🔵Making Small Hives for Virgin Queens.

hi it's kayman reynolds it is a crazy time of the year whether you're a bee or a beekeeper it's hard to keep up with them and sometimes you just don't but right now we have a bunch of beautiful queen cells right here and they're fixing to emerge i would say most of these will be out of these cells within 24 hours and one or two of them you can already hear them going at the cell trying to come on out so we need to hurry up and get these things in a colony so we were doing a bunch of these catching a bunch of queens today and i thought well goodness might as well do a video so that's what we're gonna do so i've got this hive already broken down over here it's a nice sunny day nice and warm i'm going to put a picture on facebook of my buddy jimmy and i which he's my son you don't know catching these queens over here so we can drop some of these cells with 25 mated queens right here got them in an old queen box and we'll shake some nurse bees in there and then this colony that we have right over here i've already captured the queen so we don't have to worry about that which is awesome now those queen cells were raised up in this top box it's a really packed queenless starter finisher over another colony that we use to pull resources up on those cold nights of this double screen board really helps keep them warm so let's show you though this video's main purpose is to show you how we load our three-way mating nukes because you can make them too strong you can make them too weak and it really depends on the time of the year what i like to do we're supposed to get some nights down in the low 30s highs in the 50s so i'm going to make them a tad on the strong side but it should work just fine how do i end up with two hive tools usually i can't find one so this is a nice situation to be in so what i'm wanting if possible is some capped brood or mostly capped brood so this is mostly capped over here some of the larvae down towards the bottom is still not capped but it's very close to that stage so that means there's not much work left to do this is a great candidate to take this is probably a day or two out from being capped by and large and this isn't quite enough bees though we also have to keep in mind if we keep this in the same bee yard all the forager bees are going back we don't want to make it too strong don't want to make it too weak so that's going to be one of our brood frames right there and now we're going to go over to this next one that actually works out pretty good so there's some capped brood there most of what's around it though is nectar yeah this is mostly nectar on this side as well so we're going to stick this one over here and this is all resources right here all i'm really going for is one good frame of brood doesn't have to be very full but you know 50 fill with brood and i need to make sure i have enough bees to cover that and then i need a little bit of food but right now there's a lot of food coming in so that's already a little bit more food than that one needs you definitely don't want to have two frames of food or three frames and then you after the bees go back to the original location you only have one frame of actual bee coverage that's where you run into problems with small hive beetles or wax moths but they're usually not as big of a deal so this is all food right here so we're going to go over here i've got a lot more to work with let's see we've got a little bit of capped brood right here and some adhering bees yeah this would be a good frame to take all right so we have larvae different stages some of it's capped this would be all right though especially since they're all together in one box and i think also because we're going to have a little insulated thing on top of them it'll help out so that's the middle frame for this one this one didn't have much brood so if i can get another partial or maybe just take that one out and substitute that'd be better here we go so we have some capped brood here lots of bee bread and then on this side i haven't smoked these bees in a while yeah food b bread caps brew low maintenance so what we're going to do is just go into here we don't want to make them too strong remember we don't want them swarming on us but we are going to take this frame and we're going to shake that down in there and put this one back in then we're going to give them this one so now all three of them have one good frame of decent brood now we need to make sure they have plenty of coverage and they have room to grow and expand one other thing that we're going to do is we're going to give them a frame of you can give them foundation i'm going to give them some drawn comb instead right preferably with no bee bread in it but they don't have to worry about anything uh eating it up or anything like that wax moss small high beetles they really don't like wax you can't you can't make healthy wax sauce you can't make healthy beetles on wax there's not the proteins and fats that they need they really want that bee bread and you know honey it's a nice sweet addition but it's really all about the brew anything that's protein or fatty thankfully we have the queen if you can't find the queen very easily what you can do is go into a double deep shake all the bees down put frames of larvae in the top box and put an excluder below come back in a handful of minutes 20 or so everything that's covering by and large that larvae is going to be nurse bees and you know that queen shook down below all right this has larvae in it and some capped brood a lot of fuzzy bees that's what we want and emerging bees that's where they're coming from so this is a good frame to take look at that nectar shake right there jeez louise that time of the year now it's just a matter of making sure there's enough bees now if you were taking this closing it up and quickly taking it to another yard again you don't really have to worry about the forage or bees going back but many of us just leave them in the yards my buddy zach accuses me of making these two strong he's probably right he's in hawaii they don't get 30 degree nights you know and this frame right here just got mostly food on the other side but it's got some emerging bees so you know i'm going to give that to one of these it's gonna be a little on the strong side maybe all right so there's a lot of bees in