🐝 The Overwintered Nuc System - Episode 7 - Fondant Feeding and Mid-August Progress Check

We're on to episode 7 of making splits for winter. Today we're checking on the progress and we're giving them some fondant. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I just filmed all of this video and I got home and realized that I hadn't done the intro, so I'm sitting in my truck, uh, quickly doing the intro to the beginning of this one. Episode 7 though, I've just been through the colony checking to see how they're getting on And I've given them some fondant. So I'll jump straight in and show you what I've done. Let's get inside, see how the colony's going on, see if they've expanded, and see what we can do to improve their chances of getting through winter. So the colony is looking really nice indeed, still over about 4 or 5 frames, but as we mentioned before, it's around that 3 or 4 week mark from releasing that queen where you're going to see that big increase in the number of bees. We're only about 2 weeks after releasing that queen, so we've not quite seen that yet. Good sign though is they have cleared up all of that sugar syrup, so they have taken well over a litre. I topped them up again halfway through, so they probably had a litre and a half, 2 litres of sugar syrup, and they would have stored that in the frames. And we'll see if we can find that in the frames now. But around the middle of August, if your colony or your overwintering nuc is looking like this, you are well on track to a perfect nuc going into winter. You do want to get them as strong as you possibly can You want them to fill this box. If they're clustering up in the feeder, not a problem at all. Nice big strong nucs, that's how you get healthy bees going into winter and coming out the other side. So let's get inside, see if we can find the queen, take a look at some of the brood, take a look at the stores situation. So the first frame here, we've got half a frame of capped stores. This is what you want to see, definitely middle of August. You want them to start capping on a bit of stores. Building it up, making sure they've got enough. They can quickly starve going into winter, so you want to make sure there's always kind of frame, frame and a half, something like that, a good amount of stores, be it capped or uncapped, just so if there's a rainy weekend, a rainy few days, they're not going to burn it all away rearing brood. Because colonies this time of year, they are going to rear brood at a crazy pace. Just stay on top of it, make sure they've got enough food. So we've got a nice frame of brood here. Eggs down there, which as always impossible to see, but trust me, there's eggs down there. Really nice brood pattern as well. I'm not going to shake the bees off, you've seen the brood pattern before. Want to see at least maybe 2 frames, 2 and a bit frames of brood ideally at this time of year. Not quite into rearing the winter bees yet, plenty of time for that yet, but you just want to see nice slow steady growth at this time of year. So there's my queen. She is on a frame that's got a little bit of everything. So queen's looking really good. We've got some capped stores, we've got some open stores, we've got the makings, a couple of cells of capped brood, brood in all stages, and then lots of eggs as well. You can see she is really going for it. Nice patch here all around, all the way up to there. That's a lovely frame of brood in all stages. And there's the queen again. Isn't she a beauty? And then the final frame that I've got is just a little bit of stores in there, probably a little bit of syrup, not capped over yet, but they're making good use of it and they're condensing down that brood nest. So in terms of a summary for this nuc, middle of August at the moment, bang on the 15th of August, we've got 2 frames of brood, just under 2 frames of stores, and then we still got a couple of empty-ish frames of drawn comb. And what I'm going to do with this colony here is I'm going to feed it some fondant. So just any old standard fondant. This is Honeybee Pro, but any of the fondants on the market are absolutely fine. I'm just going to leave this in there and just let them work on it over the next few weeks. The queen is laying as I would expect her to lay. There's still a long time for them to get ready for winter, and just assess them over a couple of weeks, see how big and strong they get. And if we need to go back in with 1:1 syrup, we can do. And then at the end of the year, when I've got a nice big strong colony, kind of middle of September, back end of September, we'll give them a couple of glugs of 2:1 syrup, get the strength up, get the weight up for winter, and then we'll close them up and literally not go back in again until Christmas. So fondant in a Paynes feeder is a little bit tricky. If you've got one of the Ekes, you can use that. They're really good. If you've got a top feeder and you want to start butchering it, you can do that as well. I find though, if you get Honeybee Pro, works quite well, the Honeybee Pro, and kind of squish it down a bit, cut on that side there, you can just slip it down face up into the feeder and then the bees will work it really, really well. So I'm just going to pop this in there now and I'll show you how it looks. So there we go, that's my nuc set up now. I've centralized everything, so the 2 middle frames now are the 2 brood frames. I've got my Apivar slap bang in the middle of the 2 brood frames. That's going to give you the most effective mite drop. And then the 2 adjacent frames, they're stores, and then the 2 outer frames are the most empty frames. So I've just centralized everything up, and then I've got my fondant tucked over here, and you can see, what is that sugary goodness over there? They will get on that and they will feed directly off it, and they will take that down, they'll use it for feed, they'll use it for stores, they'd use it just in the same way that they would use sugar syrup. And there we go, we're all set. So I don't need to do anything with this colony now for about 2 or 3 weeks. Weeks. They are set, they are good to go. I'm just going to let the queen get on with it. The weather's good. I'll come back occasionally and just check that there's sufficient fondant there, but I'm going to let them go and just use up all of that fondant. And then we'll see back end of August where we are with this nuc. I think all of that fondant is going to be gone. They'll be sitting over 3, 3.5 frames of brood, and hopefully if there's been a little bit of a flow, they'll have some stores as well. After 2 weeks, we'll come in Maybe do one round of 1:1 sugar syrup just to boost that brood a final time, and then we're going to 2:1 sugar syrup feeding, get them up to weight, and then we won't touch them again up until Christmas, apart from one time just to come along, take the Apivar strip out. 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.