How to Install a Package of Bees

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Had a really, really early start this morning, went to Limb Services on the M6 at 4 AM to pick up some packages. Luckily the guy got them through all the way from northern Italy, so really, really happy they turned up on time. I've got 20 packages here and then I've got another 40 coming in the next couple of weeks. So today's video is I'm just going to show you how to install a package of bees into your hive. So I appreciate you don't get many packages of bees in the UK, it tends to be nucleus colonies or full colonies of bees that are for sale, but you can get packages of bees and there's some real benefits to using packaged bees that I'm going to go over in a different video. So I'm going to do a video of a kind of comparison between nucs And packages. My personal preference is nucs. I think nucs give more benefits than packages do, but there is one really big benefit to packages, which is the fact that you can apply it onto new frames. So obviously you could do that with nucs as well, but you're kind of transferring the old frames from the previous beekeeper. I'm doing a big shift this year over to 14x12 frames, so unless I wanted to go and buy loads of 14x12 nucs, which are A, quite difficult to get hold of, and B, a little bit more expensive— quite a lot more expensive. Having the packages means that I don't have the frames of bees, and it means that I can just transfer them straight into 14 by 12 and then get them to draw those out. So I'm going to show you that today. Just in case anyone doesn't know, a package of bees is basically a £3 bundle of bees. Comes with like a canister of syrup, like a jerry can. And then you get a queen with it as well, and that's it. There's no frames, there's no stores, there's no brood, there's nothing like that. It is essentially a swarm with a queen, with a mated queen, but obviously the bees haven't actually swarmed, they've just been shaken out of their respective colonies. So in this video, I'll do a bit of a hyperlapse, I'll show you how many we're going to do. Like I say, we're going to do 20 here today, and then I'll zoom in, give you a close-up, and show you exactly how I install my packages into my hives. Right, I'm on to my 16th hive now. It's really, really quick installing packages. There's a kind of clean, simple process that you need to follow. There are numerous different ways of installing packages, so this definitely isn't the only way to do it. You can just kind of whack them in, literally knock them all out of the box and let them kind of get on with it. It's quite cold here today though. I can come back here later on in the evening to check them, so I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go for a more slow approach to kind of try and be a little bit more gentle on the bees. So I prepared all of these last night, so this is a standard Standard floor, standard 14 by 12 brood box. I've got a queen excluder on there, a wooden framed queen excluder that I use with my feeders. I've then got a Swienty 14.5 liter feeder. Love these feeders. And then the standard roof. So the configuration is I take the roof off, I take the feeder off, you've got your wooden framed queen excluder, and then you fill The box with, if you've got it, drawn brood comb. Really makes it much, much easier if you've got drawn brood comb. I appreciate a lot of people don't have that, and one of the big benefits of packages is that you're using new equipment, so new frames and new foundation anyway. I find though, in order to ensure that they don't abscond, because you kind of need to treat them a little bit like a swarm, I mean, these are bees, they have no idea where they are. They're jumbled together from loads of different colonies. It's a bit of a unique situation for them, so in order to keep them in here, you need a mated queen and ideally 1 or 2 frames of drawn comb. So that's the way that I do it. I like to keep all of that drawn comb underneath the feeder entrance. So if you've got a central feeder, put your drawn comb in the middle. If you've got a polyenti feeder like that where the The entrance is on one side. I put the drawn comb on the element— sorry, on the side where the feeder entrance is, and then that means they can cluster underneath the feeder. Just makes things a lot easier for the bees. If you put the drawn comb in the middle and then you put your feeder on like that, they might not find it. And packages need feeding. That's what's important for package. You need to get syrup into them straight away because they have no resources whatsoever. They have no stores. If it rains, they can die very, very quickly. So you need to make sure your packages are fed as soon as you do this. So we'll include that in today's activity, and I'll show you how to feed them. I'm using a 1:1 syrup, but you can use 2:1. It makes no difference to the bees, just whatever you've got on hand. Just make sure it's fresh and not mouldy. So you've got your configuration like this. So we have 10 frames and a dummy board. So I put the dummy boards in at the end. What I do now is I take out 4 frames. So I'll zoom in and show you this a little bit on a close-up, but I just wanted to talk you through the process. So then you're left with the way that I do it: drawn comb, foundation, drawn comb, foundation, 4-frame gap, 2 frames. And I have my hive the warm way. Again, personal preference. So I'll just go off and get the package. So that's what a package of bees looks like. You'll see these kind of, the American ones tend to be a lot bigger. The supplier that I'm getting them from, they come, they're actually quite small, but the bees are really densely packed in there. Like I say, that's a mix of all different ages of