2020 Spring Rewind Part 2 - COLD weather Brood Nest Management

we have boxes of bees i mean we're going through a major hatch right now this was a medium colony that we upgraded to a strong so i mean this queen has a little bit of spirit in her what is she a 2015 so she's got to be a younger super seizure but look it's just a box of bees and if you look what's going on they're just hanging off the frames which is not a good sign because that's going to allow the queen to come down and lay queen cells come on bees well they're not moving for me they're starting to come down they're laying drone brood underneath here so that's a really good sign that means this colony has some girth it's feeling really good you're gonna notice some queen cups here but they haven't had any attention put to them yet but they will next week i bet you once this hive goes through more of its hatch this colony is going to feel extremely full she's going to come down and start preparing to swarm so we have to get space on top to build to pull these bees off the bottoms of the frames move them up into the top box to kind of avert the swarming spirit so we're just entering into that i'm not sure if i'm making the right decision here i could be making a big mistake i guess i just won't know until a few weeks pass by and we see the ultimate results of my management here and it'll only be between carrie and i and 43 000 subscribers so one of our mergers we're just doing a spot check to see how the acceptance went these bees definitely moved up so that's a big strong colony on the bottom and a smaller should have brought smoke over and a smaller little nuke that we put up on top she's still laying so that would have been the brood in the original nest where's the eggs do you see she's gotta be careful look at this thing she's been she's got young larvae here and then eggs spreading out all the way down to the drunk home down there and she's making use of the population let's go one more in oh there she is holy she's a big one you could spot that queen a mile away so she's taken kindly to this nest arrangement maybe we'll just leave him let's go check another one okay let's get this back see if they've come through uh yeah let's take a look in here be rushing these guys just a little bit they've been on for just over a week now there so this hive has moved up a strong hive in the bottom right and we put a small nuke on top and we separated with a paper towel and an exploder so they slowly chewed through the paper towel and slowly merged boosting the top box with these there is you can see her old nest there which looks really good where is she right in the center ah there she is she's a dandy and she has got that frame right filled out let's see the other side of that what's happening on there oh yeah i can see larvae from here so i think this queen looks like she's got a little bit of potential to her all she needed just a little boost of bees that looks nice how far down is those eggs right to the bottom i guess see yep so that looks like it's gonna work we're gonna leave that on for another week and a half or two weeks or whatever we're so far behind i'm not sure when we'll get back to pull these off but there's no real rush on it right now not until that brood in the top box stop starts to emerge these ones are putting seconds on are boxes of bees so i'm targeting anything that's eight frames and over anything like that gets a second on it and i'm making a tough secondary call here because i'm not promoting anything that's less than seven frames so anything that's less than seven frames like this one i had this one marked as a blue tag and it definitely is not does not have as many beads as those other hives so i'm taking them assessing these ones down and i'm not assessing them down to any fault of their own it's just the day that i went through i probably was just a little optimistic on it but a hive of this strength which i'm counting one two three four five six six and a half frames of bees there they're not getting seconds so i'm making for damn sure that i'm not putting the seconds on anything that doesn't hold that girth of bees inside the colony just because i'm scared of this cold weather coming through supposed to be minus five tonight i mean highs to high tomorrow of seven or something like that and extending into the weekend they're even talking snow again i can't i can't if it snows again i don't know what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna okay i'm gonna throw a frame at you what can we do all we can do is just keep these colonies fed manage them the best we can so we have patties on them all so even if they are trapped inside their colonies for the next week or whatever they'll have something to chew on and everything's getting pales but so by the end of tomorrow everything should be topped up with pails again we have two additions to the farm yesterday what's this one's name this one's name is blue and this one's name is molly two little ponies for the girls back to my grumpy face you i've been talking to a lot of beekeepers about their bees and and the weather and everybody is extremely frustrated with this this weather we can't get our work done everybody is staggered some guys hives are in better shape than others these bees are on the feeder pail that is a really good sign we have pails on absolutely every colony now big ones are small ones everything has feed we got through yesterday and everything has more supplement on so all these colonies are drinking down the syrup so that's good that means this is cold weather that means the bees are moving up to take the syrup just trying to do this without disturbing them too much so what i want to see is i want to see if those bees are moving up into this top box and in effect turning this top box into part of their cluster if they're doing that then i don't have to worry about the integrity of this cluster down here if they're actively able to raise the ceiling i don't have my bee suit here they're going to get me they're a little pissed so they have filled this is a really good sign they have filled every seam in that top box that looks really good it kind of eases me a little bit so what's all my fuss about what i'm worried about is when i had my lid on here this is a ceiling to this colony they had organized their nest down in this bottom box according to their ceiling right over top of them i slap another box on top of them i just give them a lot more house to maintain directly above that cluster and it just changes all those cluster dynamics down within that bottom box the temperature humidity just the way they organize their cluster around their brood instantly this cluster has received space over top of it and in a way instantly they have to reorganize themselves reorganize the cluster itself to build to maintain all the work they've got done and achieved down below now that's not going to matter to a colony like this which has girth to it which is very effectively and instantly kind of moved their cluster up to fill this top box to build to maintain all the dynamics going down below this colony i don't expect to see any stress whatsoever but a colony that is a little bit smaller those are the ones i'm really concerned about the ones that maybe are borderline i put all that space up overhead they have to reorganize all their work down here to build to maintain what they have going on in here because of all this head space their ceiling has moved up it it'll induce just a little bit of stress to these