🔵Small queen mating nucs can have big impacts!

hi it's kaiman reynolds and in this video we're going to use a two-way mating nuke to show you kind of one of the principles of getting your queens mated it's one thing to be able to produce the cells like we have in our queen rain for beginners and other queen range series and i'm going to leave that up where i just pointed and if you want to see how you can do that with a five frame nuke you can go up there but you know once you have your queen cells then what do you do with them there's a lot of different options this one's just about as easy as any of them now i've got it in a apa insulated box here showcasing off the divider in the middle but you can totally make yours out of wood you don't have to have a multiple system just keep in mind when you build your equipment if you build it or you purchase it it's nice to have equipment that has multiple different functions for different purposes so let's get in here all right now we're losing some daylight sun's finally coming out we're making up for lost time the bees are too hopefully all right so we got a little lid there and got your feeders up here so the nice thing about these divided feeders is it also divides um automatically the colonies when we pull this up i don't have to worry about the bees over here getting to this one you can see the dividing board right here put this veil on this isn't the time of the day the bees are going to like and you don't see a ton of bees in here and that's really not surprising you don't want your mating nukes too large you don't want them too small it's a really a delicate balance and the small hive beetle has really made it a lot more delicate of a balance ever since they came over to the u.s and other countries as well all right so what you can see right here is we have a frame that is mostly empty there is um let's say empty of foodstuffs but there is quite a few eggs and larvae down in there the pattern is really not that good because you don't see a lot of nutrition so it's time to feed this hive it's about that time of the year where the honey flows just about over and especially on young colonies like this even during the main honey flow they might still need to be fed a little bit so this is the one of the honey frames and there's just foundation on this side so when you put some feet in the feeder all right they've capped some brood now we took some queen cells and dropped them right in here and i think i actually accidentally pulled the jzbz cups out last time i was in here let's let me rest this down right here we've got brood over here we're also going to show you a little bit about nutrition there's not a ton of b coverage so having the insulated hive plus having two colonies in it actually helps this hive keep itself warmer because of the the other colony and of course the insulated properties of the box but they are pretty low on b coverage as long as they can keep this brood going once all this brood emerges out it's going to be too packed in here it's time to pull the queen and there she is right there in dead center of the frame and she's been laying long enough to get some capped brew that's probably been capped for a handful of days so it's exactly what we want to see from a queen there's not a lot of b coverage i wouldn't want the mating nuke to be any lighter than this but once we start feeding them they'll be a lot be a lot better you can see how there's a little bit of food stuff out here towards the outer edge it's probably from the last time i fed and it's kind of a little tedious because you don't want to over feed and then plug everything up but this one definitely needs a good um i'd probably give them somewhere close to a half gallon of one to one at the most or a quart of um syrup like if you're feeding a pro suite or sucrose or something that was you know very thick you won't want to feed quite as much you can always water that down but so that's that queen right there and you know she came from one of our graphs and just looks great we've got a little bit of foodstuffs over here a little bit of brood lots of pollen over here diverse pollens that's wonderful to see it's just gorgeous and then i'm going to flip this over and there's a bunch of eggs over here and a little bit more nutrition so this colony definitely definitely needs some feed we've got to work on that you can see some of the bees over here are all yellow from the pollens that they were bringing in today from the field so that's great and as long as this colony is able to have the nutrition and the warmth to be able to turn that brood over once they get some of that new young bit of bees to come in here they are really going to grow at a rapid rate as long as we keep feeding them when we started this we took a frame of food a frame of brood a queen cell and just a drawn half drawn comb which was this one right here and that's all we gave them and just a little bit of feed and plop the cell in and that worked out super well let's go check the one on the other side a little bird that just flew next to me that's kind of cool kind of scared me there for a second like what in the world is that all right so i'm just going to place this back down in here because the last thing you want is one of your queens to hop on over and go down into the other box and then now the queens are fighting each other this one's a little bit stronger you know and someone was asking me the other day about you know beekeepers working without bee suits and stuff like that there's a big difference in the genetics of certain bees their disposition towards aggressive behavior and there's also a big difference in colony size a lot of youtubers showcase you know these little bitty four and five five frame colonies and they act totally different than that same colony would if they were covering 40 deep frames big difference big colonies know they're tough man that smoke is coming right at us smoke follows beauty my eyes must be very beautiful right now okay all right so you guys a lot more pollen in this one this one had a better population you have your queen right over here smoke running around a little bit you have some eggs down in there that looks really good now at about this stage that i'm fixing to show you both of these queens can be pulled and put into a bigger colony or into a split and then we can drop another cell in their place you don't want to let them build up the colonies too much so there's the queen over there let me go ahead and pull the next frame out and then we're going to drop her in and get her back in that colony especially when queens are young like this they tend to run around a little bit more there we go oh wow yeah we got to look at that next frame over here in a second and also show you kind of how this the rest of the system works all right let's go ahead and get to that third frame wow we're