My First Nucleus - Episode 15 - Removing the Honey Crop

We're on to episode 15 of the My First Nuclear series, the last video in this apiary for this year before we move that colony to the heather. Let's go and check, see how they're getting on. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I cannot believe it, 15 episodes of the My First Nuclear series, and I went back and had a look at it the other day, and it did, it just Started off as a really small nucleus colony. We've built that up, we've dealt with issues such as chalk brood, we've requeened the colony, we've got 3 big national deeps on there as supers jam-packed full of honey, and now we're going to close everything up. We're going to take them up to the heather, see if we can get a heather crop. So what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show you a really crude way to take the honey off, and the reason it's a very crude way of taking the honey off is that The honey is probably not capped yet, so what I can't do is I can't go and harvest it. I don't want to go and piecemeal take frames out of my colony and say, right, I'm going to harvest this frame and I'm not going to harvest that frame. When you're moving bees to the heather, you do tend to find that you have an issue like this every year, in that some frames are capped, some frames aren't capped, some are a little bit high on the moisture content. So all I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to take off all of the honey supers, I'm going to shake the bees off them, And I'm going to go and take those honey supers with the honey in, and I'm going to go and place them on another strong colony. That strong colony is going to remain in this apiary here, and they will finish off the honey supers. They'll continue to fan down that nectar, turning it into honey, getting the moisture content down, and getting the honey capped. So although we kind of come to an end in this series in terms of the honey that they're producing in this colony, we're taking that colony, we're going to move it away. And we're essentially resetting everything in order to go and get them to fill nice clean boxes of foundation and drawn-out comb and to turn that into heather stores. So it'll make more sense when we get in and do the video. I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get my smoker lit, and I'll show you for a final time just how good this colony looks in this apiary.

So I told you I'd get around to strimming this apiary. Week 15 and I've done the first trim of the year, so it's been a bit difficult the past few weeks. We're up to speed again now though. The whole apiary is trimmed nice and tidy. I've got some walkways and get on with the beekeeping without getting stung by nettles or caught up in a long grass. So as I said in the video before, what we're going to do today is we're just going to shake off all of the bees. Now you can do this in so many different ways. You can put clearer boards in, you can use a bee brush, you can use a petrol mower to blow them off, although I know some people don't like that. Any way you want, you're going to clear all the bees from these boxes, and then if the honey's ripe and you've done a refractometer test on it, or it's all capped over, obviously just go ahead and harvest it. I've got various other colonies in this apiary already, and I don't want to have to go and just extract for one colony. So all I'm going to do, I'm just going to go through the frames, shake off all of the bees, and then go and put the 3 National Deeps on top of another colony. And then they'll finish off all of the boxes. That will leave me with one national deep and a queen excluder, and then I'll just put one national deep back on there, either foundation or drawn comb, and that's what I'm going to use to transport them up to the heather. So let's get in the colony, see how they're getting on. So as I said before, with the Demaray, you end up with some frames full of honey, some frames that are empty. So all I'm going to do is I'm just going to rearrange the frame. So I've just found a frame of Empty drawn comb in this top box here. Just going to start taking the empty ones out, put them to one side. I'll collect all of the nice honey capped frames or the ones that are full of honey. They're going to be the ones I'm going to transport over to other colonies, and then I'll just leave one of the national deeps on with the empty comb, and that's the box I'm going to use to transport them up to the heather. So it's not been the best week up here in terms of weather. There's been a lot of rain. Still lots of nectar coming in. And this here is nowhere near ready to harvest. You can see probably 10 or 15% capped on this frame here, but when you look down, if I was to do a shake test on this, some of that would come out. That is fresh nectar, so definitely don't want to be harvesting any of that. So I've just gone through this box here, and 3 of the combs are either empty or very, very close to being empty. So all I'm going to do is I'll pop them off to one side, I'll put this box off to one side now, And I'm just going to start transporting over the good capped frames into this box, and hopefully once I've worked my way down to the bottom, I'm just going to end up with a box of drawn-out frames that I can use to house these bees to take them to the heli. So again, side frames, nothing in them. They've definitely gone backwards a bit this week. These were full, they had some nectar in them. They're condensing that down, condensing it into frames, and it makes it a little bit easier for me now because I'm going to have enough space to to take a whole box of frames out and leave me with 2 really full boxes of honey. Now don't think that there's no honey in here. I reckon 7 or 8 of the frames in each box are like this, like capped completely on both sides. Really, really nice frames of honey. I'm gonna put those in the box over there now. Just going through, just to do a first pass, just to take out the weaker frames or the more empty frames. And there's a really nice amount of honey in this hive, so I'm very happy with the harvest here. And just lifting these boxes, even with 5 frames in, there is a lot of honey in there. So this is pretty much indicative of what most of the frames that I've got honey in and now are looking like. Really nice, big, heavy capped frames of honey. You can definitely extract a frame when it's looking like that. 90%, anything above 90% capped, and they are good to go. So we're going to have a really good crop from this colony. If I had to estimate here, I'd say we're talking about 60 or 70 pounds because we've got 2 national deeps absolutely chock-a-full of honey. Right, so I've got us to a point where I've got 2 boxes and a little bit more. These are all frames of honey over here. On this side over here, I've got a national deep at the bottom as my brood box, then I've got my queen excluder, then I've got an empty national deep. I'm going to take each frame, I'm going to shake all the bees off back into the colony. I'll Put the frames of honey back in the box over there, take them to another colony, and then I'm going to backfill this box here with frames, all of the empty frames or partially drawn out frames from the colony. Then we're good to go up to the headland. So I'm just going through now, backfilling this box up with the frames. These are either empty frames, foundation Or the ones that really don't have that much in it at all. Doesn't matter if there's a bit of stores in there though, because it's just going to get filled up with heather honey. We'll loosen it and then we'll extract it out. Obviously you don't want big frames of honey in here. Probably on an absolute maximum got about 2 or 3% of honey as a whole box. Right, before I go and do anything else, I'm going to take my 2 boxes full of honey and I'm going to go and put them on the very top of a very strong hive. That way there's no interference by any of the Few remaining bees in there. They're not going to go down and kill the queen. Make sure you put it on the strongest hives that you've got though if you're going to do this. Put it onto a weak hive, likelihood is they'll get robbed out and you will lose all of that honey. So there we go, that's the end of the video and the end of the series in this apiary. I'm not going to go into the brood box this week, or I'm not going to show you that on the video. I'll do a quick inspection just to double-check for swarm cells, but that's quite disruptive for this colony here. So I'm just going to let them get on with it. I'll get the lid back on, I'll let them settle down, and then the next episode you'll see me here. I'll plug the entrance and then we'll take them up to the heather, try and get them up there for when the heather flows start. So as always, I hope you enjoyed the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.