One Colony No Splits - A Massive Honey Harvest - WOW - Ep 14

We have come to the end of the season down at the River Apiary. Today I'm doing the final video on the series of how to get your bees to not swarm. It's the first week of August, the flow has pretty much stopped dead here, the honey harvest is very good. In this video, I'm going to go through every single box in the stack, and I'm hopefully going to show you for a final time that the queen hasn't swarmed. I'll do a recap of this series in the winter, but for today's video, we're just going to be looking for honey and that queen. So I'll get my bee suit on, let's see if the bees have swarmed. Right, so you might have noticed that this colony is actually in a slightly different position in the apiary. Used to be about 30 yards over there. What I've done is I've made up some splits. I've put a new nucleus colony in the original position with some brood. I'll add a queen to that at a later date, and I've been bleeding off all of the flying bees from here over to the original location where I've made up my nuc. Really simple way to make a split and a really good use for all of those additional flying forager bees that you've got up in your supers. Not going to cover that in this video though, but it's a little bit of an explanation, A, as to why we're in a different position, and B, as to why there's probably going less bees than normal. It definitely makes getting the supers off a lot easier as well. Right, let's get inside, take a look how the bees are getting on. So even with all that bleeding, you can see the top box is still pretty much full of bees. I knew this manipulation would give you lots and lots of bees, but there's no point in having lots of bees unless you also get lots and lots of honey. Always nice to open it up at the top though and see lots of bees. Generally means they're not going to have swarmed. Right, that is incredibly heavy. Big top, national deep box. Oh my God, that's so heavy. Right, as it's the final video, it will go forever. Every single box, I'll pull out a couple of the central frames. This one here, pretty much every frame in the box is like that. Beautiful amounts of honey, perfectly capped, ripe for extraction. Gonna be really nice, this one. Look at these frames, beautifully capped frames, very, very heavy, maybe a little bit narrow. I always get annoyed when I do this and I get the spacing a bit wrong. Definitely something for me to work on in the future. I love my shallows where I've got the castellations in. and I'll often get the spacing a little bit wrong when I do it with the National Deeps. So beautiful frame of honey, gonna be a nightmare to extract. Right, more of the same on this box here. Very, very heavy. I'll put it down and pull out some frames. So again, next box down, 2 beautifully capped frames, very heavy box. Moisture content is gonna be perfect in here. I think we're gonna get a bumper crop from this colony. Right, we're onto some of the shallows now. Really good weight in these shallows. Let's take a look at some of the frames. So I think you kind of get the idea where we're going with this. The bees have done Very, very well indeed. All of that honey in there, vast majority of it is capped. Really good position to be in. This is going to be a very, very nice harvest. You can kind of see what I mean about the thickness. These ones here, you've got the castellations in there, and it means it's so much easier to actually go away and extract it, especially when you're using an uncapping machine. But even if you're just using a knife or an uncapping fork, much easier when you get that really good thickness onto the frame like that. Definitely something I need to get better at and something I'm going to work on over the winter. Right, pretty much Looks more of the same, not quite as heavy this one, but still really, really good weight. I'll pull out some of the nice looking frames in here. So again, lots of nice capped frames. Bees have really done well here. What you can see on this one though is they've not quite gone up to the edge there. A couple of frames like that in here where the bees have just not completed it. If I gave them a little bit more time, they might do it, but this honey's right for the taking. I don't want the bees to go backwards and start eating this honey when I can just feed them syrup. Right, another really heavy, deep box of honey. You'll notice I've got a single new comb in there. That's where I was making up my splits, took a frame out of here for the bees. Oh my God, this is so heavy. Let's get inside, take a look. So as we get closer to the brood box, you can see that the amount of honey is slightly diminishing, but also we're getting frames like this where you've got a little bit of pollen in there. That's definitely not a good thing, and it is a slight frustration with this method that you do get frames that have got pollen in. But it's a necessary evil for me. I can balance them out in the extractor and I can reuse these frames with the pollen in, in the next spring. So we're doing quite well. This one here