here we don't have to have a lot of food fixing to show you why i need one more drawn comb that's pretty empty this apama frame will work alright so last frame again by and large there's pretty much just one frame in the center of each one that has brood in it as long as there's enough bees to maintain that then as that emerges it's going to fill these up a little bit more you definitely don't want to really pack like one of those completely covered on both sides frames of brood because it'll just you know one frame of really fully capped brood it's gonna fill that up pretty fast especially if you have quite a few bees in there so it's one of the things you want to kind of watch out for it's one of the reasons why i don't like doing the the two frame nukes they can work but they just don't give you as much leeway threes are more forgiving those of you who don't understand what's going on i've got two entrances on this side if the weather is cool you can always plug one i've got two on this side and two on the front the reason i started using two is it just they needed more ventilation also we want to stick this in a place that gets some midday shade you maybe have a little more small high beetle problems but i don't see a big issue with it not here anyways both of these look really good this one looks a little light on b so i'm going to shake just a little more on the edge side and again i'm just going for about two frames of coverage i know that some of them are going to go back there wasn't much on that frame but and you can always shake bees out you definitely don't want these things plugged up but come back later we're going to check these 14 days from now i'm going to take these nice queen cells here and you can see kind of see that cell down in there and this makes it to where they can't chew at the cell from the side just helps give you a little bit more protection not everybody feels like this is necessary i'll show you how we put those down there just one second you want to be careful with these cells and we're going to make sure this is up against one of the brood frames and now it's just right down in there and they're going to cover that brood and that is going to stay warm and these cells are very ripe they should emerge tonight or tomorrow morning i can just get my fat thumbs down in there we go and hopefully we'll get three nice queens out of this if we only get two we let them lay for 21 days sometimes i'll do a little bit shorter than that if i'm using them for myself because when i use them for myself i literally take them out of here and a lot of times i'll take them on it with the frame if it's really packed and stick them right into one of my colonies and plug them in so they really don't get caged they just there's a little hiccup there but nothing too extreme like shipping queens so there you have that right there now how would you feed something like this in the middle of dearth or maybe a really rough week of rain you take this right here and whoo that glare about blow your eyeballs out and that ensures that those dividers the bees can't get from one side of the other especially once we get the lid on it and i had the lid one second ago and i guess i'm gonna hunt that down so you can see how there's just little notches the bees can get through but this lid does not have a feeder rim so it's nice and flat puts that pressure down so the bees can't get from one compartment to the other and now we can put a nice jar right in there with syrup on each one of these if we need it now being in the middle of the honey flow like we are there is food in in those uh frames i would drop those cells like i did either put on a regular leg litter have plugs for these holes and then whenever i come back 14 days from now and see if i have made a queen so i'll wait two weeks and if they're laying and they look like they could use some food then i'll give them some one to one or three quarters sug pound of sugar to one pound of water make it a little bit thinner depending on the needs of the colony so there's that right there and now what are we going to do with this big colony over here so like i said i already found the queen she's a little lackluster so i wasn't a too big of a fan of her performance we are going to get rid of her and i'm going to show you what we're going to do to get one rid of more of these queen cells but two also get some more nice queens so i'm going to turn this into a double deep situation and i'm going to divvy up the resources divvy up the resources watch too much looney tunes all right let me grab a double screen board so it would be nice to balance out the frames of brood and the frames of food so let's see we have 4 8 10 12 14 16 18 frames so nine to a box if you have 10 to a box that's fine too we got a frame of partially capped brood eggs and larvae down in here yeah different stages of larvae and she was pretty good she just just wasn't able to really put it out like this colony over here i've been pulling it back all year it's been trying to swarm it's so robust i've been able to make nukes with it so robust this is the first thing i've been able to do with this one so it's just uh the queen's not performing at as high of a level all right so there's a nice frame of brood there there's some brood on this frame keep in mind this bottom box is going to get all the forager bees back so you can cut it back a little bit more there's some brood up top root in the adjacent frame all over this frame right here nice capped brood right here and of course if you had more of those three ways that you were wanting to make up you could totally just break this down and probably fill you know nine of those maybe probably nine i'd say with this hive so that's three of those boxes that's nice and out of nine you might end up with eight or nine queens you might only end up with four or five but they're your queens and they've been mated in a nice small environment i think they do a lot better like that four frames partial brew there's brood over there i think they look pretty good the way that they are i'm just going to throw these two frames down below we already shook all the bees off of these frames and now we are going to take a ripe queen cell and this situation we're just going to drop it like that plenty of bees here also if there's not a flat lid going over it they will