🔵Signs your Honeybees Need another Box!

hi it's cayman reynolds in this video i'm going to talk about when do we need to add a second brew chamber to our colonies we just started this year this is a split that was made in april and i think they're ready for another box so if you're using foundation or if you have comb we're going to talk about that in this video we're also going to see what condition the colony is in and then we're going to go from there so let's get into the hive first and determine if they're ready for another box now my rule of thumb is if it's foundation if we're getting them to draw a foundation when they start drawing on the seventh really good the seventh frame in a ten frame box then it is time to add another box if it's combs around the eighth frame and it's time to add some more combs to them so yes this hive is definitely ready i probably should have already thrown a box on by now now i've got comb so it's easier for me to come back from this but if you were doing foundations this would be a bad sign because look how much honey they have up towards the top there's a lot of white wax towards the top and they are filling this with honey which is excellent but if they have to draw foundations it takes time and by and if it takes two weeks to draw that out or 10 days in that amount of time you could have 10 15 20 pounds of nectar come in easily and more in a strong flow and they'll pack that brood nest and then they'll want to swarm so first thing we want to do is see if this colony is wanting to swarm so what we're going to do is just drop down below and look underneath if they're going to swarm there's going to be some cells underneath the cluster now the reason this one is in a single and not like the rest of that are in doubles is it had some queen issues with the original queen so we had to throw in another one wow this is heavy so i'm seeing a cup down in here we're going to smoke them up a little bit excuse me and i'm not seeing a lot of cups i'm seeing one over here that one is dry and this one is dry as well so we're in good shape not all swarm cells are at the bottom that is a myth the queen will lay in cups that are on the sides of frames and those form from that as well excuse me and but if they're going to swarm heavily there's going to be at least some started at the bottom that box is heavy i think while they went to that queen transition they focused really heavily on nectar and this is something you need to know so experienced beekeepers know this but when you have a queen that gets superseded during a flow or anything like that you don't have as much brood in the colony but you have all these nurse bees that would have been attending brood but they have no brew to attend to during that gap so they go into a early forager mode because they've got to do something and you'll get an increased amount of foragers and you have less brood and brood takes energy so there's less energy consumption and there's more foragers during the flow and that's where they bring in extra resources for their size and that queen comes back and if they don't have a lot of extra room to put those resources that they brought in then everything's bound up honey bound is what they call it it could be pollen bound too or a combination of both so now i'm going to show you how we add another box smoke follows beauty they say now we're going to take this off i don't always scrape it every time but if we're drawing foundations especially you don't want any bur comb on these top bars because sometimes they will prefer because this is comb to raise this and go in between your frames of foundation because this is comb they love it it's theirs foundation they don't recognize as theirs until they start drawing cells on it and so they'll draw this quicker and sometimes they'll go off of this first and you'll end up with a mess between your combs so we'll scrape that off and now we're going to dive down into here starting towards the edge create a little bit of space and then add a little bit of smoke to get the bees out of the way and see where we're at we if we had foundation we should have already had the foundation on by now like i said foundation needs to go on by the time the bees have worked on their seventh frame of either foundation or comb so this is an old brood comb right here that's why it's towards the edge and we are going to put that down what i want to find now whether we are adding foundation or comb it's preferred if you bring up a frame of larvae you can see how much resources this colony has again this is because they went through a gap with their queen hey see these bees fighting down in here well they were rough and tumbling yeah there it goes they are going after small hive beetles coming out of these edge cells that's good we want them to rough them up make their life stressful lots of nutrition and bee bread here but we're not through the flow yet oh there's larvae over in here that is good we could bring this frame up if we wanted to why would we bring a frame up if it's foundation again they don't recognize that as theirs until there's cells on it so bringing up a comb especially with larvae in it they have to go up and keep that larvae warm and on top of that a frame of larvae takes thousands of visits to feed them so they have to bring up a lot of bees and it'll make them draw that foundation a lot quicker you can see how some of this is messed up this is something good to notice as well see all these drone cells intermixed with these worker cells this is why we had to re-clean this colony not all the broods cycled out yet and unfortunately this cone will always stay like this where you have some drone combs intermixed with a worker cell but the other queen that we put in here did not get made it good enough and she was shooting some blanks and unfortunately because of that they were raising a lot of drones so we did put a new queen in here so she should be laying everything correctly now and it looks to be the case good larvae in here lots of food kind of looking for the queen that have poor queens do not draw a foundation good at all and this colony is definitely behind its counterparts yeah man that other queen just messed up some of these combs you can see some more drone comb down in there kills me but sometimes it happens good bit of honey we're going to keep going until we find the frame that we want all right this is looking a lot better all right there's a lit a lot of resources intermixed with some brood i'm hoping the next frame will give us what we want lots of mixture of brood and food still not seeing a lot of larvae it's intermixed all over the place this is what happens when a colony gets honey or pollen bound and she just cannot find a good frame delay that's why we got to get this other box on so they can move some of this honey and pollen out of the way let's see what's going on down here with these cells they are both dry just there we could rip those off if we wanted to and i'm not haven't seen the queen yet lots of fresh nectar coming in this colony is just out of balance oh that breeze feels good oh my goodness you gotta be kidding me all right this is the perfect frame right here it is full of larvae down in there it's starting to rain on us of course it is lots of eggs and things down in there this is the exact frame that we would like to pull up into our foundation we want to put all these combs back the same way we found them as much as we possibly can that's cold [Music] i killed a small high bill 10 points [Music] all right so we have our frame of eggs and larvae right here which is a great frame to pull up into the foundation or into the combs now what are we going to do with this space here you could space these to nine some beekeepers run nine combs into a super i prefer to keep it 10 these days we have our box of foundations if i was going to drop a foundation down here to replace it this rain feels really good by the way these beads will be okay this isn't ideal but they'll be all right this frame only has honey so we want to put the foundation next to that we do not want to take a frame of brood and isolate that to the wall we want this foundation to be on the edge and they'll draw that out now i'm going to be using a box of combs which makes life so much easier and we can just throw this comb down in there instead and i am going to trim this down a little bit this is an old comb right here it's still got the wires in it from wax foundation i have not done that for over 10 years so this comb is about time for it to be recycled but it's done really well for me we're gonna take that off i've never seen any issues with keeping my combs a little bit longer like this all right so now we're back down to 10 we got to make sure we scoot all these frames back together so our combs don't get fat and b space is incorrect and now if we were doing foundations we would bring this up and we are going to throw this larvae right down into the foundation i'm going to use comb instead and you want that larvae to be sure to be right above where the the brood is below so the mass majority of the heat comes up and keeps it warm now when using foundation use a quality foundation with plenty of wax i really like premier or acorn foundation they they coat with a lot of wax this is premier foundation right here i mean i can just fill my fingernails sink into that some companies don't give you as much wax and the more wax there is the quicker they will use it and draw that out but today excuse me but today we are just going to be using a box of brood comb and the bees can just quickly move that nectar or any extra pollen up into this box and get that clean more lane room we are going to stick this frame of larvae just right down here into the center and this will be ensure that they get plenty of attention and we still have a good bit of our honey flow left and since they have comb we don't have to worry about feeding them right now because there's so much honey coming in and they don't have to use any of that honey towards drawing wax or very very little of it now we just pop the lid on if there's not a honey flow going on make sure to give them some feed and we're just going to knock those bees down in there and that is how you give a first year colony a little bit more room thanks for watching this video and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 71,694

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, beekeeping for beginners, backyard beekeeping, honey bees

Id: o7zBTQut7Lg

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Sun May 22 2022