here this is exactly what i want to see so we've got a good bit of brood pollen they do need a little bit more sugar syrup or nectar nectar is pretty much done we hardly produced any honey at this yard this year thankfully this is not our only yard we did better at some other places but you know you don't expect a colony like this to produce honey anyways but it would be nice if they could get a little bit of help and so you got a lot of capped brood there there's eggs all the way out into here that's great that pollen is so important but you know what if you were to just to take this colony and stick it in its own box and try to build it up all through our summer and just let nature have its way oh they'll kill this thing a heartbeat nature's gonna wipe it out there's not gonna be enough nutrition between late june july and early august here for a colony like this to be able to pick itself up and take off there's just not not so there's nothing close we'd have to feed this colony very hard wow that smoke is just loving me today sorry laurel you could have a smoker going too good all right so look at that right there just wonderful pattern that you know it would be better if she had more bees to allow her to get more uniformly the same you're seeing like oh this right here this one's being capped this one right here is being capped by the bees you have see different ages here and it works its way outward she's doing a really good job she just needs a little bit more b coverage to make the frames look impressive like you see in the pictures where oh wow you know let this solid on both sides this is an old foundationless frame right here from years ago that i i was trying that out for a little while that looks really good so as long as we give these bees a little bit of feed a little tlc a little pollen patty would be all right you know just something uh oh maybe the size of a pit of an avocado or something like that something about that size for a county like this that'd be all right help them out a little bit even though they're bringing in a little bit of pollen they could benefit from a little bit of that and help them out quite a bit now the trick is getting this in here so how this basically works again is we put in a good frame of brood maybe a shake of bees food frame and then we you know we dropped the queen cell and i didn't come back in here for i think about 15 or 16 days and both the queens came back now this is the second time we've we put a queen in here so the initial round was the the brood and the the frame of food and all that kind of stuff this is the second round the first round this is the one that came back and that's why it's stronger this one did not have a queen come back and then i pulled the queen out of this one made it put her in a colony that really needed a new queen and then i equalized equalized the beast just a little bit they loved that and then i dropped some more queen cells in both of them and this time i got both to come back so out of four you know a little over a month's time we got three out of four queens out of this system and we have an entrance over here this is where this side the queen and the bees use and this one's shut off and then of course this side right here is using the front entrance on this side and that side is shut off and in that way the the queens and the bees are able to differentiate the hives and and stuff like that so you don't have to have an appa may hive like this if you're interested and then i'll leave that in the comments below where you can look at that but you can make wooden hives like this you can buy wooden hives like this there are so many different systems out there you can take a jester nuke box like we have in some of our videos and make the same thing that we did here you just need to have weather that's not going to be extremely cold because that's not a lot of b coverage you know if we if they weren't in the hive like that and they were an adjuster and it got down to you know 30 odd degrees then there's going to be some major brute issues in a colony like this is very fragile all it would take is one good setback and they're in big trouble now if they can get like two of those frames all that brew to hatch out and develop and all that stuff just once they're off to the races as long as they have enough nutrition to do so so this both of these sides have a lot of potential i'm going to yank the queens out of here i'll mark them i'll stick them in a different colony and i'm going to drop two more cells maybe i'll show you all that in the next video but um you know it doesn't take a lot of bees to raise queens but you know some people are doing the two frame method out there and i just really feel like um three frames is better just because it gives you more space because what do you think is going to happen when all that brood comes out of there they're going to take up a lot of space and you can pull frames if they get too big pull the frame out and reduce the space but i feel like in order to have a decent bit of nutrition in there plenty of space for the queen to lay so we can evaluate her laying pattern and also keep them from you know getting too clustered up maybe with pollen and everything else and swarming because these things will form if they get a little compacted in there doesn't matter they're only three frames of bees then i feel like three frames gives you a little bit more room than a two framer does and also with a hive setup like this you know at the end of the season if we keep doing this all throughout the rest of the season i could just leave one queen in here and combine both sides and now i've got a overwinterable seven frame colony which is a seven frame nuke so i really like equipment that has options especially um when you're doing things professionally and trying to push towards that you have to limit to a certain degree but especially if you're doing it for a hobby more for fun or a small sideline it really opens you up to a lot of more of these type of things where you can really have your cake and eat it too but anyways we i still like having my cake and eating it too speaking of cake let's cut this video and go eat some coffee chocolate cake maybe we'll share that recipe one of these days thanks for watching these videos if you have any questions leave them below

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 35,898

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, honey, how to make honey, beehive, Tennessee beekeeping, Tennessee beekeepers, swarming, swarm, swarm control, queen cell, queen cup, swarm trapping, how to make a swarm trap, apimaye insulated 7 frame langstroth nucleus bee hive nuc, apimaye beehive review, apimaye beehive, queen rearing step by step, queen rearing methods, queen rearing for beginners, mating queens

Id: KPe1HBbzbc4

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020