How To Combine Beehives Safely For Winter - Unite Colonies With Confidence

In this video, I'm going to show you how to combine 2 colonies of bees. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, going to be a really simple, straightforward video, I'm going to show you how to combine 2 different colonies of bees into one single unit. Now you might be thinking, that's kind of the opposite of what most beekeepers do. Most beekeepers take a single colony of bees and split that into 2 colonies? Why are you doing it in the reverse? So I'll talk about that a little bit first. Late in the season, you do get instances where you've got failed splits. You might have a drone-laying queen, you might have 2 colonies that are just a bit too weak to go into winter to do well, and I find you're much better off cutting your losses with the poor-performing colonies, combining them with something strong, and going into winter with one really big strong unit. Really important thing to remember though is do not combine them if there's any thought of anything nasty in there. So any diseases, any chalk brood, don't like sac brood, definitely no foul brood. You can only combine nice healthy colonies. Drone-laying queens though, that's no issue whatsoever. You can combine those up. Poorly mated queens, absolutely fine as well. And just small dwindling colonies, best to get them combined late on in the season. So So you have nice strong colonies going into winter. That's what I'm going to show you in this video. I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get the smoker lit, I'll find a couple of weak colonies, and I'll condense them down, show you how to join those up for winter. Right, these are the 2 colonies that I'm gonna combine. This one here has got a virgin queen in it. It's been about 4 weeks since that virgin's emerged, and there's no eggs in the colony. So I'm going to try and find that queen, try and kill her, And then I'm going to combine this colony here, which is a much weaker queen-right colony, with that one where I'm going to kill the virgin. We'll cover all the steps in this video though. Essentially, I've got 2 colonies next to each other, one that's failing, one that's doing well, one that's stronger, one that's weaker, and I'm going to take the best bits from both of those and combine them together and make sure that the queens don't kill each other. First step in that is identify Why you're combining your hives? I've just given you a summary there. This one here, I've got a virgin that's going to fail. She's going to turn into a drone laying queen. So the first thing I need to do is go in there, find the virgin, kill the virgin, and then I can move on to combining the colonies. Right. Most difficult thing in beekeeping is finding a failed virgin queen. Or a drone laying queen in a big colony. I hate it, and it's difficult, and it takes ages. But I found her, and I've killed her. And I didn't dare try and get it on camera because if I let her out of my sight, I wouldn't find her again. So she is dead. So we now have a colony that is hopelessly queenless because it was a drone laying queen. They've got no resources to make their own queen. I've killed the queen. We're now immediately hopelessly queenless. Now most people use newspaper. To do these colony unites. I don't know who reads newspapers anymore. I certainly don't have newspapers knocking around, so to save me going and buying one, I find sugar bags, brown paper sugar bags, pretty good. Only use a single layer, and I like to drench them, get them nice and wet, so that means that the bees can get in and rip them apart a little bit better. That's what I use for my splits, but newspapers are probably a little bit better, but I don't like going out and buying a newspaper just to make a split. So to set the colony back up for a combination. Take your queen excluder, put your queen excluder back on the original colony that's now hopelessly queenless. Then take your brown paper or your newspaper or whatever you've got, and you want to get it down to as thin as possible. Obviously, if it's folded up, it's 2 layers, but these come as 2 layers anyway. Get it as thin as you possibly can and then get it wet. I find it works really well if it's wet. You don't need to get it wet if you're doing newspapers though. You want a piece ideally that's at least 460mm by 460mm. One solid piece, perfect. If you need to do 2 bits, it's not the end of the world. Then you want to lay that on top of the colony like that. You see why it's good to have one big piece that will go over, cover it all in one go. And then you want to get your hive tool or a pair of scissors and just make a few very, very small slits. We're talking tiny little slits here. The bees will start ripping that out, they'll make it bigger, but you just want it big enough for like 2 or 3 bees to be able to get through. Just so they can do a really slow colony introduction. So there's the colony with the queen excluder on. That colony there, hopelessly queenless, just killed the drone laying queen. She's going to go underneath, and then I'm going to get the paper on top. So then I get my paper on top, and you can see I've just made a few little slits, just a few all over like that. The bees will find those and they'll Start to do an introduction, but you want to do it nice and slow. So don't go putting big slits in there. These are the ones you want to see—nice small slits. The bees will start working those. Then the colony I've got over here—I know it looks like nothing, but there is about three frames of bees in there. I'll pull out a frame. I'll show you that they're queen right, nice brood pattern, and this is what I'm combining. So I've got on this side a weak queen right colony. On that side, I've got a hopelessly queenless. Strong colony. So here is the queen on the queen right side that's a little bit weak, and it's a 2020 Jolanta queen. Really nice looking queen. I made a bit of a speculative split with her, and I think I'm just going to recombine her back in just to be on the safe side, get them nice and strong for winter. But there you go, you can see that's what the queen looks like— big purple spot on her back. And then we're going to combine it up with that hive over there. Hopefully they won't kill the queen. So then combining them is the easiest thing in the world, and it's just a coincidence