colonies and it's that little bit of stress i'm fussing about it's that stress that just opens up the opportunity for disease to then come in and take foothold just that little just that little point in time where the bees are kind of maybe just shocked a little bit because of the cold weather maybe because of malnourishment because there's not as much food coming in and because of my management practice here which just changes their house a little bit just kind of pulls them back just a little bit just that instant just that little point in time just a little bit of stress provides opportunity that opportunity is taken by disease absolutely every time it'll come and take its foothold so we went through this last these last few days and we specifically targeted the strong ones assuming that these strong ones would not be interfered by this cold weather and such and they had built to handle the space that we put on top anything over eight frames we put boxes on top anything under eight frames we've left alone so now that's that's good because it's kept these colonies tight in their little singles but now when this weather breaks we're gonna have a boatload of strong colonies still in single boxes that are going to need attention right now six degrees and the bees are flying so as goes my rule when there is beekeeping whether we work bees right now i have the crew busy just doing maintenance work inside the honey house with cleaning up frames and painting boxes and making patties i think i'm going to it's too cold i mean it was minus nine last night and we're not out of it yet so it's too cold to actually do any transfer work we gotta move these nukes and it's too cold to i don't know it's too cold to do anything really i don't want to stagger these hives by trying to manipulate them so we're not going to work these highs we're going to have to be a little more patient and just allow things to happen but the bees are flying so we got to get some work done because once this nice weather comes we are going to be so far behind we won't know which way to turn it's six degrees and they're bringing streams of pulling into the colony i just so encouraging it's actually a beautiful day nice and sunny no wind and six degrees is supposed to get up to 10 i hope my intention here is just to peek down into this brood nest just to see what's going on these hives obviously we'll take a peek here they are six frames of bees and they are ready to be transferred i just want to see how many frames of birds going on inside i just want to see how that nest has been developing over the last few days so here's a frame with some honey on it full of eggs and larvae and this side is rightful larvae young larvae just hatched could have a little more jelly in the bottom of those cells but we're going through a dearth and they've run out of supplement if i had a patty i'd give them right now here's a full frame of brood which is emerging the side is emerging and being filled up with eggs right away so we have little guys coming out and the queen's got to be close because there's eggs all through here so she's using her space wisely so what i'm concerned about is being a staggered development between the of the brood because of this cold weather we've had i'm seeing old brood a cap root i'm seeing eggs i'm seeing young brood i'm seeing larvae has just hatched from the egg beautiful these guys need to be transferred they're they're gonna start getting tight they're not overly crowded right now the queen seems to have lots of space here to lay she's filling in all that space as a bird emerges but as that bird emerges this colony is going to get full and fuller and fuller bees beautiful frame of brood i haven't found that queen yet she must be on the last frame so i look at a frame of bees a frame of brood capped brood i pretty much count one frame of brood to three frames of bees as you think of it the brood the bees are pointing this way when they emerge the bees are pointing that way so they take up three times a space so when this emerges this hive is gonna overflow with bees so we need to we need to transfer these this equipment so i must have missed her through there i didn't see her she must have been on that frame with the eggs here's a frame of no eggs in this one that's got storage syrup all right so i'm running out of time they uh what did i count one two three four four frames of brood going inside uh that is emerging right now the queen is following suit laying eggs everywhere she can i've been uh able to keep the feed to them so they have lots of food stores there's a very important food rim around that brood nest that's extremely important just to maintain the uh the optimism of that colony to continue bird rearing there's a lot of promise in that nest they're maintaining themselves they've held the integrity they've continued on development of themselves throughout all this cold crap weather which is really reassuring so it's so it's provided me optimism but it's also provided me just that sense of sheer panic we've got so much work we got to do when this weather breaks like i'm not gonna we can't do this any of this work any transferring any hive work through the weather because it does it won't do the colony any good we have to keep these nests tight we have to maintain its integrity we have to you know force that queen to utilize that space that she has there we need to keep those bees you know just confined in that box to be able to you know maintain that house and develop out these nests as best they can through these really tough conditions as soon as this weather breaks we hit some 20 degree days these nests are just going to explode in size they're going to stretch out a little bit and we're going to see instant response like that these nukes are going to need space then right now we'll have to get them transferred into their single box equipment i also have a bunch of them sold so i'll have to which is going to take me a lot of time just to act as selling so we're going to transfer them into the equipment to sell and then push them out before they get too full oh and then we got to start queen ring we were gonna i was projecting to start on the 10th which was yesterday i guess but like i'm not gonna fight mother nature i'm just going to try to just uh roll with the punches so as soon as she breaks we're going to go and we're going to start searching the apri for surplus strength we're going to dedicate one maybe two yards and just skim all the strength and make up a bunch of builders before long we're going to need to have those queens ready to take off these splits but before that we have to go through the apron we got to go through all the single boxes and we got to skim down those big ones that we didn't double up skim off some of that brood so they don't swarm off and boost up some of these smaller ones just to help them catch up so we got to do all this work within a week it's going to be pretty busy but i'm not going to complain bring on that nice weather calm and foggy morning this morning the best thing about this morning was i woke up walked out the door to plus six so that's encouraging just moving some more bees with stubby just trying to poke away these yards every morning trying to spread them out as the land dries slowly but surely it's drying this yard is probably one of my wetter yards and i just got out it's a good thing i live on 4x4 so i'll clean that up once it dries i'll bring the the tractor and the blade and just smooth those down try to repair all