How To Split Your Beehive With Queen Cells

We're here in the stream apiary today. We're transferring all of the nucs that we boxed up into a 14 by 12 hive, and we're doing a manipulation so the queen stays under the excluder, all of the brood goes above the excluder, and then the queen stays underneath. So I'm doing a separate video about that at the moment, but I've opened up this hive and I found something really interesting that I just kind of want to share with you. So what we're looking at here is a colony that is ready to swarm. So we've caught it within 2 days, I reckon. 2 days and this colony would have gone. What's really interesting with this colony is that all of the rest of the ones I see here, um, I put the nucs in the middle and then I've got frames on the outside. So I've got 6 frames in the middle, 2 frames on one side, 2 frames on the other side for a Schwemti 10-frame. Um, this one, because of the way that the frames were set up, I did the whole nuc onto one side and you could, you could see that it just hadn't expanded at all. Well, Every single other one had really, really expanded. So straight away I was thinking, this is a little bit strange. Um, I've looked into it. The frame that's in between the foundation and the colony was completely capped with honey, so they were honey-bound. And again, I've twigged and kind of thought, this isn't right. Next frame, I found 3 uncapped cells and I found the queen. So I'm just going to show you exactly what I've found and I'm going to show you how to deal with it. So effectively what we're going to do is we're going to take out the queen on a frame, we're going to make up a little nuc, and we're going to do an artificial swarm. So I'll show you how to do it. So this is the first frame that came out, and it's really heavy, absolutely full of honey, capped honey both sides, you know what I mean? You could extract that, take that one home and eat it. Got a little drone there, shows how mature this colony is. As soon as I saw that as the end one, I kind of thought, this isn't good because they've not moved past it. So yeah, that was frame number 1. Then this is the frame that I found after that. So as you can see, we've got an uncapped queen cell just there, and then there's another uncapped queen cell there, but I've actually broken that one open by accident. But it's fine because I only need one. But it gives you a good indication of what they look like when they're primed with royal jelly. Do you know what I mean? When people say, oh, you've got play cups, if there's no jelly in them, don't worry. That's the complete opposite. That's a fat, chunky larva, loads of royal jelly, and this one up here will be the same. So we're going to use this one to requeen the existing colony, and we're going to take out the old queen. So the first thing that you would need to do if you find charged queen cells like that, you need to find the queen. And if they're not capped, likelihood is she's still in there. If they're capped, chances are she's gone. It's not always as clear-cut as that. I've found the queen a number of times when they've been capped. So if they cap them when it's really, really poor weather, the queen won't swarm and she'll give it a few days. But it does tend to kind of, kind of work roughly like that. So as soon as I've seen them charged but not capped, I know I've got a good chance of finding the queen. So there she is. They're grooming her, probably stopping her eating, slimming her down for her swarm flight. She's marked green, so she's a 2019 queen, but she's there. So we're going to take her along with this frame. I'm going to go and see if there's any other charged cells, and then I can knock back all the cells on this one. So whenever I'm doing these manipulations, what I like to do is I like to take the existing queen, the some bees, with some frames, and take her away from this apiary. It makes the whole process so much easier. You don't have to kind of like balance between flying bees and where they're going to fly back to, start moving stuff around. It's just a really, really even split. I'll package her up, I'll take her somewhere else. This colony here will think that they've swarmed. Make sure that you leave at least one, uh, uncapped or capped cell in here. Some people say to leave 2. I like to just find the best one and just leave one. If that one fails, I can always add another frame of eggs, or I can add them a mated queen. That's just the way I like to do it, less chance of them actually going on and swarming after that. So I'm going to look through the rest of the frames now and see if there's any other swarm cells in there. So on this frame, you can see the remnants of one. It's— they're doing them in between frames here, which is a bit strange, but they put them anywhere. And that one's broken again, so we can just safely get rid of that one. Right, so I've gone through and I've done a quick pass. I mean, I don't, I don't smoke my bees, so they're always a little bit flyy. If you wanted to smoke them, they'd calm right down. Um, I'm being quite aggressive with this colony, so they're not enjoying it at the moment. