Install a Colony of Bees into Long Hive

Hi, I'm Lawrence Edison, Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I can only apologize that this video has taken me so long, but it has been a crazy two or three months here at Black Mountain Honey. I've finally got round to doing this series though. So this is the first in a brand new series of No Nonsense Beekeeping, and it is all based around my long hive that was. Kindly provided free of charge by Matt from Hyde Hives. So in this series, we are going to talk about everything long hives. We're going to talk about how to stock them, how to feed the bees in them, where to put the queen excluders, how to split them, what to do if they swarm. If you've got any ideas for anything else in that series as well, just give me a shout. It'll probably be around 10 or 12 videos covering all of the basics, and then we'll just follow that colony Through the season as well. So the first video that I'm going to do in this series is how to put bees into your long hive. Now I'm going to put this hive of bees into the long hive here, and I'm going to talk to you about how we do that and the steps and processes you need to take. Now I appreciate some people will be doing this slightly differently. You're probably going to buy a nuc of bees. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to talk you through the steps as well if you're buying a nuc of bees. How to get that into your long hive to start off with. This video though, I've got a colony of bees. So this box here, absolutely full to the brim with bees. They're on the correct size frame for my long hive, so I've got a 14 by 12 format. It's really, really simple. If you've got a colony of bees in a hive and you've bought a long hive, all you need to do, get them as close as you possibly can together in terms of the entrances, take them out, Frame by frame, make sure you've got the queen, put them all into the long hive, and remove absolutely everything else. You might get a little bit of chaos over the next day or so, but they will work it out. And as long as that queen is in the long hive, she will attract all of the rest of them because they'll fan her pheromones in. Now I say if you're doing it with a nuc, it's going to be slightly different, so you can disregard the fact that you've got a hive there. All I would do with a nuc And I'll send you out to another video here because it's very similar to what you're going to do if you're introducing a nuc to a normal hive. So work out where you want to keep your long hive, get your nuc, put the nuc into position, open the entrance wheel, give them 3 or 4 days to orientate, although they'll probably do it after a few hours, and then move the nuc, transfer the frames over to the long hive, and put the long hive in place of the nuc. The video that I'm feeding you off to there explains that in a lot more detail, But basically, your bees are in a box, they'll fly out, they'll orientate to a position, and as long as you put your new long hive in that position, all of the bees will come back. Critical one though is find the queen, make sure the queen is in the long hive. So I'll get my bee suit on and I'll show you how I'm going to transfer over the bees in my beehive into my long hive. Right, so let's get ready to transfer over some bees then. First things first, you need to prepare the long hive. Ready to accept a colony of bees. Make sure you get the colony set up correctly. Remember, this is 2 hives here. You've got one hive on this half, another hive on that half over here. For the purpose of this video, I'm going to use this half over here. And if you're doing it where you want to transfer over a colony, try and get that entrance as close as you possibly can to the entrance of this hive. The bees, they know the surroundings here. They're going to get themselves roughly back to this point, We're going to move that hive away at the end, so you just want to get the entrance as close as you possibly can. And then open up your roof. Love the gas-powered struts on this long hive, like it just makes things so much easier. And where a lot of my colonies are on like one pallet still, I'm stooping over. It's just a really nice height for me, so I do love this hive. Right, the first thing you can do is you can take your queen excluder and you can go and put it somewhere because you don't need it for the time being. And the way that I'm going to manage this colony I'm not going to use the queen excluder until quite a way into the season, so make sure you follow these videos. I'm going to do it step by step, but for me, the queen excluder is going to get used very, very little in this hive, and I'll use it towards the end of the year once I know how strong that colony is and once I know roughly where the brood nest ends. So you can take your queen excluder and put it as far back as you can possibly go, Because you're not going to need it for this video. Then the next thing to get out is your dummy board or your follower board. And all I would say for the time being is just push this up towards where the queen excluder is. We are going to use this in this video, but you just want to keep it out of the way for the time being. So