We Are Getting Ready For The Next Level!

At Black Mountain Honey, we make up hundreds and hundreds of nucleus colonies to overwinter that are sold off in the spring to all of our customers. We pride ourselves on making not only very healthy nucs, but very calm and prolific nucs using the best Buckfast breeder queens that money can buy. Now, I have worked with my partner over the past 3 or 4 years now to build up this reputation and build up the facility in order to be able to make this amount of nucs. Now I thought it was about time to introduce the partner to the YouTube channel and show you just how good some of these nucleus colonies are. I'm going to give you a snapshot of some of the colonies that we're getting ready to overwinter that will be available for sale in 2024. As you can see, no veil needed, no bee suit even needed in this apiary. There are hundreds of nucs here and we plan to split them and split them again, grafting queens From our breeder queens in order to get up to around 400 or 500 nucs for 2024. But enough of me talking, let's get inside, let's see Richard handle the bees and show you how well the bees are doing in July 2023. Right, so the first thing that should strike you in this apiary is how new and how clean all of the equipment is. None of the equipment in this apiary is older than 12 months, and that includes all of the frames as well. They are brand new for 2023. Now we don't overwinter them in this configuration, we overwinter them in a 6-frame configuration so they are ready to go as soon as the spring comes. We don't like overwintering in bigger configurations and then splitting them. A lot of nuc producers do that, they overwinter on a 6 over 6 and they just give you the bottom half and then they add in another queen in order to keep their stocks going. That's not what we do at Black Mountain Honey, we overwinter in 6-frame configuration, and we only let that nuc go when it's strong enough to be sold. You get every single bit, all the bees, all the brood, all of the nuc boxes, and the queen. Another thing to say is that when we send our overwintered nucs out, we send them out in the exact same poly nuc that they overwintered in. We send it out in a Payne's poly nuc because we think that they do very well building up in the spring in that Payne's poly nuc. And then we can add on a ventilated screen, and we find that they go through the postal service very, very well. The poly is insulated, so it means that it can handle the cold in the postal service, but it can equally handle the warmth in the postal service as well. Now you'll see Richard dealing with these bees here now. No bees flying up, very nice calm queens. Every single queen that is in this apiary here is reared by Richard using the queen right method that I showed you on previous videos that I will link downstairs in the description. We're using the pure Buckfast breeder queens that we select from, and we test the F1 daughters, and we leave sufficient F1 daughters in this apiary to boost the amount of genetics that are going up into the air through the drone. So as you can see, they're brand new frames for 2023. Interesting to see that these are wired vertically as opposed to the zigzag wiring. Beautiful brood pattern, really nicely drawn out, good amount of stores all the way around the edge. Very nice calm bees. So what you can see there is the bees have taken advantage of that additional space in the paint feeder. They are very, very prolific, these bees. So we're down to the bottom 6 frames and this is indicative of This is the size of the nuc that would come when you get your nucs delivered in the post, always across 6 frames with a very minimum of between 3 and 4 frames of brood. We don't send them until they're ready, and we make sure that when they get to you, they're in a really good state to be transferred over to build up nice and strong. So there we go, some lovely frames of brood coming out there now. 3 or 4 frames of brood you'll get when you buy these nucs overwinter, and they can build up so, so quickly. So it's not uncommon for a single one of our nucs to be sent out in April, build up onto double brood, and then fill 6 or 7 supers throughout the season. We send our overwintered nucs out very, very early because we're not waiting to build them up to split them to make more nucs. We overwinter those nucs on 6 frames only, and as As soon as they're covering those 6 frames with 3 or 4 frames of brood, we send them out to our customers. So if you're interested in buying some of our overwintered nucs, they're available now and they generally sell out between February and March each year. We then move on to selling our summer nucs that are made up in between May towards the beginning of June. But if you want the very best start for your bees and you want them early on in the year, the best way forward is to get a deposit down for our overwintered nucs. They are some of the very best that money can buy.