This Simple Technique Produced A MASSIVE Honey Crop

In this video, I'm going to show you how to add space to your colonies in the spring without risking a cold snap setting them back. So I've spoken previously about how you shouldn't add your supers too early, or at least the reasons why we don't add our supers too early. We feel that if it gets cold, they're losing too much heat going upwards and it can set the colony back where you're adding supers on to try and kind of speed things up a little bit. So it's counterintuitive, definitely counterproductive as well. So we really do resist the urge to ever increase that expansion above the brood nest early on in the year. And our rule of thumb for North Wales is kind of like early April, but we see what the conditions are doing and we adjust accordingly. However, if you have got big, massive, booming, strong colonies and you're convinced that they're covered in brood and the bees just have no other option other than they need a little bit more space, what I'm going to show you in this video is a really quick, easy configuration that you can set your bees up in which gives them sufficient room to expand but also completely mitigates them losing too much heat above the cluster. So this manipulation, very simple indeed. I'm doing it with a National Deep. You can do it with a brood box, you can do it with a 14 by 12, you could even do it with a shallow if that's what you wanna do. And all we're gonna do is we're gonna take this box, got a mixture of foundation and drawn frames in here, and I'm gonna place it underneath the existing brood box. So there you go. How quick was that? All I've done, lifted up the box, the crown board, the roof, everything you've got on top of that box, slipped the other box underneath. It's got foundation and drawn comb underneath it. It might seem like a really strange manipulation to do at this time of year. You're effectively kind of nadiring an empty box. But if you do nadir your supers in the autumn, this is the configuration that you're ultimately going to end up with in the spring. And then you need to make that good later on in the year anyway. I only do this if the colonies are bubbling out over the top. But it does buy you a little bit of time and it gives you that additional buffer of space within that colony at the time when you need it, which is in early spring. Now don't get me wrong, this isn't a complete swarm mitigation strategy. Just by adding that additional space in there, you're not gonna say, right, I don't need to inspect them for 5 weeks now because I've got the additional box on there. You need to treat that colony exactly the same as any of your other colonies and go in and do weekly regular inspections. Once you move into the inspection season, Starting from around kind of middle towards the end of April for us. But what this does give you is it does give you that buffer, and if you've got colonies that are chock-a-block from frame to frame and they're rearing lots of brood and they are running out of space, but more importantly the weather is still relatively cold and you're concerned that if you put a super on it might lose heat going upwards and then you might have to retract that super and take it back away again and it gets you in a right old mess, doing this manipulation here is a really good Simple, easy manipulation to give your bees the additional space as and when they need it. What's more important than adding that box there though is the manipulation that comes after that. So I'll follow this video on later on in the year, but what we've done there is we've added a single national deep of foundation and drawn comb underneath the 14 by 12 box. I can leave that now until that's completely expanded and they're filling pretty much all of the frames in both of the boxes. Now this doesn't matter whether you're on a 14 by 12 or a national deep or a shallow, The size of the box underneath there really doesn't matter. The next step of the manipulation, once it's completely full, is to identify where the queen is, put the queen back in the original brood box that's on the top now, and then replace the bottom box onto the top of the hive. Put the queen excluder in the middle with the queen downstairs. Any brood that she's laid into that bottom box will just hatch out as normal, and the queen can continue laying in the downstairs brood chamber. Your colony of bees is then set up in the correct configuration for spring, and you've made sure that you've given them enough space when they need it. But most importantly, you've restricted the heat from rising upwards because you've got your polyash forth feeder or your insulated roof on top of that cluster still, and you're not introducing a void between the cluster, the void, and then the roof up here. That's the simple way to add space to your colony early on in the season if they need it, without risking any of the impacts of cold weather. If you heard the word nadir there and you're interested to know how do you nadir a super late in the season, check out this video here where I show you the full process.