that these 2 hives are next to each other. If they're not next to each other, you just do exactly the same thing. Block them all in though, just so they're not flying out everywhere going back to the original hive. All we're going to do, lift up the brood box, put it on top of the queen excluder like that, and you put the queen excluder there for one main reason really. Just to give you a little bit of protection. Obviously, this is a drone-laying colony, the one on the bottom. I found the queen, I've killed the queen, they're hopelessly queenless. If you're doing it on another colony, there might be 2 queens in the hive, so put that queen excluder in place just to keep the queens separate if there are indeed a queen on the top and a queen on the bottom. The way I do it though is I go the bottom box is where I have my hopelessly queenless box, the one that I'm introducing the colony to, And then on top, above the paper with the little slits in it, that's where I put my queen right half of the split. That's it. Now just put it all back together again, put the lid on, give it a week or so, something like that. And then we'll fast forward in this video and see if we had a successful introduction and combination for these 2 halves of the colony. So I've stacked the supers back on as well. Any bees that are in the supers, blow them out, shake them out, get them out any way possible, and just make sure that you put them back on Don't want any bees in those supers killing the queen there, so make sure you put the supers back on, make sure they're empty. And that's it. We'll fast forward a week, see if we've had a successful combination, and then I'll show you what to do next. Right, so let's get back inside this colony to see if we've had a successful combination of a weak queen-right colony and a strong queenless colony. So the first thing I'll always do whenever I'm going to see if the colonies have combined correctly Is I'll just split them apart. So I'm going to take off all the supers, pop them off to one side, one brood box on the other side, and then leave the original brood box on the stand. Hopefully we'll see where we made those little slits in the paper, the bees have started to tear that apart, make the holes, and it gives you a really nice slow combination of the colonies. So I've got my 2 boxes separate now. I've got my supers over there, that's the top brood box there, and then as you can see here, they've worked their way through And made enough holes to get in between the brood boxes and the queen excluder. So there we go. You can see they've made the holes, and they make these holes where you have your little splits. You really don't need to go crazy on this. The bees will start chewing away just to give them enough space to get through. They're not gonna take all of it away. Plenty of space for them to get through there. When you go into this box below, you'll see loads of little bits of paper all around the place. The bees will clean that up though, it's just plain brown paper, and as you can see, the paper has dried out a lot as well. So we've had a successful combination of the colonies here. Now what we want to see though is we want to see the queen from that top box alive and well, and what we don't want to see is a dead queen and emergency cells. So there's my queen, she was still residing in that top box. She's absolutely fine though. No emergency cells on any of the brood. We've still got eggs in the cells, so everything is good. We've had a successful combination. You're seeing the queen upstairs in the box, you're seeing the holes between the 2 boxes there, and there's no queen, no eggs downstairs. You've had a successful combination, and then you can move on to the next step. So I've been through all of the frames in that bottom box Now there's definitely no queens down there, obviously no queen cells because there was no brood down there anyway. No eggs in any of the cells, not that you'd be able to see on that shot there, but more importantly we're seeing lots and lots of polished cells. That's a really good sign for a combination because it means that the bottom box is ready to receive a queen. Remember, you've had a queen excluder in between the two of them, the queen's not been able to get down there, You're going to make it so it can get down there now. Also, see this behavior here? That is a perfect sign that you've just taken their queen away from them. They're fanning their Nazanoff glands saying, give me my queen back. Shows that they're seeing themselves as one single colony now, and you can continue the combination just to get them down to one box now. So that's the hard bit out of the way. Really, really easy now. Just go through your frames, pick out all of the dormant frames, anything that's empty. Choose your ten best frames and combine them into a single box. Get your queen somewhere safe. Just make sure the queen goes into that final box before you seal everything back up again. And that's the two colonies fully combined. And as you can see, even fully combined, they're struggling to fill that entire brood box. Give it a few weeks though. That queen will get going again. Build that brood up. Last week of August at the moment. Plenty of time to build this up nice and strong for winter. Combining colonies is such a good thing to do as we move into August, into September. Combine the weak ones, cull the bad ones, go through winter with fewer stronger colonies. So once you're all combined, you can pop your supers back on, get your feeders back on. Obviously just empty feeders. We're storing them on top. Get them all strapped back up again, and that's how you combine. Colonies, like I said before, it's a really important technique combining colonies. I use it so much going into the back end of the season. I honestly would prefer to have four really big strong colonies as opposed to eight weak colonies. So there we go. That's the colony successfully combined. I've taken two weaker colonies or one weak colony and a stronger colony. I've combined the two together. I've made sure that the queen has been successfully reintroduced, and when you've combined them, they've not gone and killed the queen. And now we can just move on to straightforward standard winter preps for that combined colony. So I hope you enjoyed the video. 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.