The Easiest Way To Save A Beehive

In this video, I'm going to show you how to save a tiny little colony from dwindling away to nothing. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to show you how to save a really small dwindling colony dying out completely. So in this nuc here, I've got a really, really small colony. The queen seems to be okay though, and the reason that they're so small is that they've been knocked back and knocked back, taking queens out, moving stuff around. It can happen for any reason that you just end up with a really small colony with a decent queen in it. That's what I'm going to show you in this video, and the fix is the easiest fix in the world, but you do need to make sure that you have a decent queen in there. She's laying eggs, she's not a drone-laying queen, there's no disease or anything in order. It's just a really, really small colony that can't expand because there's not enough bees. And I'm going to do it in the simplest method possible. All I'm going to do is I'm going to take a frame of brood from another colony, but I'm also going to take bees on that frame as well, good amount of nurse bees. I'm going to take the queen, I'll cage the queen, give it a few days, come back, the colony should have boosted in numbers because of the extra bees that I've put in there, but But also some brood that's emerged, see what they're acting like around that queen, and then hopefully we can open the cage and let the queen back out. That's the plan anyway. Obviously things can go wrong. Follow this video right to the end though. We'll see if we can get this small tiny nuc there up to full strength by winter. So here we go, here's my colony of bees. It is an absolute whopper, isn't it? Now I'm sure you've all got little colonies like this, but I have to say, if these were mine, I would just pitch the queen and go and do something different. But I know that some people do want to save colonies like this, and if you've only got a couple of them, you want to save them. I just thought I'd do the video, show you how to do it. So tiny little colony of bees. Let's get inside, have a look at the brood, see if we can find that queen. Right, so there's my queen, and at first glance, yeah, she's nothing wrong with her. She looks fine, she looks mated. Obviously you can't just go on the fact that she looks okay. You need some proof that she's actually doing her job, but as you can see, there are no bees there. She is really struggling and needs some help. But here is the proof, there is some capped brood, and the brood looks absolutely fine, so no signs of disease. There's just not enough bees here in order to sustain this nuc, to keep that brood warm, and to get them strong enough so that the colony can expand. Now, you might just think the easy solution here is just add a frame of brood and And then the brood's going to emerge, and then it's going to give the colony a boost. But the colony just can't sustain that amount of brood. All that will happen is the brood will die. So you need to add bees in there as well. You need to add brood and bees. And if you add a frame of brood and bees, they'll just kill the queen. So we're going with this kind of double-pronged approach. We're going to cage up the queen, stick a few attendants in there, bit of fondant, completely sealed, and then we're going to boost this nuc with bees and with brood, and then we're going to release the queen at a later date. We'll cover all of that in this video. So first thing I need to do, I'm gonna go and find the queen. I'm gonna pop her in the cage. There we go, I've got my queen in the cage. She's in there. Most important, the cage is completely sealed. She can't get out, and now I can boost the colony up to strength. So now it's really, really easy. You can just take bees from wherever Doesn't matter. Preferably nurse bees though. Preferably bees from another apiary. But if you overstock this colony, loads of them will fly back and you'll still get a decent amount that will stay. You don't need to go crazy with this. You don't need to put six frames of bees in there. One frame of brood. Couple of shakes of nurse bees from another colony, preferably from another apiary. But you can do it in the same apiary. And then we're going to close that colony up, leave it for seven days, come back. See how many bees we've managed to collect, check out their behavior towards the queen, and then we'll pop that cage, release the queen. So there we go. This is the frame of brood that I'm going to use. The reason I've chosen this one is that it's