my yards that have destroyed this spring just you know so it doesn't haunt me for the rest of my beekeeping career as i'm loading my hives up here i have a few empty spots to fill so this is when i'm starting to take advantage of the uh the merger i put those smaller type nukes on top of big units they've merged i've had the girls go around and queen checks everything's queen checked i think i had about 125 or so we had one that got killed off so that's pretty good the nests are looking really good up on top nice and viable and capped brood so their main their you know they've established a nice little nest now that it's starting to warm i'm gonna start stripping these uh top units off and put in their own place i didn't want to do that before when it's cold just because they've they've organized their nest between the two boxes you know the cluster is going between the two i take i take it apart put it in a new spot and that hive all of a sudden has all these dynamics that you know they're relying on the heat from underneath the girth of bees have taken that away you know their nest is stretched right down to that bottom box so i take that away and it's cold they just can't maintain all that work that they've established with that big nest so i have to make sure to do this when it's warm and now we're starting to approach into warmth not to mention the bottom one and take away the top although it's getting uh a ceiling right over top of them anyways the bottom one would be fine just that top one just got to make sure that as we're working that as we manipulate these colonies that they can adjust to the conditions that we that we force them into and i think now you know a nighttime low of plus six and i'm looking ahead we're looking into 20s for daytime highs yeah i can only hope but uh with this optimism moving forward i think our manipulations the the stress we induce on the colonies with them will become minimized so i can see now it's one two three four five five and a half frames of bees up top so i'm simply gonna just strip this box off the top here make them their own little unit again man i wish i had my smoker going for that you want simpler with smoke but don't have the smoker going because they did not like that box full of bees not quite as full one two three four five six frames of bees that'll work some of these bigger units underneath are stronger than others so some give more than others this unit chewed through through more of the newspaper just larger units this one a lot smaller so there's a little patch just let them do what they want to do one of the reasons why i use smoke when i'm beekeeping is just to help keep these bees calm when i strip these merger units off without smoke and that really agitated that nest and it's not good at any time that you can practice anytime that you can manipulate a hive without you know disrupting them you take the extra effort to do that and one of those things is smoke you'll notice sometimes i don't use as much smoke as i should but then you'll notice that i use smoke a lot because they really lean on smoke to make sure that when i'm working these colonies that i can keep them calm you know that smoke that disrupts the the whole alarm pheromone and that disruption as you're working with them and you just a little bit of smoke doesn't take much just a little bit just calms that nest allows you to do what you want to do without getting them all stirred up especially when i'm stripping off these merger units on top i'm spending so much time trying to set up the right environment to have that unit like the two queens and the bees inside cooperate with with each other then i go and just rip these off the top throw them onto another bottom board get both nests all riled up sometimes when that happens those bees will turn on the queen they just love to blame the queen for everything that goes on within that nest so i'm hoping because of my impatience here because i didn't bring a smoker with me this morning that this unit it will just settle right down and just leave that queen alone and then when i set them down they'll just carry on action as if very little has happened but there's a chance that those bees are balling that queen right now just because of all that disruption i provided them and i didn't do that extra step just to calm them to ensure that my work wasn't really going to shake them up and this is the proper way of doing it see what you got here big hive so i'm counting they're kind of spread out but i'm looking at one two three four five six seven they'll probably make themselves into a seven or eight frame it's really nice this hive still looks a little bit big so we're going to have to come through and probably equalize from this colony yet which is no big deal what i could be doing is it could be equalizing between the top and bottom unit so i could be pulling some brood from the bottom bring them up top just to equalize out the unit so then when i strip off that box then all the equalization work is done in here and this box has already been equalized also just and then i could just simply strip it away later but uh timeline's not working that way i'm just going to have to go through and all i'm doing is just dripping off the top boxes because they hold themselves with a nice little cluster now throw them into their place and then we'll equalize later on we come back through and the weather is warmer minus one last night but i looked at the forecast and it looks like this is the end of it uh we're looking at highs of 20s 25s 28s further out and nighttime lows of fives tens 14s so we're actually gonna get some glows that are the same as our highs over the last few days so me so for those who are endlessly curious in what i'm doing here i'm going through a process of merger i'm going i'm taking uh so i guess i'll go right from the start i made a bunch of nukes up last summer and five frames six frames put them into winter brought them out of winter everything looks in fantastic shape we've been slapped with this really cold spring and the fives are just a little bit smaller just for a lot of reasons but mostly because they were built in a five frame arrangement so they just had less space to build to build out their nest last uh last fall which is what the whole purpose is around building nukes throughout the summer is to keep them restricted in a smaller space not to wear that queen out until you need her for the next season get them through a nice decent little cluster and they'll explode the next spring well the sixes made it through all right just because i had a little bit of extra girth in there but the fives had just a little bit trouble because their nest was just a little bit smaller so through this cold weather they were just weren't able to move forward and progress the same as the rest of the aperi just mostly because of the cold weather just staggered their development right so there's nothing wrong with those little fives those little fives had terrific little queens in there they you know those fives i put two of them together to cooperate through the honey flow they built me like seven blocks of honey on a stack just absolutely tremendous so they're very well proven when they come out of winter when we hit this spring they staggered a little bit fill back so what we did is we took those fives and we put them over top of a strong unit okay like one of those big boxes of bees we put uh paper newspaper or paper towel or whatever over top of that strong unit with a queen excluder and