National Beehive Frames - Converting From National Deep To 14 x 12

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. So it's about 20 degrees here today. I'm doing a really, really quick manipulation that I need to do. I just thought I'd get the camera out and show you exactly how I do it. So today we're going to be replacing the national brood box. That is a standard kind of brood box deep that you'd get in the UK with the DN4 frame. I'm going to be replacing that with a 14 by 12 brood box. Now I'm doing that on all my colonies this year. These are the colonies that I've adopted from a deceased beekeeper. They're going really, really well, but they're in wood and I like to keep all of my hives in poly. But I am doing this across all of my hives at the moment. So I'm just going to give you a kind of a taste of how I actually conduct that manipulation. So the way these hives are set up at the moment is you've got the normal floor, my standard underfloor entrance, and then you've got a wooden National brood And then I've got a multi-purpose crown board and I've got fondant on top. If you were going to treat these as a normal colony at this time of year, I would probably take the feed off, add a super on, and let them expand that way. Because the, the weather's not perfect at the moment and because I'm looking to expand that brood further down, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the 14 by 12 brood box underneath the national brood box. Just getting a few pings from these bees. I've not got any smoke on them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the 14 by 12 brood box, put that underneath the deep brood box, and that way the brood can expand downwards. I can keep my feed on top, which means that they can make use of the found— of the fondant that's still there, and they can use that to draw out the combs. So they'll go out, they'll get some water, they'll break down the fondant, and they'll use that as a fuel to draw out the foundation in the 14x12 box. And then when I see that we're on a really, really good flow, what I'll do is I will remove the fondant, I will find the queen, I will place the queen on a single frame underneath a queen excluder. So you'll have a 14x12 brood box with a, with a single frame of brood and the queen underneath. I'll then put the queen excluder on top and then the standard brood box with Brood in all stages on top of that. I'll leave that for 4 weeks, so obviously you've got the standard brood cycle of 3 weeks. I'll leave that for 4 weeks and then I know that I've not got any brood in that top box and I can safely remove it and all my brood will be below. Or more than likely what I'll do is I'll just leave that box on and I'll use that as a super going forward. So we'll crack on with it. I've not got any smoke on these bees today, so they might be a little bit feisty. We'll do it as quick as we possibly can. They should be all right though, it's a nice day, they're out foraging, so hopefully they won't bother me too much. So the easiest way to do it is just remove the brood box as a whole. Take your new brood box and place it on the floor. Depends if you want it the cold way or the warm way. I always favor the warm way because I like to work from behind, stops any twisting. Appreciate others don't. Um, I put a dummy board in there eventually so you can see the gap. It's a bit annoying, you can only get 10 frames in. I've got dummy boards that go in there, but you don't need that just yet. And then I take my brood box. So we've got some brood on that frame, both sides. Really nice shaped brood on that side, and there, standard cluster shape. Again, really nice shape, size of brood on there, a few bees with pollen on, a couple of random drones, which is good. There's the queen on that one. I'll bring her around so you can see her. So there's the queen, busy laying her eggs. It's a red queen, so she's getting on a little bit. Really nice-looking queen though. Nice calm bees. Looks a bit like patchy brood there. It's not patchy brood, it's just kind of brood in all stages. She's laid all of that up with eggs. The same on that side, you can see really nice ring of brood. All of this is fresh eggs, she's laid it all out. Just a bit of brace comb. Nice bees, not fussed by me looking at them at all, which is good. So that's 4 frames of brood so far. Another nice frame of brood. Really nice temperament bees, you can see lots of young bees in there. And again, another really nice frame of brood. Nice pattern, nice calm bees, plenty of pollen, plenty of stores. And that's the end of the brood now, so we're on to pollen frames. These are really nice-looking pollen frames, absolutely full. So we won't go any further. So we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 7 frames of brood. That's a really nice colony for this time of year. So we'll put the fondant back on, and then we'll put the roof back on. So like I said, the benefit of putting the brood box underneath like this, there's a few really big advantages to it. So one is I can still continue to feed. I don't want to take that feed off yet because I want the colony to continue to expand. Um, putting the brood box underneath Means that the brood will naturally go down and build downwards, as opposed to if you put it on top, they're more likely to keep the brood in the lower box and store honey in the upper box, and then that's not what I want. I'd have to do an additional manipulation. So they're the real benefits to that. So what I'll do is I'll give it like 3 weeks, I'll let that colony build up as much as it can, it will start to move down, draw out those frames, and then I'll find that queen, I'll put her in the bottom box I'll put a queen excluder in between the two. At that point, I'll take the fondant off, and then that colony is good to go. It's in a standard kind of spring setup, which would be brood box