this is the configuration that I've got it in. Queen excluder all the way to the back. Remember, the back is in the middle there. Then I've got my dummy board. I've pushed that to the back as well. I've just got a nice big void ready to take some bees. All your crown boards can go over that side. We'll put them on at the end. And then all that's left to do is get some bees and put them in. Like I said, if you were doing this with a nuc, I'd have the nuc as close as possible to the entrance here with bees flying in and out. And then we just do the same thing. We're just going to transfer them over. And then the really important thing is once you've transferred over all of the bees, definitely need to see the queen. Make sure you see the queen, make sure she's in the long hive. But equally important, make sure everything gets removed at the end. Don't leave the nuc sitting there because all that will happen is that the bees will fly off and they'll just go back to the nuc. Same with the hive, they'll fly off and they'll just go back to the hive. So the really important thing is don't give the bees any option. They need to find somewhere that's home. You want to make the long hive their home. So I'll get my gloves on, I'll get my hood on, and I'm going to stock this long hive with bees now. So believe me, that was a complete fluke. She was actually on the top bars when I opened up. Would you believe it? But the queen is on this frame here. This is actually just a national frame that's been built out underneath, but the majority of the rest of the frames are 14 by 12. That honestly wasn't a fix. Found the queen, she was on the first frame on the top bar. I've made this so easy for me. So that is the first piece of the jigsaw accomplished. I found the queen and I've got the queen into the long hive. So now I've got my frame with the queen, all you need to do, transfer over all of the rest of the frames. Make sure you put them in the same order, line them up exactly the same. It's as simple as that. So there you go, that's the majority of the bees in the hive now. There's a lot of activity over at the original entrance, and that's to be expected because the bees don't know this is home. So once you get to this point here, I would suggest for any size colony, get one frame of foundation at the front and one frame of foundation at the back. You don't need to go overboard here, just a single frame. Put that at the back, gives the bees a little bit of space. To be honest, there isn't as much of an issue in giving the bees too much space in a horizontal hive because they're not going to lose the heat sidewards as much as they would vertically. So if you want to give them 2 or 3 frames of foundation, absolutely fine. It's really not the end of the world, but make sure they've got enough space in order to expand. And then you want to take your dummy board and you want to bring that as close as possible to that last frame of foundation that you put in. That's going to stop the bees drawing any wild comb. This is really important, and this is probably the most used piece of equipment in a long hive. So bring it in as close as possible. Leave the queen excluder, you don't need that yet, and then we'll sort out all of the stragglers that are left either at your nuc if you did it via the nuc method or back at your beehive. Now before we go and do that, we can put our crown boards back on. The bees are going crazy, they're flying up, you want to seal them in and you're going to get a few knocking around in the roof, so we need to get the crown boards on as soon as we possibly can. And the crown boards are really simple, this is a top bee space design, so it means that you want the flush side facing down. I know it seems tempting to put it that way around with, with the rebate underneath, but that's the wrong way around. It's top bee space and you have the flush piece of acrylic directly on top of the frames. It's top bee space, so you've got your gap there in order for the bees to move. Now we've got a void over in this side. Obviously that's where the colony is going to expand into. Stick the crown board on, just get it back into position, and then we'll follow it up in the next video showing you how to expand that colony. Now once you've done this, you're going to have loads of bees knocking around in the roof. There is an entrance so the bees can get out, and they will eventually find their way out, but you might as well just dust as many as you can off from the inside as well, just to give them a bit of a head start to try and not block too many in the roof void. Now I'll just draw your attention if I stand back a little bit. To my leg. This is really good news, and this shows why I positioned the hive like that. I've blocked the path for the bees by the new long hive, so all of these bees here on my leg are thinking, how do I get home? Where is home? When bees don't know where home is, they think I'm home. That's always the way it goes. They'll just try and cluster up on anything they can. Anything that's in their flight path there. So this is really, really good news. The bees aren't returning back to the hive, they're just kind of on my leg. So I'm going to leave