Stocking Queen Rearing Long Hive - Hyde Hives - Queen Castle - What is a Queen Castle

We're on to episode 2 of the 8-frame nuc long hive series. Today we're adding colonies and adding 2 very special queens. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. We're straight on to stocking the 8-frame nuc that we got from Hyde Hives, and we're going to do it in a very, very simple way. All we're going to do this time of the year, so we're Around middle of August at the moment, is I'm going to stock it one side with one colony and one side with another colony. Now, when I first got this hive, I thought I'm going to put together 8 nucs and I'm going to overwinter 8 nucs in this. And I've gone away and I've kind of had a little bit of a think about it, and I'm thinking, what's the benefit for me overwintering 8 nucs in it this year? Because I'm going to have to go and make up 8 nucs, put 8 queens in there, and try and overwinter them. Okay, I'll get 8 nucs through the winter. Hopefully. But then it's not really providing me with any benefit because I was fast-forwarding a little bit further into what I'm going to do next year. And all I'm going to do is I'm going to remove the queens and then I'm going to add cells and I'm going to use it as a mating hive. I can get away with just adding 2 colonies in. So that's what I'm going to try and do this year is I'm going to overwinter 2 colonies, one on one side, one on the other, and then into the spring next year in 2022, I'm going to do some stimulative feeding, get those colonies really big and strong, They're going to start on the outer edges, they're going to move their way up into the middle. I'm going to have 2 big strong colonies in there. I'll remove the queens, open up all the entrances, and then I will have all 8 boxes, all 8 slots full of bees, and I can move on from there. It's less resources, it works out well in terms of timing, and I think it gives me a better chance of getting both of those colonies through the winter just to focus on 2 of them. So that's what I'm going to show you in this video, how to stock the 8-frame nuc, specifically if you're doing it late in the year. Right, so here are my queens. They've got their unique line identification numbers that I'm going to get some paperwork for hopefully as well, but they are island-mated Danish queens. I'm really excited by them. Just look at the size of that queen in that one. She cannot even turn around. She is desperate to come out of that cage, but both of the queens look really, really nice. I can't wait to see how they're going to come along. Very, very excited. Right, you'll have to excuse me, I'm a little bit out of breath after that. I've just lugged over a big heavy colony and they have packed it full of honey, so that was a little bit of a silly thing to do. But I wanted to bring it over here because it makes more sense you seeing what I'm doing over here, making the splits, stocking this colony. Back at the site over there, 30 meters away, I've just popped a nuc. The first thing I'm going to do, go in there Find the queen on a frame with some bees, and I'll take that back over to the nuc. And then everything else in this colony is fair game in terms of splitting it up, distributing it about, making 2 nice splits in this 8-frame nuc. So if you watch my channel all the time and you want to know what colony this is, this is the 2nd abandoned hive video that I did. Not the first one, but the 2nd one where I thought there is no way that this colony is going to get through This is the colony. They're not very friendly, they're not very nice bees, but they've actually packed in a decent amount of honey this year and they're looking pretty good. However, the fact that the temperament is not so good, I'm not too fussed about splitting these guys up. I'm going to give them some nice friendly Danish queens, that will sort them right out. So like I said, first thing I'm going to do, get into the brood box, find the queen, go and put her back on the original site. Right, I've definitely not just spent half an hour looking for the queen and not being able to find her. I'm just going to casually move on to the honey supers and start splitting those up again, and then we'll move back on, try and find that queen. She is impossible to find. So So this is the beauty of using national deeps upstairs above the queen excluder. You've got ready access to drawn-out combs, sometimes with a little bit of stores in it as well for when you're making splits. Makes things so much easier. So we've got some nice frames up here. Getting late in the year though, this is nowhere near capped. These are really perfect frames for making these splits. Gives them an instant boost of nice open stores. I'm going to pinch a few frames from up here and spread them out over the 2 splits. So I'm just taking frames from this national deep upstairs. Obviously no queen up here. You can just take the frames with the bees. I'm just going to pop them in, spread them about nice and even. Some of the frames, a little bit too good to go into splits. We'll take those ones out, extract them, because they're really nice big heavy honey frames. So there we go, slots 1 and 2. I've got 3 frames of stores, some capped, some open, but 3 good quality frames. Got it as far away as possible from the entrance. Don't stack it right up next to the entrance, you're just asking for it to be robbed. So keep it nice back there, as far as you can get it back on that 10-frame slot. Same over here, 3 frames of stores. Not too much in this one either. Gonna get some more bees in there now once I get some brood in. Make sure you don't put any queens in here though. Well, at least I know why it's taken me half an hour to find that queen. This was an abandoned colony, but she's unmarked, she's very small, and that took me at least 30 minutes to find her. So I'm going to go and pop her back over on the original location now. I'll get her set up in a nuc, one frame of brood, little bit of stores, and the flying bees can return back to her. I'm going to get her marked as well just so she's a little bit easier to see. But yeah, she was very, very difficult to find. And there we go, that's the difficult bit out of the way. I cannot believe how long it took me to find that queen. What we're left with now is lots of bees, lots of brood, and I'm just going to split those evenly between the colony over there Right, so what I have now is a fully stocked colony. 