we put the small little nuke on top of that big unit and over time the bees in the strong unit chewed through that paper and very slowly merged with that top unit so very in very effect i had a queen going in the bottom in that strong unit just chugging along and then a queen on the top smaller unit that needed a boost so those bees from the big unit and all the warmth and humidity from that bottom unit went up and kind of boosted that smaller nuke and that's all those are the nukes i'm stripping off right now so we gave him two and a half three weeks i forget my timelines now but we gave him enough time to be able to allow the merger to build to boost that top colony we left them alone just to you know prevent any type of disturbance to allow the merger of those two queen cents so then in very effect those two queens were operating with the same bees in that colony we allowed that top unit to establish her nest with the amount of bees that were given or but that were allowed from the bottom unit and got to got her to a point now where she has cat brood up on top and she's maintaining a nice tight little cluster we're going through now with the anticipation of nice weather and we're stripping off those top boxes to be thrown back into the apron uh to fill in dead spots or empty spots as we go around with a second third call we make a pretty tough call in some of these colonies and we leave a bunch of empty spots all over the place so these merger units are being stripped off right now thrown onto a bottom board just for transport and we'll be taking them to yards throughout the apron just to fill in dead spots so they'll they've maintained their little nest they've been taken off they're they're operating on their own now it's a neat little trick one thing i really need to stress when doing this type of merger is i'm not everybody says merging a weak colony i don't promote weak colonies i promote vigor i promote optimism anticipated development growth you know potential potential is what i'm promoting i'm not i'm not trying to prop up any type of weak stock you're not doing yourself any good if you're doing that you just got a bill to look at what's going on and see all the situations that are influencing the april and just try to help you know our job as a beekeeper is just to help manage through some of these tough situations and that's what we're doing here with those little fives we're just trying to boost our population threshold up a little bit just to allow that colony enough bees enough girth to be able to advance and now they're good the girls went through a few days ago on and you know the warmest afternoon we could find they went down they spot checked for eggs just to make sure that the top unit was viable um and they were for the most part we only lost one out of 125 or whatever that was so the merger worked really well i wanted to wait to do this procedure when the temperature started cooperating with us like it's been minus nines minus eights minus fives daytime highs of only five or six and if we get up to ten we feel pretty good that's too cold uh so i wasn't we weren't stripping any of these boxes we weren't doing any major hive work throughout the cold because it just compromises the integrity of that that colony so last night was minus one i'm looking ahead to plus fives plus this sixes plus tens plus four teams of nighttime lows you know and then daytime hives of 20s and 25s and even a 28 put in there so that's that's providing us the opportunity to you know promote and advance the apron moving forward i didn't want to do this through that cold weather because it just shocks the integrity of that top unit the top unit had gained the bees up top right and it's established this nest and is probably stretching his brood down to that bottom cluster just because of all those heat dynamics coming up and humidity and everything and the girth of bees i strip that top box off that nest is still stretched down to the bottom of the frame so they need to make sure that they are able to hold that cluster down over all that work that's been established so that when i take them off it doesn't you know they don't shrink to the cold and have to abandon some of that brood that's bad news once that starts to happen because it just forces a sense of shock and stress on the colony and that's when you get disease problems and and the colony will start falling backwards so we want to move things forward at all times moving things forward best we can just to promote that forward movement so we got to make for damn sure what we're doing here doesn't negatively affect what's going on inside there so any rate i better get back to work because the day is moving on on me it's not it's not waiting for me so i'm just going through i'm just going to pick 25 of these off this morning and get them out spread them out to some of these uh queenless they're not queenless but these empty spots within my apri try to get all this it was 24 spread out amongst uh empty spots um just kind of target a few yards uh before the crew shows up at eight and it's supposed to be a nice day the bees tell you exactly the size of a cluster just by the amount of paper that they've removed part of that is it's been so cold that they don't stretch themselves out as much they don't remove all the paper they just remove what they have to around that cluster because it that paper really annoys them so they want to get rid of it but it shows you a very clear defined cluster through that paper and i'm pulling off these uh these mergers and i can almost tell just by looking at that paper how many beads are going to be in the top box i mean you get hives like this whoops that's pretty much a box of bees that have been given to the top you know more bees promoted up top whereas i look at this one and i'm looking at like four or five frames so that that uh the amount of bees they're probably gonna give to the top is probably a lot less building builders this morning with this well building builders this morning was good morning good morning building builders this morning with this warmth just about done digging through this yard making up builders we're going to be one builder shy so we're going to have to go to another yard to do that but we'll find those bees on another day because we have transferring and nukes to do so what we're going to do because we're using this hive or these hives just for the bees we have to make for damn sure that we don't take too many bees away from these guys that they can't maintain all that work that they just established for themselves so we're going to probably skim off the bees from the top box we're going to go down to the bottom we're going to sort those brood frames down to the bottom skim a few bees and then just leave them so it satisfies all their work requirements all this pollen coming in it's just crazy we're pulling frames out searching for the queen and we're wasting pollen they're just fresh little grains or what do you call the pulling the leg of a bee grain pulling grains i think it's pulling grains any rate i think you know what i'm talking about they just freshly put them into the cells we lift the frame up and we're actually wasting the pollen as is dropping into the grass is like oh crap but there's that's how much pollen is coming into the colony right now they're just packing frames full it's so exciting finally we're getting some development and some movement forward but now we just gotta you know pedal to the metal and try to keep up to these girls