In this episode of the No Nonsense Beekeeping series, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates how to inspect a nucleus colony during cold, windy weather. He shows the bees covering nine frames, explains the use of a brood box as a super, and discusses the importance of queen excluders and additional space. Laurence inspects without smoke, noting that cooler temperatures make bees more agitated, and advises using a smoker to calm them. The inspection reveals a fully populated brood box with eggs, a visible queen, abundant food, no disease, and no swarm cells, indicating a healthy, strong colony after a rapid growth spurt in week four. He concludes with a call to subscribe and stay tuned for future episodes.
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So the bees seem in a reasonable mood, and the bees are easily covering 9 frames here. Get the queen excluders on, get your supers on, they need extra space. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. It's episode 4 of the My First Nucleus series, and we're going to get inside those bees and see what they've been up to. So the past week has been very, very cold. I came here today preparing to show you how to inspect your bees, or what you can do to inspect your bees on a cold day, because sometimes it is just too cold and too windy to get in there and actually do anything. I've turned up at about 4 o'clock and they're flying quite well, and it's about 12 or 13 degrees, so it's probably borderline going in there, but they're flying, so I'm taking that as an indication that they're good to inspect. So in this video, as always, I'm going to give you a picture of every single frame. I'm going to talk to you about how many frames the bees are covering, and we're just going to take a look and see how the bees are getting on.
So I'll get my hood on and let's get inside those bees.
So the bees are up working in the super, which is fantastic to see. Remember, this colony, we're using a brood box as a super, and they're covering about 4 or 5 frames in the, in the super upstairs, which is really good. Exceptional growth at this time of year. You really do notice them boom. It's nice to see them up here, so really happy to see Bees upstairs in the super. So I thought I'd try inspecting them without smoke this week, and it just goes to show, when you're inspecting them and it's not the best weather— so it's only around 12 degrees here today— you've got pretty much all of the bees in the hive and they get ratty. So if this happens, get your smoker out, it really does calm them down. So you can see the colony has now completely filled up that brood box, so they're over every single one of those 10 frames. Lots and lots of bees. We'll get them out now and have a look at the frames. So that's all 10 frames. As you can see, the colony has come on so much in a week, and you do get that around week 4. You get this huge boost in numbers because it's the first round of brood that is all emerging. But that's it for today. We've done our inspection. The brood box is now full of bees. No disease, plenty of food, no swarm cells. We've seen eggs, we've seen the queen. We've done all of our normal inspections. The bees are looking really, really healthy, really strong, but they're a little bit annoyed with me opening them up today. They probably think it's a bit too cold. So that's it for this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
