In this hands‑on video, Laurence Edwards demonstrates a walkaway split on an 8‑section queen‑rearing nuc at Hyde Hives. He begins by removing the existing queens, making the nuc queenless, and then re‑sections the hive using divider boards so each of the eight sections contains frames with brood at all developmental stages, ample stores, and a healthy population of bees. The goal is to trigger the bees’ emergency impulse, prompting them to raise new queens in each section without further intervention. Throughout the demonstration, Laurence explains his equipment setup, the importance of matching brood age to queen‑rearing needs, and the logistics of sharing resources between sections. He acknowledges that while he prefers grafting and selective queen‑rearing, a walkaway split is the simplest method when weather permits, though it carries risks and may not produce the highest‑quality queens. He outlines expectations for how many queens might be mated, discusses potential issues such as drift and initial chaos, and mentions a contingency plan to introduce grafted cells later if the walkaway queens fail. The video ends with a call to subscribe for a follow‑up update in a few weeks.
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Right, we're back at the Hyde Hives 8-section queen rearing nuc, and I've decided to take this one off on a little bit of a tangent. So what I'm going to do for the first round is I'm just going to take the queen out, put the sections back in, and leave them to it. We're effectively doing a walkaway split, but we're doing a walkaway split with 8 entrances. How many queens do you reckon will get mated? I have no idea. Will the queens be any good? We will have to wait and see. What I'm going to do today though, really simple, rejig everything around, move the queens, take them out, make them queenless, make sure each of the sections has got brood in all stages and larva of the correct age for the queens to turn them into cells using the emergency impulse. And then we are just going to leave these bees to it and see how many queens we can get mated. So I've got my back to the sun, so I look like a little bit of a silhouette here. Here's the nucs. Let's go in. I'll show you how strong they are. They really have come on over the past couple of weeks. Get those divider boards in And then the bees are gonna do all the hard work and I'm gonna come back and see the mated queens. So you can see the bees have really come on since the last time we were here, filling up all of those sections now. No space whatsoever left over, bees on every single frame. All I need to do is get those queens out, put the divider boards back in, and then the bees will sort everything else out. So all I've done here is I've just set up a couple of little nucs just to take the queens out on a frame, A single frame of bees with some brood and the queen, and we'll take them out to somewhere else in the same apiary. I'll end up with a really, really mega small split, but at this time of the year that's no problem. Just want to separate those queens off and then I can make up some nucs with them at a later date. Got another nuc set up over here. I'm only going to take one frame out. I'll stick a dummy board in there just to keep them nice and warm, but the weather's looking good. I just need someone to take the queens out just to make sure that this queen-rearing nuc is now queenless. So I'll get back in here now, find the queens, transfer them over to those nucs, and then I can section everything up and I'm just going to leave them to it. This method here is by far and away the easiest method to raise queens. Probably not the best method to raise queens, maybe not going to end up with the best quality queens, but I know a lot of people that swear by this method and this is all they use. I've spoken about the fact that I'm not a massive fan of walkaway splits previously. I prefer to graft, I prefer to select. But if the weather's good, there is nothing easier than a walkaway split. Right, so I found my first queen here. They have managed to take that marking off her, or there's been a supersedure that I'm not aware of. Loads of brood in all stages though, loads of worker brood. Really nice healthy looking queen. I'm going to take her over now and put her in a nuc. Just going to take a frame of stores and put that over with the nucs as well. I'll stick a couple of shakes of bees in. I reckon 80% of them will return back to this queen rearing nuc. I just want to make sure there's enough bees in the nuc just to keep that queen and the small split happy. So I'll get to the other section now. I'll open all that up, I'll find the queen over there, and then we can rejig everything around. And there's my second queen. Hopefully you can see her beautiful frame of stores that she's on. Don't often find queens on frames of stores. That's a complete myth, you find them anywhere. 100% stores in that frame, and that's where I found my queen. So I'll take this frame off, this will go into the other split. My queen-rearing nuc is now queenless. Not hopelessly queenless, just queenless. They're going to requeen themselves from what is in that nuc. So look at all the resources that I've got now. Frames and frames and frames of bees, brood in all stages, frames of stores. I'm going to do a really straightforward split, put those section boards back in, make sure that each and every section has got a suitable frame of eggs and larvae of the correct age for them to start rearing their own queens using the emergency Impulse. Really happy with how strong this one is. I reckon we're going to get good results from this. So here's my section boards. I'm going to start working from the center of the hive, sectioning it out, making sure that every single section has got a frame of stores, a frame of brood in all stages, plenty of bees, and then I'll close everything back up. Now that both sides of that split are queenless, I can chop and change and share the resources. The one that's closest to me has got a lot of frames of stores. where the other one is far more advanced with brood. That gives me the ability to chop and change, share those frames. The bees might fight for a little bit, but it doesn't matter. They will team up and they will create the emergency cells, and there's no queens in there, so I've got no risk of queens being killed. So here's my first section. I've got my 5 frames, brood in all stages, some emerging brood, a frame of eggs, lots of stores, lots of bees, and all I'm going to do now is just take my divider Slide that into position, and then I've got a nicely sectioned off division of bees, and they have got an entrance at the front there. So I'll continue that. I'll do eight more of those. I'll show you how it's all set up at the end. Always going to be a little bit of carnage at the beginning because you're going to have bees flying out, trying to get into different entrances. It will balance itself out eventually, and as long as you've got bees in all stages and good. Frames of emerging brood in each one, then you'll have sufficient bees in order to maintain the numbers in each of those sections. Right, so I've got all my sections in now, turned it out into 8 separate sections for this queen rearing nuc. I tried to keep the end ones not quite as full because I think I'm going to get a lot of drift back to those, but it's always a little bit of a balancing act. You will see some variation between them. I'm going to get the crown boards back on and close everything up now. Right, so we're all sealed up, crown boards are on, 8 sections, all the entrances are open. I'm gonna leave these bees now and I'm just gonna leave them to it. I'm not gonna come back down and knock the cells, I'm not gonna make sure there's only one. This is gonna be a standard walkaway split. We will come back and hopefully we will see lots of bees in there and a mated queen with some eggs and brood in all stages. So there we go, I'm really excited about that. Walkaway splits are great fun, they're always risky. I'm not a massive fan of them, I've said that before, but we will leave them to it and we will see what we get. What we will definitely have though after all of this is the opportunity to start putting some grafted cells into those sections. We'll have bees, bees of all ages in there, so if the queens fail to mate or they don't mate very well, then we can squish those queens. They're going to be really easy to find. And we can start adding grafted cells in and start doing some proper queen rearing in this nuc. I'll follow this one up in a few weeks' time from now though, so if you're interested in finding out what's going on, hit the subscribe button and I'll see you in a few weeks.