the most emerging. So there's some emerging brood on it, completely capped over. Don't go and put eggs in there. Don't go and put a brood in all stages. You want the most capped over frame that you can possibly find. Doesn't even need to be that full. Even if it's kind of a half full, a quarter full, it doesn't matter. But make sure it's really nicely capped and emerging if possible. So then I'm going to go and get some bees to add in here. Make sure you don't go throwing any other queens in here, so either take them out of the supers or remove the queen from the colony that you're shaking them from. Just make sure you don't add any other queens in here. So shaking bees, any supers, shake Lots of bees in. I'm going to shake about 5 or 6 frames of bees in here. I'm going to overstock it because loads of them are going to fly off, go back to their donor hive, which is just behind the camera there. A few of them will stay though, and we just want enough to stay to keep that brood warm so that can hatch. So then once you've stocked your colony with bees and you can see them all going and flying back over there anyway, we only want a proportion. We're going to take the queen, cage still on, sealed in the top. We're going to pop that next to the brood frame horizontally in between the frames. So this is what the colony should look like now. I know it doesn't look like there's a lot of bees in there, but believe me, there is a load of bees in there now. You'll get a bit of drift back to the original donor colony. They can't kill the queen because she's caged up. I'm going to get that roof on and then we'll come back, see how they're getting on. And that's it, that's the manipulation part complete. We'll fast forward 7 days, see how much brood has emerged, see how many bees have stayed. Hopefully the queen's still alive in her cage, and then we can take it from there. But don't go anywhere, you'll see this colony all the way through the year. Hopefully we'll get that one up to full strength going into winter.

So it's been 7 days since I caged up the queen and chucked in loads of bees. Let's get inside and see what we've got. Hopefully the queen is She's still in the cage, she's still alive, there's no emergency cells, but there's lots and lots of bees. That's what we're looking for here. We want to see lots of bees, lots of brood, and a queen that's still alive. We're going to have a look at the behavior towards that queen as well, and if the behavior is good and there's no queen cells, no emergency cells, then we'll pop the cap, we'll release that queen, and then we'll fast forward another 7 days And see if we've had a successful reintroduction of that queen. So let's get inside, see how the colony's getting on. So I think you will agree that is a vast improvement on last week. We were barely on one frame of bees. No, we were nowhere near one frame of bees. We were on a quarter or half a frame of bees in total, and now they're over 5 frames of bees. And this is 7 days later. This doesn't mean these bees are going to fly back to any original hives. They are here and they're here to stay. This will be bees that have reorientated. This will be nurse bees that have emerged. These are staying here for good. What we want to see now is no queen cells and a safe queen in her cage. So there's my queen inside there. I know it doesn't look much like a queen in there, but there's no other bees there for reference. Believe me, that is definitely the queen. She's safe inside that cage. It's a really good-looking queen there. I'm just going to go back through the frames now, check to see if they made any emergency cells. before I decide on whether to open up that tab just yet. So no emergency queen cells on this frame here, really nice frame of brood. The fact they've not drawn out any emergency cells on any of the frames of brood, we're good to go. We're going to pop that cage, put her back in, leave it 7 days, come back, hopefully we'll have a successful reintroduction of that queen. So I've now removed the tab so the bees have got access into the fondant. I'm going to pop that back in between the frames, Let the bees eat through that fondant, get a successful reintroduction. There we go. That's the queen back in between those brood frames in the middle. You can see down there nice access into the fondant. One bee checking that out already. As always, when you get to this point, don't rush it. Leave it a good seven days before you go back in to check. There's no benefit from going in there early. It's only to satisfy your curiosity.

Give it.