3 frames of brood on this one, 4 frames of brood on this one. I've kept all of the honey stores back away from the entrances, and now I'm going to shake in a whole load of bees. Now, whenever you're making splits late on in the year, think about your varroa treatments. Don't just jump in and think I'm going to do my varroa treatments at the normal time. Coincidentally, it is the normal time, but as soon as you're making a split like this and saying, right, I'm not going to have any honey off it, then get in there, do your varroa treatments. I'm using Apivar this year, so I'm just going to treat them, get them treated at the same time. 4 frames of brood in that one, 3 frames of brood in that one. I'm just going to have 1 strip of Apivar in each half of this colony. I've done plenty of videos on the channel how to apply Apivar to your colony, so hit the subscribe button, check Take a look through our channel. There's loads of videos to help you get that varroa count down. And then we're nearly finished. I've got lots of bees left over, both in the supers and the remaining brood box. I'm just going to shake them in. You will get drift back to the original hive, so overstock them as much as you possibly can. And then we're going to temporarily block the entrances as well, and then we'll introduce the queens. You can see how it's really important to find the queen before you do this. Isolate her, then everything else is really easy and you can just shake bees in. Then don't forget, if you're splitting colonies, you've got your supers, use all of the resources. You might as well shake these back in. Some of them will fly back, but you want them nice and strong in both of these halves of the split. And that's it, we've got 2 successful splits of that colony. Loads of bees, loads of brood, no queens. We can now introduce our mated queens. So that's what slots 7 and 8's looking like. Really nice, big strong colony of bees now. And then slots 1 and 2, even bigger. Look at that colony. That is a really nice, big strong colony of bees. So I'm not going to go through all the details. You've seen this before, hopefully. We're going to do a slow introduction. We're going to put the queens in now, wait 8 days, come back, Knock down all the queen cells, pop open the cages to allow access to the fondant, leave it for 7 days, come back, and the queens will be introduced. It's a bulletproof method, that one. I'll stick a link up there and you can see it if you've not done it already. It's a really, really easy method. Just going to pop them horizontally in between 2 frames of brood. And that's it. Now we can close everything up. Obviously, you've got a few bees kind of crawling over the top. Just do your best to get everything back in. And then we're going to look at the entrances to close them up temporarily. So there we go, we've got the colonies nice and split now. You can see in that one there we've got our Apivar strip, the queen is tucked away in between those 2 bars. And then over on this side again, you've got your Apivar strip and then the queen is tucked away nicely. Don't worry about any bees up there, there's a nice little escape, they'll get out no problem. Just brush it off when you close it and everything will be fine. Now on the entrances, you want to get the entrance block in like that, nice small entrance block, really well protected. And then what we're going to do is we're going to stuff a little bit of grass in there relatively firmly just to keep them in for the next 24 to 48 hours, and that will help them reorientate back to this spot. Hopefully we're not going to lose too many back to the original nuc. So there we go, grass is stuffed in there now. They will manage to push that out eventually, but I'll come back after 48 hours If they've not pushed it out, I'll just release them and then everything's good to go. This is the bee escape here, so all of the bees that are trapped up in the roof, they will work their way through that. Can't get back in that way, so when we open the roof up next time, there'll be no bees there. And there we go, that's it for the video. Really nice simple one if you can find the queen. If you can't find the queen, it can take a little bit longer, but we've successfully done it now. We've taken a colony from over there in this apiary, brought it over here, Found the queen, moved the queen back to the original site to make a split with the nuc, and then I've used the resources from that colony to create 2 new splits, one in slot 7 and 8, one in slot 1 and 2, over about 4 or 5 frames of bees each. We've added Apivar as it's the right time of the season to do a mite treatment. We've added a mated queen in a sealed cage. We'll wait 8 days, wait for emergency cells to come up, knock down the emergency cells, Pop open the cap and then we give it another 7 days and then we'll move on to some sort of feeding. And here is a word of warning for you, don't think, oh, I'll give these colonies the best possible chance of increasing in size for the winter and I'll start feeding them straight away. If you do that in the same apiary, all of those bees over there, they will just get told that there's loads of food here for them to come and eat and they will just rob everything out and you'll just get left with nothing. Do not feed for the first couple of weeks, that's my advice to you. Really excited to see how this colony is going to come on next year. As I said, I've got one colony over that side, one colony over that side. I'm going to expand them early in 2022, see which one can reach the middle first, and then I'll start putting in divider boards, taking out the queens, adding queen cells, and that'll be my queen rearing setup for 2022. Hope you enjoyed that one. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.