Laurence Edwards prepares a Hyde Hives queen-rearing nuc with two pure-bred Danish Buckfast queens, filling every compartment with brood at all stages. He relocates frames toward the center, opens multiple entrances, and plans to remove the queens once the nuc reaches 80 percent capacity to create a queen-less environment for grafting.
In this video, I'm gonna start off my queen rearing operation in my Hyde Hives queen rearing nuc. So in this series of videos, I will stitch everything together for the final video that's gonna go out on YouTube. At the moment, I've got 2 Danish Buckfast breeder queens, gotta stop calling them breeder queens, 2 Danish purebred queens. And what I wanna do is I wanna fill out all of that queen rearing nuc, all of the different compartments to give me bees in every single compartment. Once I've done that, I'm gonna take out a nuc, take out the pure queens. They're gonna go off somewhere else and live a really privileged life. life somewhere. And what that's going to leave me with is a completely full queen-rearing nuc with bees and brood, brood in all stages in every single compartment. What I'll then do is I'll open up the discs, try and get the bees to orientate to those discs. I might have to do a little bit of manipulation because they are all going to cluster up at that original entrance, do a little bit of balancing to try and get them to the point where all of them are full and they're actually using the entrances as well. Once we've taken those queens away, they're going to build out emergency cells, I'm not going to raise queens from those emergency cells, but you could do if you wanted to because these are from a pure queen. And if I get some particularly nice cells, I might give it a run in maybe one or two of the compartments. But my plan for this is to take down all the emergency cells, let them go hopelessly queenless, and then I'm going to add in some of my own grafted cells from some of my pure queens. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll go and show you what the colonies are looking like now. I'm going to do a little bit of a manipulation, move things around a little bit, and get this Hyde Hives queen rearing nuc set up for queen rearing in 2022. Right, so here is the Hyde Hives queen rearing nuc. How big are they getting? They are the purebred Buckfast queens, and I just cannot get over how fast they are expanding. So what I'm going to do in this video, I'm going to do that pushback. I'm going to get them into the center, and I want them to build outwards. Once we're completely full, I'm going to take those queens out, put them somewhere safe, but I'll probably do that maybe 80% full. I don't want to get to the point where we're anywhere close to the risk of swarming. Because when I take that queen out, we're still going to have a couple of weeks of expansion with all of that brood that's going to emerge. What I'm going to do is I'm going to push them both to the center. There's 2 colonies in here with a divider board in the middle, and then I'm going to start opening the entrances at this point as well. I want to try and get the bees used to using those additional side entrances before I close off the original entrance, because otherwise it's really going to confuse them. And at this point of the year, I'm not really having to battle with wasps. So having additional entrances shouldn't pose too much of a stress on the bees. I'll give you a close-up now, show you exactly what I mean. So this is what they're looking like at the moment. That's one colony over there, pure Danish Buckfast queen, and then the same over here, very similar in size, covering maybe 10 or 12 frames. These are on National Deeps, and then I've got this void in the middle that I'm trying to get rid of at the moment, so I'm going to push everything back. I'm going to be really, really careful not to mess around with the queen, not to damage the queen. So I'm going to find the queen first, but I'm going to take this colony over here, identify where most of the brood is, move it to there next to that central divider board, and then I'll do the same over here. Identify where the queen is, where the brood is, move it to here, fill up all the space, and then let the bees get busy filling it all out, ready for me to do my queen rearing. Absolutely glorious frames of brood in here. Really nice, calm, gentle bees. I can't wait to take some grafts from this queen. So queen's on that frame there. See if you can see her. Just going to take that off to one side, make sure that's safe. Don't want to damage this queen. So what you can see is I've done that pullback, moved everything back there. I want them to start off in the center and build the nest that way, fill up all of the compartments, and then we can take out that queen, start doing some rearing. And exactly the same on this side, but I've just put those dividers back on because I don't want 2 colonies with 2 queens so close to each other without some protection on top. Got the dividers back in there and I've overstocked them and put frames in the place of the dividers. Means that when I put the dividers in, I've got some frames left over in order to make up a split to take that queen out. So there we go, that's the queen rearing nuc all set up. I reckon only a week, 2 weeks max before that's completely full. And as I said, I'll come back before, just a little bit before that, just to take those splits out and let them build up naturally from the brood that's there. Don't want to overstock these at all. No need to overstock them either. All I'm going to do as well is I'm going to go around and I'm just going to open every single entrance on the nuc now. Reason that I'm doing that is I want to make them comfortable with those entrances and I want to get some of the bees orientating to those entrances. And where I've shifted that brood around a little bit, some of the bees are going to use those new entrances and it'll just become really natural to them. Them. So fast forward a couple of weeks, these bees are going to be completely filling this queen rearing nuc.
