My First Nucleus - Episode 10 - Checking the Demaree Split and Preventing Swarms

In order to do this preemptive demarate, it works better, I find, if you've got boxes of supers on already, and it works better if the boxes are full of bees as well. I'm just going to summarize what we've done again. So that bottom box you can see at the bottom, that is a brand new national deep that has got one queen, the only queen in the colony, one frame of capped brood, no queen cells, And then I filled the rest of the box with either foundation or drawn comb. Then I've got my queen excluder, then I've got my 2 supers, and then I've got the original brood box that was at the bottom before full of all my brood. So effectively tip the hive upside down like that. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, episode 10. 10 weeks in a row of the My First Nuclear series. And the bees are doing really, really well. The weather, after a terrible start, has just dramatically turned around. It's been pretty much 4 weeks of perfect bee weather. So all I'm going to do in this video, same thing I do in every single one of these videos, I'll go through the brood box, I'll show you how that colony is expanding down there, we'll take a look at the brood, some of that F1 Buckfast brood. You're going to have really nice capped brood down there now. I'll show you how that brood nest is I'm going to go through all of the original brood nests that we moved up to the top in the last episode, show you what the status is of that box, show you how they're backfilling the emerging brood space with honey, and I'm going to show you how they've pulled out emergency cells there as well. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get my smoker on, we'll jump straight in, see how the bees are doing. Right, so today we're going to start on the top box, and I'll just recap what we did last week again. We took the original brood box We lifted that up to the top, and the only thing we left downstairs in the new brood area was a single frame of capped brood and the queen, and then we were looking for her to expand. So what we're expecting to find today up in this top box here is sealed brood, and we'll find some emergency queen cells as well. Now, a number of people commented about the use of this queen excluder on this level here, and the fact is, is you don't actually need to use that queen excluder. I always put that queen excluder there because I often run a separate entrance at the top for requeening colonies. And I'm going to cover all of that in a separate video. So I always put that in just in case I want to requeen the colony or something happens downstairs. Also means that if you miss any cells, it's a little bit of a safety net just to stop the queens killing each other. Fact is though, if you do this on your colonies, you don't need this queen excluder here unless you want to do some requeening at the top and run 2 concurrent queens. If you do it like I've done here, we'll find it today. You'll see a few drones stuck in the queen excluder, and I'll take a look and I'll see how I want to take this one forward. So I'm going to look into this top box here first. Like I said, we're expecting to see emergency queen cells, a little bit of backfilling of honey, hopefully lots of bees. So this is the top box. As you can see here, not a huge amount of bees. I did just give them a good puff of smoke to get them down, but there's plenty of brood in here. So I'm just going to flash up now a few different pictures of some frames, but this is what that So I've got a few empty frames up here, and if you remember a couple of weeks back, I exchanged the honeybound frames. So we've still got some empty frames up in this top box, and then you see we've got frames of capped brood up here. And as you can see, I'll flash up a couple of close-ups now, we've got some emergency cells on these frames. Now, if you do this manipulation and the bees don't draw emergency cells, don't worry about it, you've not done it wrong. Yeah, they're just not ready for it. They don't always draw emergency cells. It depends how far away you get them from the colony downstairs and if the bees feel like drawing emergency cells. So it doesn't always happen. What you need to do though is if you do find emergency cells, you need to make sure you take them all down. So as I went through all of the frames there, there was one emergency cell with a larva with some royal jelly in it. So they did prepare a charged open cell, which I've just taken down. So this is what the queen excluder is looking like, and yeah, unfortunately we do have a few stuck drones in that queen excluder. If you don't want this to happen, do put an additional entrance up top. They can cope with that easily at this time of year, but I find if you're doing it for a few days, what you tend to find is you'll get a few stuck, but yeah, most of the drones will just kind of stand around on the top waiting to be fed. Not too much of an issue. I'll shake them off now and they can go back in through the entrance. So then we're on to one of our second supers. We've got 2 National Deeps on here. Lots of bees in there, really looking nice. I'll pull out a few frames and I'll show you how much honey they've stored in these 2 supers above the brood box downstairs. So lots of honey being stored in these 2 middle boxes. This is the top box, couple of nice centre frames there packed full of honey, loads of weight in these boxes as well. Probably 50% capped on this frame here, lots of And lots of honey going in. Really good to see. We've had such good weather here in North Wales and the bees are making the most of it and pulling in all of that honey. So then we move on to the next box down. This is the super directly above the queen excluder, which happens to be a National Deep. And again, lots and lots of bees in here. Few more grumpy bees down here because we're getting closer and closer to that brood box. And like I say, it does take a good kind of 6 to 8 weeks to get them really, really nice and gentle after requeening. But what I'm seeing here is very good. Big strong colony. That top super that I just took off probably weighing around 20 pounds of honey, I reckon. This one here looks even more full. I'll grab a couple of frames out now and I'll just show you how much honey these guys are pulling in. So there you go. Yeah, they're definitely getting a little bit more grumpy with me now, but there's another 2 frames from the bottom super this time, nearly all capped. But look at those bees, like they They are jamming that honey in. Really, really good to see. That box there weighs a ton. It's at least 30 pounds