how are these builders settling in well those four are definitely cleaners sure a stir of activity here oh man just going to give them some syrup to fill up those stomachs we'll have them on constant feed because these are our builders so we have seven going here now we have to add one more to make a full cycle and these two will be monday tuesday wednesday and once we get another one in here for this row what did i say monday tuesday wednesday thursday and back friday we just keep cycling them through did you have a chance to put pollen frames into them everything is ready to go so we have a foundation honey poland this is a foundation as a place taker for a graft poland another foundation for a place taker for a graft pull-on foundation feeder so this will be our slot a slot b and once we get this thing cooking in about uh four or five days maybe when we come back to this builder to drop us another graft frame into we'll exchange this frame for a brood frame and cycle the brood frames through every week i have a box of foundation underneath just for a place to hang all those surplus bees so we have these packed and i'll show you the process as we go we are going to dig into the builders to see how the graft went carrie is into our breeder to find some larvae those guys aren't happy i'll just kind of hide from them so we're going to dig into the builder here i want to see what this graph looks like this is the first graft so sometimes the first one is a bit of a challenge as we get things up and running we have a heavy pollen flow we don't have any nectar coming in yet they are on the patty that's nice to see loads of pollen if there's anything these colonies are becoming pole and bound which is kind of frustrating but they have a lot of protein to work with how is the level of sugar in there oh yeah so they've only taken it down about an inch and a half lots of bees in here we'll just take a peek and see what the acceptance is i went and lost carrie's flashlight so she was using her cell phone to find the larvae these guys aren't very happy either i don't see too many blanks there not seeing any so that is a hundred percent not too bad for first craft so that looks good let's take a look into that first builder let me just take a peek here so if you see what's going on boy they're sure drawing up the wax these bees are motivated it's pretty obvious which cells are accepted this is 24 hours after graft and they just nicely pulled down the wax and they're just starting to freshen up the cells with some nice real jelly we'll check them tomorrow maybe probably not check them tomorrow but if we were to check them tomorrow that rural jelly will start to be pulled down within the cells we try to leave the builders alone as much as we can least amount of disturbance is the best we need some nectar flow to get these guys in a happy mood they're not short on bees anyway so that's good take a look at this next builder so i plan on boosting there's a little builder going on over there we never finished that one so i'm gonna finish that one i'm gonna add two more to this line so we can do at what is this today is what's today yesterday is tuesday today's wednesday today's tuesday so you did this monday so tuesday then wednesday and thursday we're gonna do three graft frames just because we have a little bit of demand they're not as populated these guys could use a shake of bees but it looks so that they might have drifted to another colony but we'll take a look to see how they're doing i'll maybe give them a boost today we'll see what the graft frame looks like i don't have as many bees on the frame but well there's enough bees there so that's 27 out of 30. all right so that's good that's an excellent start so we have 57 cells right 57 that will be ready in nine days so that's off to a real good start are you making out i gotta give you joe mays crafting tools i wonder if his would have a ledge that's what the issue that i've had with these is that they've got a ledge on the ledge what does that mean ain't too wide uh no wideness isn't the issue it's the lips got a bit of a ledge that you have to get the larvae over oh in order to here i'm gonna go find them that's from joe may got three of them here so you can try them out and see so that's what you mean i guess you'll find one yes i kind of have to see them first i think he's yeah he's sanded them down or something yeah it looks like he's gotten rid of that little ledge give that a try anyways which ones are down these ones yep then working on these ones boy that tree is a neat little trick super cool well i better go see if the crew is still working good luck nice if we had some fresh nectar come in already boatload of pollen but we haven't had any flowers come out yet dun dun that's cool uh that looks pretty good to me no blanks i don't see a single blank thanks um see the royal jelly they're pulling it down that's i mean this is 36 hours now what's this yes no this one's 24 hours see this is yesterday yeah this is that's look at that yeah this is the graph that's 24 hours i like the cells you can see through all this england's blank yeah you can see what's going on that wax looks nice so that's one on that one so that's two blanks out of 60. there's one blank just two blanks so the last today we've grafted a third bar in here we're going to try three cell bars per frame just to increase our builder capacity because these guys look like they're handling the work quite well so that's uh one two three four right yep out of how many do we have 90 90. four blanks at a 90 holy carry that's even without any type of natural forage coming in the highest grade i've ever had grunts pretty much have this nuke yard sold off now a yard that was full with boxes and bees now pretty much empty just have a few hives here that didn't make the grade to sell so i will likely the queens are still good in there they just need a little bit of time and i'll likely move those off into some empty spots within the apri but for the most part my yard is empty just brought a couple more guys out here to pick up some more hives and these are the last ones to be moved out ready to be sold it can be picked up tomorrow morning box of bees we have had no flowers yet this spring and they're all lining up to bloom at exactly the same time so instead of spreading that nectar flow out nicely throughout the spring where the bees can benefit on that fresh nutritious nectar coming in with the pull on throughout the spring it's all going to happen all at once here so if i go ahead and fill up these pails of sugar just to keep these hives going for days that they can't fly like today and they fill up with sugar and then also all this fresh stuff comes in it just completely plugs the nests out we won't be able to work the colonies properly because they'll be backfilled with nectar and it's just going to cause a whole lot of problems so i think i'm going to be patient as patient as i can be and just wait for this natural stuff to finally come out hopefully the weather allows for flight it's just been a tough spring and we just need we just we need a little bit of good weather just to help move things forward brutal wind last night yeah kept me up all night just thinking about my beehive tops blowing away i'm going to send the crew around just to check lids and make sure everything's in its place this carries in the builder yard this morning and just preparing the cells for the next graft this afternoon and we made our way through the cycle row one row two row three