Hyde Hives Queen Rearing Nuc - Ep 3

Right, so we're back up at the Forest Apiary. We're doing episode 3 of my queen rearing nuc from Hyde Hives. In the previous episode, we spread the brood around all of the sections, partitioned off every single section, and made sure that within each section there was brood in all stages and a sufficient amount of bees. All I'm going to do today is I just want to go in and see what type of queen cells they've drawn out, give you a look at those emergency cells, show you how many they've drawn out. We're not going to knock any of them down, and I might need to just do a little bit of rejigging just to make sure that there is a queen cell in every single So I'll get my bee suit on, let's go and take a look how the queen rearing nuc is getting on. I'm really curious to see how the bees are getting on in here, really intrigued as well to see how they've balanced between the different sections. What I'm expecting to see is some of the sections are going to be stronger than others because more bees have drifted to that location because they're used to that entrance, and then also the spread of brood that I put in there is going to be different. So I'm expecting to see some that are really strong and some that aren't so strong. Hopefully they're all perfectly even, or they're all at least full of bees, and then we'll go inside and have a look around and see how many emergency cells they've pulled out in each one. As I said on the previous video, I'm not going to knock down the cells because I want to do a true walkaway split, and I find when the colonies and the splits are so small like this, the risk of casting is much, much less. So I will leave multiple cells because A, I can't get in and actually see and get a positive ID on the larva anyway, and then also I don't know which of those cells is going to be the best one that they've created. So let's get inside, take a look, see how the bees are getting on. So first thing that's really good is that we've got activity on all of the entrances. So they're the original entrances there, and then you come around and you can see we've got activity on all of the little mini entrances. This is where the bees are going to have reorientated to, and this is where the queens are going to come out and mate. You can see this one here, we've got activity on this entrance as well, and then the final entrance on this side, we've got activity. So all 8 entrances have got bees flying around them in varying degrees of intensity. So as you can see from this Notice here we've got different amount of bees in each of the different sections. This was always going to happen and there's pretty much no way that you can resolve this. What I expected to see was these end ones were going to be the strongest, which on this side was true, but on the other side actually isn't true. And then you've got ones like this next to it with nowhere near as many bees. However, I think there's plenty of bees in there in order to produce a queen. I'm not sure how good that queen's actually going to be though. We'll follow this through on the series though, and we will see how we get on. So I'll go through all of the sections now, pull out a couple of the frames, just double-check we've got emergency cells in there, and we will do a completely natural walkaway split using the emergency impulse. So it's actually going to be quite difficult for me to pull all of these frames out without damaging the queen cells. The first one I've pulled out there, you can just see that blob of royal jelly. That is where I've actually damaged one of them by pulling it out. And there's kind of no way around this because the sections are quite tight. It means that when you actually go and pull them out, you do risk breaking them. So I'm not going to go through every single one. I'm just going to show you it here now, though. I'll try and get the bees off them. And there you go. What you can see there is one broken emergency queen cell with quite a mature larva in there. We've got another one down in this corner. There's plenty of bees in there, lots of nice young emerging brood. So I'm confident that we will get a queen out of that. Whether she's a good queen, whether she goes off and mates, nobody knows that yet. But what we've definitely got is we've got queen cells and we've got the ability for them to requeen using the emergency impulse. So I'm happy with that. I think across all of those different sections, we're going to see cells just like this. As I said before, I'm not going to take them down and I'm going to revise this video a bit because the last thing I want to do is if there's only one or two decent cells in each of those sections that I go in and damage them. So I'm just going to assume the cells are there and leave the bees to it. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to go into the weakest one, try and wiggle myself a little bit of room and see if they've created emergency cells in the weakest split. I will then take that as an indication that all of the rest of them, I know they had broodinal stages, I know they had Sufficient bees, and I know they had larvae of the correct age in order to make queens. And then I will just say, if the weakest one's done it, I will assume all of the stronger ones will have done it as well. So I would say by quite a long way, this is going to be the weakest one that we've got here. Maybe 3 frames of bees, and I would not recommend making splits as small as this to try and requeen because it's always going to be suspect how good the queens are going to be. Let's pull out just one frame though and see if the bees have done anything in this section. And there we go. I needn't have worried. It's actually surprisingly strong, this split, once you get in there because of the amount of brood that went in there. What's really interesting though is look, that as an emergency cell for me is not a very good emergency cell. And then you look over here, okay, they're a little bit better, but the bees covering one there. I really don't like the look of these emergency cells though. They just don't look big enough for me. I like to see them when they're big, long, and really well fed. So there we go. I've looked in the strongest section, I found emergency cells. I've looked in the weakest section, I found emergency cells. I've left them all. I've not taken any of them down, even the scrubby little ones. We're going to close this hive up now and we are not going to come back for 3 weeks. 1 week to let all of those virgins emerge, 2 weeks for them to mature and go out on mating flights and hopefully come back and get into lay. And then we will do the grand reveal at the end and see how many queens we've got mated. My personal expectations on a hive like this using eight sections: if I can get four mated queens out of that 50% ratio, I will be very, very happy indeed. Anything less than four, I'll be a little bit gutted. If we get eight queens, I will be absolutely amazed, and everybody will think it's a fix. There is no possible way we're going to get eight queens mated. If you want to see how I set up this colony, watch the previous couple of episodes. Check out this link here for the previous episodes in this series.