of honey. So the bees, they're doing their job. We'll get down now, take a look in that brood box and see how much that queen has expanded that brood area. So I've completely disassembled that box there and okay, the bees aren't quite as friendly anymore, but you can see what we're doing here with this Demaray is that we've got the brood area down there. Tons of room for the queen to lay. You've got a big national deep full of honey, full of bees, another national deep full of honey, full of bees, loads of brood frames up here. This is the top brood box that we've got at the very top of the colony. It just works really well, gives you massive, big, strong colonies of bees, really perfectly poised to bring in a big honey crop. So I'm going to get inside the brood box now. The downstairs brood box, and I'm gonna show you the queen, and I'm gonna show you the brood that she's laying out and how that brood nest is expanding. So this is the brood nest downstairs, and as you can see, it's not completely full. Just pulled a couple of frames away there, probably over like 4 or 5 frames in the middle. You can see where the bees are clustered up there, and that's really what you wanna see. You don't necessarily wanna see this box completely full of bees. You wanna give the queen that space That's what this manipulation is all about. So I'll pull out some frames now, hopefully show you the queen if she's not chilling out on the floor again, and I'll show you some of that brood pattern as well. All right, so we found the queen first time today. She's pretty nippy, this one, but she's definitely still there. She's learned that she's got loads of different frames to lay on, and she really is doing the business, laying up every single cell that she possibly can. Nice to find the queen though, and nice to see that she is actually back on the frames for once. So here's the first frame. As you can see, they're just getting ready to cap all of that over. Lots of nice big chubby white larva all around the center there, capped brood in the middle, and then eggs all the way around the side. So she's laying it up really, really nicely. Then we've got another frame here, no capped brood, but you can see they're very, very close to capping that up all over the frame, right into the very corner. Hopefully you can see that. Eggs right down in the corner. She's making the most of all of that space, and that is the whole point of the Demarate, is to give her additional space to lay. And then final frame down in the brood area. This was the original big capped frame of brood that we put in there. That will all be emerging now, but it just goes to show we're already on 4 frames of brood down in that new brood area. She's doing exactly what she's supposed to do, which is expanding that brood nest down there as as quick as she possibly can, which means that we can target some of the late summer flows, hopefully reduce the chance of her swarming because we've given her additional space. So there we go, manipulation complete. The further I got down, the more grumpy they become. But do stay tuned to the rest of this series, probably going to get another 10 episodes, and you really will see week by week, the further we go down, the closer to the brood nest we become, the bees will become more and more calm. due to that new queen. But the Demaray is working perfectly. We've now got this top box that we'll put back on. We're gonna stack everything back up together. We've got a new brood area, loads of space for the queen, no honey stores in there whatsoever, no swarm cells, loads of space for her to lay. Then the queen excluder, then 2 National Deeps as supers. Then I've got my other queen excluder, which you don't need anymore, 'cause I've decided I'm not gonna do any requeening on this colony. And obviously I don't need to 'cause it's a new queen anyway. Put everything back together now, exactly the same order in which you took it apart, and then I'll talk to you a little bit more about the next steps. Right, so that's everything back together again. Remember, I've got my brood, emerging brood up here. I've taken down all of my emergency swarm cells from this top box. I've removed the queen excluder because I didn't really need that in the first place, but I just wanted to put it there just to show you if you're gonna re-cream with a top entrance where that should go. So effectively now I've got 3 boxes that will all be supers, all be used for honey production. This top box here still got some capped brood that's going to emerge. Then I've got my queen excluder. Then I've got my downstairs brood area with 4 frames of brood in all stages with my queen. And then I've got 4 frames of drawn comb foundation with nothing in it. Plenty of space for that queen to expand. That's pretty much it. The Demeray is such a Simple technique, really, really not that difficult at all. But in terms of this manipulation, we are complete. We're completely back to normal now. They are hopelessly queenless upstairs, i.e., there's no queen in this top box and there's no resources to create a new queen. So we could just treat that as a honey super from now on. You don't need to go in and do any further inspections in there to knock down any further cells because they don't have the capacity to make them. Then we've got another super full of honey, another super full of honey. We're just going to go back and return to normal weekly inspections in the brood nest, checking for swarm cells. So that's it for the video. I hope you enjoyed that one. 10 weeks in a row we've been doing this series. I've really enjoyed it. It's good to document what can happen, and it's great because there's no hiding from you as well, because it's not like I can just take a video and say, oh, I'm not going to post that one, or I've done something wrong and I can hide it from people on YouTube. So you get to see everything, warts and all, with this. Week by week updates on this colony, but things are going very, very well. Final thing I'll say is if you do remember, the reason that we requeened this colony in the first place was to try and get rid of the really bad chalk brood problem. There is still chalk brood up in this top box, but I'm going to wait until we get a full round of brood downstairs in the new brood box, and then we can evaluate that position again. Looking at it though, anything that I've seen down there looks really, really good, so hopefully The introduction of that new queen has stopped the chalkbrood issue. Hopefully it won't come back to this colony. So I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. 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.