row four back to row one now and to do that we are going to do a little bit of frame shifting so this is the graft frame that we put in when did we put that in on monday on monday this is in slot a and we're going to slip this graft frame into slot b and we're going to drop a fresh graft frame in slot a and the reason why i'm doing that is just because i want to keep this builder in constant building mode so i don't want to give that start stop i want those bees to continuously draw these graft frames out and we'll just take a peek here to see what these sails look like two blanks what did we count last time i think it was too easy look at those cells just capping just capping nice looking cells so this builder is in a really good mood they've drawn the royal jelly you can see right down to the edge of the wax and they're just about to cap these sails off that is an excellent looking frame so we are dropping this frame into slot b and that's where it's going to live for the next four days before we take it to the incubator and this afternoon carrie's going to graft another frame and drop it in slot a this will keep these bees drawing out graft frames continuously so there's no start stop i don't know if it makes any difference but it sure draws out nice cells and just keeps these guys keeps these gals in a constant building mode how's their sugar we'll need to be topped up we'll have to put a bit of sugar in there so that's good we don't have any fresh nectar yet which is extremely frustrating none of the fruit trees are out ah the dandelions are slow we have pollen though so that's good we have natural stuff coming in and they are on the patties here so that's good too so they have lots of protein on hand they just need the sugars and we can give them that and we have a little bit of rocket fuel in that sugar just to help them out okay good let's get take a look at the other one so just look at the process in this builder they are on the patties also demand on protein so that's good to see they could use a shake of bees by the looks of it one thing about these builders is we want to keep them well stocked so today we're going to gather a few bees from the yards as we're going through with their equalization round and maybe shake a pound of bees per builder just to boost them we want bees of all ages there's lots of bees there and we're also going to start rotating brood frames through we're going to start that on monday so what kerry's going to do is they're that's the breeders over there and she's going to pull up they're getting really full of bees so we're going to pull up cat brood over an excluder and then we'll cycle them into these builder yards into these builder hives all that fussing with the level on this thing hasn't seemed to bother them that much like those cells those are nice looking cells so these are going to make excellent little queens that's good work good deal lots of bees on there isn't there yeah one blank there count okay that is really good two blanks there so that's good so that is going to be rotated into slot b just to finish off those cells and then we are going to drop a new graph train after lunch into slot 8. and keep her cooking the kids have four days so i just wanted to show you guys the reason why i boost smaller colonies a lot of people will argue that don't boost a small colony because they're small and you shouldn't be you know supporting smaller type units my argument against that is there's a lot of reasons and a lot of conditions for a unit to be small and some of those not necessarily are the fault of the colony itself it's just there's so many different variables and situations around us it might not be the colonies fault-wise it's small our job as a beekeeper is to build to identify the vigor the potential within the colony regardless of what it looks like just being able to look down and see the potential that we can extract from that unit and by doing that we'll identify weak colonies and we don't we shake them out we don't promote any of that but as a beekeeper we should be able to see those conditions and see we should be able to see those traits and characteristics that are within the colony to build express their true potential so this unit is marked as a nuke that we had put over top of a strong unit just because that nuke was small it went through some hard time and it wasn't it needed a boost it was below that population threshold didn't have enough bees to be able to advance itself so we dropped this over top of a strong unit with newspaper and an excluder and we left it for a few weeks just to build to merge the two units work together to be able to give this unit a boost about a week and a half ago i've taken this off that and i've put it into an empty spot within this yard just to be able to have it move forward as its own separate individual individual unit now i'll just show you what's going on in here now so i haven't found the queen so i'll go back through it again but what i have here is the start of a brood nest and you can see good laying pattern going on there with the cap brood as on this side too she's got capped root and she has this laid right out now this is a box of bees so she has all the bees in the world that she needs to be able to use to be able to develop out this nest you see i'm almost out of battery there so quickly go through this so here's another frame solid brood right stretch down to the bottom she stretches all the way down because you can kind of see where that cluster was underneath and she has it right down to the bottom this nuke has been pulled off with enough bees to be able to maintain all that work that one needs uh it needs two and a shake of bees good shake of these so here's another frame of brood stretched right down to the bottom anywhere there's space these hives are just throwing pollen anywhere and everywhere in here just kind of making a mess but that queen is demanding her space in here and she has a nice solid pattern we have brood we have poland mostly around the outside and kind of shotgunned right in the middle and then nectar all the way around the outside that's three frames of brood this one is a frame that has emerged and she's filled right up with eggs again and i can see that poland is kind of just thrown anywhere they could just drop it off as they've moved in here's a side of brood that's about to emerge it's more mature so i call that about half a frame so three and a half frames of brood here's a frame that just emerged and filled with eggs she's got to be close here if there's eggs all through this sylvan found her so this might not quite represent a full frame of brood but that's called half so that's four and then the last frame solid frame of brood this is five this is heavy this is right full of brood bees and honey it must be on the next frame look at this i mean she did that right she did that right when we probably introduced the two together where she got that influx of bees and moved up and she just went crazy laying the eggs and it is absolutely solid beautiful leg laying pattern take a look at the frame beside here i bet you see it's on here we're gonna have to skim two frames of brood off this colony just so they don't swarm off on us still no queen this is mostly full of poland and honey this side is right full of mature larvae still no queen where are they where are you so we're going to pull two frames from this colony just to keep them from swarming and this come from a small nuke coming through winter small for no reason of her