How Late Can You Add Foundation - Best Time To Add Foundation To Your Hive

In this video, I'm going to show you how late in the season you can add foundation to your beehive. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to show you how late in the season you can add foundation to your beehive, talk to you about why you would add foundation to your beehive, talk to you about why I think it's the best time of the season to add it. So why do you need to add foundation to your beehive? A lot of the time you buy a nuc, you buy a package of bees, you chuck it in with loads of foundation, the bees draw it all out, and then you get left with loads of drawn comb in the brood area. Now, best practice says that you should replace that comb every 3 years, and one way of replacing it is to do a shook swarm. That's the last time you're ever going to hear that said on this channel. Do not believe in shook swarms because they're not good for the bees. Definitely not something that I would do anyway, unless there was a dramatic outbreak of EFB, and even then I'm a little bit dubious if that's the best way to treat them. Another method is a Bailey comb exchange, and I've got a lot of time for Bailey comb exchanges. It is something that you can do, but on a wider scale, on a lot of colonies, takes a huge amount of planning to do it. What I like to do is throughout the course of the season is to move the worst frames to the outer edges of the colony. Similar to what you do in a Bailey comb where you're moving them to the outer edge and replacing them back in the middle and moving them, constantly moving the frames. Bailey combs do work really well, but the way that I like to do it is I like to move the bad frames to the edge at the end of the season. They're going to get filled up with honey, and then before you go to put your Apivar strips in, you need to get in there and you can remove those combs and you can replace them with foundation. And what I do is I replace them with foundation and I put that foundation in the middle of the colony. You do that before you put your Apivar strips in, and you do that before you put your feeders on, then I guarantee you, you'll come back in the spring and they will have drawn out all of that foundation. And even better than that, they would have drawn it out with barely any drone comb included on it. So the video is about how late on in the season can you do that. Kind of depends when you're going to put your Apivar strips on, when you're going to do your mite treatments if you're not using Apivar, when you're going to start feeding. But if you take away any contamination from varroa treatments, you can do it right up until September, October time. You'll be amazed. Bees will draw foundation when the weather is cold, and bees will draw that foundation when there's very, very minor flows on, especially if you put it in the middle. They hate being blocked in the middle like that. Don't go and do it back end of October, early November, but as a safe bet, towards the end of September, it's a really, really good time to get any old manky black brood frames out of your colonies. You can reclaim the honey, you can melt the honey down, and then you can reuse those frames again. Just rewire them, put the foundation back in, and then you're gonna replace those frames with foundation by putting it into the middle of the hive. I'm gonna show you how to do it in this video though, so I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get my smoker lit, and I'll go and find some nasty brown-black frames, and I'll replace it with foundation. Right, let's get into this colony then. We're gonna take out the oldest, mankiest frame. We're gonna replace it with a frame of foundation that we're gonna put right in the middle. We're gonna see how quickly the bees draw that out. Right, so here's my colony of bees. Not an absolute monster. This was a relatively small split a good few weeks ago, but it's come on really nicely. Gonna get through it now. I'm gonna find the darkest, blackest comb, or if I've got any shorter frames in there that shouldn't be in there as well, I might take those out. I'll go and find the worst frame though, and then I'm gonna get it out and I'm gonna Switch it for some foundation. Right, turns out I'm way ahead of the game with this colony, and this is by far and away the darkest frame that I've got. Do not throw out your frames when they look like this. There is nothing wrong with this frame. I'll show you some of the frames that I've got because some of the frames that I've got are literally black. But this is good, I'm ahead of the game. But I'm going to show you it anyway with this frame here because this is the darkest one and it's the one that's not being used. All I've got in there is a little bit of nectar. So if you're doing this and it's full of honey, then you can just melt that honey out. As long as it's not been contaminated by any of our other products, the honey's good to go. So all I'm going to do is I'm just going to remove this dark frame and I'm going to replace it with a frame of foundation. So here's my frame of foundation. The only one that I had is one that ever so slightly started to be drawn out, but I think to be completely fair, I've had to scratch that back. So I've scratched it all back on both sides. We're down to foundation again. And then even there, I've scratched it right back. So all we've got there is one sheet of foundation, and I'm just going to plop that in straight into the middle of the hive. So simple as that, sheet of foundation that's going to go into the middle of the hive. The bees are working a really, really good ivy flow here, absolutely superb ivy flow. So I'm not even going to feed them. The weather wasn't good though, I would get the feeders on, gives them a little bit of a help just to get this drawn out. But I reckon give it 2 weeks, this is going to be fully drawn out. And not only that, I reckon it'll probably be laid up with eggs as well. Just to be completely fair, I've marked it with an F, F for foundation. I'll give it 2 weeks and I'll come back to this colony and I'll show you how well they've drawn out that frame of foundation. It's now the 2nd of October. It's 1 week since we put that sheet of foundation in the middle of this hive. Let's get inside, see if they've drawn out that foundation And they haven't had a single feed yet. And there you have it, 1 week later. It has rained all week. They've had little glimpses of sunshine, but it's been probably on average 14 degrees Celsius. They've even put away some stores, so they've been out on the ivy. You can see they've drawn out all of that, only the edges where they haven't really drawn that out yet, but without a shadow of a doubt, they're going to draw that out within the end of the week. And then you look down and that is the frame marked F that we marked 1 week ago. So I think that's pretty conclusive. You can definitely add foundation in the first week in October, and I would say you can probably add it a lot later than that as well. How about that then? 1 week after adding the foundation, they've drawn all of that out, probably 80 or 90%. The same on the other side, and we haven't even given them a feed. So Without a doubt, you can go way, way into October, add foundation like this, and you'll notice on the foundation as well there's no drone comb on it. They've not built any drone comb whatsoever. It's all worker cells, which gives you really big booming colonies when you get into spring. Now, if you get into the habit of doing that year in, year out, and doing it with maybe 2 or 3 frames a year, over the course of a brood box that's got, say, 10 or 11 frames in it, you're pretty much replacing it on a 3-year cycle. And what I would suggest is not to go in and take 3 frames of feed out and replace it with foundation, because that's not going to be really economical in terms of feed. But if you do one in August, one at the beginning of September, and one at the end of September, they're going to be the best times of the year for you to go in and take out the manky black frames, replace it with foundation, and then you can start getting that drawn really, really early. You're going to replace the wax You're gonna keep it nice, disease-free, and you're gonna ensure that there's very minimal drone comb on that wax foundation. Keep yourself in that cycle, and then you're working to a really good 3-year cycle where no wax frames are older than 3 years old. So that's it. Hope you enjoyed the video. Hope you found that one useful. 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.