How to Perform a Shook Swarm - Step by Step Method to Reset a Colony Fast

This one needs a shook swarm. This one needs some bees. We'll put them all together and we'll do a really cool video. Let's jump straight into it. So before we get started, what is a shook swarm? Sounds really fancy. A shook swarm is as follows: in this beehive here, we have lots of bees. We have a queen. We have eggs. We have larvae. We have pupae. We have capped brood. We have everything that you need to start up a colony of bees, a full-sized colony. But what we don't know about that colony there is the disease. Status. I've done a brood inspection; it looks okay, but that doesn't mean that there's no disease there. Every single frame in the entire hive is as black as they come. If there is going to be disease, it's going to be in this hive. So we need to ensure that that disease cannot be carried through, and the way to do that is to do a pre-empty shook swarm. So all that means is I'm going to remove the roof. I'm going to remove the boxes. Everything that you see here is going to go frames, brood, eggs. Roof, shallows, brood box, floor, everything. Everything is gonna go. The only thing that's gonna remain is the queen and the bees. Simple as that. They need a new home. They need a brand new clean home. You can do this into a nuc, you can do this into a full-size hive. Has to be brand new equipment and it has to be brand new frames with foundation. You can use secondhand equipment, but make sure it is sterile. You really do need to do that. Scrape it, scorch it, bleach it, do whatever you want, My advice to you is use new when you're doing a shook swarm though. Really important process during the shook swarm is you shake all of the bees in, which I'll show you later on, and then you leave it for 3 days without feeding. Do not feed them straight away. Completely defeats the point of a preemptive shook swarm. Inside a bee, they have like a honey stomach and they keep a reserve of honey in that honey stomach. If you do a shook swarm and then you feed them immediately, what they do is they say, thank you very much, we'll use your sugar syrup to draw out all the wax and we will empty our honey stomachs as stores back into the frames. You kind of think, well, that's, that's not what I wanted you to do. I wanted you to empty your honey stomachs to create the new wax, to ensure that if there is any bacteria in their stomach, EFB, European foulbrood bacteria, in their stomach, it's going to be purged. It's a proven method, works very, very well. Let's jump straight in and do a shook swarm. So shook swarm, super simple. Take the beehive that you want to do the shook swarm on. And place it off out of the way. So the new box is all set up there. Just assume that that's kind of full of foundation in there, but you can see brand new box. And then the most important thing there is that the entrance is going to be in exactly the same place as the entrance was before. You'll see a few bees checking it out at the moment, but as soon as I start shaking those bees in, they're going to want to get in there and find out what is going on. So entrance is open. And just as I walk away there, you can see all of the bees trying to get back in there now. Really, really important. Do the shook swarm in the exact same location where that colony is. And then everything will work well. So then the next part of the job, super simple really. It's very disruptive and the bees don't like it, but this is a necessary evil, something that does have to be done. So that first super is empty. Multipurpose crown board, just got a little bit of comb in there. And then what we said previously is we trapped the queen downstairs. So I know the queen is down below this queen excluder. And we did that in order to ensure that all of these bees, all of that brood can emerge. And you'll see there now there's no capped brood 'cause all of the brood has emerged into young bees. Much better way of doing a shook swarm if you cage the queen off for a little bit. So then you just take your frame, frame by frame, and shake it into the new box here. I've just gotta get in here and make a start. So first thing I need to do though, I need to find my queen. Very, very important when you do a shook swarm that you find the queen and you place her into the nuc. So see the queen there? So all I'm gonna do, and this makes it so much easier, is you just pick up the queen and you place her into the new nuc. And there we go, the queen is in there. And what she wants to do is she wants to get out of the light. So the box there has got all of the old comb in it. There's no bees in there. I've shaken every single one of those bees out, and we're going to take that off in a minute, and we are going to burn all of the insides, and then we'll scrape down the outsides and re-sterilize them, scorch them, and that beehive there can be used again. Everything inside it though is going to be burnt. Then if we take a look at what the nuc is looking like, you will see we have got a lot of bees. They've not worked out how to get into the entrance yet. They will work out how to get into the entrance. I'll go off, I'll burn all the stuff, And we'll come back here and take a look. So you want a super, super hot fire, the hottest fire you can make. Get loads of pallets in there. I built this fire up now over about half an hour, chucking loads of pallets in there, and you can see it's really, really going. So all you do now is you just take frame by frame and you chuck them in. You're going to see how quickly these burn. Obviously they're wax, so they're flammable. You need to get that heat up though in order to make sure that