Laurence Edwards starts a season-long experiment to maximize honey from one colony without splits or swarms. He's using a double-brood setup to suppress swarming, starting with a colony covering 5-6 frames in early March and tracking it through the season with regular updates for premium members.
If you've joined us as a premium channel member, you'll know I'm doing a series, how many splits can I make out of one colony throughout the whole of a season. I'm going to flip that on its head, do a completely different series at the same time, and that is I'm going to show you one single colony all the way throughout the season with the aim of getting as much honey as I possibly can and not making any splits. I've spoken about this before, this is the biggest challenge in beekeeping. Making splits is easy. It's child's play. You can do a walkaway split. You can add queens in. You can do whatever you want. It makes beekeeping very, very easy. The skill in beekeeping and the difficulty in beekeeping is getting yourself a consistent honey crop, which is always going to be a bit weather dependent, without making splits and whilst keeping the number of colonies that you own consistent. So we'll follow this up all the way throughout the year. I'll do regular drop-ins. I'll show you the colony. I'll show you how it's building up. I'll show you how the honey crop's getting on. I'll show you the swarm manipulation techniques, the varroa controls that I'm using, how we get them ready for winter. You'll see this colony all the way through, but the modus operandi is to not make any splits whilst maintaining honey output. So in the first video today, I'm going to show you the colony that I've selected, give you a snapshot of that colony in the first week of March, show you how it's building up, and talk about some of the challenges that we're going to face over the next few weeks. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll go and show you the colony, Let's take a look how they're getting on in the first week of March. Right, so this is the colony that I've chosen to do this series on. Few reasons that I've chosen this colony. First, it's got a late season 2021 mated queen. The later that the queen's mated, the younger that the queen is, the easier it is to fend off the swarming impulse. That should mean they're a lot likelier to stay put without too much intervention. The next reason is that they're in a nice, big, strong apiary. The next reason is an even simpler reason than that. It's at the end of the row, really easy for me to remember which colony it is. And the final one, as you'll see in a little bit when we get in there, it's a nice, big, strong, healthy colony that's not got any issues with it. Means that I should be able to get them through the year. In terms of strategy for the season though, we're talking about getting as much honey as we possibly can, but of more importance than that, we're talking about not making any splits, not losing any swarms. So I'll probably be going down the double brood approach. Means that you get extra space within the brood box, and it also means that you can do your vertical splits, your manipulations that really do stem that swarming impulse, make it much more unlikely for the bees to swarm, whilst still maintaining a good honey crop. We're going to cover that on all future videos. Today though, we're going to get inside, we'll take a look at the colony, see how they're getting on munching through that fondant, and just see how big they are for the first week of March. I'm so excited, beekeeping season is here, and you're going to get to see every single minute of it. as a premium channel member as and when it happens. Right, so here we go. This is the colony. As I said, I've not looked to get the biggest colony or the smallest colony. I've tried to get something that's average, probably a little bit below average, this one, but it will serve the purpose well. I'm not gonna pull any frames out here. I'm just gonna give you a snapshot of what it's looking like on the top and underneath, 'cause there might be a cluster below. Hopefully we can see that cluster below, 'cause it gives you a good indication that there's a big amount of bees there. So this is what the colony is looking like on the first week of March. Not the biggest colony by any means. I'll show you some of the other colonies now in this apiary. I've picked this one though, this is the one we're gonna stick with. You can see bees along all these frames here, covering, I would say, between 5 and 6 frames. Nice-sized cluster. So there we go, that's the first glimpse of the colony. I know they don't look like much, but believe me, the next 3 to 4 weeks, as soon as any brood that's in there has hatched out and we've been through the first cycle of brood, You get exponential growth. This video, I just wanted to timestamp it first week of March. This is the colony that we're going to use, and this is the one that you're going to see all the way throughout the season. So there you go. That's the colony that I've chosen to do this series. I hope you find this one enjoyable, and this one for premium members is going to be such valuable content. You are going to see these manipulations as and when they're completed within maybe a one or two day gap of me actually doing them. At the end of the year, I'll stitch them all together. I'll do a single. Feature-length episode covering every single stage throughout the process. You never know, maybe we fail, maybe we lose the swarm. I'll cover all of that as well if it does go wrong, but as premium members, you will get to see it all the way through, and you can copy and follow and do the same with your hives.
