Laurence Edwards moves nuc colonies to a new remote apiary just after the summer solstice, using Abello Lyson adjustable stands and 9-frame Langstroth hives on uneven ground. He plans to use the site for filming, demonstrating different queen lines, and taking advantage of the high-quality forage.
Today I'm moving my bees to a brand new apiary. So these are the nucs that I'm taking with me. You can see I've come up late enough at night that the bees aren't flying. If you're a channel member, you'll definitely notice these from the channel member exclusive videos that I'm doing at the moment. And if you've not signed up as a channel exclusive member, definitely get involved because there's some really good long-form, rough, raw, uncut footage of all of my beekeeping inspections throughout the year. So I'm just going down to all of the entrances now, going to close up those entrances. Might get the odd bee that doesn't make it back in, but you can see they're not flying. Already got my ratchet straps on, got them on doubles, which I know that I can fit in the back of the pickup truck. We are pretty much good to go. Right, the nucs are loaded into the back of the truck. So I've wedged everything in with some extra lids that I've got, made it nice and secure, saves me strapping it all down in there. Let's get these bees to their new apiary. So made it to the brand new apiary site. It's surprisingly light for kind of half 9 at night. It is very, very close to the summer solstice or the spring solstice. I always forget which one, but the longest day of the year. So it's half 9 and it's kind of fully daylight still, which is amazing. I can hear the bees buzzing in the back of the car, but I'll flip the camera around and I'll show you my brand new apiary. So you can see there's the track coming up. Obviously I've not given away the details of where this is, but here we go directly into it here, right onto the road. You can see I've got a few hives already on there. They're empty, they're ready to put the bees So what I'm going to do here, the farmer's given me permission to take down this post, put a fence post in, put a little gate in here, and then I'm going to put a couple of sleepers across that ditch to give me a bridge, which means that I can park there and I've got my apiary directly next to the site. Absolutely brilliant. And as I said, we are in the middle of nowhere. We're about 2.5 miles in away from a road here, middle of nowhere. Absolutely brilliant. I'll stop talking for a second and I'll just let you hear the sounds of what I can hear. Right, so there we go, all set up. Boy, that was like serious workout. Check out the hair, absolute crazy hair at the moment. Not had a haircut for months, but that was hard work. It was very, very mild and muggy tonight, which I'm hoping means it'll bring thunderstorms, but I think once those thunderstorms clear through I think we're going to be in for some really nice weather, fingers crossed. But we're set up at the new apiary finally, and I'll give you again just a couple of seconds of silence, which is— I love it here, absolutely love it here. It is just a panorama all the way around there, which I'm not going to show you because it might give it away, but believe me, it is absolutely beautiful. Let's take a look at the hives, let's open them up, let's get the bees flying, and then we've got ourselves a brand new apiary. Apery site setup. So all of the nucs have come in Payne's poly boxes, but they're going to soon be cycled out. This is going to be a 100% Abello Lyson site. You can see the Abello stands, brilliant for this kind of terrain here which is incredibly uneven. You can see the adjustable legs there mean that I can have fully flat and level stands. Love these stands. And then I've got my 9-frame Lyson Langstroth hives that I'm going to run exclusively on this site. Got a little mini stand there, going to extend that one out just like this one over here so you've got the double legs so you can get You can get 6 hives at a push, but I like to run 4 on these. But at the moment I've just got these 2 on, and then I've got another 8 nucs over here. Again, a bellow stand's brilliant for this kind of terrain. Definitely going to trip up here in a minute, but I think the bees and the nucs and the hives are going to be very, very happy here. So I'm just going to put the mic right up next to this hive so you can hear them desperate to come out, but they've been inside for about 5 minutes now settling down. They'll definitely rush out, try and get me, but I'm not going to bother putting the bee suit on. There'll just be a few stragglers coming out. You can see though, do it late at night, you might get the odd one or two that come out, but you really don't get loads. Even on the busy ones, they realize that it's nighttime and they don't want to Come out of the nuc. And there we go, a brand new apiary site complete. I'm so excited about this apiary site. You are going to see a lot of it on my YouTube channel because it is just the perfect site for filming. Going to be really nice throughout the seasons, excellent forage, very easy access if you know where to get to it. But even better than that, I'm going to put every single type of the bees that we sell, the queens that we sell at blackmountainhoney.co.uk, in this apiary so I can show you exactly what they can do.
