Winter Beehive Setup Explained - Shrinking Hives For Thermal Efficiency And Varroa Control

In this video, I'm going to show you why I condense my colonies down for winter, and I suggest you do exactly the same. Now, across this apiary here, I shook swarmed the entire apiary about 6 to 8 weeks ago now, and what I did is I shook all the bees off the old frames, burnt all of the old frames, reclaimed the wax, and then I put them on new equipment across all of the hives in this apiary except my couple of Flow hives. The bees have come on so, so well since then. And I've been giving them extra boxes to try and get them to build up brood for winter, stores for winter, and just to get them to a decent size for winter. Now I've got some colonies over there that are on 3 extension boxes. I've got some that are on 2 extension boxes. And believe it or not, this colony here is now actually only on 1 brood box. There's nothing in this brood box and there's nothing in this brood box. So you might be thinking, well, why don't you just take them away? And I can take them away, but not before I've done this video. It's a very, very important video. And one that can potentially save your bees from dying over winter. So all of these nucs, as I said, they got shook swarmed. I've been trying to build them up, but the rate in which some of them build up is a little bit different. When you do a shook swarm, some bees just say, I'm not going into that hive, I'm gonna go into the one next door. And you tend to get these big bumper nucleus colonies, and some of them are a little bit smaller. So what I've done with all of the colonies here is I've gone through and I'm just getting them down to the exact size that I want them for winter. Now these are all Langstroth nucs. Most of the nucs in this apiary now are Langstroth nucs, and a Langstroth nuc, 6-frame Langstroth nuc, to get it over winter is more than enough space for even the biggest colonies. But the reason that I condense my colonies down, and especially the nucleus colonies, is threefold. The first one is that colonies perform way better over winter if they're in a smaller space because they don't need as much energy or stores to heat up that space and to keep it warm, to keep the hive at a manageable temperature. So you're reducing the risk that the colony is going to starve, and you're making life so much easier for the bees because they've got a nice small space just to keep warm. They don't need to try and kind of keep this big space warm where you're losing all this heat going upwards. The second one is that it ties in with my integrated pest management program, and specifically for me, the use of Apivar. It's an amatraz-based chemical product, and it works by the bees walking over the amatraz strips and distributing that miticide chemical to all corners of the hive. Now you can imagine if you've just got a big space with like a couple of frames up here and a couple of frames there, and then you've got frames missing down in the brood area, then that individual strip of amatraz that you're putting in there kind of doesn't give you much of an effective dose throughout that size. So my view is, is that if you've got a much smaller space and you've got your Amitraz, your Apivar strips in there, you're getting a far better distribution of that chemical all the way around all of those brood frames, which leads to a higher mite drop, which leads to healthier winter bees. And then the third, and I would say probably most important reason for condensing these colonies down at this time of the year, as we've just seen over there and with these bees here and wasps, is that if you trigger a robbing situation, a colony that's packed into a single brood box as opposed to just being sparsely spread out across 3 or 4 brood boxes, or maybe a brood box and 2 or 3 supers, far more easy for that colony to defend itself because of the number of bees within the entrance area. Any robbing bees coming in, any wasps coming in, you've got so many bees down there that they just take them out immediately, and the robbers go off and they go and try somewhere else. If you've got them interspersed and bees everywhere and loads of space, The wasps just come in, and as soon as they come in and start taking what they want, it's a really, really difficult situation to get away from. So I'm going to show you inside this one. This was at one point over 2 boxes. So obviously earlier on in the season, I'm trying to get them to build up, and they filled the bottom brood nest, and it was like maybe the first week of August, and I thought, well, I'm going to give them another brood box because say we get 3 or 4 weeks of beautiful weather, I don't want to risk them swarming, and I want to get my frames drawn out, and I want to get them to produce their own stores for winter. So I'm not saying to do this in July, I'm not saying to do this kind of first week of August, do this at the end of the season. I'm doing it around the middle of September. So I've given the bees a chance for expansion, they didn't take that chance, and now I'm pressing them back down into the smallest possible space they can get into. So as you can see, top box is just completely empty, second box as well completely empty. And then what I've got down here is a plastic crown board that's separating the bees from all of that space above and the actual working hive below. So you can see there now we've got a very, very good-sized nuc. They're packed in there, but they're not overly packed in there. I've got some that are considerably more packed than this. Got my Apivar strip in there as well, and I'll quickly pull the lid off here just to show you the amount of bees that are in there. And I would say this one here is about average in terms of packing them in. So easily covering 6 frames into the feeder as well, so that's always a good sign that there's a little bit of overflow. They're probably a little bit too big for that 6 frames, but these are nicely congested, bees down every single line. I've condensed these from a 14 Langstroth frame box down to a 6 frame Langstroth frame box, and the bees are very, very happy and doing very well. So you might ask why the boxes are still there. Trying to keep all of my equipment really quarantined at the moment. The robbing bees are back as well over here, so I'm keeping the used boxes on the used hives. I'm going to backfill it with a little bit of insulation later on in the year, but as long as I've got my plastic crown board on there like that, the bees can't get up into that space, and at the moment they will respect that space, and it's only minimal heat that they're losing upwards. As I said, later on I'll put the extension boxes back on and I'll backfill fill it with some insulation and then use the space above it as storage. I highly recommend you compress your colonies down for winter. A single National Brood Box is more than enough space for pretty much all of the colonies in the UK. Don't leave big spaces for the bees to heat up over winter, it will only end in trouble.