any honey in there is going to be completely burnt off. Obviously try and shake off as many bees as you can. Now as we start to put the honey frames in with a bit of brood, you'll see why it needs to be a hot fire. So you'll see now that fire's come right down. I know it still looks like a roaring fire, and it is because I've got it very, very hot with lots of logs and lots of cardboard, but you'll see it slowed down in that corner now, and it'll just take a little bit of time to burn all of that in. So you can see why it's so important to do the shook swarm on a nice warm sunny day when the bees are flying. They're starting to move back in there now. The bees are fanning, they're saying come back in. I can see bees going in through the entrance, and then the more bees that go in, the more bees that fan and say come in. And then within maybe like an hour, you're not going to see any bees left here. About 45 minutes after I did it, and there's already about 50% of the bees gone. So they will make their way in, might take them the rest of the day, but I know when I come back here next time, all of those bees are going to be inside. Don't skip any corners when it comes to doing a shook swarm. And then after 3 days, we're going to come back here, see how the bees are getting on. We'll give them some syrup, And then we'll get this multiplex hive ready for rearing some queens. I love it when a plan comes together. So it's been about 4 weeks since we shook swarmed this colony. I just want to give you a bit of a word of warning. Should have done this at the beginning. When you do a shook swarm like this, you might have like a big strong colony and then you shook swarm them, come back in a few weeks and you're like, wow, they have properly, properly shrunk. And generally you're taking away all of that brood. I know in this instance here we tried to cage the queen for a bit, but there's still a significant amount of brood that went on the fire, which is the right thing to do in terms of disease control. But it does mean that when you do the shook swarm, they really do shrink down. Now the good thing about a shook swarm is you're taking away all of the diseases, all of the viruses that are kept within those combs. So the bees now should be super, super healthy. And we treated them for varroa as well. So that should knock down the phoretic mites. And I also came back in a few days after the shook swarm as well and redosed them. Perfect time to do that with ApiBioxal or any oxalic acid product depending on where you are in the world. Because the bees were broodless, we've ate them again, Knocked down all of the phoretic mites. So although the colony has shrunk quite a bit, which I'll show you in a second, the bees are much healthier for it. I managed also to not feed the bees. If you can do a shook swarm and not feed, it is so much better. It means that they properly purge themselves of any bacteria in their stomach. It's better for the bees. However, keep on top of it. Really easy for shook swarms to starve if you don't feed them. We've had crazy weather this year, so we've not needed to feed. But normally after 3 or 4 days, you can go in and safely feed without any risk of Let's get inside, see how these are getting on. So you'll see they've not even actually filled the box yet, and you'll see that they're really not very nice bees. It's interesting because on all my colonies they're dead calm, and these ones are just savage mongrel bees. So when I say to people, oh yeah, I used to keep the Welsh dark bees and they were horrible, and people say, no, they're absolutely lovely— these are Welsh dark bees. These are mongrels. And they're angry, very, very angry. So let's take out some of the frames and I'll show you inside. So fully drawn out, I had to add in a frame of foundation for them there. Interesting that they put some brood there and then moved away from it. They are then busy drawing out my multiplex frames. So you can see like they're not even fully drawn stuff out yet. Could argue they could do with a feed. Looking a lot better over here though. It's got most of this frame over here completely drawn. This one not so much. What's nice to see though is we've found our queen. Really good-looking queen, but her daughters are very, very feisty. But lots of nice brood there. You can see here we've got the foundation where the bees have ignored it, and then they start to draw it out. That's what this white bit is here. And then as it progresses and gets taller, the bees start to use it for stuff. So we've got capped worker brood. That's where the young bees will come out. And then if we look directly down in those cells there, you should be able to see eggs, little Tic Tacs sitting at the bottom. That shows that we've got a good laying queen. So it seems to get progressively stronger as we move over. Very nice frame there, beautiful capped brood. We've got a good mated queen there. And then the final frame, really looking good. So there we go, that's how you complete a shook swarm. Follow all of those steps, you'll do very, very well. Just be aware it will shrink that colony back down. I like to do my shook swarms no later than kind of middle to end of June, early July at a push. Don't do them really late on in the year. And equally, don't do them really early on in the year. This one was probably a little bit too early. I would say around the swarm season. So say from middle of April through to the end of May, really good time to do a shook swarm. And then those colonies the following season will be your best colonies without a doubt. Really turbocharges them, gives them a nice clean fresh slate to get on with their business.