🚫STOP Swarming when you have Capped Queen Cells!!

hi it's cayman reynolds here we are in our honey yard and i'm going through this colony right here and i wanted to show you a little trick we're going to get into the hive and inspect it here in just a second but as you can see i have a couple of partially drawn combs right here and they have nectar down in them and they're gorgeous brand new combs and every year we'd like to get a couple new combs however we also want to put drawn combs if we have them on the colony so they can immediately move that nectar out of the queen's laying room and and be good to go so we're going to add another super here but i wanted to show you this principle i already went through and moved things around but this did have ten comes and it had eight drawn combs and two foundations in the center now ideally we want nine frames in a honey super so they draw the combs fat and it makes it easier for us to uncap them with a knife but we do want to get some new drawn combs so having two foundations in the center of eight drawn combs early in the season encourages them to draw these foundations out but also gives them other space to deposit that nectar so they don't backfill and you end up with a swarming problem now they've just started on these you can see this one's just started a little bit right here these are ready to go either with other foundations we can stick these two right here with eight more foundations in a box and they'll readily go into that box and start working because they've already started on these bees don't view foundation as their space and their stuff but once they put comb in it and especially once they put resources into it then they really occupy that space and go after it so that can help get things started for you and if you do that over dozens of colonies and multiple supers you can draw quite a few comes that way throughout your season here's a box from last year that i did not come back and remove the two because i just forgot about it they would have been ideal that i came through later and dropped this back down to nine and you can see i'm pulling this out right here and they drew this comb in this comb out and they are still good combs to be used this year and just over well we'll drop it down to nine today that's for sure then over here i have another comb and we have all these older combs right here that are ready for the bees to use that one's got a little bit of wax moth damage but that's not enough to keep them from fixing it and using it all right let's get to the colony so we have an excluder right here this allows us to be able to take these off and not have to worry about brood or swarm cells being up here or the queen if i need to find her that's got a decent bit of weight to it i'd say it's probably about 30 percent full this is not a super large colony this this one's kind of a medium size so our bigger colonies have over a deep box worth of honey so far and are working on a medium but this is still a good colony and if the flow continues i think we'll still be able to get three medium supers off of this county possibly more we'll just have to see how things go that's got more weight to it for sure let's see how the queen's doing down in here the main thing that we want to do we're busy right now so we actually don't have to pull these frames out if we don't want to i could have left that excluder on and just tipped the bottom up and well let's just show you this is an old single bottom board and it is well it's holy but not in the good way well that's got a pretty good weight down in there oh boy and here we go i've got some swarm cells but they're not capped yet at least none that i can see so look down into here and you can see that there's cups and these aren't a big deal this one's dry this one's dry this one is wet all right let's see i don't know how well you can see that this one right here is the problem though and it's drawn out it's a few day old cell two or three days and it yes it definitely has a lot of jelly and look at that larvae down in there so that means this colony is wanting to swarm they have not capped it yet so that means there's an opportunity to keep this colony from swarming and i don't have to make a split so we have to go through every frame and make sure every single cup and cell is crushed and eliminated and then that way we can and then we'll show you what else we'll do to swarming in this colony they're not heavily swarming there's not a bunch of cells but it only takes a little bit of that stimuli and they're almost past it they've committed to putting a lot of resources in these supers but we need to that's why we check them during the honey flow at the start of it right beforehand we check them once a week and sometimes sooner than that if we feel like it's necessary we're going to scoot these around a little bit and yep there's a whale shucks this one's capped completely that means we're gonna have to make a split or something and i don't know how many times i've tried this but i can tell you whenever they're to the the point where they're capping cells the stimuli is just so far along you've got to do something all right so there's that cell right there that's one we're still gonna i'm still gonna crush every cell in here because they'll sometimes take off with the the virgins as they emerge now i don't recommend that i have a lot of queens i have extra hives so if this hive does go queenless i have queens of my own and little colonies that i can combine in there so my main goal is now finding the queen because if they don't have that queen and they have no cells they have no opportunity to swarm see this is part of the problem they have nectar down in this brood for whatever reason they weren't getting up in the supers quick enough the flow has been extremely powerful lately though i'm not seeing any swarm cells or cups on this frame but if there's a lot of bees on it you have to shake it off and make sure that you don't miss one and maybe this colony if it's capped maybe it has swarmed maybe that's why it's not as big as i'd like it to be i'm not seeing any eggs that would be a sign that we had a queen within the last three three and a half days i'm not seeing anything on this one you'd think if it was a heavy swarming situation that there would be more cells okay here's some young stuff maybe i'll find an egg or two down in here there's some pretty young stuff in here i'm gonna spot the queen laurel and we're not just looking for the queen again we're also looking for any cups so take your time and honestly shaking them off of the frame sometimes is helpful you can just shake them down into the colony or if your colonies are like on pallets on the ground you can make a like a little ramp with sticks or something and they'll just go right back into the colony but meanwhile they're out of your way and you got to check edge frames too they will put swarm cells anywhere and a lot of times when the queen's getting ready to swarm you know she might not be on a combs the bees are running her around the hive she could be on the walls so you have to check that too that's one of the reasons why i'm not putting those back in will make a little easier on myself oh there she is she's still trying to lay i believe she's looking down in there honeybees measure honeybee queens measure and i believe actually regular workers do measure as well i'm using going head first into a cell and so the queen she'll go into a cell and she'll measure that and if it's a certain size she lays an unfertilized egg which will be a drone and then if it is the size cell that she feels is good for a female then it will be a fertilized egg and see she's trying to back