Laurence Edwards shows how to split a hive before it swarms. Take the mated queen and some brood to start a new colony, leave the original hive with a charged queen cell to raise its own queen. He walks through locating queen cells, brushing frames, and shaking bees into the new box.
Crazy day here today. The bees are going wild, and this colony is trying to swarm. So I'm going to show you what swarm cells look like, what to look out for in your colonies, and I'm going to show you here how to manage swarm cells by taking the queen away and making up a nuc. We're going to leave the colony here with one uncapped cell. We're going to make sure there's a nice larva in it, and we're going to let the bees. Rear their own queen. We're going to take away the mated queen into another apiary, and that's how we're going to do the split here today. So we're doing making splits with queen cells again. I'm just going to run through it as quick as I possibly can, show you the different bits, show you how to split 2 colonies when you find swarm cells. Right, so the absolute first thing to do as soon as you see any queen cells, try and identify where the queen is. I found her for First frame, really, really lucky. The cells haven't been capped yet. If you can find that queen and you've got some uncapped cells, you are good to go. It's the easiest split in the world to make, so I'll show you how to do that now. So what we have here is a charged cell, and you can see they've drawn that down much more than a play cup. So that one there, that is a play cup. Difficult to show you inside it, but there's nothing inside that one. That one there, clear to see, full of jelly, and there is a larva in there as well. So that's what the frame looks like here. We've got the queen in the cage and we've got a cell with jelly with a larva in it. And like I said, it's the simplest manipulation in the world, really, really quick. All we're going to do, we're going to leave one cell in this colony and we're going to take the queen and some brood and everything that's needed to make up another nuc into that one. Take that one away. Let the colony here rear their own queen from that charged queen cell. Simple as that. So then on the frame where you've identified the larva in the cell, you just wanna brush off the bees. Don't shake this frame. You could dislodge the larva. And all you're doing is you're looking to see if there's any more. So there's nothing else on this frame, just one swarm cell. So I'm gonna put that frame to one side. Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through the rest of the colony and squish down any other cells that we find. And what you can do now, 'cause you've got your queen secure somewhere, you've got your one swarm cell secure somewhere, you can shake them off. And this is why they're a bit crazy. So all I'm doing, shaking the bees, making up a nuc. So I'm shaking all of the bees into the nuc, 'cause that's where I want some bees to be. Checking the frames, squishing any larva, any swarm cells that I see. Right, so we're good to go. Pandemonium here because the queen's somewhere else, she's down there. Bees don't know what's going on. They're packed to the rafters anyway because they're getting ready to swarm. What we have got though is one nuc, a nuc with brood in all stages, no queen cells, and one original queen from this hive. And then in this colony here, all we've got is one charged swarm cell. All of the other swarm cells have been taken down and all of the original bees. And that's it. You just close it back up. This colony's gonna go away to another apiary. This one here has got all the resources it needs to make its own queen, and the colony will just continue as normal. And that's it for this week. The video seems like craziness here today, but it's really warm. The bees are on a crazy flow. You look at all of the hives, very, very busy. They don't like that manipulation 'cause there's a lot of shaking and you're taking their queen away as well. So they're angry with me. They will settle down as soon as they get that queen out. Nice virgin. She'll go out, she'll mate, come back, and this colony will settle right down. So in a couple of months' time, we'll come back to this colony here and I'll show you how well that queen's been mated. Fingers crossed she gets mated well. And then I'll show you how well the nucs are getting on as well. So fast forward a couple of months and I'll give you an update on both of these colonies.
