Episode 6 - My First Nucleus - Removing Queen Cells And Introducing A Mated Queen

So the colony is looking nice and strong. This colony has got a terrible, terrible case of chalkbrood. Right, so this colony is now queenless. 5 weeks in and we've had to kill the queen, so not the best start. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. We're on to episode 6 of the My First Nuclear series, and the highlights from last week showed we had a really bad case of chalkbrood. So what we did last week is we killed the queen, and what we're expecting to find today is emergency queen cells. Going to be a really quick episode today. All we're going to do, we're going to find those cells, we're going to shake the bees off the frames, we're going to knock down and kill every single queen cell. That's going to render this colony hopelessly queenless, which means they have no resources to make their own queen. And then we're going to add a mated Postal queen. And because that colony will be in a hopelessly queenless state after we knock down the cells, we can pop the cap straight away and they will get into that cage and they will release the queen. So let's get the hood on, smoker on, and we'll get inside those bees. Now even on the sunniest of days, this isn't one of my friendliest colonies. But when you've got a colony that hasn't got a queen, so it's queenless— not hopelessly queenless yet because they've still got cells in there— but when you've got a colony that's queenless The temperament goes downhill pretty quickly. So even though this isn't the friendliest colony anyway, I'm expecting them to be a little bit grumpy today, especially considering this is the Welsh spring/summer and it's about 12 degrees, raining and drizzly. Been terrible all week. So I'm going to give them lots of smoke, try and calm them down, and we'll get in there and I'll show you as normal, frame by frame, to see how the colonies come on and show you just how many queen cells they draw out when you take away that queen. We'll also give you an update on the chalkbrood situation. I'll show you the chalkbrood in the frames, and I'll show you some of the mummies on the floor as well. So I've given those colonies a really good puff of smoke from the entrance. I'm going to give them a puff of smoke from the top as well, and then let's get inside the colony. Hopefully my smoker won't burst into flames this week. So we're not expecting to see dramatic growth this week. Obviously you're still going to get brood emerging, so you still might get the colony expanding a little bit. But this year is just rubbish. The weather's so bad, so many colonies are going backwards. So do not worry if you don't see eggs in your colony. Do not worry if they're dwindling a little bit. Just give them some feed, keep them ticking over. Hopefully some better weather is on its way. Right, so we're not interested in that top box. Nothing in there of interest. Fair amount of nectar in there. But what we're interested in is looking at the brood, seeing where they are. And obviously every other week we've been looking to hope that there's no queen cells. This week there definitely will be queen cells. So we'll go through, as always, we'll go through frame by frame, picking out every single frame and showing you the status. So we'll start off on the frames closest to me. You're expected to see a little bit of stores here. As we go forward, you're going to see more and more brood, and then you're going to start seeing some swarm cells as well. And sometimes they put 20 or 30 swarm cells on one cell, other times they spread it out throughout the colony. So we're going to see a real mix here. Doesn't matter whether these cells are charged cells, so you can see inside them and see that larva, or they're completely capped up. We're taking down absolutely everything this week that can be conceived to be a queen cell. Don't risk it, don't leave a single one. If you're unsure, take it down, because that's what's going to cause the issues here. So you need to get this colony into a point that is hopelessly queenless. Like I said before, what that means is that there's no queen, but also there is no resources that the bees have in order to make themselves a new queen. So there's no eggs, there's no open brood, and if there's no eggs and there's no open brood, the bees cannot make themselves a new queen. If you get them into that hopelessly queenless state, adding a new queen is very, very easy. If you don't get them into that state, you'll have probably 2 or 3 goes before you realize you need to get them hopelessly queenless before you start adding mated queens. So there you go, that's all the frames of the colony. As you can see, this is, this is horrible colony. Requeening this colony is going to serve 2 purposes actually. It's gonna get rid of the chalk brood, hopefully. That's the reason that we're doing it. But also it's going to hopefully give us a slightly nicer bee as well. I know I'm coming in, I'm doing inspections when I shouldn't really be doing inspections. The bees aren't flying, it's not warm enough, so the, the boxes are full anyway. So what you need to do next In this manipulation is you need to go through every single one of those frames. You need to shake off all the bees. You're shaking off all the bees so you can look at the frames again and you can knock down every single swarm cell. So that's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to shake each frame, knock down the queen cells, put it all back together again. Right, so now the colony is hopelessly queenless. So then at this point you want to take your mated queen. So I've ordered this one through the post. You want to open the cap but leave the shield on, and what they're going to do is the bees, they're going to eat their way through the fondant to do what's called a slow release. That's going to give you a much, much better chance for successful introduction for your queen. You're just going to put this in the middle, directly in the middle of that brood nest, horizontally on the frames. The bees will feed the queen through that cage, but they will release her pretty quickly. So we're going to pop that in now, and I'll show you just how it should look on those frames. So you can see already the bees are really curious to see what's going on on there. That is not nice behaviour. But it doesn't matter because it's going to be a slow release. They're going to work out very, very shortly that they're hopelessly queenless, and they're going to introduce that queen. So that's the manipulation complete for this week. We didn't talk too much about chalkbrood, but I'll just flash up the frame now to show you that chalkbrood without any bees on. You can see it's really, really bad, way above the threshold. And I had a question come in that I'll answer now. In terms of the threshold, I would say it's quite high, I have a number of colonies that I will leave with chalkbrood, especially this time of the year, because the ground is damp, the air is moist, and it does bring out chalkbrood. You may get colonies that you get it early on in the year, later on in the year it goes away. So I think we're talking, if I want to say a number of cells, I'd say 20 or 30 per frame is probably like the level in which I would intervene. Anything less than that, I'd probably give them maybe a season to see if it clears up. If they keep on doing it season after season, then I'll kill the queen and I'll stick a new queen in that's resistant. No mummies on the floor though this week, so they've not had a good clear-up yet. As this colony progresses though, we'll definitely start to see some mummies on the floor. So as soon as that comes on, I'll show you them just so you can identify them in your own colonies. But that's it for this week's episode. We've gone through, taken down all of the emergency queen cells that they raised because we dispatched and killed their queen last week. The colony is now hopelessly queenless with no resources to raise their own queen. We've added a posted mated queen, popped the cage, and the bees are going to work through that over the next few hours and release that queen. Hopefully next week, if all has gone well, we'll come back, we'll see the queen, we'll find an empty cage, and we'll find eggs. And at that point, we know that integration has been successful. So I hope you enjoyed that 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.