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to find a frame and make sure there's absolutely no queen cells on it. That's really, really important. And I'm going to go and put that into a nuc. So always keep a spare nuc At your apiary or in your truck or at home or whatever. Spare nucs, so invaluable, but make sure they're there where you need them. Don't keep them 20 miles away because then you come to need it and it's not there. So keep one right by the hives. I've only got one here at the moment, so hopefully there's no more that are going to swarm here, but I'll top this up later. I'll come back, I'll bring another one. So the first frame that I'm going to take out is my honey frame, and the reason I'm taking out the honey frame is that I know, pretty certain, there's going to be no warm cells on there. So that's going to be my first one that I put into the nuc. Make sure the queen's not on it again, but I know where the queen is in there, so I'm going to put that in the nuc. And then you want a frame with brood in all stages. Again, check that it's got nothing that you want in there, so no cells. Make sure the queen's not on it again. And then what I do is I shake the bees in. And that way you can do a full kind of recce over the whole frame, double-check you've not missed anything, and you've not. So there's no queen, there's no cells, this one's good to go in. And then that's all I'm going to take from this colony because I don't want the nuc to be overwhelmed. I want the majority of the bees to be in here. So I'll show you what I'm going to do next. So now I've only got one cell and it's on this frame. Frame, and annoyingly the queen's on the same frame. So I need to gently, without shaking bees, get the queen from this frame into the nuc. Right, so I found the queen. So the queen's in there, I've just double-checked. That makes it much, much more difficult. Yeah, so when you've only got a few, uh, swarm cells to play with and they're not kind of dotted over all the frames. I don't kind of play too much into the numbers. You know what I mean? There were 4 or 5 there. I broke some of them as I kind of took them apart, um, so I'm convinced the way these were honeybound, they definitely wanted to swarm. The fact that they were packed into a nuc for a little bit too long, they definitely wanted to swarm. So I'm not treating it as a supersedure, treating it as a swarm. But you just need to be careful with this— the frame that has got the charged cells on, can't shake it. You need to be really, really gentle with it. If you dislodge that larvae, probably going to wreck the whole process. So now we've got it really, really easy. Yeah, we know we've got, um, a frame of stores and a frame of brood in all stages in here. We've also got the queen in there. That's the important thing. The queen's safely in there. Yeah. Now I know this is the queen cell that I want to use. Yeah, so I've got a single queen cell on this frame. I've checked all over it, there's only one. That's the cell that I'm going to use. So what I can do with my other frames now is I can either shake some more bees into the nuc or I can shake them into here. And then once you've shaken it, you can check the whole frame, make sure that there's no more swarm cells. So that one's fine, that one is the one with my cell. That one's fine. And that one's fine. So now you can rebuild them. Always give them a little bit of a clean. Then you can put everything back together again. So queen excluder on, roof back on, and a brick. And then what you want to do, you might have seen my other video where I've got the little nuc wheels. I haven't actually prepared these ones yet, so you want to indicate somehow so you can remember that there is a capped queen cell in here, because I don't want to come back here for at least 4 weeks now. I'm going to leave that, she's going to come out, she's going to mate, and I don't want to be disturbing her at all. So I need some way of remembering that this colony here has got an unmated queen in it. And the way I do that is I just pick up a stick or something And I plonk it on the colony. Now that actually serves 2 purposes. It reminds me where that colony is, but also when that queen comes out to mate, it distinguishes them from the other colonies. So I've got a colony right next to it, I don't want the queen returning to that one, so this stick should help guide her into the correct colony. Doesn't always work, but most of the time it does. Then Then in your nuc, you want to kind of put either fresh foundation or old comb. These are combs we used last year, they're still good to use. You've thrown in enough bees to keep the brood warm. You've only got one frame of brood in all stages in there. Make sure that the wheel's closed. Crown board. It's secure. So there we are. That's it's that easy. Like, I mean, if you've got your nuke for the first time in the season and you want to do a split. This is what you're looking out for, do you know what I mean? This is why we say 7-day inspections, because by you going in and doing 7-day inspections, you're very, very likely to see the cell before it's capped, and then you can do this manipulation. So what we've got in the nuc that we're going to take away to a completely different apiary over 3 miles away, we've got 1 frame of stores, 1 frame of brood in all stages, loads of bees thrown in, and then we filled it up with drawn comb, or you Fill it up with foundation, whatever's easiest for you. And we've got the queen in there. Make sure there's no cells in the nuc. Make sure the queen's in the nuc. That's good to go. We've got a nuc. In the remaining colony, what they think's happened now is that the queen's swarmed. So she's left, taken all these bees with her, and they're in a situation now where they're kind of queenless. So they've got that cell, they'll finish feeding that cell, they'll cap it off, and then they'll just continue as normal. The queen will come out, she'll go out, she'll mate, and then she'll come back to this colony, and then this colony is good to go as well. So that's it, it's as simple as that. I just thought, you know, as I'm kind of going through doing the inspections, I'll stop, I'll give you a video and just show you how things are done. So that's a really, really easy artificial swarm method that you can try at home. Just make sure that you keep a spare nuc there for when the situation arises.