own and we just gave her the ability to express her brilliance and her true potential by giving her just a boost of bees and if someone shake that colony out because they're small they're missing the point that you know they're small for other circumstances other than her performance obviously she's good obviously these bees are set up well i missed her again she must be on the side wall in there somewhere but our job as a beekeeper is to be able to identify true potential and you know ex help them express it promote the brilliance within your apiary and we can't be superficial by the way we look and manage our operations we have to involve a little skill and talent and build to you know extract the core of the zapery to make it produce and make us a lot of money there's no use if i would have just shaken that colony out into the grass i would have lost that potential and i would have had to go replace that and that's very costly i mean we're in this to make money we're not in this to spend money so i was able to utilize the strength i had within my operation and promote the brilliance within my operation to bring everything together and now those guys are going to make me a boatload of money and that colony that gave that split away to that it's able to you know we've already done our split work on that colony we don't have to worry about doing any more reduction on there we can just send it straight into the flow so that's just a little trick i wanted to point out and just continue my argument on as beekeepers we need to be able to focus on what's going on and with such a limited amount of information we have as we go into these colonies we have to be able to do everything we can to be able to read these nests and you know act accordingly before i run into battery here just look at the loads of pulling coming in this nest of course now they stop streams of yellow and orange and kerry says orange all that wealth grabbing every bit of it promoting brilliance within the operation also means you have to make a real tough call as you're going through identifying all the poor colonies and basically getting rid of them we haven't quite got queen sales going yet if we had cells i would take these cold units and just condense them into a nuke and take them out to the killer queen and take them out to the mating yard but we're not quite there yet so i'm coming across some uh poor colonies and basically what we're doing is we're either killing off the queen and merging it with a small one or basically just shaking them out so i wanted to show you that not everything in my aperi is sunny days so i'm going through this hive and this is a an older queen smoker's gone out on me uh so i'll i'll just quickly go through this i won't need smoke for this anyways these guys aren't that bad of a mood so i'm going through i'm looking i'm trying to find a bird nest and i'm seeing a lot of pollen which is fine a little bit smaller of a hive i had identified it as a smaller hive so we automatically go down and take a look at these ones i come upon this brood nest and that's a full frame of brood except it's real shotgun it's real spotty not really not really appealing to me looking i can't find the queen so you'll notice it's just it's just you know sporadic kind of shotgunny you'll notice uh a drone laid there i wouldn't even count that as a full frame of brood and here these are just kind of scattered they got pulling all thrown all over the place there's no real organization to the nest this side a little more broad but just you know they're emerging so this is mature brood and it's just very sporadic not very interesting at all i'm not seeing any eggs i'm not saying very well organized usually you have your brood nest and you have it rimed with poland rimmed with nectar i'm not seeing that it's just very sporadic very unorganized a little bit of a hum to this colony so this colony is poor this is what you'd call a poor colony it's not doing very well actually it looks like it's failed already i doubt she's even in here i don't see any evidence of her being around for the last two weeks so these are the colonies i'm not going to invest any time or resources into basically just going to shake them out so i went through and i tried to find her and i couldn't find her i'll just find a smaller hive within the yard and tap the bees out in front of that colony and these bees might drift back they might drift back into this colony or they might walk into the colony i tap them out into but basically we just this colony is finished so i can take these brood frames and i'm going to salvage them i'm going to put them into another box or sort them into another hive just to make use of those bees so we don't want this in the apron anymore we're going to call it out we're not going to invest any money into it because these are getting older bees something's going on in here we don't want to promote that or just continue let on shake it out and you know let's leave this empty spot for another colony to come down and sit down into she's a little busy yeah what color is that she's more of a red she's got a golden butt but she's got a red thorax i'll give a damn that we're here pretty pretty she last year's queen i believe so yep as far as i know i have two of them from last year it take two days an incubator what happened if it wasn't came out they hatched themselves okay so we're gonna go build a bear fence good morning running a little bit late this morning getting going should be able to get going here by seven o'clock or so typically i like get to get at least going by six i've been running by 5 30 for the last three four weeks now or something like that i have a little bit of a philosophy when things get busy or you know problems occur the best thing you can do the easiest thing that you can do to build to relieve the situation is simply just get up early and just start the day earlier go as hard as you can through the day until you drop and it's it doesn't really sound like much but it helped tremendously like you add another hour hour and a half sometimes two hours in the beginning of the day and if something doesn't go right then at least you have you can extend that day on into the late hours and just take care of business just simply showing up to work is half the job i'm going to give you an early morning tip this morning i'm just pulling off some of the merger splits they're going to go fill up some dead spots and take a look at this this is something i'm always watching for this time of year um the bees are building drone cone and uh they build them within all the spaces so whenever we're doing our work with the hives we tend to break open the drone comb and that's just something we're watching for all the time as beekeepers as we survey for mites uh we're always washing we're always washing to be able to count the infection within the colonies but but as we go you're also looking for drone comb that you break open mites just love to reside in drones because mites or the drones take a little bit longer to develop so the mites can reproduce a little bit longer within the drones so they like to target the drones or so they say so when you break open the drone combs like that just take a quick peek and if you don't see any mites running around then your colony is good don't rest your surveillance on that just keep an open eye for it because if you do see mites in those drones that's probably bad news and you better you know take the next step to take a sample to see what your infection