Why You NEED more Than One Colony Of Bees

In this video, I'm going to tell you why it's so important to always have more than one colony of bees. When you're starting off beekeeping, there's a lot of expense up front, and a lot of people opt for a single colony of bees. But starting off your beekeeping journey with one colony of bees, you really are setting yourself up for some form of failure. You're buying a bee suit, you're buying a honey extractor, you're buying a beehive, you're buying a nuc, you're putting all of your money into a single investment that is your one And if you're an inexperienced beekeeper, there is just so much that can go wrong in the first year. The main things that can go wrong is that the colony can swarm, or your queen can turn into a drone-laying queen. Now, if either of those 2 things occur, what might happen is you come to a point where you believe the colony is queenless. So if your bees swarm, the queen goes out, she takes half of the bees with her, she leaves behind a number of virgin queens, and then if those virgin queens fail to mate, What you will see is lots of bees in the colony, honey in the frames, and no eggs and no larvae. And you're thinking, right, I'm queenless, I need to do something. And what most people do at that point is they'll buy a mated queen, put it in, and then the virgin that's in the colony will kill that queen. Now, if you had a second colony at that point, what you could do is you could take a frame of eggs from that colony and you could do a test to see whether there is a queen in that colony. You could also use a frame of eggs to put in there to rear a new queen. And you could also use frames of emerging brood to boost that colony if they start to dwindle. There are so many scenarios where having an additional queen-right colony, a colony in good health, gives you the flexibility to ensure that you don't go back down to zero. That's the most expensive mistake that you can make because you bought the bee suit, you bought the beehive, you bought the honey extractor, and then if your bees fail, the only way for you to get back on track is to buy another nucleus colony. And okay, you can come to us at Blackmans in Hurley and buy another nucleus colony, but I'd prefer to set people on their way and to educate them in order to enable them to become self-sufficient in their own beekeeping. Now I appreciate nucleus colonies aren't cheap and you might only have the money for one nucleus colony, and if that's your situation, what I would suggest you do is you buy your nucleus colony, you build it up, and as soon as it's covering all of the frames in the brood box, you make a You buy an additional mated queen and you turn that one colony into 2 colonies before you get into the swarming season. Gives you a real benefit in your first year as well, in that you don't actually have to tackle the swarming season when the bees are reaching mass population. You navigate through that period with 2 smaller colonies, and then they start to build up as you get past the solstice and the swarming season reduces down a little bit. Not to say that they won't swarm later on in the season, but the chances Much, much less. Having 2 colonies also gives you a really nice benefit that you can balance colonies as well. Now, no 2 colonies of bees are the same. The configuration of the beehive, the position in the garden, the size of the colony, the genetics of the queen, the makeup of the colony in terms of drones, nurse bees, worker bees, foragers— all beehives are different. And you might buy 2 nucs at the beginning of the season, and one's really small and one's really big, or or even they start off at the same size and they just grow at different rates. Having 2 beehives allows you to balance those 2 colonies to make sure that the smaller one is strong enough to protect itself from any pests, maybe some wasps, and you get the benefit by taking brood out of the bigger one to give to the smaller one, which helps relieve swarm congestion. Now as the numbers go up, it becomes even easier to do that. You can pinch kind of like 6 frames of brood from 6 individual colonies and maybe make up a nucleus colony. Or you can take a couple of frames of brood from your strongest colonies and give them to one or two of the weakest colonies, as long as there's enough bees in there to be able to actually use that brood and for it to not become chilled. What I'm trying to say is that any number of colonies above one colony is very, very useful, but having just one colony in your first year, there are so, so many things that can go wrong with that nucleus colony. Perfectly normal things, things that you would expect a nucleus colony to do in the first year, that maybe for a new beekeeper puts them in a situation where they don't really understand what is going on. So another example of having 2 colonies is if your colony turns into laying workers. Maybe you had a nucleus at the beginning of the season, it was building up nicely, they sent out a swarm, the virgins didn't mate at the beginning, you've got a drone-laying queen, the bees have killed that drone-laying queen, or you've killed the drone-laying queen, and then a number of workers have decided to take it themselves to start laying multiple eggs on the sidewalls of the cells. Now, I've had a number of people this year in this exact situation, and they say, I've got a colony of laying workers, what would you suggest? And my general suggestion for laying workers, at least up until now, was take it 30 or 40 meters away, shake them all out, and then go and make yourself a fresh split from another colony to get your numbers back up. Don't try introducing queens into laying workers 'Cause it just does not work. And they say, well, I've only got one colony of bees, I can't do that. So what's the next step? What do I do to get them back on track? And it's really hard to say to people, you know what, there is no next step. There's nothing you can actually do. You've got a laying worker colony that is so far gone that there is nothing you can actually do to get that colony back on track. And there's another way of doing it. And people say you can wean the laying workers off by slowly adding a frame of brood a week from another colony to try and get the colony back on track with the right configuration of drones and worker bees and nurse bees. Again, you need access to more brood to be able to do that, and I just hate seeing it where people have put so much money and time and effort and investment into that one colony and then just something completely random or something completely normal goes wrong and they're left with nothing. So my advice, start off the year with 2 nucs. If you can't afford 2 nucs, buy one nuc, but then get yourself an early season mated queen, split the colony really, really early, And turn it into 2. And I probably wouldn't leave it there either. I would probably say if you're going to have a space to keep some bees, you get such economies of scale with beehives in that you can start off with 1 colony and make a few splits over the first year with mated queens from blackmountainhoney.co.uk. You could end up with 4 or 5 colonies going into the winter. Maybe you lose one of those colonies in the winter, but then you come out next year with 4. And I would say the optimum minimum number of beehives that you should really have is somewhere between 3 to 6. That's a really nice manageable amount of beehives, doesn't increase the inspection time too much, and it just gives you that ability to be able to manipulate your entire apiary and make sure you continually have nice healthy bees with no problems that can arise from just owning a single colony.