at the bottom, queen excluder, and then boxes above which act as supers. It doesn't matter what size they are. So another thing to say is you can use this method for any change of frame. So if you're on a commercial, if you're on a Langstroth, if you're on a Manley, or any of these other kind of frame types and you want to convert to another one, you can use this method, and all you need to do is you cut out a piece of ply the size of the lower box, the same exterior dimension, and then you cut a hole in the ply that has the same exterior dimension of the upper box and place it on top. It looks a bit ugly for a few weeks, it works really, really well though, and then all you do is you don't do the queen excluder after that, you just remove the box that you don't want and go and put it on another hive. So really, really good tip for if you need to change frames, that's how I would do it. So we'll move on, we'll just do the rest of these now and we'll call it a day. So bees happily chomping through their fondant. So this is worth zooming in on. Changed these floors about 6 weeks ago. You've got mummies on the base, so that's a classic sign of chalkbrood. Always happens at this time of year. You find a few colonies with chalkbrood. Sometimes it clears itself up. A floor like this is really good for managing chalkbrood, but ultimately it comes down to the queen. If she's susceptible to it, you will get chalkbrood. So you've got a nice clean floor. Make sure there's none of them there. So you've got a nice clean floor. I'll replace that back on and I will monitor this hive. So same as before, position your new 14 by 12 box there. You want to take your old brood box, make sure the frames are aligned the same way. Good amount of stores in there still. So that colony has really, really come on in just 2 weeks. It's added on like 2 or 3 additional frames of bees. I'm not going to go into this one and check the brood. I'm just going to kind of monitor it. I'm going to come back at a later point and I'm going to check that for signs of chalkbrood. If we can't get it to kind of— if we can't resolve it through cleaning out that floor and increasing the airflow, then we'll have to requeen. But like I say, I find a lot of chalkbrood this time of year, and sometimes if you just do those quick manipulations, it can clear it up itself. It's a really, really easy disease. To get rid of, so don't worry about it if you see those mummies on your floor. So over to our final hive here. Still got absolutely tons of fondant on there, which is good. Any fondant that we don't use and we take off, we use to build nucs up throughout the year, so we never waste our fondant. And would you take a look at that? There's fresh nectar coming into this hive. They're absolutely jam-packed full of bees. Really, really nice to see. Why, why, why can't they all be like that? That is what we want to see this time of year. This colony needs action being taken to it straight away. This colony will swarm within a few weeks if you don't take any action. Now, that action can be Adding additional space in the brood area, adding additional supers or splits. You need to take action on that one, they're running out of space ASAP. So we're going to do that manipulation today. It's a very simple manipulation to do. No chalk brood on this colony, which is good to see. So the manipulation we're going to do is we're going to do the same as the others, we're going to add additional space Temporarily in the brood area. We're going to try and get them to transfer out this comb, draw it out nicely, and then we'll use the top one as a super. Bit feistier, this colony. These are the first kind of— first times I've ever even opened them up. Thing with me is though, I don't mind feisty bees. They're a bit flappy, but they're not trying to sting me. They're just protecting their home. Okay. So that was really good fun. I've had real good fun here today kind of checking over these colonies. It's always nice to see really, really good strong colonies coming out of winter. I'll definitely use a bit of smoke here next time, try and keep the bees a little bit calmer, but I just wanted to give you kind of a feel for what I'm doing when I'm replacing brood boxes or replacing the kind of format of frames that I'm using in early spring. My method would always be leave your feeders on. If you If there's not ample kind of forage around at the moment, or if you're trying to draw out boxes, you can leave your feeders on. I'd always put the brood box underneath and try and get them to draw downwards. Otherwise, the new box that you put on top is likely to get stuffed full of honey, which is not the idea of this. The idea is to get them to move their brood area into a new box. Best way I find of doing that is putting it underneath and attracting them downwards like that. So these don't need to be looked at now for another couple of weeks. So I will report back and let you know how it's going on, but we'll do another video showing you the next piece of the manipulation. And just to summarize what it will be again, I'm going to take a single frame of brood with the queen on it, and I will put her downstairs in the lower box. I'll then split the boxes with a queen excluder, which means the queen can't go up from this box into this box. The worker— sorry, the nurse bees will move down to accompany the queen bee, and then they'll fill that bottom box with brood. After 3 to 4 weeks, all of the top box will be removed from brood, and then they can use that as a super. Really, really good method to stop swarming this time of year. Good method to get them into a different size box or different size frames if that's what you need. So that's it for this episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I really hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every single video, and I'll see you next time.