Laurence Edwards inspects ten nucs split from one colony a week earlier, confirming queen acceptance and brood development. He feeds each nuc a litre-plus of Api-Invert syrup using a cautious 1:1 or 2:1 ratio to avoid robber bees, and expects them to grow from two frames now to full strength by early June.
Right, so we're back with the nucs that we split from that single colony. It's been about a week now and some of them are really coming on very, very nicely. All of that brood is emerging. You have to excuse the bees. I do not know what's happened in this apiary. One colony has gone rogue and they hate me, absolutely hate me. So I'm glad I got my good suit on. Just gonna give you a snapshot in these colonies today though. They're at the point now where I think they're strong enough that I can give them a little bit of syrup. I'm gonna be really, really careful though, giving them the syrup here. I don't want to attract any of these bees any of these robber bees and let them know there's syrup there. But I do want to start getting syrup into them, regular small amounts of syrup, because it helps that colony grow. It makes sure they've got a little bit of a buffer against poor weather as well. And the aim here is to try and make as many splits as possible. So having frames of stores, having frames of brood, having aggressive growth, this is what it's all about. I've been through every single colony here and had a check. Every single queen's been accepted. Really, really happy with that. I've got one colony that's just too small, really I'm not happy with this one colony because there's not quite enough bees in it. The bees have probably drifted over to another one, so I might have to pull that nuc. I might have to get us down to 9 here, but we can play that one by ear. I'll give you a snapshot just to show you a couple of the queens, show you that they've been accepted, show you some of the eggs, do a little bit of feeding, and then we will literally close them up. Not going to touch them for a good couple of weeks. I want to get through at least a single round of brood, and then I'll come back and maybe feed them again. Let's get inside though, take a look at one of the average-looking colonies. So this one here is looking about average. I know it looks like a tiny little split, doesn't it? Really not very big at all, but you have to remember we've butchered a double national deep colony and there's not that many bees to go around. So I would say there we're over, say, 2 frames of bees. That will grow though. The queen's been accepted now. Give it 2 rounds of brood and I reckon that box will be full. So we're talking about 6 weeks from now, which will take us to kind of maybe the first or second week of June to get these 10 boxes full. Going to be touch and go whether we get to 40, but I'm happy with the state of them at the moment. I'll pull out a frame here just to show you the queen, just to show you the eggs, and then we'll get some feed into these nucs. So there's my queen, F1 Buckfast. I've got all of my nice emerging brood, and then if you look down into those cells there, always difficult to see, Hopefully you can see that she's started to lay some eggs. So really happy with that. Got an accepted queen. I've got emerging brood from the split, and then I've got new eggs. So this little split now is going to start to build up nicely. So I've got my syrup, carton of Api-Invert. You can use 1:1, you can use 2:1. Bees don't really care at this point of year. It's got so cold and stormy here all of a sudden, and coupled with the horrible bees, it's a nightmare, this apiary. I'm really not enjoying it at all. So what I'm going to do now, just going to go through each and every single nuc here, Probably going to give them about a litre, litre and a half of syrup. Got 14 litres here, so I'll just divide it evenly between the 10 colonies, and then I literally will leave them to it. I want to go through a single round of brood. I'm not going to do an update on this one for at least 3 weeks now. I reckon after that update we'll be looking at between 3 and 4 frames of bees in each and every single nuc. I'll get through them now, give them a feed, and then we'll come back in 3 weeks and see how much they've grown.
