Laurence Edwards attempts to maximize colony splits in one season, starting with ten nucs and performing 2-frame splits to reach forty by season's end. Each split gets one frame of brood, one of stores, and a shake of bees, with the original queen staying behind. He walks through the technique and discusses the logistical limits of aggressive splitting.
Right, we're back at the apiary from hell again. Sorry, I mean the river apiary. Although the bees do seem to have calmed down a little bit today. Famous last words. They are going to be horrible once I get into that colony, and I know they're going to be buzzing all around me again. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to do this bit of the video without getting into the bees and without them flying everywhere. I have completely lost count though. I do not know what episode we're on. I'm sure I'll put it on the title of this video. We're making as many splits as we possibly can from a single colony, and I'm pretty sure when we go in today, we're going to find that those 10 nucs are Full and they're ready for splitting. I brought an extra 10 nucs with me, empty boxes. I've got probably 80-85% drawn comb ready to go into them, and I've had to fill up a little bit of that with foundation because I'm running out of drawn comb rapidly at this time of the year. What I've decided to do with these splits is I'm going to make the splits here, I'm going to leave 10 colonies here, the original 10 colonies in the position, and then I'm going to take 10 colonies to another apiary. What I will then do is I'll do the 2 separate videos in 2 separate apiaries. I'll split those respective 10 colonies both into 20, and then I will move the 40 into a single apiary so we can see them all together towards the end of the season. There's no denying it though, somebody mentioned this on YouTube the other day, this isn't cheap. This isn't something that you're going to want to kind of do each and every year. You're paying for the nuc, you're paying for the frames, you're paying for the queens. Huge amount of money going into the queens in order to make these aggressive splits like this. But I'm just doing it just to kind of try and prove how many you can do in a year whilst using drawn-out comb and using mated queens. I might do it next year, see how many I can get mated like naturally, and it'll probably be about 6. So the numbers do drop off quite rapidly and the use of resources isn't anywhere near as effective. Enough of me rambling on though, I'll go and get my bee suit on. Let's go and have a look at the 10 nucs and see how strong they've got.
Right, so the nucs are looking very, very strong indeed. Gonna be able to split these now because they're covering all of the 6 frames and they're pretty even across the board. Could leave this for another couple of weeks and you could let them get a little bit stronger just to make sure they're covering the frames. But what I don't want to happen here is I don't want to leave them and let them swarm. And then I really am kind of snookered because I lose not only my queens, but I also lose a lot of the bees as well. So I'm going to start making splits. I'm going to take a 2-frame split, the same size split that I took to start these colonies off. I'm going to take a frame of brood, a frame of stores, a shake of bees, and I'm going to leave the original queen in situ and let them build up again. That means I can feed this colony here again. They can have the foundation. They'll probably end up with the extra bees. It's going to be a really easy split manipulation. So as I said, all I'm going to do now is I'm just going to take a single frame of brood, a single frame of stores, half a shake of bees. Just want to make sure that I'm getting enough bees into the new nuc whilst leaving enough bees in these old nucs here. And then I'm going to take the splits away to another apiary Leave these 10 here and then I'll add the queens in the new apiary. Makes things a little bit easier to manage, means that I can balance the colonies a little bit better as well. I'll show you how I do it now just on one of the nucs and then I'll do it another 9 times and then we'll skip to the next apiary which shows me introducing the queens and that is a successful double up from 10 colonies up to 20. Right, so all I'm going to do with these colonies here, I'm going to go through, find the queen, make sure I'm not taking the queen because the queen is going to stay in these nucs here. That makes it so much easier because Find her, put her off to one side, and then I can just shake bees in. And as I said, one frame of stores, one frame of brood, shake of bees, and that's it. That's the same split I made previously, and you can see just how quick that will build up when you get the weather right, when they've got drawn comb, and when you feed them as well. So here we go, we got a nice frame of brood on this one. This would be a perfect frame to do it with. I just want to find that queen first though, just to make sure I'm not putting the queen into the new nuc. Beautiful frame of brood, Very, very happy with these queens. These are my F1 Buckfast queens, and as you can see, they are doing the business. Beautiful frames. So there's my queen. You can see her on the frame. I'll take her off to one side now, and then I can make up a really easy nuc. So this is the split I'm making. I'm leaving 4 frames in there. That's got the queen in, 2 frames of brood, and a little bit of stores. And then this is the split that I'm making down here. Frame of brood, frame of stores, and there's no queen in there. I'll just fill the gaps up with foundation, withdrawn comb, and then I can take this colony off to another apiary. So I'll repeat that 9 more times. I'll see you at the next apiary. We would have done the first split, turning 10 nucs into 20 nucs. And then, as I said, we'll move both sets of those 10 nucs when we do the split into a new apiary where we have 40 nucs all in a line. If you want to catch up on this series showing you all the steps as to how I make as many splits as I possibly can in a single season, Check out this playlist here to see where we've got to today.
