Laurence Edwards shows how to handle a drone-laying queen by killing her, shaking the remaining bees into adjacent colonies, and merging the hives. He confirms the problem by finding 100% drone brood on the frames and explains why reusing frames for stores is safe with larger colonies but risky with smaller ones.
Let's get inside and I'll show you exactly what's going on. So first thing I notice when I see this hive here is that there's nowhere near as many bees as I think there should be at this point in the year. I pull out middle frames like that and there is lots of stores. Again, shouldn't be lots of stores on middle frames at this point in the year. And look at that, straight away I found the queen. So she is there. So always the rule is you've got to kill the queen as soon as you possibly can. Let me just make sure I've got her on camera. Oh no, she's legged it. I really, really don't want her to fly away. I killed her when I saw her. I can see her again. There she is. Is oh, I've lost her again. There she is. I can see her. I can see her. Very good at hiding that one. Right. So there she is. Let me just get her and kill her so she can't run after there. There we go. One dead failed drone laying queen. And I've already gone in here and checked. So I know this is a drone layer. I've not just found a virgin and killed her. So what you could do at this point in the year is you could. I'm just going to chuck that virgin away. You could add a mated queen in here. But I've not got access to any mated queens. Very, very late for that. I'm just going to shake them all out and let them go into the colonies next door. I'll show you how I know first that she is a drone-laying queen. So there we go, pretty simple. You can see it on that camera there. Just show all the cameras. So before she wrecks all of these frames, I'm just going to shake her out. Knowing that I've got 2 big double-brood colonies next to this one, I know that they can take the bees. If these were all single nuc boxes, I wouldn't be doing this here. But shake out, dead simple. Shake the bees out. Before you do that, remove the hive. Always helps. So I'm just taking the frames, shaking them in front like that. Give you a little close-up of the drones coming out there. Still drones coming out there, but you can see 100% drone layer, that one. And this is pretty safe now because we've killed that virgin, or killed the drone-laying queen, I should say. Now you can reuse these frames if you've got colonies that need a little bit more stores. Perfectly safe to use these frames. I know I've said previously about melting them down, but there's no more disease risk here than swapping frames on colonies that have got brood. So I wouldn't do it on smaller colonies, but I have slightly changed tack on that now. I have some really nice frames of stores here. Shame to let them all go to waste. And then final one. And I'm just going to take the box as well, give them a good tap, all those bees out. And then for the time being, I'm just going to put everything back together again. Don't want to start a huge Robbing frenzy over here. And for the time being, all I'm gonna do is just get some grass, properly stuff the entrance full there, make sure it's completely sealed up, and then that there is no longer a disease risk. Now with the 2 adjacent colonies here, I've just compressed them together. Little bit muddy behind me here. And all of the bees will kind of congregate at the front there, but they will eventually work their way in. And I've effectively merged 3 colonies down into 2. I hope you enjoyed that video. Please hit the like button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. I'll see you next time.