keep that warm plenty of bees so here's our double screen board and it is flat like a lid right here we have this bottom screen well it's flat like one of our lids that has the feeder rims sorry i'm going to drop this down on top that gives them plenty of room above and the nice thing is all the heat from this is going to go up and warm this box so if too many forager bees go down here not quite enough to cover the brood in this box the heat's still going to come up here and warm this up and make it easier on those beads also since there's two screens and the bees can't exchange mandibular pheromone from the queens neither side will know that there's a different queen both of these hives have plenty of food multiple frames worth if it's all added together and i'm guessing that both of these have two or three frames of brood plenty of bees but if i was going to lean on giving one side more of course definitely the top box because they're not picking up any of the foragers so i gave them that nice frame of brood and hopefully we'll get a new queen here and one down the bottom i did this a lot last year did really good for me the year before i tried it out and i liked it last year i did a lot of it and it's a great method of re-cleaning big colonies and of course you can raise these cells for very inexpensive amount of money they're just when you raise your own queens it's it's so wonderful so let me stick that there i don't think i'm going to stick it a little bit more towards the center because there's more brood there but uh so there you have it now this one is flat right here but we have that feeder rim so it'll bow up in there and it's just going to get help them stay a little bit warmer only thing i don't really like about these uh foamies or double bubbles it's technically called reflectix around here find it at lowe's is that a lot of times you can get ants that build up in between the lid in here because the bees can't patrol it and the ants really don't cause any problems other than you can get them all over you and all up your pants when ants in your pants is almost as bad as a bee in your bonnet so anyways that's what we're doing that's we're raising a bunch of queens this colony may have looked pretty good to a lot of you and you know used to ought to just let this colony go but it is the queen's on her way down so uh new queens great queens new queens dead mites and good nutrition thanks for watching our videos all right i forgot some things in the video i do most videos however for those of you who didn't notice there is an entrance on the double screen board so this colony right here can forage once they figure out where the entrance is and they graduate to forage or be age and that mated queen or excuse me that queen cell that we dropped in there will leave out of that to go on her mating flight and hopefully return and be awesome like we love to see now over here this is where all these nice queen cells were made and this was this box was created from just strong colonies that needed pulled back and we're just like what we're going to do with all this brood with like yeah let's make more queens if you have too many good queens the answer is no you know you cannot and so there's quite a few bees up in there and what we are going to do is pack this box to sell some queens to some lucky person just pulled these queens out about an hour ago and we got them rigged up we've got a sponge that's moist down in here it's wet and we've got some nice queen candy which for those of you who don't know that's two pounds of powdered sugar with one cup of honey it's nice if you warm that honey up a good bit it mixes in quite a bit easier now you can feed bees this candy it's also used for the plugs on these queens right here so there's the queen candy right there and it works really good however you definitely wouldn't want to feed this during winter time because there is a little corn starch in powdered sugar and if you did that in the wintertime that can sit there and and mess up their guts and really cause your bees a lot of problems this time of the year they can take cleansing flights and let her go just let it go i need to sing that one to my daughter in that context and see what she says anyways getting back to bees we need to shake a decent bit of nurse bees in here so that these queens are well fed well maintained bees are a social insect and the queens really suffer if they even if they have everything they need nutritionally and temperature wise they really don't do as well if they don't have some bees around them so this is mostly forager bees some of them have nurse bees some of them have graduated to forager bees we're just going to pull this out and we're going to shake that down in there and then we are going to get rid of all the forager bees you can see them getting rid of themselves i like it when the bees help me out we're going to give a little bit more smoke so we can get rid of the rest of them because some of them don't always take off and once i give them a little bit of smoke like that that pretty much gets rid of 90 of the forager bees and you can see these bees down here and they're just clustering on the walls and they're confused and they're trying to figure things out and that's the young nurse bees and a few drones in there but you know you're blocking my shot girl those drones you know they don't know much ask any woman all right shaking them to the corner like that oops and there's a little bit of water in there [Music] and still a couple foragers but mostly nurse bees and that was plenty of bees in there so those queens feel kind of like they're in a hive really helps things out all right so just kind of recapping a little bit covering stuff that i missed thanks laurel for the reminder and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 114,223

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, honey, How to install a package of bees, How to install a nuc, package vs nuc challenge, how to make honey, beehive, provap 110, Tennessee beekeeping, Tennessee beekeepers, Package of bees, swarming, swarm, swarm control, queen cell, queen cup, swarmtrap, swarm trapping, how to make a swarm trap, swarm trap, bee cast, mating nucs, queen rearing, hive live conference, kamon reynolds queen rearing

Id: sLLxaSuxY_4

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021