Two Simple Methods To Clip Your Queens Wing: Anyone Can Do It!

The best change I ever made to my beekeeping was clipping my queen's wings. In today's video, I'm going to show you just how to do it. So clipping a queen's wing has massive benefits to the beekeeper. It also has benefits to the colony as a whole in terms of what you're looking to get out of your bees. Might not benefit the bees in terms of not allowing them to multiply and for them to swarm, But bees multiplying and bees swarming is not what the beekeeper wants, and really it's not a responsible thing to do as a beekeeper. You want your bees to remain in your beehive, produce lots of honey, stay healthy, stay under control, and for them not to swarm and end up in your neighbour's chimney. Now, in any normal hive, a colony will build up nice and strong. They'll get to the point where they think, right, we're going to swarm. They'll create loads of swarm cells, and on the day that they cap the swarm cells, The queen in the colony leaves with about half of the bees, and you are left with another half of the bees and all of these swarm cells. Now, if you do nothing at this point, the bees will cast out further swarms, and that means further swarms will leave the hive as each of those virgins emerge. Now, they might do this once, they might do this 2 or 3 times. Sometimes you can get left with absolutely nothing. What's really important to say here is clipping a queen's wing isn't a silver bullet to fix everything, and it means that you don't have to do your inspections. All it does is it buys you a little bit more time, basically buys you 3 days more time. But what it gives you is the ability to not lose your bees during that swarm. So as I said, a normal swarm, the bee's gone, the queen's gone, she's in your neighbor's chimney. Sometimes it's very difficult, if not impossible, to get her back. When a queen swarms and she has a clipped wing, what happens is the exact same process takes place. The bees build swarm cells, they get ready to swarm, and then as they are trying to swarm, the queen either looks outside the front door and says, Yeah, I can't actually fly, so I'm going back inside the hive, and all of the swarming bees retreat with her. Or the other thing that sometimes happens is the queen attempts to fly, falls down to the floor, and then you generally find the swarm either on the floor or trapped underneath the open mesh floor if you've got one. All of those scenarios there mean you do not lose the bees and you do not lose your queen. That's your valuable investment, that's what gives you honey, and that's the responsible thing that you want to keep by not allowing that to go into your neighbor's chimney. Now, ever since I started clipping my bees, I have produced way, way more honey. Absolutely loads more, probably double the honey crop, because it means that I never really lose swarms anymore if I'm responsible and I'm going and doing my inspections every 7 days. What I will find though is I'll find that I maybe missed swarm cells. I go through, I find capped swarm cells, which is usually the sign that you're too late, the queen's gone. But what you also find alongside those capped swarm cells is that you find the queen. Clipped queen walking around the frames, and you know if the clipped queen is there and the cells are still capped, you've not lost any bees and you've not lost the queen. Now, if you were to fast forward that cycle a little bit and you were to allow those swarm cells to actually emerge, what happens then is that the prime swarm, the first swarm that leaves the colony in the year, they go on a flight, a swarm flight, with the virgin that emerges. So you can get virgins that go in swarms, you can get multiple virgins that go in swarms, but you will lose the prime swarm if you don't go in and continue to do your inspections. So as I said, it's not a silver bullet, it's not an elixir to fix all of your inspection troubles, but what it does do is it buys you a little bit more time and it gives you a really useful mechanism to ensure that you do not lose bees into your neighbour's chimney, which maximises the amount of bees that you keep in your beehive, which ultimately increases your honey crop. Now, clipping a queen's wing, super, super simple. There are loads of different ways to do it. You will see people picking up queens and holding them and clipping, and I look at that and I can do it that way, But I've killed queens doing it that way before. It's tricky, and if you get it wrong, you can kill the queen. But also, if you get it wrong, the queen flies off, and then you lose that queen if she doesn't come back. The way that I clip my queens is very different. I don't see many people doing it. And the way that I do it is that I literally just pin the queen down with my 2 fingers, and I get a pair of nail scissors, and I try and slide the nail scissors alongside the queen, get one of her wings if I possibly can, if I can get it underneath one of them, and just nip the end off. Now, if you find that you can only get it under both wings, clipping both wings works just as well. It's not quite as neat and the queen doesn't look quite as nice, but the queen cannot fly with 2 clipped wings. The idea with the clipped wing is that you just nip a couple of millimeters off one wing and it puts the queen off balance. But if you nip a couple of millimeters off both wings, the queen cannot fly as well. And I know that from personal experience, having clipped hundreds of queens. Doesn't look as nice, but the process is loads, loads easier. So enough talking, I'll go along there now, I'll clip one of my queens that needs clipping today, and I'll show you just how simple it really is. So I found the queen. I've done a previous video about marking queens. If you're interested in learning more about beekeeping in general, definitely hit the subscribe button, blackmountainhoney.co.uk. But today we are clipping the queen. Now what I could do is I could just pick the queen up like this. Basically you need to work out what hand you're working on, so I like to clip with my right hand. But you can just pick the queen up and hold her like that. That is how a lot of people do this manipulation here. So queen's moving, and all you'll come in and do is just clip one of the wings like that. That is a clipped queen. She is done now. One wing, really, really easy. She does not care about that. She's quite happy. But then the other method that I like to use— I'll just get her back into the shot over there. Right, there we go. She's coming in. The other method that I like to use, and I'll just try and do it on her other wing, Is I'll come in from behind and I'll hold her down like that, and then I'll get the scissors in and I'll cut her from behind. Now, I'm not going to be able to show you this on video because of the way that they're just completely balling her. So I guess you could argue that the other method is a lot easier. I will try and do it though. I'll try and get a frame. I'll just take that bee off there, that queen off. Just holding the queen in one hand, nice and easy. I'm just going to shake off another frame there and try and keep her away from some bees. Right, so I'm going to put that queen back on this frame here. So the method that I like to use sometimes is like this. You let the queen walk towards you, you pin her down, and then you're just going in underneath and you're just clipping the wing like that. And you can see I've clipped the other wing now. The queen will walk off, she's perfectly happy. I've taken a couple of millimeters off either wing using 2 different methods there. If you had to ask me which one do I prefer, I would just say it all depends on kind of how the queen is reacting. If she's going to let you pick her up like that, then go for it. But not everyone likes picking up queens like that. It can be a little bit worrying that you're going to do something to her. But you can see though, I've just got her by her thorax there. She can fully move all the way around. And you'd come in and you'd clip the queen, put her back down there. And then the other way I would say that it's a bit easier for beginners is just to pin her down and nip the end of the wing off like that. Either way, you'll end up with a very, very happy queen bee that's not going to go off and go swarming into your neighbor's chimney.