7 days, come back, hopefully we'll see the queen and we'll see eggs. So if you're doing this with your bees and you do find emergency cells, make sure that it was 8 days after you put that frame of brood in. If it's 8 days after, you can take down all of those emergency cells and then just continue, pop the cage, and you'll be in exactly the same position that I'm in here. I didn't have any emergency cells there. Sometimes they make them, sometimes they don't. The fact that there was a presence of a mated queen in there already And obviously some of the nurse bees were receptive to her, has meant they didn't create any emergency cells. But this step here, if there isn't emergency cells, just proceed. If there is emergency cells on day 8, knock them down, pop the cap, continue as normal. But I will re-emphasize, when you get to this point here, you really want to know whether it's going to work and it's a successful introduction. After about 24 hours, they would have probably eaten their way through that fondant and the queen's been introduced. But I've had firsthand experience of going in 24, 48 hours afterwards, lifting up the frame and the queen flies off, or lifting up the frame and they ball the queen. It can happen. It doesn't happen if you leave it 7 days later, but it really does pay to be a little bit patient at this point. Just give it 7 days, you've got nothing to lose. So we'll fast forward 7 days, hopefully we'll find the queen on the frame, see some eggs, And then that's it. We've reintroduced a queen into a really poor, struggling colony, boosted it with bees and brood, and we got it into a really good position going into winter. So I'll fast forward 7 days and we'll take another update on this colony. So it's been about 5 days since we popped the tab on that queen. Let's get back into this colony here, see if they've released the queen, see if she's walking around the frames, and then we'll leave them for a couple of weeks just to get that queen going again. See if we can see some eggs and some brood. And there is our queen bee, and she's not the biggest queen bee at all. She's quite a small one. Maybe that's why she was dwindling. There's potential here for them to supersede this queen, so we'll give her a little bit of a chance, give her a couple of weeks, see what she can do. Just going to let her go back down there now. I don't want to interrupt too much with her, but we've got a successful introduction on this colony here. We'll give it a couple of weeks and we'll see what that queen is We're back to the dwindling nuc. Let's get inside, see if we can find that queen again, and see if she has come back into lay, started to expand that colony again. So the nuc is looking really strong indeed. The weather is useless around here at the moment— too cold, too wet, too windy. The bees are pretty much isolated, so I'm going to pop some feed on these guys here today. But what I want to see is if I can find that queen again But I also want to see if she's come back into lay. Been a couple of weeks since the last video, so any eggs we see today are going to be freshly laid by that new queen, and we should be able to tell if she's been turbocharged by adding all of those additional bees in. So there's the queen, and as we said last time, she's not the biggest queen in the world, but we thought we'd give her a chance, and I think she's repaid my faith. She's just gone off on her way there now. But if you take a look at this frame, at first glance doesn't look like much at all. You think, well, what are we looking at here? You go inside now and you look into the frames, you can see that she has started to lay that up and lay it up really, really nicely. I'm going to shake this frame off here just to show you the eggs. So if you think back to the beginning, the small little patch of eggs, You look at this frame now and she has laid it up front to back. Every single cell we've got eggs in, all over the frame. This isn't just a patch. Every single cell that you look into has got eggs or larva or capped brood, every single one. So there was nothing wrong with that queen. This is the reason that I wanted to do this video, is to show you It's not that there's something wrong with the queen. Some colonies do just dwindle, and they can dwindle because you can make them dwindle. You need to give them a chance, and you need to give them the bees to prove that the queen is okay. So here is a frame of capped brood, and this is a couple of weeks after I did the last video showing that the queen had been successfully reintroduced. This is the capped worker brood from the queen that we've reintroduced back into this colony, and as you can see Nothing wrong with it at all. In fact, it's really, really good-looking brood. So there we go, that's the video complete. Really, really happy with the progress of this nuc. So happy that I gave that queen another chance. That's the kind of result that you can expect. And this is the end of the video because that frame is up to 6 frames of bees. They've got a good amount of stores, they've got a good amount of brood, they've got a queen, they've got brood in all stages. That is a perfect nuc going into winter for the middle of August. Just to recap what I did though, just remember I had a colony that looked like it was failing, but I had a queen that appeared to be laying good worker eggs and brood. There just wasn't enough bees. So what I did is I shook in loads of bees, I gave them additional brood, I found the queen, I sealed the queen up, I waited 8 days, see if they made any emergency cells. If they do make cells, knock them down, and then I reintroduced the queen using a slow introduction method. The presence of all of those worker bees Turbocharged the queen, and they got her back into laying. Absolutely over the moon. Love rescuing colonies like that. This one will go through into 2022 and become one of my production colonies. So I hope you enjoyed that video. 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.