In this episode of the "One Colony No Splits" series, Laurence Edwards walks viewers through a late‑season hive manipulation aimed at preventing swarming and optimizing honey collection before the summer solstice. He explains the timing of the operation (mid‑June, one week before the solstice) and why the risk of swarming is low at this point. Edwards introduces a new 14 × 12 drawn‑comb box, re‑uses boxes from a failed drone‑laying queen colony, and details a second Demaree split performed in a slightly altered configuration. He describes lifting the three existing brood boxes, placing the new 14 × 12 box on top, moving the queen onto a single frame of brood, and inserting a queen excluder to create a large stacked colony with the queen on the floor. Throughout the process he inspects frames for eggs, brood, and swarm cells, notes the current nectar gap, and ensures that any boxes previously treated with Apivar are kept away from honey supers. After the split, he rebuilds the hive stack in reverse order of honey volume, keeping empty or lightly loaded boxes close to the queen to give the impression of ample space, and positions the heavy, honey‑filled boxes higher. He ends with a visual of the final high stack, outlines the plan to run the colony as a single brood box with weekly inspections, and expresses cautious optimism that the colony will stay swarm‑free for the remainder of the season.
Chapters
We've made it to the middle of June. We're 1 week away from the summer solstice. That is the target, to make sure they don't swarm before the solstice. Now I'm going to do one more manipulation to break the brood up again, give the queen lots of space down in the brood area, and organize the boxes effectively so I've got boxes that are viable for honey collection. If you followed the series all the way through, you would have seen various manipulations moving the boxes around. We're tweaking things a lot here. Always need to think one step ahead. So what I'm thinking about at the moment is I'm getting to the point where we're past the solstice, we're past the longest day of the year, the bees are much less likely to swarm. So I want to get my boxes in a good configuration in order that I can collect honey in them. No point configuring things at this stage and trying to think, well, I'll switch it around again and I'll do this. It's almost too late. This is the last chance. Just about getting to the point where the bramble's opening up here. Himalayan balsam's very nearly in flower as well. They are going to be collecting honey like it's going out of fashion, and I need to make sure that any boxes that have had Apivar strips in them are nowhere near honey collection zones. That's what I'm going to do in today's video. We'll do another snapshot of it, take a look, and I'll rearrange those boxes to make sure that we get them in the perfect format. I'll get my bee suit on. Let's go and take a look. Right, so it probably won't surprise you, we're going to add another box into the system. This is a 14 by 12 box full of drawn comb. Although you can do it with foundation, and you'd probably argue that it's better with foundation as well, this is just what I've got to hand. This is a colony that failed due to a drone-laying queen. I'm reusing all of these boxes now. I'll give you a quick close-up on this box, and then I'll show you what I'm gonna do with it. So here's my box, standard 14 by 12. You can see it's been well used, been attacked by a badger as well. I'll pull out a couple of the frames just to show you the drone-laying damage that I've got on there. Relatively minor, and the bees will sort that straight away. So as you can see, nice used combs, little bit dark, but they're fine, no problem for a brood box. So right, what are we going to do? We're going to reperform another Demarest split. This is going to sound crazy, but you've got to remember where we are in the season. Coming towards the solstice means that we're really getting past the point where the colony wants to swarm. I know that's tempting fate, famous last words, and I'll say it and come back next week and they will have swarmed. But you've got to play the odds here, and you've got to assume that the worst part of the season is out of the way and you're setting the colony up Now for one last push to boost the numbers as big as you possibly can and also give them the impression that they've swarmed again. So we're going to rerun the Demarate. It's exactly the same thing, but we're going to rerun it in a slightly different way, slightly different configuration, in order to give us the best possible chance of getting the bees to put the honey where we want them to put the honey. So at the moment we've got 3 brood boxes, a National Deep, a National Deep, and a 14x12. I'm going to take all 3 of those boxes and I'm going to lift them to the top. I'm going to put the 14x12 box, that newest box that we put in there, at the very, very top of the stack. I'm then going to take the queen on a single frame of 14x12 brood and replace the brood box with this new brood box here and put the queen excluder above it. We are effectively going to end up with a very, very big stack of bees on a single 14x12 brood box, this new brood box that I've got on the floor. As always, it sounds like a lot of work, and in this case it's going to be a lot of work, a lot of heavy lifting. But all we need to do, find the queen, rejig the boxes, come back in 7 days, make sure they're not doing emergency cells, and then really you could leave this colony. And I would say even without further inspections, the chances of them swarming are very, very low. We'll continue this series though because I really do enjoy this series, and I've got high, high hopes for this colony. Before all of that's out the window though, let's get inside, double-check the queen's still there, double-check they've not swarmed, see how they're getting on. So this is amazing. I literally cannot even see what's going on. I've got the extra reach of the camera here, my gimbal giving me that extra reach. But if you look up at the moment, we've got 1, 2, 3, 4 supers, and then we've got all of those brood boxes down below. Really good to see though that we've still got bees flying in that top box, and you can see we've got a few old drones that are trapped up there as well. They're coming out for their first flight. So 2 supers, really heavy. National deep, really heavy. These 2 shallows, much lighter. Little bit of drawing out going on in there, not a huge amount though. And then we're down to the brood nest. So I'm gonna open it up, pull out some frames, do my weekly inspection, find that queen, and