Splitting The Beehive - Making A Nuc With A Mated Queen - Step-by-Step

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. You may have noticed I've had a bit of a haircut, so excuse the bald head. The barbershop wasn't open, so I had to take matters into my own hands. And as you know, we go for no-nonsense styles here at No Nonsense Beekeeping, so I've got a bald head for the next few weeks. Today I'm going to show you how to make up a nuc using your existing colonies and a mated queen. So I've got a few additional mated queens early in the season this year, some of them kind of from dwindled colonies. The bees, the queens are absolutely fine, the colony just hasn't made it through. So there's kind of signs of eggs there, it's not— they're not drone layers, so you can see kind of nice capped normal worker brood, and it seems a shame to kind of Let them go to waste. They will just eventually dwindle and die. I've got empty nuc boxes, I've got some colonies that are really, really big, and you could kind of do with knocking them back a little bit just to make sure they don't swarm. So we're back at these colonies again today where we did the manipulation, where we're trying to get them down into a 14 by 12 box. I'm just going to take kind of 1 or 2 frames from each colony, put it in a nuc, add a mated queen, and away you go. It's as simple as that. There's a few key things you need to make sure that you do though, or don't do, when you're putting these together, and I'll kind of run through those in the video. But to summarize, the key things are make sure you don't put any of the mated queens from any of your main hives in the nuc. And that sounds like a really simple, stupid thing to say, but I've done that before. You just, you forget when you're shaking the bees in, because you need to shake in quite a lot of nurse bees, you forget where the queen is sometimes. So make sure the first First thing you do is you take the queen from your hive that you're donating either the nurse bees or the brood or whatever stores from, and you isolate that queen, and you know exactly where she is. So I like to do a check at the beginning and a check at the end. Make sure all of the colonies that have donated anything to the nucs have still got their queen present. Otherwise, you're in a lot of trouble, and you could end up with no queens as opposed to two queens. So really quick summary of what I'm going to do: I'm going to I've got. 3 colonies here, and they're really, really big colonies. They're across kind of like 8 or 9 frames of brood now, and there's plenty of stores. If anything, there's a little bit too much stores in these boxes. This is why I've chosen these specific colonies, because they, they don't actually need those additional frames of stores on the outer kind of frames of the colony at the moment. So I'm going to remove those and I'll put them in there. I'm only going to make up small nucs. I don't want to knock these nucs These colonies back too much, so I'm only going to do 2 frames of brood per nuc. So I'm going to kind of have 2 frames of brood, 2 frames of stores, and then either 2 frames of foundation or 2 frames of comb. Lucky enough to have comb here today, so I'm gonna get on with that. The other thing to say is it's always best to work in 3s when you're making up nucs. So you can do a kind of a walkaway split if you want with one colony, Or if you're going to add 2 colonies together, you can have fighting, so the bees can fight each other, which isn't good. I find the best way to do it is to use a minimum of 3 colonies and put all the bees in, a mixture from all 3 of the colonies, into a single nuc, then add your queen, and that way the bees, they tend not to fight as much. Another thing I need to say is don't feed your nucs. This is a real simple one. And it's counterintuitive. You think, okay, you've put a new colony together, let's feed it, let's build it up and get it strong. No, that's the worst possible thing you can do. The only way you can do that is if you're taking your colony 3 miles away from your donor colonies. Because if you think about it, what's actually going to happen is a lot of these bees are going to leave the nuc that you've put together, they're going to fly off, and they're going to come back to their original colony. And if you're feeding them, they're going to come back and tell all the other bees, I found a terrific source of food, and then they'll rob out your nuc. That's happened to me before. You've just got to be really, really careful of that. The way to counteract it is just to put more frames of stores in the nucs that you're making up to make sure that there's kind of sufficient food for the new nuc, and do it while you're on a flow. So if you're on a flow, all the bees are busy anyway. They're not going to go and rob something else out. So there is a bit of a flow going on here at the moment. It's not a major one, but kind of— we're in the Orchard Apiary today, I mean, there's blossom on loads of the trees, the cherries, kind of some of the apples are even starting to show. So the next thing to say is the queens. So I've taken