In this vlog, beekeeper Laurence Edwards returns to his Zest horizontal hive after three weeks to determine the colony’s queen status and overall health. He explains the hive’s backstory—initial poor construction, a swarm event, and the introduction of a Buckfast queen as a speculative split. Using a "checkerboard" approach, he shifts existing wooden frames to one side and intersperses new white plastic Zest frames on the other, aiming to transition the entire colony to plastic by year‑end. During the inspection he finds brood in all stages, removes unwanted drone brood, and observes remnants of queen cells, concluding that a mated queen (likely the introduced F1 Buckfast) is present and the colony is expanding. He also discusses ergonomic challenges of working the horizontal hive from the back versus the side, critiques the plastic pallet design, and outlines his plan to let the bees draw comb naturally on the plastic frames without starter strips. The video ends with a call to subscribe for future updates on the Zest hive’s progress.
Chapters
Today we're going back through our zest hive. We're going to see if there's a queen in there. If it was a virgin, we're going to see if she was mated. We're also going to check aboard the entire colony. This is an episode not to be missed. So the backstory with the zest hive is I built it very badly, linked you out to a video where it showed someone else building it a lot better than me. I transported some bees over to put into the zest hive and then realized they were in the middle of swarming. So I never found the queen and I left them a swarm cell in order for them to requeen themselves naturally. I have not been in there for about three weeks. Weeks since that happened, so I'm going to go back in there today. I've actually not even checked prior to recording the video, so we're either going to find a colony that is hopelessly queenless, or we're going to find a colony that's got a virgin running around, or we're not going to find a virgin, or we're going to find a mated queen, or maybe a mixture of all of those 3 scenarios there. I'm very excited to get back into the Zest Hive. I think it's a really cool design. Also, what I want to do before the end of the year, I've set myself a target to cycle out All of the older wooden frames. It's nice that it runs with wooden frames, but I've got a mixture at the moment of wooden 14x12 frames, wooden National deep frames, and then I've got interspersed in between the actual Zest plastic frames. I've got enough Zest plastic frames to fill up that entire Zest Hive, and my target for the year is to get all of the bees onto those plastic frames. So I'll get my bee suit on, let's go and see how the bees are getting on in the Zest Hive. Right, you have to excuse the bees here. I just did the checkerboard colony and they're really, really angry with me. Let's get inside the Zest Hive I'll show you how I've checkerboarded that colony, and I'll show you why I think there's a mated queen in there. Maybe we'll even find her. Right, so here we go. The bees are coming out and absolutely battering me. They hate this camera. What you can see here is I've shifted all of the wooden frames over to one side. That's where the majority of the brood is. And then over here, I've started to introduce and checkerboard the white plastic Zest frames. We're going to go through it now. I'm going to See if I can find that queen, see if we can find any brood, brood in all stages, maybe even find a queen as well. And then over the next few weeks, hopefully these checkerboarded Zest frames, they'll build them out naturally. Might need a little bit of rework, but we'll aim for the end of the year to get all of the bees onto these plastic frames. So I really enjoy working from the back end of the Zest hive. I find this with all horizontal hives, if I can get in from one end, I really like it. I'm so used to working the bees the warm way, That I like to kind of be face on and lift the frames out like that. Really not too keen on working it from the side, effectively working it the cold way from the back. Just don't like the way I have to twist my back. Not good for me. But I'm looking over at this end here now, and all I can see is I've just checkerboarded those frames. There's really not much to see over here. Things will get interesting over this side, the checkerboarded side, when we get right into the flow that's just about starting now. The bees are going to need to store that honey, and in order for them to do that, they're going to have to draw out these frames. Going to be real fun because there is No guides, there's no starter strips, there's no foundation. It's just wild comb, and I'm just trying to get them to do it in the plastic. That's just giving you a heads up for future episodes to see if we can get it all onto the plastic frames. I'm going to head over to that end now and see if we can find the queen, see if we can see any brood. So you'll see what I mean. I kind of have to reach over a little bit because I built it so rubbish over here. In fact, I can kind of kneel on it. That's actually a really good way of doing this. Get some kneeling pads and we will be away. But you see what I mean? I have to twist. I'm never a fan of twisting like that to get frames out. I like to go straight forward. Right, so first frame I've got here, no eggs, nothing like that. Can't see a queen. All I'm going to do, just to give myself a little bit of room, I'm just going to shake that frame off and I'm just going to rest that over there. Nothing to see on the next frame apart from some remnants of some queen cells. And then again, nothing to see on the next frame along, just lots of bees. Well, I'm gonna have to stop inspecting the bees at night. You do really need to do this in the daytime. However, I shook off that frame there because we've got brood in all stages, so I'm really happy with that. Got brood in all stages in this colony. I kind of have to think back through my notes at the moment, and what I remember doing is I actually introduced a Buckfast queen into this colony, kind of as a bit of a speculative split. I didn't know if there was a queen in there. We took down all the cells and then I put a queen in, so I'm genuinely not 100% sure what's going on with this colony. But we do have brood in all stages. So I'll pull out a couple more frames and then I'm just going to put everything back together because the bees really aren't too pleased to see me. Right, I had to move from the other side because it was just killing my knees. Can't find a comfortable position here. And my design where I put the plastic pallets on is already a shocking design. Such a bad design because I can't get my feet underneath it. So I'm kind of having to lean over more than I would have had to lean over before. That's what's causing the issue here. So Bill, you were right. Pallets, plastic pallets, rubbish idea. Oh, now that's very interesting. They're starting to draw the comb in the completely wrong place. Oh my God. But we've got brood in all stages on this frame as well, and then they're extending that down. So let me have a look. It's all drone brood. I think I'm going to take that down. And I don't need to think because it's just fallen off. So let me shake the bees off. Yeah, that's all drone brood. They're not having that. I'll take that off, that can be melted down. I've got brood in all stages, so I've got a tiny little bit of capped worker brood on that side, loads of eggs on there. And there we go, stop the video, we do not need to go any further than that. I have got a full capped frame of worker brood. I've seen enough for today. I've got a queen in there, I've got a colony that's expanding, I've checkerboarded them out, and now I'm going to close them up and I'm going home. So it's literally pitch black now. We actually learned quite a lot today. I've got a queen in there, the colony is expanding, we've got worker brood, capped worker brood, really nice pattern. We've checkerboarded that colony out. I'm going to leave these for a good couple of weeks now to settle in. Hopefully the new queen is the F1 Buckfast that I put in, and that at the end of the season should calm these bees down, definitely calm them down before we get to next year. I'll give you regular updates on this one 'cause I wanna see how they're drawing out those Zest frames. Gonna be really interesting 'cause there's no real strips or any guidance for them other than just the kind of frame mechanism that's gone in there. Definitely hit the subscribe button, check out how we get on with the Zest Hive this season.
