In this tutorial Laurence Edwards walks through rescuing a hive that has been built with the wrong frame sizes (14 × 12 frames in national deep and shallow boxes) and is filled with wild comb and excessive drone brood. He emphasizes the importance of handling the bees gently to avoid squashing the queen, demonstrates how to locate and temporarily secure the queen, and then methodically removes wild comb and chiseled excess drone comb. Edwards reassembles the colony into a standard double‑brood configuration using DN4 national deep frames, fills gaps with new foundation, and redistributes healthy 14 × 12 frames to strengthen other colonies while recycling older equipment. He also discusses requeening plans, the benefits of performing such clean‑ups in spring, and references a previous pre‑emptive demerit split on the same colony.
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If you've managed to get your bee spacing wrong, you've got the wrong size frames in the wrong size boxes, or you've just got a colony that's full of wild comb, this is the video for you. This colony down here is a complete and utter mess. In this video, I'm going to show you how to fix it. So for anybody that remembers, we did a pre-emptive Demaray split on this colony last year, and I was a little bit short in terms of the equipment that I had. I ended up making up a 14 by 12 Wasn't really a 14 by 12. I ended up using a national deep and a shallow and putting 14 by 12 frames in it. And then later on in the season, I ran out of boxes again. So this hive here, it's just got the wrong frames in the wrong hive. I know when I open it up, there is going to be wild comb everywhere. Let's get in, see what a mess they've made. So you have to excuse these bees, they are not friendly bees. These are definitely not my F1 Buckfast. We're going to do some requeening on these ones as well because they are gnarly. But as you can see from the top, Doesn't look too bad. We've got 14 by 12 frames in there, an empty packet of Hiverlife fondant. They took that down, they really did like that. And then you can see we've got a national shallow and then a national deep and then a national deep. In the middle there, there's going to be some crazy void and I reckon it's going to be full of loads of comb. So what you need to be careful with if you've got a situation like this, worst thing you can possibly do is squish the queen. So whenever I'm doing something like this or doing cutouts, The focus is just take your time, bee slowly. If you can find the queen, get her on a frame, get her in a cage, get her out the way. Makes the whole job a lot easier once you've found and identified the queen. I'm going to try and pull out some frames. Let's see what we get when we pull out those frames. So first off, I've got a National Deep in with that mix as well. No wild comb underneath it, which is quite good. And I've not been able to find the queen yet. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to shake off all these bees, put them back into the beehive, Put this one off to one side, try and give myself a little bit of space to maneuver. So really interesting frame here. You can see what I mean. You're just getting the beginnings of the bees drawing out some crazy comb there. Lots of drone brood on this as well. I'm not thinking this is a drone laying queen. It's far too big, far too active. I think this is just early season drone preparation, which means we are coming into swarm season very, very quickly. Can't see the queen on this frame, so all I'm going to do, I'm I'm just gonna start chiseling away any additional comb that I can see, put it off in a bucket, and just try and get the right size frames back into the right size boxes. Right, you can start to see why this is in such a mess. I got it completely wrong. It's National deep frames that are in there. There must be a little bit of a mix. I'm not sure what's going on. All I know is that this colony was a mess and it needed sorting out. I still can't find the queen. The first thing I wanna do is go and find that queen. So I'm just going to take my time going through the frames now. I'll take off any brood that's at the bottom. Lots of drones being produced in this colony here. Just want to go through and find that queen though. So I knew there were some 14x12 frames in there. I've got into them now. So here are the 6 14x12 frames. As you can see, they look fantastic. Lots of worker brood, really good healthy queen in here. Obviously still haven't found her though. And when you're searching through wild colonies, it can be a little bit difficult to find that queen. Another lovely, lovely frame. Queen's still not there though. We'll keep on searching through. Right, still haven't found the queen. The bees are telling me something on this frame though. See if you can guess what it is. So here we go, another completely wild comb. Quite secure though, which is good. It's obviously old, national deep, drawn out to be a very, very deep, very difficult comb to handle. Still not found the queen though, so we'll plod on, see if we can find her. Always interesting when bees do this. When bees cluster up like that, that means they're going to fill the space underneath with comb. They've just not got around to it yet. So a very big, strong colony. And I have just spotted the queen clustering up down here. So I do not want to drop her. I'm going to get her in my hand. So the queen is no longer on this frame. I'm not sure where she is, but I've done that from experience because I've had that before where that cluster falls, it goes on the floor. It's near impossible to find a queen when she's on the floor in the long grass. I much prefer to get her in a handful, chuck her back in. So what I'm going to do— she might be on this frame still— I'm going to shake this frame back into the hive. I'll give it a couple of minutes and I'll So I bet you thought at this moment I was going to say, right, I found the queen, but 20 minutes later I've still not found her. This is what happens in beekeeping. So all I'm going to do is I'm just going to shake off every single frame into that bottom box that's got the correct configuration on it, and I'm going to start building it back up from the bottom up. Nice to find the queen. Sometimes things don't go to plan, you just need to adapt. I'm confident that just by shaking off all of those frames, we'll get the queen down in the bottom box. Box, which is the safest place for her to be, and all of the frames are the correct format. So partway through the reconfiguration now, I've got a single national deep and I've got loads of foundation in there. These are just empty frames of foundation, and I've shaken off all of the bees and they are just clustering in there, completely jam-packed full of bees. Hopefully we've got that queen in there as well. What I'm then going to do is I'm going to take another brood box, again national deep, standard national deep, And I'm going to chisel away all of that drone comb that was extended down, and I'm just going to fill this second box up just with national deep frames. That will leave me on a standard double brood configuration, 20 frames of national deeps. So any frames that are looking like that, all I'm doing is I'm just going to take off that excess comb. If it doesn't break off nicely, get your hive tool out, clean off the bottom. You want to leave a nice clean frame. Take the opportunity just to clean the top and the bottom So I've come well prepared. I've brought some additional DN4 National Deep frames. I'm going to put those in now to fill up any gaps. And then obviously I'm not just going to get rid of these frames, I'm going to go and put these to good use. I use them to boost up weaker colonies that are on 14x12, and I use it to cycle out some older frames as well. These ones here have probably seen better days, but there's no way I'm just going to chuck away big frames of brood, 14x12. There's a lot of good healthy bees in there. I'm just going to distribute them around this apiary and identify any old and gnarly ones for recycling. So that's the manipulation complete. We're on a standard double brood configuration now. Everything's on the right frame size, DN4, national deeps. Top box up there, got some new frames of foundation in. Bottom one's going to be drawn out as well. Queen's definitely going to be in there, he says uber confidently. I'll do an update in a couple of weeks just to show that she's in there. I reckon she is though, but as always with beekeeping, not everything goes to plan. So it's a good time of the year to tidy up any colonies like that. If you want to cycle out any national deeps where they've drawn it down, or you've just got completely wild colonies with wild comb everywhere, do it in the spring. Much easier to find the queen, he says after not being able to find the queen, but it is easier before these colonies just get too big, before they get out of control. Really easy way just to sort them out, get them nice and easy to manage going into spring. If you want to see how I did the preemptive demerit on this colony last year, check this video out here. They are a monster colony of bees.