bees shaken in from various different colonies, and then that's a 3-pound nuc. And if you look, you can't see it on here, there's a few dead bees at the bottom. You want to really minimize the amount of dead bees there, so I can probably count I don't know, 50 dead bees out of a package of a lot of bees. So that's a really, really good ratio. You don't want a big pile of dead bees at the bottom. You can see the way they're clustering at the top, that's a really, really healthy sign. And then you've got like a feeder here. So this comes— you see the American ones, they're like a can. These ones, they come in a plastic version. And the big difference as well with the nucs that we get over here from this particular supplier is the queen doesn't come included in this. So I've ordered the packages with queens and they just come separately. So on the American ones, you get a bit of tape here and then the queen is suspended in there and they cluster around her. So I'm not sure why the difference from this supplier. It really, really makes no difference. The queens that they supply with packages, they don't come from the colonies, so this isn't just like they've shaken out all the bees from one colony with the queen that was in that colony and they know and accept her. It doesn't work like that. These are just bees shaken in from various different colonies with a random queen, so you need to be careful. And the whole point of this is to get the package fed up and get that queen accepted. So that's what it looks like, and I'll show you how to install it now. So very conveniently, these are shaped to fit perfectly in a National Hive, hence why they're a little bit smaller, I think. So all I do, again, like I say, You've got your configuration like that, so you've got 2 frames of drawn comb, 2 frames of foundation, and then a gap, and then another 2 frames of foundation. And all I do is I put the package in like that and we're all set. So then I'll take a queen, and again, the queen, you've got the bungs at the end, so it's completely sealed. So you've got the queen in the cage like that. What you need to do with the queen is you need to place that over the drawn comb with the holes at the bottom, yeah, and then that way the bees can come up and they can access and feed the queen. That's what you want them to do. Then you get your queen excluder ready because they do fly up a little bit, and you lean in and you take out the jerry can. Sometimes has a few bees still attached. And then you put your feeder straight on like that. So I'll zoom in and show you that again. What I do is I empty the can of syrup into the feeder, put the lid back on, and then I just leave that at the entrance, and any surplus bees will fly in and find their way in eventually. So that's the process. It's really, really easy. What I do then is I go back around at the very end and I fill them all up with syrup. I give them 10 litres of syrup each, absolutely loads of syrup because they need to draw out all of those frames. 10 litres is, is kind of a good amount to give them. You can basically fill up one of these feeders though, and that's it. So I'll do a couple more zoom-ins just to show you exactly what the process is, give you a little bit more detail, kind of showing you in. It's difficult to talk to the camera and show you that at the same time, so we'll run through it again doing a bit of a close-up. So we'll take our queen excluders off, take out our central 4 frames. Go and get our packages. You put the packages in the gap that you've created. These particular packages perfectly spaced for 4 frames in a national colony. We then take our caged queens, don't take the caps off, and then we rest them that way up so the hole's down. On where you've got the drawn comb and the frames mixed together like that. Then get your queen excluders ready because the bees do fly up, and you've taken out these containers so they just come out. I give it a bit of a shake just to get the excess bees off, a few flyers, and then place that on top like that. And then we're going to place a feeder on straight away just to stop them coming in. Same with this one, take that can out, give it a bit of a shake just to get the excess bees off, put that lid straight on, get your feeder on. And like I say, you can see again the feeder. So you've got the entrance coming in this way, you've got the entrance of the feeder there, you've got all of your colony resources over here, so your drawn comb, your your queen, and then the bees are going to go over that way, which means they've got access to the entrance and then access to the actual feeder as well. Put that on. I take any excess syrup and I'll place the syrup in like that. Don't like it to go to waste. Make sure you close the lids though, because it could encourage robbing. And then we give them a really good glug of syrup. You'll be amazed how quickly packages take down syrup. See, this is where it's different from a swarm though. You'd never feed a swarm syrup. For disease control, you want them to kind of empty their honey stomachs on drawing out foundation, whereas with a package there's no risk of that. So you want to make sure that they don't die. So like I say, give them a really good feed, probably 8 or 9 litres there. Make sure you've got enough for all of them. Then you can finish up by putting the lids back on. And that's it, that is how you install a package of bees. So that's not the actual full procedure though. What I do, I mean, it's 7 o'clock in the morning at the moment, what I do is I come back now kind of later on in the day, maybe 4 o'clock, so I've given them a good kind of 8 hours, 7-8 hours And then I'll do the second part of the manipulation. And the second part of the manipulation is I will take out the package, empty