Laurence Edwards inspects his first nucleus colony at a heather apiary after a week of rain. He finds limited stores, a contracting brood nest with no eggs, and chalk brood, suggesting the queen slowed laying in poor weather. He's weighing whether to feed the bees or risk losing the heather honey crop.
Episode 17 of the My First Nuclear series. First week up at the heather, let's check out how the colony's getting on. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Finally got the bees up to the heather and we have had rain all week long. It has not stopped raining, so I need to get into this colony and check to see if they've got enough stores. I'm really hoping they've not starved in the first week. I will be devastated. If you remember a couple of episodes back, we took away all of their honey, we moved them up to the heather, and now they've not had any opportunity to get out and fly and build up their stores because it's been raining so much. So better weather is on the lookout over the next few days. Hopefully we'll find they've got enough stores to keep them going until then. If not, we're going to have to do some emergency feeding. Hopefully it won't come to that. I've got my suit on, I'll get my veil on. Let's get into the colony, see how they're getting on. Right, I'm going to do the video as quick as I possibly can today because I've got a gap in the weather. It is blowing a gale up here, so exposed, and there's rain right over there. So I'm going to do it as quick as I possibly can. So thankfully the bees haven't starved. They don't look too happy for me to be opening them up, but there are bees. They've not starved. I'll pull out a couple of the frames up there. Hopefully they've got some stores up there already. That should keep them going until the heather comes into full flower, and then they've got the weather to go and forage on it as well. So thankfully we're looking okay. We've got some capped stores, not that much of it, but a little bit of capped stores, and then we've got a good amount of uncapped stores as well. So they've been going out collecting something. Can't smell any heather, so I'm assuming that's not heather, but good to see there's something in there. This will see them through over the weekend. Which means I don't need to feed them, which is a massive relief. So I'm so happy about that. Moving bees to the heather and feeding them is a nightmare. It really, really is. I'm glad now I've got a static heather apiary. I leave them with enough food to keep them going to make sure that they're not going to starve while you move from the transition from taking off these supers, which I've still not had a chance to do because it's just been too wet, into the actual heather flows. So I'm going to move this top box. Let's get down, have a look in the brood box, See how we're doing down there. So the brood box is positively bulging with bees. There are so many bees down there. I have to say, I prefer my colonies quite a bit stronger than this when I take them to bear heather, so I'm not holding out a huge amount of hope to get a bumper crop. If they fill that national deep, I will be astonished, to be honest. But if we get 2 or 3 frames of heather, I'll be happy with that. You look around some of the other colonies up here. You need big, mega, super strong colonies to get a good crop at the heather. Let's get in, take a look, see if we can see the queen, see if we've got some brood, do our standard weekly checks, see how we get on from there. So here's my queen, she survived the trip up there. Always nice to see the queen after you move a colony like that because the frames can move, you can squish them. So very, very happy to see that queen. Other things to note on this frame, hardly Any stores. If you remember previously, we had nice rings of stores all the way around. That's gone now because they've used that because they're running low on stores. So everything is stored upstairs in the supers. I want to get them back to a point where that is full again, and unfortunately they are going to fill that first with any heather that comes in, which is further going to deplete any heather crop that I'm going to get this year. So I know I'm downplaying it, I really don't think we're going to get a huge amount here. You can also see in there as well, no eggs. When you're up at the heather, it's not a good sign. They should have constant inflow of nectar keeping that queen laying. And because it's been rainy, really, really bad weather, the queen isn't on lay at the moment, which is again further going to deplete that honey crop, which is a real shame. So I'm not going to go through every single frame here today because the weather's just not good. But the brood nest is definitely contracting and we do not like to see the brood nest is contracting at the heather. Got a bit of brood up on that one as well, but we're probably only covering four or five frames of brood up in this apiary. You go through some of the other colonies, and they are on ten frames of fourteen by twelve brood. They're absolute monsters. This one here, she's getting ready for winter, and it's not the phase you want to be in when the heather flows on. Right, so I've closed the colony up. Really not good weather for going and inspecting bees. Want to keep them closed for as much as possible. But in summary. Brood nest is contracting. Seeing a little bit of chalk brood coming back, which is really annoying. Hopefully that will clear up next week once they get back onto a flow. No stores in the brood box whatsoever. Little amount of stores up in the super. A few days of rain forecast. I'm going to hold off feeding for as long as I possibly can, but ultimately it comes down to getting the bees through winter. That's my prime objective here, not getting a mediocre honey crop. So if they need feeding, I will feed them and I'll cull off the heather completely. Fingers crossed it won't get to that though. Make sure you tune into next week's episode though, because things at the heather can change so quickly. If you get a week, 2 weeks of warm weather, now that the ground's wet, you can get a huge harvest of heather. So be sure not to miss next week's episode, 'cause we could have a bumper heather crop. Hope you enjoyed that video though. 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.