some donor queens and I've got them in a column, in a cage like this. I've got a plug of fondant in that end and then that end is open, and then what I do is I just tape them up. And the taping up is really, really important. So if you don't tape them up like that, then the new bees see their queen as a threat, they'll eat through the fondant and they'll kill her. If you leave the tape on, And good practice is kind of 7, 8, 9 days. You want to do this for as long as you possibly can, really. And then you come back after— I use 7 days— knock out any queen cells that they've formed, and then they're hopelessly queenless. And that's what you want when you're introducing a queen. You want to get them to that stage of hopelessly queenless, and then they, they'll accept anything. So that's what we're going to do today. So to summarize again, we're going to take some frames of stores, some frames of brood from each of these separate colonies. We're not going to feed our nucs. We're going to place those stores and brood and bees in the nucs, and we're going to add one of these mated queens in a fondant plug that's taped up. We're going to keep them in the same apiary, and we're going to put them in one of the positions, kind of— we're basically going to put them in there. We're going to overfill both of the nucs with bees, making sure we don't put the queen in there. And then what will happen is a number of those bees will fly off, come back to their existing colonies, and then things should even out again. The nucs always need to be overfull. That's always the tip you give, they're overfull, because you'll lose a lot of those flying bees. And that's what we're going to do, so I'll crack on and I'll show you how I do it. Right, so first thing to do is remove all of the frames from your existing nucs and just place them out on the floor somewhere. These are going to be the frames that will Backfill the frames from your donor colonies. Just worthwhile showing you that frame, bit of mouse damage in there. The bees will sort that out, no problem, so don't throw away frames if they're like that. So the first thing you need to do is you need to find your queens. So I do it one colony at a time. I'll find the queen in this colony, I'll donate the brood and the stores and the bees to each of the nucs, I'll close this one back up, and then I'll move on to my next You don't need to have all 3 open at once. So there's the queen in the top corner there. I just thought I'd pull this frame out as well to show you. It's a really nice pollen frame, so you can kind of see lots of pollen along there. I'd probably pick something like that to kind of use that as my queen rearing frame later on in the season. Um, not a perfect one, do you know what I mean? I've seen better than that. Maybe I want to kind of— those stores up there filled up with a bit more pollen. But, but it's a good one. That's kind of like something that I'd end up having later on in the season. So nice reference point for a pollen frame if you're looking for a pollen frame for any breeding. And there's the queen just on the top corner there. So we're going to take this frame now and we're going to put it somewhere out of the way. I'm just going to rest it up against the side of the hive, and then I can take whatever I want from this hive knowing that I'm not going to take that queen. Really, really important. Protect the queen, make sure she's out of the way, don't confuse the frames. So then you can take what you want from the hive. So for each hive, I'm going to take one frame of brood and one frame of stores for each nuc box, and then I'm going to throw in a load of additional bees. So the first one here I've got, that's a frame of stores. Next frame, another frame of stores, so that'll go into the next nuc. When you're building up the nucs, make sure that you do it in the natural order, so you have your stores to the outer side, then if you've got a pollen frame in between, and then your brood in the centre. So now we're going to take 2 frames of brood And they're going to go in as well. I like to go for capped brood, makes it a lot easier for the nuc to rear them. All they've got to do is keep them warm and then they'll emerge. It gives the nucs a really good boost, so go for your best frame of capped brood. Show you the nice pattern on that frame. That's the one that I'd go for here. A little bit patchier that side, but you know what I mean, that side there, that's going to open up within a week or so. And you're going to have lovely kind of small young bees coming out. So that's the one that I'd go for here. So that's all I'm going to take out of this hive because I've got another 2 hives to be able to use as donors. I don't want to knock back any of them too much, but what I am going to do is I'm going to throw in some additional bees onto those frames now. So all you do is you just throw them in. And throw in more than you think is necessary. A lot of them are going to come back to this hive, so I like to pretty much clean them out. Then once you're done with this colony, put it all back together again. Make sure it's in the