is by far and away the lightest box so far. Shows that I probably oversupered them a little bit, but there's still a decent amount in here. So I'll pull out a couple of the frames and show you just how much they've drawn this out, how much honey they've put into it. And remember, with this one, this started off the year as foundation. So as you can see with this box, not a huge amount of activity actually going on here. Got a little bit of honey, a little bit of capped stores, decent amount of nectar, some pollen in there as well. I would say I'm probably not even going to bother extracting these frames, but I'll take them nonetheless because I don't want to leave them on the colony. I'm going to do my feeding, I'm going to start Apivar strips today, so I don't want supers anywhere near. And then my final National Shallow, similar to the other one, ever so slightly heavier. I'll pull out a couple of frames and maybe I'll mix and match between the two and take the best frames from both. So you can see on this one again, a little bit of honey in there. Very interesting to see we do have fresh nectar still coming in. Probably explains why we've got such a good temperament on this colony. I thought it was going to be really bad today, but the weather is nice. It is a river apiary. The Himalayan balsam is in flow, so maybe that session where there's not a huge amount of honey is still yet to come. What would I do with a frame like this? Very, very difficult to judge actually, because you're never going to get it to a point where everything is perfectly ripe. I like to take these ones off and then I'll make a decision in the extracting room what I'm going to do. You could nadir them, but I don't like to do that because I like to get my treatments on today, get them fed. It's a difficult decision and one that I'll probably cover on a separate video. Right, total yield. I've got 3 national deeps that are heaving with honey, 2 national shallows that are really full with honey, and then another 2 national shallows that haven't got quite as much in. I would say if you discount the top 2 completely, we've got there 3 national deeps, 2 national shallows. I'd say a conservative estimate is going to be around the £100 mark. North Wales, I am more than happy with that. Still got a really decent amount of bees here in the brood nest. If we get this queen out, I'll be so happy. And I have to say, I'm relatively confident because I don't think I've lost a swarm. Going by the number of bees that are left in here. And there we go, that pretty much is the series complete. We've got all the way through the season and the bees haven't swarmed. You can see the queen in the center of the frame there, she's constantly laying it up. I've got another 10 big frames of brood in there, brood in all stages, eggs and larvae, capped brood. This queen has performed very, very well throughout the season. So before I close this one up, the final note that I would say in there is that the brood box is packed full of bees, 10 frames of brood with literally no stores whatsoever. So just be warned, be wary when you're taking off all your honey. If you've got a brood box like that and that amount of bees in there, they can starve overnight. They really can perish that quickly. What I like to do, I'll get all of my honey in the car, I'll leave the roofs on, but I won't strap them back up. Once the honey is all in the back of the truck, I'll get the syrup out, I'll get my Apivar strips out, I go through, put the Apivar strips in the brood box, Put some syrup in the feeder, and then I can leave the apiary safe in the knowledge that I'm already starting to reduce that mite count. And again, that's going to be another video as to when is the best time to start doing that mite treatment. But the bigger one for me is making sure they've got some last-minute feed, just to make sure that you're not killing your bees on the day you take your honey off. I really hope you've enjoyed this series. It's been really fun for me. I know I say that it's kind of mission complete, we've got all the way through the season and the colony hasn't Swarmed. I am aware that it is the first week of August. This colony could continue to swarm, but for me it's not worth the time coming in and doing the inspections anymore. I've got a good honey crop off it. I would say now, if I've got 15 colonies in an apiary, we take the honey off first or second week of August, the chances are I might lose one colony as a swarm. And realistically, in most seasons I don't tend to lose swarms that late in the year, and you know that through the presence of a marked queen in April or May. So for me, the series is over. It's not to say that the colony won't swarm now, but it's entirely up to you whether you accept that risk or you continue doing your inspections. I hope you enjoyed that series. I really enjoyed it. Lots of honey, prolific queen. She's done the business, built up from a really small cluster of bees into an absolute monster of a colony. Didn't swarm, stuck around for the whole year, and I reckon she's given me £100 of honey.