out any remaining straggler bees. I will take that queen, I'll pop it in between the frames, so in between those drawn comb frames and foundation, make sure she's kind of nice and tight in there. I'll probably tape her in just so she doesn't fall down, and then I'll shake in all the excess bees, and then I'll close them up. And if necessary, I'll top up that feeder, but they probably won't have taken any of it down by then. So it's a bit of a two-stage approach. That's the first stage there, though. And like I say, this is quite a gentle way of doing it. Instead of shaking them all in now and completely disorientating them, you're giving them that kind of chance to kind of come out of the box slowly, sense where they are, and then you want them to get to cluster around that queen and start feeding her. So we'll zoom forward to later on in the day, and then we'll kind of. Show you what step 2 is. Just wanted to give you a little summary. This is about 45 minutes after I put this one in the box, so you can see the bees are nice and slowly just kind of making their way up to that queen. They're clustering up onto that foundation, and the queen is drawing them up there, so she'll call them all up and then they'll cluster around her. So we'll pop back later on in this evening, we'll take that box out, we'll kind of tap out all of the remaining bees, and then we can add those additional frames back in. So I'm going to close them up now and I'll see you later on. So we're back at the apiary now, it's a beautiful sunny day. As you can see, the bees are very, very active, so we're just going to finish this procedure of unpacking all of the packages. If there's any bees left in the box, and I suspect there'll still be quite a lot left in the box, we're just going to smash them out now. Now that it's warm, they can go out, they can fly. We're going to try and get them around to cluster around that queen. So we're going to go through each and every one, we'll take off the feeders, Take off the queen excluder, take the box out, hit all of the bees back in, put the remaining frames up, and then close them up. Make sure they're nice and tightly sealed, because otherwise robbing bees can get in and get at that syrup. So we'll go through that now and show you how to do it. Right, so we're just going to pick up where we left off. The bees, they might not have come out of the box yet, but they've had a chance to kind of come out if they want to. When I did this earlier on this morning, it was just too cold. It was like 5 degrees. Even though it was quite nice and sunny, I didn't want to shake all the bees in and risk loads of them kind of clustering up outside and potentially damaging them. So if you want, you can just skip straight to this step if the weather's nice. A lot of people do it that way, just bang the bees in, put the frames in, and then away you go. This is my next part of the method. I'm going to bump all the bees out, put the frames back in, and tidy everything up. So we remove the roof, take off the Careful not to spill anything. Take off your queen excluder. You'll see that the queen is getting a lot of attention. They're trying to kill her. Bump off the excess bees. Check the queen's still okay. She's fine. So this colony is All inside that box still, so they didn't do anything. So I'm pretty much back to where I started off this morning with this one. None of them have come out, but it's fine. It's bought me some time and I've not lost any bees and I've not damaged them. So all I'm going to do now, dump all the bees into the box, put the frames back in, build it all back up. Job's a good'un. Try and get as many as you possibly can out. Don't worry about the stragglers, they'll come out themselves. Put your frames back in, try not to squish all the bees. Just kind of let them float down, don't push them down. The bees will get out of their way. Line everything up. Take your queen, and now if you're doing this with the, the, these cages, they fit nicely in between the frames. If you're doing it with the American-style one, you have to have like a bit of tape and then you staple it to the top to hang it down, but these fit in nicely. Just like that. Make sure there's good pressure so it doesn't fall. Queen excluder back on. Feeder back on and roof back on. So what you can see here, this is the risk that you take with packages. Like, they're all leaving the box and they're trying to go back to their— the, the package box that they came in. They obviously kind of associate that with home. They don't like the home that I've given them. So I've got 20 boxes here. This This is only one that this has happened to, but this is the risk. So you do need to keep an eye on them. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to let them cluster up on there now because I don't want to confuse them, and I'm going to knock them all back into the box, and I'm going to take all the boxes away because all of the other bees, they've left those boxes and gone into the main hive. These ones, they're all coming out, they're filling the air, do you know what I mean? This is kind of almost like a swarm going on here now. Um, so just, just something to be aware of. They do abscond. You need to kind of do everything you can to try and make them stay within that box. I don't know how well you can see it on here, but this is classic swarm behavior. Look, they're leaving the box, they're coming out here, they're walking down, and they're just walking back to the box that I've just taken them out from. Um, really frustrating, but like we discussed, these are the risks that you take with packages. Done 20 packages here today, this is the only one that's doing this. So very, very easy to fix. I'll wait until they've clustered up again in it, I'll knock them