correct order. Add additional foundation or comb in if you've got it. Make sure the queen's back in. Double-check that queen. I can see the queen. The queen's going back in, so I know this colony's Add my old frames back in now. And the manipulation is complete for this colony. You can then move on to the next colony and do exactly the same thing. Do you know what I mean? A few of those bees have flown away, but a lot of them have clustered up in there. That's exactly what you want to see. You want to keep the bees in there, um, and when you leave for the day, you want more bees in there than should be in there, because what's going to happen is a lot of them are going to fly out to forage and they're going to come back to their respective hives. They're not going to come back to this nuc. Um, now if you were going to take these nucs away over 3 miles away, then you don't do that. You want to put the Correct amount of bees in there. Don't overfill them. So it's a bit of a difference as to where you're kind of locating your nucs. So exactly the same process as before, find the queen. First thing to do, find that queen, get her out of the way. Just another quick close-up for you, something a bit interesting. If you can see on this frame here, you've got stores and then you've got empty comb, and then on this band here You've got fresh nectar, and you can see that at this time of the year, everything that's kind of uncapped, they'll kind of polish it out really, really quickly. So if I shook that now, you'd see loads of the nectar fall out. It's really, really easy to tell. That's a great sign, and it means that if you wanted to, you could put a super on this colony. We're obviously kind of putting that brood box underneath in this colony for a different reason, to get them to span down. But it's a good sign. It's proof that there is nectar coming in and nectar available at this time of the year. Right, so this is the first time I've opened up this colony. They're a bit nasty, and when you're looking for a queen, you really need to be able to take your time and not worry about the bees getting up your smock or stinging you or anything. So I've put on the Ultra Suit, really, really good at not getting stung. I've got a bit of smoke, just got some leaves in there at the moment and some cardboard to keep it going, and then we start again. So there's Nothing wrong with kind of taking a break during these activities. If the bees aren't playing ball or they're not being very nice, just close them up ten minutes, have a bit of a break, get your thoughts together, and then you can move on. Right, let's find that queen. See how much calmer the bees are with the smoke. Really does help. You just need to persevere sometimes finding that queen. There she is, really nice, big, healthy-looking queen. So we'll go and put her somewhere safe, and then we can use the nurse bees and the worker bees now. Right, so do the same again. Put it all back, correct order, make sure the queen's there. I can see the queen and I'm placing her back in the box. So that colony's set, we can put it back together. So then we move on to the final colony of bees. You can see in there already it's turning out to be like a really, really nice-sized colony in there. We're just going to do the same, take out some frames of stores, some frames of brood, loads of bees, but make sure you find the queen first and isolate her. Just worthwhile showing you this, so you've got your worker brood around there and then up in this corner you've got your drone brood. So this colony is really moving on this time of the year, it's safe enough for it to create its own drone brood. They'll come out and obviously go mate. Just thought I'd kind of give you a bit of a view as to what that drone brood looks like and what to look out for in your own colonies. So don't always think that your queen's going to be in the middle of the colony. I just found her in the final piece of the colony, the last frame. There you can see her. Looks like a frame of stores. But it's not. She's laid all of that up. This colony is wall-to-wall with brood. There she is. So I'm going to isolate this queen and I'm going to take a bit more from this colony because it's really, really big. So the queen's gone. I know I can do whatever I like with this colony now because I'm going to put the queen back and they'll be okay. There's tons of workers in here, loads and loads of brood, so I can take a lot of the resources to put them into my nucs, and that's what I'm going to do. So there's a lot of bees in both of these nucs. Now I've got between 3 and 4 frames of brood in each, and then I've got some really nice big amounts of stores on the side as well. So I can put this one back together again. Again, make sure you get the queen, check she's there, check she's okay. These bees will start flying back into their respective boxes and all the colonies should even out. Right, so all that's left to do now is put our new mated queens that are in their cages into the nucs, and I'll just go over it again. Make sure that Your queens are taped up. Make sure that they can't eat through