16 of the My First Nuclear series. We're closing up the colony, taking it up to the heather apiary. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. It's about 8 o'clock here this evening. The colony is already prepped. We did all of that in the previous video. All I need to do now, put the bung in, close the colony up, Strap them up, and we're off up to the heather apiary. So bee suit's already on, don't need any smoke today because I'm not going into the colony. I'm going to get my foam bungs and I'm going to get the colony secured, ready for transport. So let's get on with transferring this colony to the heather, and the first thing I'm going to do sounds a little bit strange, but I'm going to change the floor. So it's about 6 o'clock in the evening at the moment, and as you can see, this hive is really, really active still. It's very, very warm today, so the bees will work late, late into the night. And because I'm taking these bees to the heather, I want to make sure every single foraging bee in this colony makes its way up to the heather. If I was just moving colonies between sites for any other reason than to go into a crop, I'd just seal these up now, take them, and just let all of the forager bees just go into other hives within the apiary. When I'm moving to the heather, I want to get every single last bee. So I will continue this video later on this evening, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to move this colony over to a new floor, and I'm going to move it over to one of my underfloor entrances because I find, oh, they are so much easier when it comes to transporting colonies. They're very secure, they're not going to fall apart. I can strap them up really tight, the mesh is very secure in position, and the biggest advantage is I can just pop a really nice big foam bung in there Takes me 2 seconds and it just seals the colony really, really well. The Suyenti floors, they're actually pretty decent floors, but they're quite difficult to seal up for transporting. Takes a little bit longer, and I find that they're a little bit more leaky as well. So first part of this video, all I'm going to do, I'm just going to swap the floors over, get them ready for the big move later on this evening. So swapping floors over is the easiest thing in the world. All you do, put a new floor next to the colony there. If you can lift it all in one go, great. If not, do it in stages. I'm just gonna lift it up from the bottom, plonk it onto that new floor, remove the old floor, and then shift everything along to the right. Always worth double-checking the floor when you do that. Just have a quick glance over it, make sure the queen's not on the floor. We'll tap this down in front of the hive in a minute, but it's just worthwhile taking a little bit of a check just to make sure she's not in there. And that's it, it's as simple as that. So I'll fast forward to later on this evening, going to wait until it's dark, I'll come here, I'll get this colony, we'll get it up to the heather, and then we'll release the bees up there. So I've got here a little bit earlier than planned, the bees are still flying, but there's not going to be too many out flying now. So I'm just going to go ahead, put this foam bung in. This is just furniture foam, really, really good for transporting colonies. Underfloor entrances though, they are So good for transporting. You'll see how quick it is for me to put this in. Completely seals the colony off. What I would say is the second that you put it in though, go and take the colony off, move it 3 or 4 meters away, 'cause otherwise any of the flying bees will congregate around the entrance and then it can make the transit a little bit more frustrating. So I'll pop the bung in now, seal this colony up, get it over to the car, get it up to the Heather Apiary. So putting the foam bung in is the easiest thing in the world. You just pop it in like that. Push it to the back, and that is the colony fully sealed up. Right, so getting the beehive ready for transit in the truck. First thing you need to do is make sure you've got a good quality strap, and then get that strap super, super tight, like as tight as you're willing to go. Shouldn't crush the beehive. I can live with crushed poly. I do not want the bees opening up in the back of my truck. So there we go, that is super secure now, really nice and tight. I'm going to push that into the back of the truck and then I'm going to get another strap to secure it back against the base of the pickup truck. That way it's not going to move about that much. You'll always get a little bit of jiggling. The bees can cope with that. Don't just stick it in the back of your pickup truck and let it fly around though, because it will open up, especially when you're driving along fields and bumpy roads. And you just want to feed it through the eyelets that you use to lock the car. So hopefully you can see that like that. And then strap everything up. You don't need to go crazy tight here because you can pull these out. Just want to get it nice and tight. As soon as you start to see any flexing, that's it, don't go any further. And then that is a really good secure position for transporting. I don't bother closing the roof. You can close it down like that if you want and strap it down. I just leave it up. Obviously, if you're doing it in a car, doing it in an estate or anything, you have to come up with a different method of transporting it. I find though, if I'm just doing 1 or 2 hives, this is a really good method. Right, so let's get on our way up to the heather apiary. And there we go, successful trip up to the heather. Only about 10 minutes away here, so it really doesn't make a massive difference keeping bees in the back of the truck for that long. But whenever you're transporting bees, make sure they've got ventilated floors. If it's a long journey, ventilated roofs as well. Plenty of airflow. Do it in the evening when it's cool. Do take precaution when you're moving colonies because they can overheat really quickly. Especially big colonies like this where you condense them down. Get them out, get the entrances on, pull out the plugs, let them orientate as soon as possible so they stay cool. So I'll get this colony out here now. I've got a hive stand ready for it over there. I'll pull out the foam bung, I'll let the bees reorientate, and that'll be the end of the video. So once you've got your colony in position, it's as easy as that. Take the foam bung out, you'll see the bees come flying out. They're always really angry after being transported in the pickup truck. They'll calm down though, they'll orientate to their new spot, and they are going to be very happy bees up here at the heather. So here come the bees now. They're going to be thinking, where are we? This is not where we used to be. They'll go out, they'll start doing loops, they'll all come back to this hive though. You don't lose any. They get really, really confused. They will reorientate back to this hive here, and there are lots and lots of bees in here, so I'm just going to leave them to it. I hope you're enjoying this series though. This is episode 16. Stay tuned for episode 17 because we're going to take a look back in that brood box, see how the colony is getting on, see what they've done in that national deep up above the queen excluder, whether they brought in any nectar, if they built out that comb. And then we are well and truly into heather season. Hopefully we get some good weather. The weather isn't looking the best at the moment. We're kind of very, very early August. 12th of August is the day that's always suggested to get your bees up to the heather for. I always go for the last week in July, so I aim to get them up there 23rd, 24th of July. That's when you get a real mega flow if you do get the weather, and then I find you get a bit of a slower flow throughout August. This year though, it rained for the whole of the last week of July, and the next few weeks don't look that good either. So I'm going to need to keep an eye on these guys, make sure they don't starve. Hopefully the warm, dry weather will come back though, now that the ground's soaked, and it only takes a week or two to get a really good heather crop. My target is to fill that National Deep with heather honey. I'll be really, really happy with that. So I hope you enjoyed the video. 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.
