Episode 23 - My First Nucleus - Getting Ready For Winter

We're on to episode 23 of the My First Nucleus series, and we're getting the colony ready for winter. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. The last episode, we took all of that honey away, but there's quite a bit of stuff that you didn't see that I did in that video as well. Forgot my tripod, I forgot all of my kit, and there seems to be just a week in September that is just chaos. Every single year, everything happens all at once in North Wales. And I'm feeding, I'm doing mite treatments, and then I've got all of my heather apiaries as well that I need to go and get the honey off. And then I need to go and do the extraction while the heather's still warm. So there's always just that week of absolute carnage, and that was last week. So what you didn't see that I did with my, my first nucleus colony, I took all of the honey off, I showed you all of that, that's all sitting in jars now. I've done all the extraction. But with the colony here, obviously I removed all of the supers. I've condensed them down into a single brood box. I gave them the first little glug of 1:1 sugar syrup, although the brood box was nice and heavy because they do tend to backfill it when they're at the heather. I added the Apivar strips in into the brood nest, and it's now about a week and a half since I've done that. So I'm sorry you didn't get to see any of that. I have done that on numerous videos already this year. I'll stick a link out, you can see exactly how it is. All I've done though Fed them a little bit of 1:1 sugar syrup, couple of litres absolute max, and I put my Apivar strips in to treat them for varroa. That's an 8-week treatment, and they went in— it was around the 20th of September that they went in, so 20th of November is when the Apivar strips is going to come out here. That's very, very late. You don't want to be going into your colonies too much in November. You definitely, definitely don't want to be touching them, but you do need to be quite strict on that 8-week period for Apivar. So you do need to go in, you need to get them out, take the Apivar strips out, and I will cover that in this series. Episode 23 though, what we're going to do is we're going to take a look in that brood nest, and we've not looked in that brood nest for a good few weeks now, because when they're up at the heather, I say to myself, the bees are not going to swarm at the heather. Now that doesn't mean that all of the 25 colonies that are here, not a single one of them is going to swarm, but I say, look, maybe one of them is going to swarm out of the 25, I'm going to save myself 8 weeks of inspections on 25 colonies for the sake of losing a single swarm. And luckily I've been through them all now. I didn't lose a single swarm, so I saved a huge amount of inspection time. However, I didn't know what was going on in a lot of the brood nests, and it's interesting to go and see the state of some of the colonies. Some of them have really condensed that brood nest down, backfilled it with lots of heather honey. Some of them are just over like 10 or 11 frames of brood where I've got an 11-framer up here. And they're really struggling in terms of the amount of food and they need feeding as soon as possible. So you do need to judge each colony on its merit and you need to get in and assess what they need. I don't treat the colonies up at the heather apiary like I would other colonies because I'm working around middle of August, back end of August, I'm taking my honey crop off and then I've got this interim period, this 6 to 8 weeks where the bees really don't know what to do and they don't want to get ready for winter too early. So I So I use trickle feeding to keep them going, to build them up, to get them strong, to get them into winter. Bees up at the heather, it's a completely different story because that 6 to 8 week period they've been on a heather flow, so it's kind of naturally stimulating that colony to remain large. So you can almost jump straight in with heavy 2:1 feeding. I'll give them maybe 1 or 2 weeks of trickle feeding just to top them up, just to keep them going, get rid of the rest of the 1:1 that I've made up. But I go straight in heavy 2:1 feeding, And that's what we're going to cover in next week's episode. This episode though, all I'm going to do, I'm just going to give you a bit of a recap of what I've done. I'm going to go in though, I'm going to take a look at the brood nest frame by frame, see how the brood nest has expanded, see how the queen's looking, just generally take a look at how that brood nest is coping. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get my smoker lit, I'll get inside the colony, and I'll show you how they're doing. Here's my colony then. You will notice this is on a national deep box. Everything else up here is on 14 by 12. I'm hoping there's going to be a really good amount of stores in there. This one here is on a national deep though, so these are the ones you do need to keep an eye on in terms of starvation. If they're up at the heather, they're packing all the heather honey at the top, and at the bottom they're putting all their brood. You swipe away the heather honey. I never ever swipe honey away at the heather without giving them a little glug of syrup just to keep them going. A little bit of an insurance policy. I'd prefer them to backfill the brood nest a bit quicker than normal than to risk them starve, because the heather colonies, they're so big, they will starve in a matter of hours if you don't give them enough food. First thing I'm going to do though, I'm going to give this colony a little bit of a heft, and I can feel from that already, no problem whatsoever. Really, really good amount of weight. Not excessive, not up to their winter weight, and I will post the winter weights in the subsequent videos when we're building the colony up to strength. Just good at this time of the year to get into the habit, and this is why I like the ratchet straps. Just give them a little heft like that, can tell you so much about a colony without needing to go into it. However, purpose of this video, we're going to go in here, we're going to show you exactly what's going on. So let's crack it open now. So as I always say, I like my colonies boiling with bees going into winter. You want to see them covering all of those frames, you want to see them crammed in. And a little bit of bearding really isn't the worst thing in the world. Just look at these bees. Look at the amount of bees on those frames. This is what you want to see in your beehives when you're getting them ready for winter. So first frame, we found the queen. She is a very shy queen. She always runs off whenever I'm filming her, but there you go, she's come back for a little bit of a filming now. First frame, really good-looking queen. She, she's done really well. Very, very happy with this queen. She's performed well, she's eradicated that chalkbrood issue, she's given a really good yield up at the heather. Probably about £30 that worked out for that National deep box that was up here, maybe £25, but she's done very well indeed. This frame here, this