How To Add Space Early Without Risking Starvation

In this video, I'm going to show you a technique that will save your bees in spring. So in the UK, it's often difficult to know when to give your bees additional space in the spring. If you don't give them space soon enough, you're likely to trigger swarming, but the whole time you need to make sure that they have enough stores so that they do not die. It is the space-stores conundrum, and it's one that catches a lot of beekeepers out. If you go ahead and you add space above in the form of supers too early in the season, not only do you lose all of the heat upwards from the brood box, but also if you've got a feeder in place, you've effectively distanced the bees, the brood nest, from the feeder, and then they are at risk of starvation. So the advice is to not put the supers on until the bees are really ready for it, but the springs in the UK are becoming so up and down, it's difficult to get that timing right. This technique that I'm going to show you today gives you the flexibility to mitigate that stores and space conundrum, By adding an additional brood box underneath the existing one really, really early in the season. You can do this in February if you want to do it. And luckily for you, I did exactly that about 4 or 5 weeks ago on this colony here. And today I'm going to show you inside and show you why it works so, so well. So it's the 21st of April today, and this hive here overwintered just on this blue box, which is a 14 by 12 National box. It's quite a big brood box. On top we've got our roof and then we've got a polyash forth feeder. And then what I did about 4 or 5 weeks ago is I looked inside this colony and I thought, hmm, I think they need additional space, but I'm not ready to put the supers on yet because the weather was all over the place. It's only just got nice now. But I knew that I wanted to go ahead and split this colony, turn it into either 2 colonies or make some splits and make some nucs up. If I'd have gone ahead and done nothing, not added this box and not added the supers above, I'm almost certain the bees in here will have swarmed by now, 'cause it's so difficult to get that timing right. I didn't add the supers above. I went ahead and added the brood box below, which many beekeepers will tell you does not work. And I'm doing this video to prove to you that it works and works very, very well. So giving the bees a puff of smoke there, and we'll start at the top and work our way down and see how far the bees have made it. So as I open up this colony here, I'll talk to you about one of the main benefits of having the feeder and the bees in this configuration. I've taken this feeder off, and as you can see, there's still a little bit of syrup inside the feeder, which means that if the bees needed it, they can come up, go upstairs, take some food from the feeder without having to break cluster. If I'd have gone ahead and put the supers on or put any other brood box somewhere else or overbrooded, I create this distance between the feeder and the bees, and in cold snaps they will not find it. Plus you lose all of the heat upwards. So this configuration just ticks so many boxes. The only thing that people seem to have a problem with about it is they say bees move up, they don't move down, you're putting it in the wrong place. So let's pull some of these frames out, Zane, and see what the bees are doing. 14 by 12 frames are always magnificent because they are huge. And look how much capped stores is on that side over there still. So the bees were never really running out of stores in here, but they would have definitely run out of space, especially with all of that capped stores here. So let's get another frame out, see if we can find that queen. Lovely calm F1 Buckfast bees here from Black Mountain Honey. So there we go, one beautiful golden F1 Buckfast queen for Black Mountain Honey. She is busy just laying eggs like it's going out of fashion. Blue marked for 2025, so she successfully overwintered here in the UK, perfectly adapted to the conditions here. You can see nothing wrong with this colony at all. So I'm going to place that frame back in there now, and then I'm going to compress everything back Up together. This box here, apart from one frame of foundation at the end, is completely full. The real test is going to be downstairs. Has the queen made it down there? Has she laid it up? Have they even drawn it out? Because it went in four weeks ago as foundation. So I really wanted to show you today how this big colony had expanded and grown downstairs into that bottom brood box. But ah, it has not worked as planned. But there's still plenty of benefit here. So let me just take off. the original brood box, and then let me show you what the bees have done downstairs in this box here that was a mixture of drawn comb and foundation. So we have still got foundation, we've got a few bees hanging around, not really doing that much. We've effectively just got loads of dead space, Sam, and if you come in and have a look, you can see there is literally nothing downstairs in that box, is there? No. But there is nothing wrong with that, it served its purpose. Remember, it's the space stores conundrum. If you add that space in the wrong position and put it above the brood nest, you are fighting against the bees during that really difficult time when the temperature goes down overnight. If you are placing the dead space underneath like this, even if the bees haven't gone down and used it, which I promise you they will, which I promise you they do, and I will prove it, I'll get it on camera. But all you've done here is had a complete free bet because putting the configuration set up like that, The bees still had contact upstairs with the feeder. They didn't lose any heat to the space you added because it was downstairs and the heat rises up. You can see the bees are fine, they're quite happy up there. I've got them through the space stores conundrum really easily. And then how about this for a reset? All I do is I just take this box, put it back over there, take my original brood box and place it exactly where it started. And I can just go ahead now, put a queen excluder on and put my supers on. And I've got my bees into a much better position than adding the supers So is it a perfect system? No. Does it mitigate a lot of the risks that you have during that difficult spring period? Yes. And are these bees here better for having that manipulation done? I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever. So this one here didn't go to plan, but no damage done. They're ready for a super, and this colony here really is starting to get going now.