What To Do With Old Frames From A DLQ Colony?

In this video, I'm going to tell you why you should never throw away your drawn comb, even if the colony's turned into a drone laying queen. We're going to show you how to make the best use of those combs into the next season. So whenever a colony turns drone laying queen, all I ever do is I shake the bees out. That is always my strategy, and the reason that I do that— I've covered it in separate videos— is because I don't want to take the risk at any point in the season with any combines, and I like to distribute the bees evenly across the apiary. And a shakeout makes that very, very simple. What you always end up with though is a lot of unused frames. Most of the time there's some drone brood in it as well, but what I do with those frames is I seal them up, I put them into storage, and I come back the next year. In this video I'm going to show you what they look like after a year in storage and show you why it's a really valuable resource and something that you can use in the next year with pretty much no issue at all. So what we'll cover in this video, I'll show you some of those frames, I'll show you how they come through in storage, I'll show you how to prepare them to use them again in the season, and I'll show you just how quickly the bees get to work on them and turn them back into normal combs. So I've got a few examples here of what your frames might look like after, say, a year, 9 months of dry storage after you've pulled them out of a drone-laying queen colony. This one's the worst by far because this one's had a little bit of wax moth damage. But overall, that's definitely recoverable. This one here, really interesting. You can see they've started going droney. They've been shaken out at the earliest opportunity, so that's like, what, 1 or 2% of the cells there that have been a little bit ruined with drone cells. Also, take a look at the pollen in there. Dry storage, you can take advantage of pollen mites, and it means that they work that pollen and then the pollen just shakes out really easily. I know pollen's a good resource, but it does give you a good fresh start, and it makes these frames so easy to use. And then another version up there, really classic spotty drone brood frame. And all you're going to see now is if you just start to scrape this off, it's kind of all decayed in the middle. All that brood, as long as you get them out early, it's not a huge amount of damage. Seems to just decay down to nothing. And if you just scrape them with the back of your hive tool like this, You've kind of sorted out the problem already. The bees will finish that off, clean out all of that dry pollen, clean out any decaying bodies inside there, and as long as you've left it in a good airy dry position, you're not going to come back to horrible mouldy frames. So again, this one down here, you can just look if you get your hive tool in. I'll try and break one open and you can see what's inside. Kind of goes to nothing, you see, you just get the remnants of nothing in there. That would have been a drone. And let's open this one as well, and you can see, you can just see the wings and a little bit of decay at the bottom. But if you just scrape all that down, even if you need to take a little bit of the wax out like that, the bees will fix all of the rest of that. If you have a look, if I shake it like this, you'll see all of this pollen muck falling out. Don't need to do that, the bees can make the use of it. I just wanted to show you how it does fall out if you dry store them. And then this one over here, this is the worst one. You can see some decaying bodies in there. And you can see the strands that you get from the wax moth. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to try and break that down a little bit. And I've got no problem at all. I think the bees will just clear that up nicely for me. So we'll mark them up. Frame 1, frame 2, frame 3. 3 frames. I'll mark them, I'll put them into a colony, and then we'll see how the bees get on repairing those frames. So there's my 3 frames. I'll open up a colony now, get them in, see what the bees do to them. So this is the colony that I'm going to use to put those frames in. I'll swap them out for either frames of stores or maybe a frame of brood, equalize some of the colonies here. Let's get inside though, and I'll show you a nice big strong colony and just how quickly they repair those frames. So I've just made some space in this colony, just pulled out some of those outer frames, frames of stores. We use those to make up some nucs. And then all I'm going to do, just going to checkerboard it a bit just to get the bees working them, intersperse them. You can definitely do that on a big colony like this. We'll get those 3 frames in, give it a couple of weeks, see what the bees turn them into. Right, so we're all set. Absolute monster colony, this one. 3 frames: frame 1, frame 2, frame 3. We'll fast forward a couple of weeks, see what the bees have made of these. Right, let's get back inside this colony here, have a look at those 3 drone-laying frames, see what the bees have made of them. I don't know what's going on with this apiary. They have just turned horrible, absolutely vile. I've never experienced in my life such horrible bees. Something's gone on here. It's very, very strange. They're literally swarming around me, swarming around the camera. These are not the Bugfast queens, don't worry about that, but we are going to deal with these queens. You can use this as a benchmark. We will sort this out. Well, even though the bees are swarming around my face, they're not coming from this colony here. This colony is very, very happy indeed, so we know this colony here is not the problem. We've got our 3 frames in there, frames 1, 2, and 3. I'll pull them out now and show you what the bees have turned them into. So here are the frames. This one you can see here, this is frame number 2. All they've turned this one into is a beautiful frame of pollen, gathering stores right in the corners as well. But that is a really nice frame, as you can see, a perfectly usable frame. There was a few cells on there that were drone cells But the bees just have completely ignored that, maybe stored some stores in those cells. But that one there, number 2, they're just using that as a perfectly usable frame. This frame here, this is frame number 3, and they've done exactly the same with this one as well. They're using it for stores, they're using it for pollen. There is a colony around here that is so, so angry. I need to sort these bees out. But in terms of these frames, nothing wrong with them whatsoever. Don't throw away your drone laying queen frames. There's no disease risk, and it's a really valuable commodity that you can use throughout the season. Right, so that's it. I just can't get over how horrible these bees have turned. Okay, it's not nice here today, but they've been like this on a number of videos now. I think there's one or two colonies here that have just gone completely rogue. I need to sort them out. But in terms of this video, we're done. Drone laying queen colonies, when they fail, really easy to identify. Don't throw away the frames. Get in there early, shake the bees out, make sure they don't turn all of it into useless drone comb, and then you can put 'em to good use like this again. It makes such a big difference having it on hand throughout the season. If you wanna see what I do with drone-laying colonies, check out this video here, which shows you how I shake them out to boost the numbers across the apiary.