is the second from last outside frame, so frame 2, and as you can see we've got some brood on there. Probably can't see it down in there as well, but there's eggs and There's larva in there as well, a little bit easier to see there hopefully, but she's getting ready for winter and she's probably moving towards building that colony up to strength, maybe a few weeks away from building up and laying the eggs that will become the winter bees. Just want to take a look at the outside frame, so I'll pop that one in next. So there's my outside frame. I know that does look a little bit like brood, but you'll have to believe me, it's not. That is all capped honey. A little bit of space up in this end as well, so we'll fill all of that out when we come to do some heavy feeding with invert. But nice that they've got a good buffer in there, and you can almost guarantee that's going to be nice, good quality heather honey. I'm not going to pinch that though. The bees have done enough work for me this year. I'm just going to leave them alone now. Varroa treatments, get them fed. Anything they get from the ivy float, they can keep for themselves. My main priority now is getting all of these bees safely through winter. So I'm losing my mind at the moment. I thought I didn't put the Apivar strips in, then I did put them in, and then we found them down there. So okay, I wasn't losing my mind. We did already put the Apivar strips in. They're just pinned into the frames there on that brood area, and I've got one over here as well if you can see that one. So 2 frames of Apivar that are in there. Those 2 frames of honey over there, nice frame of brood, and then we're just working our way along this colony here. So there's my Apivar strip. I've just repositioned that. That was sitting over this side. Whenever you're pulling the frames out, and you really don't need to be pulling the frames out this time of year, I'm just doing this just to show you, but it is worthwhile just moving that Apivar strip around, giving it a little scrape with the hive tool, and it will give you really good efficacy against varroa mites. But as you can see on this frame as well, we've got brood, brood in all stages, got eggs, got larvae, and then I think the further we go across we're going to see more and more brood. So the further I've gone through this colony, it's apparent that there is quite a lot of weight in this colony, a lot of stores in it already. I'm definitely not going to be feeding this colony at least for a good few weeks. There's probably actually not enough space for the queen to be laying it up. Last thing I want to do at this point of the year is fill all of the rest of those gaps with any sugar syrup. It's going to be way more detrimental to the colony, so I'm just going to leave them. They've got their Apivar strips in, they're a nice big strong colony of bees, they're queen right, there's brood in all stages. I'm just going to leave them to sort it out. I'm not even going to trickle feed, and I'm not going to give them anything at all because there's probably 6 or 6.5 frames of stores in there and only 3 or 4 frames of brood. It's a little bit excessive. I like to see them a bit bigger than that. You could take out some frames here, and it's not a bad idea to do that. Take out a couple of frames of stores, maybe give them to weaker colonies, colonies that need a little bit of a feed, and replace it with either drawn comb or foundation. Foundation's really good to go in at this time of year. They draw it out really well. Put hardly any drone cells on it whatsoever. Don't go mad, don't go put 6 frames of foundation in there, but if you want to do it, just take out 1 or 2 frames. That's not the end of the world. You can replace it with foundation and they'll draw it out really nice for next year. But the bees are looking in a great state, so I'm just going to let them get on with it. They're doing all the work, they're building their stores, they're contracting that nest. I'm helping them along with the varroa treatment. We're just going to see how they get on. So I'm just going to put everything back together again. The colony is queen right, got brood in all stages, got about 3 frames of brood, got my varroa treatments in. There's good weight in the colony, probably a little bit too much stores, so I'm just going to leave them and monitor them and see how they get on. Colonies like this, they will take down invert syrup really, really late into October, even into November if the temperature's okay. Anything above 10 or 11 degrees, they'll take down invert. You can feed them really late. So if the worst comes to it and you leave it too late and you can't feed them, you can always give them fondant as an emergency measure. But I'd say to you, and people must get bored of me saying this on these videos, the worst thing you can do to a colony is just to feed it too much syrup. Like, you will wipe out your colony, and you really don't see it coming because the colony looks like this big, massive, strong colony. If you didn't go in there and thought, I'm just going to feed syrup, Blind, loads and loads of syrup. You're picking it up, you're thinking, this is great, I've got a big strong colony with loads of bees, it's really heavy, things are going to be fine going into winter. Then all of a sudden, all of those summer bees die off and you're left with this puny little colony and it just dwindles away to nothing. You need to be careful with feeding sugar syrup, make sure you don't overdo it because it doesn't become apparent until kind of December, January, February. That you're struggling with the number of bees in there. And then because all of those bees die off so quickly, the queen can't relay the frames up because there's not enough bees to keep the brood warm. It's a balancing act, and it's a balancing act all the way throughout the year. These are looking good though. I'm just going to leave them to it 3 or 4 weeks. I'll come back, I'll assess how they're getting on. If the weather's been nice and they've been on the ivy, I'm just going to leave them to it until I need to come back Take those Apivar strips out and these ones will be good for winter. So there we go, that's it for the video. Very, very happy with how this colony has performed throughout the whole of the season. I'll keep these episodes going though. Going to give it a good 3 or 4 week gap now because there's no action that needs to be taken. We're in the last week of September here. I'm not even going to come back and look at this colony until middle to kind of like towards the end of October. They've got everything they need to see them through that gap. And if I come back at a later date, I can feed them later on. If you're in your first winter of beekeeping, it's quite difficult to know what your bees should be looking like going into winter. You just need to try and think ahead. Don't feed too much syrup too early and give the bees a chance to get ready for winter with the correct amount of brood and the correct amount of stores. I hope you enjoyed that video though. I hope you're enjoying the series. 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.