back in, and then I'll take that box away. And I'll probably reduce the entrance down a little bit for this one, just, just overnight, just so they kind of feel comfortable where they are. So this package does Does not want to play ball. We put it in his box. It's the only one out of 20 that tried to get out. It tried to get back into its box where all the stragglers were. Um, we dumped them all back in there again. They're balling the queen, uh, and then they swarm. So they swarm, they went up into the air. I thought I'd give them a chance to return to the box, and you'll see the hyperlapse. They had a go, but to be honest, I don't think they were coming back. Um, and now they think I'm home again, so I'll probably get a few more bees on my suit. I had to resort to putting the old box where they knew the scent from and putting that on top of the hive. And as you can see, they kind of all come back into it. So welcome back. So yesterday evening, it was absolutely manic here. Looked like they were swarming, thought they were swarming, maybe caught a natural swarm, don't know. It was, it was absolute chaos. But you do get that when you're kind of dealing with packages. Um, I mean, I've gone through them all today. Like some are on 3 frames, some are on 8 frames, so they kind of choose which hive they want to go into. So you do it as best as you possibly can in terms of doing a slow release of the packages, but ultimately they don't know where home is. They come out and then they choose which hive they want to go back into. So there's quite a lot of variation between the hives, which is fine. So all I'm doing today, the second stage of the process, is I'm just going around checking that they're in the feeders. That's the big important one for me. Checking their feeding, drawing out the foundation. So there's kind of like four or five things that I'm looking for. First one is check that they're there. You don't want to see an empty hive. That's the first one. So every single hive I've got, there is colony in there. Second thing you want to check for is check that they're accessing the feeder okay. They need feed. It's really important. Every single one is accessing the feeder. That's good news. Third one is check that the queen is. Still alive, still present, and that she's not fallen down the gaps. I've had one or maybe two that have fallen down the gaps, and that's fine. You just pick her back up and wedge it back in. Doing the belt and braces method is what they do in the US with this, is where you kind of, you get a piece of tape and then you staple it to the frame, and then that can't happen. So I think if I do it again with these packages, I will kind of, I'll use some tape just to make sure, because then I haven't got to check them again. But I just double-checked that the queen's alive still as well and kind of put it all back together again, and that's about it. Like, all of the colonies are drawing out foundation now, so you just start to see that drawing out. The big important thing to say here at the moment though is don't rush to release that queen. So that queen is still sitting there in her cage. She's got a fondant plug and she's got a plastic plug as well. So although some of the bees want to kill her still, they can't get in and kill her. And even if you were to let her out now, she can't really do much. Because there's no foundation for— there's no comb for her to lay in. So if you're using drawn comb, okay, you can kind of speed that up a little bit, but I still recommend 3 or 4 days as an absolute minimum. But if you're using all foundation, which I think most people will be with packages, then you give them a few days to draw that foundation out before you even think about letting that queen out. The queen will last in there for days, if not weeks. They'll feed her through the holes. She's absolutely fine in there. So don't Don't rush to let that queen out. You've got plenty of time to do it. So all I'm doing today is I'm just going through every single colony doing those 5 checks, as I said, um, making sure there's enough food in the feeders for them. If you need to, top it up, and then we'll leave them. And like I say, we'll probably leave them for like another 2 days. So I'm going to give it 5 days in total from when they've been installed to come and releasing that cap to let the bees eat her out through the fondant. And then I will leave them for at least 2 weeks. And that's not kind of to do with anything to do with mating. Obviously these are mated queens. I just don't think there's any other reason that you need to be looking in those colonies at that time. They've got a huge amount of foundation they need to draw out. The only reason you need to be going into those hives is to check to see if they need topping up on that feeder. So that's all I'll do. I'll lift the roof up. If they've got feed, I'll leave them to it. 2 weeks as an absolute minimum. And I know it's really, really Difficult to not go in there and check to see if the queen's been accepted. You want to go in, you want to see eggs, but I can say from personal experience, if you go in there too early, they can ball the queen and kill her, and then, ah, it's a nightmare. You're back to putting a frame of eggs in there, and it will set you back 4 or 5 weeks if you've got good weather, potentially longer than that. So that's all this video is, you know what I mean, just topping it up now, going around checking on them all, making sure they're all okay. Absolutely every single one of them is okay here. I've somehow ended up with an extra package, so there were definitely 20 packages when I came here, but because of all that swarming activity that went on, some of them went into a different hive. One hive, and you know the hive I'm talking about, it