Layens Hive Transfer Hack - Hyde Hives

In this video, I'm gonna show you how to transfer a colony of bees into a Hyde Hives layon hive. So I've been meaning to do this video for ages. April's pretty much a write-off for me, so I do apologize that it's taken so long to do this video. What I'm gonna show you though is a really simple, easy method for transferring a national nucleus colony into a Hyde Hives layon-style hive. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll go over to the hives, and I'll show you just how simple it is. Right, the colony behind me is a colony that I'm gonna transfer over. Recently been requeened. Gonna make it really simple. I'm just gonna pull the lay-on hive right up next to it, move the original hive away, find the queen first, get her in the lay-on hive, and then it's just a case of transferring them all over, shaking them in, and making sure the bees have nowhere to go. Right, so I've positioned my lay-on hive as close as I possibly can to the beehive that I'm transferring over. It's a little bit difficult for me to get it into the exact spot here 'cause I've got other colonies on the pallet. If you are doing this at home though, get it in the exact same spot within the millimeter to where that entrance is. Makes this manipulation so much easier, it really does. Because the original bees, okay, they know what their beehive looks like, but they're more orientated to that spot. So all I'm gonna do now, really simple, I'm gonna go and find the queen in the colony first, take out that frame of brood, zip tie it into one of these frames, and then I'm just gonna do that with all of the frames within the colony. Right, so I found my frame with the queen on it. That's really important when you're doing this, make sure you get the queen. Don't start transferring them over before you get the queen because it makes your life very, very difficult. Once you've got the frame with the queen on it, queen on, we're going to zip tie that into the lay-on-hive frames. Quite difficult for me to show you that on camera, so I'm just going to take this one off first with the queen in it, get it into the frame, and then I'll bring it back here and show you exactly what I mean. Right, so once you've got your frame here, try and keep an eye on where that queen is. She is running all over the place. But what you want to do— it's an amazing fit, this, for some reason— you can just about squeeze that frame into position and just force it down in between the bars. It's incredibly crude, this, it really is. But if you look at that now, that is in position. And you look at that frame now, I can pick it up like that, and that is how I'm going to connect my colonies into my frames. Okay, it's a little bit messy, but you can see whichever way I hold that now, up or down, that is rock solid. The design, yeah, okay, it's a little bit messy. But it doesn't matter. I've got my queen on there. I've got my frame jam-packed into there. I'm just going to transfer that over now into my layon's hive, and then the bees are just going to fill all of this with wild comb. They might not get it right the first time. They might not get it right the second time. But eventually, they are just going to fill all of this area with the correct type of comb, and then you'll just have a really easy to manage layon style hive. So once you've got it to this point, how easy is that? It just fits in there. It is amazing. Millimeter perfect fit. Just double check you've got your queen. The queen's in a safe position, and I'm just going to transfer that into its new home now. So once you've got that bit out of the way, the next thing you need to do is go and move the original hive from its position if you're doing it side by side like I am, or you need to move it away at the beginning of the manipulation if you're doing it another way. Just get that queen into the hive here first because her pheromone and the pheromone of the brood is going to bring all of the bees away from their original hive into your lay-on hive. So I'm just going to repeat that now. Keep on going over every single brood frame you've got. Do it in here. Shake off all the bees from the supers if they're in the supers as well. The aim here is to get all of the brood frames into the lay-on hive, all of the bees into the lay-on hive, the queen into the lay-on hive, and then you can just leave them to it. Just make sure when you're putting them in that they're completely centralized. That's going to help you when it comes to them drawing out the frames. I'm not suggesting this is a perfect solution here. Perfect solution is you wire up these frames, you put foundation in them, probably have to make the foundation yourself, and you chuck a swarm in here and you're away. That is a much, much easier method of getting bees into a lay-on hive. But if you want a nuc, you want to do it with national frames, you don't want to mess around cutting out, it fits perfectly. Don't even need to zip tie it in. I was coming here today thinking I'm going to probably have to do a few zip ties as well just to keep it safe. But look at that, it really does fit so well. That is not going anywhere. It'll be interesting to see how the bees take to this. I'll cover that in future episodes. I'll come back to this, I'll show you at regular intervals how the bees are adapting to this new space, how they're filling the voids, how stable those voids are. I can't see any issue whatsoever with this method though. This is what you call no-nonsense beekeeping. One more frame to do, then we'll close them all up. Right, so before I put that last frame in, I'm going to go and remove the other hive, shake off all the bees in there while I've still got a little bit of space to shake some bees down into it, and I'm going to close them up and just leave the bees to it. So you can see we've got some very, very disorientated bees, but the most important thing you've got here is you've got the queen and the brood in that layon-style hive. And you can see if I go a little bit closer The bees are already there. They're fanning their Nazanoff glands. They're telling the bees, this is it, we've moved next door. Don't worry, all of the bees will make their way in. And even the ones on the top there, we've got some exits on the lay-on hive. They'll come out, they'll work their way in as well. Just make sure there's nothing on the original spot. I've had to move one of the other hives that was next to it because it just looked too similar to the hive and they were struggling a little bit with that. So I've just moved that one over. I know it looks like chaos here, Don't worry, next episode we'll come in, I'll show you how those bees are getting on. So there you go. I want to say simple as that. I know it's pandemonium here, isn't it? Absolutely crazy. But there's no real easy way to do that. I've said it before in this video, a much simpler method of populating your laying style hive with bees is just to wire up the frames, get some foundation in there, go and catch a swarm, buy a package, dump them in. So much easier. No flying bees, no craziness. But if you want to do it with the National Nuc, this is probably the best method that I've got. The other method would involve cutting out all of that comb and trying to strap it in, which I think is messy. I think it's quite damaging. And then the other method is doing a shook swarm, which I just think is a massive, massive waste of resources. Sets your bees back too much. I bet you're interested to see how this colony gets on. I can hear them roaring, which means the queen is in here. This is our new home. Come back to this hive. I'm going to close everything up. We'll do a follow-up video in a couple of weeks just to show you how the bees are getting on, how well they've transitioned to their new hive. If you want to see an update on some of our other long hives, check out this series here. I've got about 15 videos on all of our different long hives. So there we go, simple as that. That is a really easy, simple method for transferring a national nuc into a lay-on hive. Going to be very, very difficult in the UK to get yourself a hive on a lay-on style frame, if not impossible to actually get one. However, getting a national colony— however, getting a colony, either a nucleus or a full colony, on national frames should be really easy. That's the method that I recommend. All you need, big bag of zip ties, zip them in as best as you possibly can, close them up, and then the bees will take care of the rest. If you want to check out a playlist of some of our other Hyde Hives long hive series— if you want to check out some of our other Hyde Hives long hive videos, check out this series here where there's about 15 videos in total.