them there until the end of the video. We'll shake them all off. I'm going to wait until I've moved the boxes from over here because I don't want them flying back over there. So this is what the original hive looks like now. Obviously it's empty, haven't got any frames in there. It's blocked by the long hive, so the bees are thinking, how on earth do I get in there? They're all on my leg, they don't know where to go. This is the position we want to be in. So what we're going to do now is we're going to take those bees, shake them off in front of the long hive, and then we're going to remove any trace of that hive. So we're going to remove the hive, the feeder, the roof, the straps, and the pallet. We're going to give them no option other than to go back into the long hive. So this will either be your nuc or your hive. You'll have loads of straggler bees thinking, how do I get home? Just shake them off in front of the entrance, they will work it out. Now I know this seems like chaos, and it is a little bit of chaos, so if you're doing this in your garden, kind of choose the right time to do it, but the chaos will subside very, very quickly and the bees will go back into the long hive. The really important thing to note though is, and I'll say it again, don't put this hive anywhere near where the bees are going to see it. Take it right out of the way, 10, 15, 20 meters away, You don't want the bees to go back to the hive. Don't leave anything there, the floor, the stand, the pallet, anything. Give them no option but to go into this hive. Same with the floor, they're just returning back to it because that's the only place they know. Shake it off. Do it on a nice warm sunny day. You can see the bees flying back now, trying to work out where home is. Go and put this right out of the way. Now at this point I'm going to close the roof because they're clustering up a little bit on the top. Just going to brush all the bees off the top. Get as many out as you possibly can, but there are escapes for them. So there's escapes where they can get out, they can't get back in. So that will clear over the course of about 24 hours and there won't be any bees in there next time we come to take a look. I've still got a leg full of bees. And remember, the leg full of bees is a really good thing because they don't know where home is. We're going to show them where home is. Before I do that though, I'm going to go and remove everything from the original location. So if this is your nuc down here, Make sure there's nothing left. This is your hive over here. Get rid of the hive, get rid of the pallets, get rid of everything. So the next thing I would say is when you're doing this introduction, take out the entrance reducer. You can see here I've got it on the absolute minimal setting, and I'll probably leave it on that setting throughout the whole of the year. This is the only time where I'm really going to take it out, but take it out because it just makes it a little bit easier to fan all of the bees in, makes them a little bit easier for them to find out where they're going. So we're in a really, really good position now, which is the original hive is gone. If you had your nuc, your nuc would be gone as well. The colony is in the long hive. We've got the queen in there, all of the frames in the exact same order. We've dummied them up with the dummy board. We've put the queen excluder away, right out of the way. We don't need that for the time being. We've put the crown boards on the correct way up, so the flat side down. The The bees will come out of the entrance at the top here, which they can't get back into, and we've opened up the entrance reducer to the maximum setting to allow the colony to fan the queen's pheromone to attract all of the bees in. So if you can get the colony of bees to this point here, the job is done. The queen and the rest of the bees will just attract all of those bees back in, nice big wide entrance, and that is the manipulation complete. So you can see the bees fanning their wings here, and what they're doing here is they're fanning the queen's pheromone out to attract all of the rest of the bees into the hive. If you see this, then this is exactly what you need to see. It will attract all of the rest of the bees into the hive. So there you go, it's as simple as that. Like I said, if the bees aren't playing ball and they're just clustering up elsewhere, just pop back in, give them a nudge, send them back up into the air again. And they'll work it out. The more bees you get inside that long hive, the easier it is for the rest of them to find their way in. But that's it for the video. I've showed you how to get a colony of bees from either a nucleus or a beehive into your long hive. That's the difficult bit done. Now we can move on to some proper long hive management, and we'll cover that in future episodes of our long hive series. Last thing to say is, if you're interested in getting yourself one of these long hives, You can get them direct from hidehives.co.uk, but they definitely come with my recommendation. They're really, really well built, very nice hives. So I hope you enjoyed the video. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.