How To Bank Queen Bees - A Complete Guide To Banking Mated Queens Safely And Successfully

Ever wondered how to bank mated queens so they're ready for when you need them? In this video, I'm going to show you how. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to talk about queen banking, how to bank queens so they're ready for when you need them. So if you haven't noticed already, we are now supplying F1 Buckfast queens for Murray McGregor Really massive beekeeper, manages over 5,000 colonies in the UK, and he is supplying us a weekly batch of F1 Buckfast queens. Now the batch that I've got here today, I can't get out because I'm away over the weekend, so I'm banking these queens, and that's what I'm going to show you in this video. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with banking queens so long as you do it correctly, and what you need to do is you need to put them into a strong active colony on top of a super on top of a queen excluder. The bees will come up, they'll recognize that there is queens there, and so long as there is a flow or a simulated flow, i.e., you're feeding them, the nurse bees will feed the queens and you can keep them in there for anything up to about a week. Now you can bank queens for way, way longer than that. I hear about some people banking queens from September through to say like April the next year, and that's not something that we would ever try to do because I just don't think that it would do any good to the queen staying in the cages that long. But the way we see it is that our introduction is actually leaving the queen in a cage for a week. So banking them for a week, no problem whatsoever. The queens come out of it really, really well. They're well fed and they're ready to go. So I've got a batch here today. It's a Friday afternoon today, going away for the bank holiday weekend, and I'm coming back on Tuesday. I'm just going to bank my queens over the weekend just so they're being fed, they're kept at the right temperature, And then come Tuesday, I can take them out and go and use them. So like I said, really simple process. That's what I'm going to show you in the video. So I'm going to get my hood on, get my smoker on, go and find a nice strong colony of bees. So this is the colony I'm going to use to bank my queens. The reason I'm using this one— there's a couple of reasons really. The first one is this is the strongest colony in this apiary. Second one is it's got a queen excluder already on it, and then it's got 2 supers. I just like that gap between the queen right box below where there's a queen in and then the supers where I'm going to bank my queen. So I'm going to bank my queens on that second level of the super. Obviously, wherever you're banking your queen, make sure there's sufficient bees there. You don't want to have a full brood box, a queen excluder, a full super, and then put an empty super with no bees on top and then bank your queens, because you might attract some bees up, but you really want the boxes completely full to the brim Before you start banking your queens. And it is the simplest process in the world, it really is. So I'll open the box now, I'll show you how strong the colony should be, and then I'll show you how to set it up for banking. So there you go, nice strong colony all the way up to the top of that box, filling all of the frames. Really nice strong colony of bees. So once you got it to this position, it is so easy to bank your queens. All you do, take your queen excluder, I like to use a wooden framed wire queen excluder for this. And then take your queens one by one, and on these cages here you have a Perspex sheet on one side and then ventilation holes on the other side. And what you want to do is you want to face them downwards like that so the bees can come up from underneath, feed the queens. And you can see here the nurse bees already coming up because they're interested in what's going on. Not horrible behavior, but the queens are full Fully protected in these cages. You just want to make sure that you're putting them face down like that, and then the nurse bees can come up and they can access those queens to make sure they're well fed. So that's it, it's as easy as that. These are set up now, and there's one big thing to remember here. If it's poor weather, you need to make sure you feed this colony. So you can do that in any way you like. You could put a frame feeder in, you could put a top feeder in, You need to work out some way of being able to feed this colony whilst you've got the queen excluder and the queens on like that. So you could put an empty super on and then put an Ashforth feeder on, on the top. You don't need to go crazy, you're just talking about little trickle feed, nice 1:1 sugar syrup, because it will simulate a flow and then all of the bees, nurse bees, will feed the queens in the cages. Luckily it is forecast for 26 degrees tomorrow, It's a little bit grey here today, but it's actually quite warm, and there has been a flow on today. It's about half 6 in the evening now, so these will be fine until the morning, and then tomorrow there is going to be copious amounts of nectar coming in because it's forecast to be 26 degrees, and that forecast is set to continue. So I don't need to worry about simulating a flow because there's going to be a really strong natural flow, and that's what's going to get these queens fed. So in the standard fashion, that's not the end of the video. I'm going to come back on Tuesday and I'm going to show you How the bees have fared. So obviously all the queens are still alive. I'll go through one by one and I'll show you how well they still look, because the attendants should still be alive because they're being fed. The queen should still be alive because they're being fed. Everything should be absolutely fine. So fast forward now to Tuesday, 3 and a half, 4 days after this part of the video, and I'll show you how well these queens have banked over the weekend. Now obviously, if you're long-term banking, you wouldn't want to go down this solution. You probably want to go something purpose-built. Just because you'll get a lot of brace comb. But over a weekend, no problem at all. Empty super, upturned Ashforth feeder, something like that. Just want to give them the space so they can come up, tend to those queens. So that's all I'm going to use, upturned Ashforth feeder, and that's it. That's the queens successfully banked. So we'll fast forward 4 days and I'll show you how well the queens have banked over the long bank holiday weekend. Right, so we're back at the queen banking colony after 4 days. I'm going to open it up, show you how well the queens have been tended to. You should see no dead attendants, no dead queens, and you'll see that they're being treated really, really nicely. So as you can see, there's a lot of action on the queens, and this is what you want to see— nice, healthy, non-aggressive action. These are nurse bees, and all they're interested in doing is feeding those queens. If you didn't see them covered in bees, then you're going to have an issue here because they need to be covered in bees in order for them to be fed. And obviously they're being fed from underneath, so if you've got bees on top, you can guarantee you've got bees underneath feeding them. Now if you start to have a look in some of these cages, you can see healthy bees, healthy queens, nothing dead, everything's still moving, they're being fed really, really well-banked queens. Not a single cage there with a dead queen in it or a queen that's not moving. See that one there's moving around. Oh, really nice and healthy. Perfectly banked queens. Right, so that's it. I'm going to take these queens now. I'm going to go and use them. I'm going to make some splits. They've been in their cages for four days, but as you can see, no problem whatsoever. Just follow the advice: nice big strong colony, preferably with a couple of supers on. Full of bees, queen excluder on the top, an eek, a super, or an upturned feeder, and that is how you bank your queens. So there you go. That's it for the video. I hope you enjoyed that one. My word of advice though is don't try and bank your queens for anything longer than say a week. It can definitely be done, but it can cause issues. I'd say anything up to a week and you're good to go. You can do it longer than that, but that's not what I do. So I'm not going to give you advice to do something that I don't do. So I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful, and I hope you'll give banking queens a go. 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.