into that cell and lay i'm pretty sure but probably with this swarm impulse they're harassing her and that's something that does happen whenever there's a swarm a tendency going strong in the colony they harass the queen and don't give her a chance to lay and hustle her around the hive and causes her to lose weight because she cannot fly good when she is producing eggs she will lose a significant amount of weight well that's good we still have to go through every frame though and below the queen is right here yep she's laying so that's that's a good sign but still this uh that's a dry cell or dry cup i should say there's a couple down in here i've got to go get a nuke box so we can put the queen into that little split that we're going to make all right so i have a nuke box with me with three drawn combs with nothing in them and then i have this frame that's got honey and it also has a good bit of b bread we're going to place this down into here we could just give them foundation this time of the year but i want to give her some combs i have some extra anyways and there she is up there and she'll have a little bit of brood and some bees with her on this frame she's an older queen definitely an under performing queen i'm not not bad bad but not great for sure but she's just older that's all right she can work on this nuke right here now this will need more bees we can shake more bees in but i'm actually going to take this to another location and i will shake bees in from another low location because i want all these bees to stay here and work on honey production so now let's get over here just not a big booming colony right here i'm not looking down into here and seeing big brood patterns that make me think this is going to be an exceptional honey yielding colony yeah she's on the way out that's why they only had there was only two supers on this colony and they weren't even filled yet this this one's got a little bit more to it now i didn't see any didn't see any cells on that one we're still looking for cells here all right that's more like it a little bit better over here but why is there only a couple that have good patterns on it should be better than that all right there's one that just about got me all right so what we can do at this point we're now we're not going to be shaking the queen off this was the cell that we crushed down below you can see the royal jelly in there there's a larvae [Music] and the bees will just reconsume that and redistribute that for other needs in the hive so looks to be good we'll want to come back i'm going to come back in five days and i am going to crush any cells because they'll make some emergency queens and i'm going to crush those and then i'm going to plug in either a queen in a cage that's younger or i'm going to plug in a nucleus colony into this and this county will still be productive but it won't be full honey production worthy this year there's not as many bees as i'd like to see but this is one of the things that you get when you let queens run a little bit older that queen's quite a bit in age i don't know exactly how old she is i don't always use my ink pens correctly but i know i didn't use green last year so she's at least two years old here's a cup up here doesn't matter if it's dry we still have to to look and double check make sure there's not an egg in there all right last but not least and we'll just drop a comb in where we took the one with the queen i want to shake two frames worth of bees in with that queen again while we're not taking them from this colonies we want those bees to stay here and work on making a honey crop and this looks like just resources yeah old foundationless frame still got a couple of those wandering around all right looks good this colony is just not super vigorous i know i'm kind of saying that again but you can kind of tell because their swarm tendency wasn't even that strong they they have some swarm tendency but they're just not that strong of a colony um this is the sign of an old queen and this is one of the reasons why we re-clean colonies and try to keep younger queens they definitely perform better than older queens do and but it's all good this is a still good hive albeit not a great one and we'll be able to reclaim this and it may seem impressive to you on that end but when we go into colonies and you know they're way up to here already and they've got six frames that are solid capped brood and looking ideal and they got other frames with brood and well all you have to do is go to a county like this put a new queen in and you see the difference but we'll let her build up that nuke right there and then probably they'll supersede her at some point if we don't do it first and we'll just put a queen cell in there and a virgin will probably uh take over and voila but it's important colonies that don't need anything really don't get marked maybe you might get a check mark with a lumber crayon on the lid but a colony like this we either need to have documentation with papers or we need to have a piece of duct tape on the lid that we take a lumber crayon or a permanent marker and write a message reminding ourselves what our job is and what the situation was when you have 30 or 40 colonies in a yard some of my yards had over 120 i just got one yard back down to around 70. it's important to know these things all right now we're going to take a drawn comb i'll just steal one from here we're going to place it on the edge that way we're not disrupting the brood nest there's no queen delay in it anyways but it's okay to put drawn combs on the edge because they'll just move resources nectar and stuff over here where they want it now we have the spacing to nine we'll need to come back and reclaim this colony again if i didn't say it the reason we didn't leave any queen cells that stimuli can take a little while for the bees to kind of get over it and so even if we let these queen cells in the hive and took the queen out there's still a decent chance that they'll just swarm with those virgin queens and that wouldn't be any good so i that's one of the reasons why i stress to you all so much much make splits have insurance colonies it's not always losing your bees in winter it's queen issues in spring fall summer i had a great colony that went through winter came out in february was looking just great in march she started laying drones about 50 50 and she just i don't know if she didn't get mated properly we raised a couple hundred queens for ourselves a year and a couple of them always end up having some issues just a handful it's just how it works so things happen in your beekeeping operation so if you want five hives to be successful maybe have seven or eight and it's bees for pete's sake can you have too many bees no no you can't laurel's going yes yes you can well laurel is always right so take her advice but anyways we're just going to throw all this back together i'm still going to add another honey super and we'll get this colony straightened out and i promise you when we get the new queen in here it's like a light switch great queens dead mites and good nutrition we'll see in the next video

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 59,526

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, How to install a nuc, beehive, Package of bees, swarming, swarm, queen cell, queen cup, swarmtrap, swarm trapping, how to make a swarm trap, swarm trap, drawing comb, draw a bee hive, drawing wax foundation, queen cells vs drone cells, queen cells vs swarm cells, queen cells in hive, swarm catcher honey bees, swarm control for managed beehives, swarm control split, swarm control methods

Id: hh5wRVQXOS4

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022