Laurence Edwards inspects a colony seven days after a Demarée split and finds an F1 Buckfast queen laying eggs across 12 frames in one week. The colony is expanding fast and aggressive, projected to yield 100 lb of honey, but it's at high risk of swarming and needs weekly checks.
Right, so it's 7 days after I did the Demarée split on this colony. Everything's changed here, apart from the fact the bees are still really, really angry, driving me mad. I have to say, I really don't like colonies when they get like this. I'm going to do a clean sweep of this apiary, take down all the queens. But what we're doing in the video today is you need to go back in, into that Demarée split, all of the brood you lifted up to the top, shake off every single frame, take down every single emergency cell if they've created them. They don't always create them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but you need to make sure that they don't leave any up there unless you're looking to do some sort of requeening, which in this video and this series, we're definitely not doing that. So here's the colony, nice and strong. I've split the boxes off. I'm gonna go through now, show you some of the frames, take down any cells, put them back together again, and then we'll take a look down in the new brood area and see what the queen's made down there. So this is the top brood box, National Deep. I've had to come up on a step, I'm so high, all the way up the very, very top, barring the 14 by 12. Loads of bees up here. I'll pull out a couple of frames now and show you what they've done. So pretty standard what they've done up here. They're backfilling with nectar, all the brood's emerging. In this box there's no emergency cells. They've started backfilling the entire box with nectar as well though, so if you want to use it as a super you can leave it up here, or if you don't want to use it as a super, let all of the brood emerge and then you can just take it away. You'll lose a little bit of honey doing it that way, but if you don't want to use the boxes as supers, you've really not got much choice. So this top box here, full of brood, full of bees, no emergency cells. Let's go and have a look at the 14 by 12 box that was at the very top, because that had brood in it as well. So not quite as many bees in this box, but you would expect that with a really super tall colony like this. All of the brood's going to emerge and it's going to drift down to the new brood area where that queen is raising new brood. That's what happens in a Demarée split, so this is to be expected. No problems here whatsoever. Just need to go through all of these frames, double-check there's no emergency cells. So this is indicative of what you'll see in the top box as well. Spotty brood where she's not replenishing it, but more importantly, you can see they're backfilling with nectar. They always do that. You're always going to sacrifice a little bit of nectar in these frames if you don't want to use them for honey. My 14 by 12, this has had Apivar in it, so this frame is definitely not going to be used for honey. I'll make up some splits on this one. But the national deep, that's fresh foundation. That's fine to be extracting honey from. And there's no emergency cells anywhere. So I'm really happy with that. I've shaken off all of the frames in those 2 old brood boxes. Lots of brood, lots of bees storing some nectar. No emergency cells. We're good to go. So I've been through all of the top box now as well. In both of those brood boxes that I lifted up to the top, I've got brood, I've got bees, I've got no capped emergency cells or no open emergency cells either. If there were any up there, make sure you take them down, but as far as I'm concerned, they are effectively supers now. If you can use them for honey storage, great, no problem. The wooden one that I've got behind me, that's fine for honey. My 14x12 box, I'm going to wait until all that brood's emerged, and then I'll try and shake out any nectar that's in there and remove the box completely. You can continue to cycle that arrangement, do it again and again, but let's go downstairs now and have a look in that brood area, see what the queen's Right, so this is the top box of a new double brood configuration. Let's get inside, see what the bees have done. I'm not expecting 20 frames of brood, but I'm expecting to see the queen, hopefully see some eggs, maybe see a little bit of brood. Well, I was just about to give up and say I can't find the queen, but there's loads of eggs. But there you go, really nice big long white-marked F1 Buckfast queen. And then if I look into some of those cells You can see she has laid so many eggs, like an unbelievable amount of eggs. I've been through both of these boxes, I counted 12 frames of eggs. She's done that in a week. 12 frames. What an absolute egg-laying monster. So I'm going to close it all back up again. These bottom 2 boxes now I'm going to go into my regular weekly inspections. Don't need to worry about the ones up top now. No chance of them creating any further queens. cells. Very, very happy with how this colony is getting on. Hi, so there we go. I'm going to put everything back together again. Doing this with your bees, the Demarais split, will result in monster colonies. Not like aggressive colonies, like this one is a little bit aggressive, but just really humongous colonies. So maybe not for everyone. You will see the amount of honey we get from this if we manage to keep the bees here all year. I reckon we're going to be talking about 100 pounds of honey, which, okay, for elsewhere in the UK is not amazing, but in North Wales, that's very, very good. We're not out of the woods yet though. These bees could swarm at any minute. You need to stay on top. Weekly inspections, that is your best mitigation against colony swarming.