then we'll rejig things. So first thing I found, first frame, I found some eggs. Always nice to see eggs. Gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside in that I'm probably not gonna find swarm cells. Doesn't completely rule it out, but as soon as I see eggs, I'm always really happy with a colony. So no queen in the top box. What I'm seeing is quite a lot of brood, quite a lot of eggs. They're actually starting to backfill into this third box, which is a really good indication to me that a treble brood for them is way, way too much. I knew that anyway, but I just didn't want to give the queen any reason. And because I'm only going for one crop a year, it doesn't matter if I get that slightly wrong. This box here can work as a honey super. This one can work as a honey super. It's only that bottom box that's had the Apivar treatment that I cannot So, second national box complete. Just going to put this off to one side over here. Really interesting what's going on in there. Hardly any brood, hardly any eggs. Effectively a box full of bees and not much else on the frames. This is working really, really well. We are either kind of coming towards the end or have just come to the end of the June gap. Not seeing much nectar coming in, so I'm going to assume we're still in the middle of the gap, which can range around here from about, I don't know, 7 to 10 days. Yeah, it's a really good point. Something like that, Gemberly. I can see open blackberries, so I know the gap is coming to an end as soon as that starts to yield. And the queen has obviously lowered the amount of eggs that she's laying. They've cleared out these boxes here for me, which I'm now going to use as supers. So she's done all of the hard work. I'm expecting this box down here to see a little bit more brood, and hopefully we can find that queen. So there's my queen. Very, very distinctive queen, this one. You know, there's no cheating going on with this one. That is exactly the same queen that we clipped earlier on in the season, where she's got a wing that's a little bit Too short, and she's got some smeared paint on that wing as well. So I found the queen. I'm just going to get her now before she wanders off, and then we're going to put her into that new box. Really good though, no swarm cells, queen's still there. We've got them to the point where I think we're going to get them through. Right, so all I'm going to do is I'm going to take that frame, single frame with brood. It's got lots of emerging brood on here, it's got the queen on it, and I'm going to place that into my new brood box. Just on the floor at the moment, and then we're going to swap those boxes over. So I like to work quick now because that queen could just wander off on the floor. Highly unlikely that she will. Right, I've checked that brood box there, no signs of any swarm cells, quite a bit of brood, quite a lot of pollen, which is really good to see, and it means that I can cycle this box out. Show you how to do that now. Right, so first thing we're going to do is we're going to remove all the boxes. So we're back down now to a single floor floor, and all the bees are thinking, where has my beehive gone? Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put that new 14x12 brood box on there with a single frame of brood that I've pinched from the upper boxes and the queen. And that is my demarée complete in terms of my new brood area. Now on the original location, I've got that brood box, I put the queen excluder on, and then over here I've got my 3 old brood area boxes. So the original 14x12 and then the 2 National Deeps. That is interspersed with eggs, with brood, no cells, and a little bit of honey. What I'm then going to do is start building everything back up, and I'm doing it in reverse order. The idea here is you want as much distance as possible between the queen below the queen excluder and all of her brood. That's what makes them think they've swarmed, and that's what makes them draw out emergency cells, although they don't do it every time. And I find the later on in the year you do it, the less likely they are to draw those cells out. Don't know why, that tends to work though. So then I'm stacking everything up, and I'm stacking it up in reverse order of the amount of honey. So if you've got some boxes that are empty, you want to place them on as close to the queen as possible. The idea that the bees feel they've got more space, so they're going to start drawing out that area first. Then just keep on going, adding your supers back on until you get to a point where you've got all of your supers back on and a new brood box. Then we're going to stack up. We're going to go really high here. You want to get the old brood boxes back onto the top. And as we said, we're looking to cycle out a box The 14x12, so we're going to put that as high as we possibly can on the stack. So first off, one National Deep, then another National Deep, and then don't forget you should be one frame short in this new box because you've taken one out to put the queen in that new box below. So then finally you've got your original 14x12, and this is going to be so far out of shot and I definitely need a step to get up there. So I'm standing here now, I'm 6 foot 2-ish, and I've got my hand and I can't actually touch the top of the box. I've not even got the lid on yet, so I'm going to go up my step again, get that lid on, and then I'll show you just how tall it is. Right, so starting from the bottom, what have we got now? We've got one new 14 by 12 brood box, drawn comb, One frame of the original brood box with emerging brood and the queen. Then we've got a queen excluder. Then we've got 2 shallows in a row, they're just honey supers. And then we've got one national deep and another super that we use for storage. I've then got my 3 brood boxes that were down at the bottom all the way at the top. And as you can see, that is a very, very high stack. Right, so my straps are nowhere near big enough to get around this stack now. I'm going to stick a rock on the top. Not due to be too windy, so I think this should be okay. Fingers crossed it fall down. I think though this is going to work really, really well. So there we go, that's the episode complete. That's the final proper manipulation we're going to do on this colony. We're definitely going to take away at least one of those boxes, and then we're just going to run this colony as a single brood box and do weekly inspections. Hopefully we're past the worst of it now. I'll continue to do regular updates on this one though, see if we can keep that colony there and try and prevent this colony swarming at all costs.