the fondant plug, because these are really, really big, strong colonies. They'll eat straight in within a matter of hours and they'll kill your queens, and you're back to square one. So make sure they're really tightly wrapped with tape and that the bees can't get into them. Mm-hmm. I always double-check the queen's still alive, check the cage is on properly, and then I place the— in the middle like that. And then you can place the lid on. Same with this one, make sure that that's on really, really tight. There's fondant underneath it so the queen can eat If she needs to, she will feed herself if needed. The bees will probably start feeding her through the holes. And then you want to place that tightly between 2 frames, and then you can put your lid back on. Always double-check that entrances are open. This one's closed. That would be a disaster. And that's it, that's the manipulation complete. So we'll come back here in 7 days To take the tape off those cages. What we will also do is we'll go through every single frame in these colonies and make sure there's no queen cells. If there's queen cells, they'll kill the queen. So you just need to come back in 7 days, knock down all those queen cells, and then you can safely remove the tape because they're going to be hopelessly queenless and it'll take them a few hours to eat through that fondant. And then you've got 2 new colonies. So then I'd give them a couple of weeks, then I wouldn't come and interrupt them at all, and then I'd come back in a couple of weeks after that, so 3 weeks from today and I'd check for laying eggs and then they're good to go. And then what I would do straight away with these ones is I would add an extension box on top and then you can do another split if you so wish. So it seems like a bit of a lengthy process and it is, but I reckon 80% of the time here is, is you spent looking for the queens. Like, you can't do this manipulation properly unless you can find your queens, so get practicing finding your queens. I'm sure you're very good at it anyway, but this is one of the times where you really, really do need to see them, so it helps if they're marked. So just to summarize what I've done again, I've gone through each of these 3 colonies, I've found the queen, I've taken out the queen on the frame that she's on, and I've isolated her. I can then go into each colony and take what I want. So I've taken brood, I've taken stores, I've taken worker bees, and I've taken nurse bees, and I've put them all into these nucs in a standard configuration. Where I put the stores on the outside and then brood and maybe a bit of pollen in the middle, and then I've shook in lots of additional nurse bees. It's the nurse bees are the ones that are going to stay in there. All of the worker bees will fly back to their respective colonies once they go out and forage, so the numbers in here will dwindle, the numbers in here will increase, and it should all equalize. I've then added a queen. In a cage with a fondant plug so she can feed herself, and I've taped all of the entrances shut so the bees can't get in and kill her. That's really important, they will kill her. And then I'm going to come back in 7 days, I'm going to take off that tab, I'm going to kill all queen cells that are present, do a full inspection, and then 2 weeks after that I'm going to check for eggs. But she'll be laying before that, but I like to give it 2 weeks just to not mess around with them. So that's it. I really enjoy making splits. It's one of my favourite parts of beekeeping. We've turned 3 colonies here into 5 colonies, and it's taken me about an hour to do it. I know the video is not that long. I'll cut it and edit it as necessary. So I hope you're all gonna have a really, really good Easter weekend. It's Easter Friday today. This is the last thing I'm doing with the bees. I'm off now to go and kind of spend some time with my daughter and chill out in the garden. Don't need to be out unnecessarily. I'm This off to the beach. time of year, but I had mated queens that I needed to make some splits from. These colonies as well, they also needed a little bit of brood removing just to kind of give them some additional space for that queen to lay. I know she's got the boxes underneath, but sometimes they need a bit of horizontal space as well. So that's it for today's video. I really hope you've enjoyed it. This is something that everyone can try at home. I mean, you can buy a mated queen in the post really, really easy. Whether you want to get it from the UK or the EU, doesn't matter. But I kind of— I think everyone should get in the habit of kind of making up additional nucs. They're really, really handy to have. If you take additional nucs into winter, then when you lose your hive, if you do lose it over winter, you've got backups. But it's a really, really good way of learning about the bees, making nucs, understanding kind of what the makeup of a colony should be like. And actually kind of manipulating that yourself. So have a go and I'm sure you'll enjoy it. So that's it for today's video. Um, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.