literally had about 4 packages worth of bees in it, so I've just had to split that one out. So what I've done with that one is I've given it an additional frame of eggs. I also had one queen that was dead, which was a bit frustrating. All the attendants were dead and the queen was dead as well, so I'm getting kind of a replacement queen sent through for that one. They'll be all right for the time being though. It may well have been those— that was the colony that absconded. There's not quite as many bees in that one, but the queen does tend to kind of keep them in there. So it's the comb keeps them in the box and the scent of that queen will keep them in the box. So I did put the dead queen in just to try and keep them there, but they probably sensed that she was dead. So So I'll get my hood back on and I'll show you just quickly what I'm doing now, and then we'll call it a day. So all I'm doing with these colonies, like I said, taking the roof off, checking to see there's bees in the feeder. Some of them are absolutely jam-packed full of bees, others aren't, but all you want to see is a few bees in the feeder. They know where the feed is, that's important. Take the feeder off, don't spill the syrup. And then you're just checking to see that the bees are there, which they are. And I've picked one here where the queen's fallen through, so that's good. I can show you how to do that. So you take off your queen excluder, take out a frame, find where that queen's dropped down to, shake the bees off. Check the queen's still alive. She is still alive. You can see there they're starting to draw out the foundation. Absolutely nowhere near complete though. They decided to move some of that syrup down into the comb that I've given them. Probably a smart move on their behalf in case it gets a bit Cold, bring the resources close to where the nest is, and then we build it back up again. So like on the American ones, you have like a piece of tape, piece of tape that comes off here like that, and then you put that down and you staple the tape on so it can't fall down. That's a much better design in my opinion. I'm going to mock something up for these next time. I think that's the way forward. Just try and get that pressure right and try not to knock it when you're putting it all back together. So there we go, we're all done. A bit of an annoying issue, that queen dropping issue. I had 4 out of the 20 that did that, so 20%. Next time, like I say, I'll definitely kind of work out a solution, either with a, like, a pencil or a bit of string or some tape or something like that. I think if you're doing that in drawn comb, it works absolutely fine. Like, I do that all the time in drawn comb and never ever have them drop. But because there's so much foundation in there, there's kind of nothing to really stick it all together. But also there's nothing to kind of hold it if it does fall. Right, so I'll leave, I'll leave that one in the video this time. I edited it out last time. Got me in the forehead, so that's gonna hurt. Um, but you know, we're— I'm a beekeeper, I get stung all the time, so I'll let you see that one. You can have it for free. But that's it for the video, we're pretty much done. We've installed 20 packages. We've kind of showed you how to do it, from picking them up to getting them into the hives, to making sure that they reorientate to the correct hive. And as you can see, it's kind of a bit of a free-for-all. If you had only 1 or 2 of these, I think you'd have a lot more success in getting the actual package bees into the correct hive. Because there's 20, they just don't know where they're going, and they kind of just follow the closest bee and end up in whichever hive they want. So they will even themselves out over time. I can always kind of balance them once you start getting brood and stuff in there. But all of them have got more than enough bees to be able to kind of produce a colony. So as soon as that queen gets out and she gets laying, they'll be firing on all cylinders. Like I say, the important things to note at this point is don't let that queen out too early. Make sure that they keep on getting fed. So where the kind of advice is with a nuc, give them a feed until they fill that box up, it's going to take— it's going to take the package a lot longer to be able to fill that box up. So just make sure you keep on feeding them. And again, 2 stings in the forehead. So again, we'll keep this in the video for you just so you can see how incredibly fun it is being a bee farmer, getting stung in the face while you're doing a video. Right, we'll pause there. Right, so we'll put that down to them not liking the hat, shall we? 2 stings in the forehead. Right, but that is that is it for the video. So I really hope you've enjoyed this video. Something a bit new for me. Like I've installed packages before, but I've never installed twenty at once. Got really really high hopes for these packages. We're going to do we're going to do that video like I suggested where we'll do the comparison of a nuc building up because I've just had some six frame nucs versus a package building up and you'll be able to see like I said the package starts off like that and then it contracts in and then it goes. Whereas a nuc starts like that and it just goes. So I think it's a really, really interesting comparison. Um, the fact that they're drawing out that foundation so quickly though, I've got really, really high hopes for them. Once again, thank you very much to our sponsors, Toto Abello and to BB Wear. Really, really glad that you guys are on board. Please hit the subscribe button, subscribe to our channel, hit the bell so you're notified of every single video. I'm off home to get some antihistamine for my forehead stings. And I'll see you next time. Bye!