Why You Should Replace Old Brood Combs - Healthier Bees And Stronger Colonies

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about how often you should replace your brood frames. Now, I see some horrendous videos on YouTube, mine included from a few years back, where people had lack black combs. And there seems to be some people that are just quite willing to have the darkest, blackest combs and, and sell nucs and sell bees and think that it's an acceptable thing to do. And then some people are a bit more responsible and they'll go through a regime of changing their frames very, very regularly. So in a brood frame, which is very, very different from a super frame or a frame where you're just storing honey, the queen will go in, she'll lay an egg, turns into a larva, and then once it forms into a pupa, it effectively has a cocoon that goes around it. The bees will then cap over that with wax, and then the pupa emerges and it becomes a bee. That is the life cycle within the brood nest. But these cocoons build up over time. They become dark, they become black, the space becomes reduced, they harbor diseases and bacteria. And this is the reason that colonies in the wild will find a new location and kind of build up in that location, and then they'll swarm, they'll go somewhere else, and the colony eventually dies out, and then another swarm comes in and takes over that colony and starts building and repurposing the wax and building off in another direction. Now, if you're a responsible beekeeper, the last thing that you want to do is to harbor this wax. And I tell you this from personal experience and not from a position of kind of preaching and saying, well, look what we do here. I was exactly the same as most people, which was I bought a frame, put some foundation in it, put it in the brood nest, and just forgot about it. And then kind of reused that frame the following year, which is fine, and then forgot about it again, and then reused it the next year. Just kept on doing it and thinking, well, the bees are still using it, so I'm just going to keep it there. It's going to cost me money, and it's going to cost me energy and effort to repurpose and recycle all of that wax. Why bother if the bees are just using it and they're getting on okay? What I didn't realize was that although the bees were doing okay on those frames, I wasn't getting the very best out of them. And it was only when I came to start doing like some full apiary shook swarms as a preventative measure for kind of disease transmission that I saw for myself the difference of how the bees performed on nice brand new comb. Now a shook swarm is quite drastic. It involves taking away all of the combs, all of the brood, all of the stores and everything, and just burning it all and shaking all of the bees onto brand new frames, new boxes, new foundation. And then after a few days, once the bees have purged their stomachs, feeding them and building them back up. In the short term, it's very disruptive. It's not the best for the bees, but in the medium term, I cannot believe how well the bees did the following season after a shook swarm. Now you might think, well, I'm just going to recommend doing a shook swarm. I'm not, because there are ways to go about replacing that wax at the right time of the year. Now you can do what's called a Bailey comb exchange, where you start building out the frames and recycling them in a certain fashion, in a certain way. You can checkerboard if that's what you want to do. Or what I think is the easiest recommendation that I can give you is every single season you take the worst 3 frames out of the brood nest. And if you're wondering which frames they should be, try not to go for the ones that have got the most brood on them, 'cause that's the most disruptive. Try not to go for the ones that have got the most stores on them. But if at any point throughout the year you see an old black manky frame that hasn't got any brood or just got a tiny bit of brood in it, and hasn't got any stores in it, take it out, burn it, melt it down, recycle that frame, and add in a frame of foundation. You can do that at absolutely any point throughout the season. You can do it now, early October. I kid you not. If you take a frame out now, don't go into your colony searching for it though. But if you did it at this point in the year and put a frame of foundation in the middle and gave them a feed, you'd come back in the spring and you would have a perfectly drawn out frame. So from any time from April to September, this works and it works really, really well. If you just religiously do stuff like that, then you will end up with much, much healthier bees, and you're reducing the chance of any diseases being spread between apiaries and being spread between beehives as well. But if you're not worried about disease, and I see there's a different approach to kind of disease control in the UK than there is in America, and I get that because the UK is so compressed and we're all so close to each other, whereas in the USA, you know, you might have hundreds of miles before you've got the next beekeeper, so disease control maybe isn't as much of an issue as long as you're controlling your own bees. Not got to worry about your next-door neighbor who might not be controlling their bees. But ever since I've continually recycled out the old frames by either a Bailey comb exchange or a shook swarm, or just that repeated recycling and removal of the older frames, I have noticed that my bees have thrived. Now it's a strange one because I started off in the place of never exchanging these frames, like literally never. 5, 6, 7 years of exactly the same combs. And the bees showed me that that wasn't a good thing to do. As we've transitioned forward as a company, we've changed the way that we manage our operation as well. So what we do now is we sell a huge amount of nucs. Nucs is about 50% of our business and queens is like about 40% of our business. The other 10% is honey and social media and stuff like that. But because we sell so many nucs now, we're in this really luxurious position, which is all of the frames are just constantly recycled out. So when you see nucs on the market and you might think, oh, Black Mountain Honey, They look good, the nucs look good, but they may be a little bit more expensive than the other ones. Here is the assurance that I'm going to give you. Every single frame from 2025 onwards that we sell in a nucleus colony is less than 12 months old. I see adverts on Facebook of people selling nucs, and I guarantee they are not selling you 12-month-old frames. What they are doing— they understand the benefit of getting rid of old black manky frames, and what they do— I should correct that. What some of them do is they sell you the old manky frames and they keep all the good ones for themselves. That is not what we do because we are in the position that we are a nuc-focused business. We're making up nucs to supply the demand with beautiful, calm Black Mountain Honey, Buckfast queens. As you can see here, maybe 8 to 10 minutes and the bees are just not interested in me. So if you are interested in calm bees, blackmountainhoney.co.uk. But because we are so focused on nucs, because we have to put so much energy and resource into building the colonies up, It means that every single year, new frames, new boxes, new foundation, fresh feed. You're going to get the healthiest bees you possibly can, and that is how we result in bumper crops for our customers with the overwintered nucs that we supply in the spring. I've had a number of people come back to me this year and say, we bought an overwintered nuc from you, delivered in the middle of April 2024, it's now on double brood, 8 supers full of honey, and they're still piling in more. That's like 240 pounds weight of honey, 480 little jars. If you get the good flow and you manage your bees well, it soon pays you back. So sorry if that went off in a little bit of an advertorial way for the Black Mountain Honey Nucs. The point I'm trying to get across is don't keep old Black Mankey frames, replace them with new. Your bees will thank you and you'll end up with much better honey crops as a result.