levels are so that's ian's tip of the day constant fight to keep these empty spots full just filling them any way i can to bring my yard back together gotta manage these yards full and every time we identify a weak or poor performance we cut them out and then we bring in youth and excellence to fill in those spots keep those places productive and making money for me so we can't allow those hives that are failing to just kind of linger within my apri because they're not going to make me any money they're just going to cost me money as we invest into them we cut those ones out and we drop in the pure brilliance that we are promoting within our stock we're digging into the builder to find some graftable larvae heard me raider oh he said elder right this is not a builder he's a breeder this is the eight of clubs so we don't have a tag on this one except for that two stars a blue tag another flag so something's going on in there that we like so we do it the old-fashioned way and we just dig through the colony till we find something that's suitable and she pushed straight out to the wall she's well she's just yeah she's a beauty that's her mama this nicely filled with nectar and if you can see can't really see but she has dominated her space in this frame she's about to start laying in this area here so those bees are are behaving unless there's eggs in there now no there's no eggs in there so they're just providing space that she needs there no she's got a few eggs which is what we like to see in a colony well organized like this that queen is demanding her space we uh grafted from her before nope first time first time to shine so i can't see what's in there so that's a frame full of mature larvae wow that's solid that's that's what you want to see is you won't see this through the camera but you want to see groups of liked aged eggs or larvae or brewed just all the same age and grouped together very well organized and placed here right there right in here okay so that's exactly right so here's mature larvae and it gets younger as it goes out kind of like a semi-circle right and then it just kind of moves itself younger all the way out so there's a frame to craft from if you have lots there it looks like it i need 90. you need 90. a big number what's the other side of that frame look like full upon yep you give him a second box to lay in there so she will be moving up shortly i'm sure yeah as they're emerging they're packing it from the phone that's why she's out there so soon all that resource beautiful brood very nice nice and solid we almost need pollen traps on here how many frames of brood do they have here hold a wall by looks of it we're not going to pull them down too much we'll just keep bothering them as we pull graftable larvae from them very well fed ready to work for us which bunch of builders are you after today you are a second row right i am going to bother you to let's see how you did yesterday these were grafted yesterday most acceptance you can see the royal jelly just being drawn down and all those cells just starting to i think these guys need a little bit of a boost yeah we'll maybe give them some bees see what the other one looks like see the royal jelly coming down in them it's nice just started as we're working through the builders we're noticing that uh the builders might be a little bit shy on bees so we've been rotating a brood frame throughout the builder just to provide some fresh young bees to them but uh we decided to shake some more bees into them just to make sure they have all they need to be able to draw these queen cells so we picked a yard we picked this yard and we're just going through and uh we're just basically just skimming all the surplus bees out of the yard so we have one box made up i might have filled this up a little bit too much so there'll be four frames of foundation in there packed full of bees and we'll give one frame per builder so that should really bulk them up and we're working on another one here right now this yard is a pretty good yard is giving us a lot of bees you notice there's a bit of a jungle we got to get out here with the mower but we're working through and filling up our second box and that should provide us all the beads we need to be able to boost these builders up these hives are i mean i'm just absolutely surprised not surprised just impressed on how full these hives are i mean boxes of bees are tipping back boxes of bees all day these guys aren't swarming it you'll notice a lot of drone cell on the bottom and cups but they're just getting ready they're in just getting into the spirit to swarm off so we're skimming those bees off to boost up the builders there's no problem here the rest of the yards we've been putting out seconds we depending on the yard we have 50 to 75 percent of the hives up into seconds now and just the way the year is we're a little bit behind normal here we'd be pretty much on time but this year we're just a little bit behind so we're preparing those hives that we're doubling up to further skim off some nukes from them huh so it's gonna be a lot of work ahead of us but these hives are growing and it's amazing how fast that they are progressing forward and we just got to try to keep up to them now so one of the reasons why we're boosting up these builders is because we want to ensure there's a lot of young bees within the colonies and that means we need every single stage every single age of bee within those builders at all times to properly feed those developing queens as we build these queens throughout the process and we're building 45 cells per cell right now every starts 45 cells every four days so we have to make for damn sure we have an abundance of young bees introduced into those colonies at all times one of the reasons one of the ways we're doing that is with uh introduction of brood frames so we just have a constant emerge of young bees into that colony at all times and the other way is just to smack a whole lot of bulk bees shake them into the colonies just to make sure that they got everything that they need so anyways we're spending a little bit of time here uh collecting these bees just making sure that we have everything that these builders need to build to properly draw these cells and by the looks of it by the way the the builders are accepting the cells and the way they're building them out they they must be pretty well stocked but we're just trying to carry that momentum forward um into you know we want to get the first week second week um almost push into the third week before we shut them down cells are ready today so today is the first day of the split so we've prepared these big colonies earlier on in two boxes so the queen has full rain over both these boxes so we doubled up the boxes of bees earlier on and we arranged the top box as a split so we had two foundation each side and then we put six frames a comb in the center so honey on each side and then four empties so we kind of enticed that queen to come up and lay within those little those four frames and that's basically what we're finding right now is that queen has laid three to four nice little frames up top here so simply put what we're doing is we're coming through and we're shaking all these bees down into the bottom box to make sure that queen is isolated in the bottom unless we find her when we're shaking then we can just put things back together if we want that queen in the bottom box put an excluder in here the bees will come back over that brood and we'll come back either tonight or tomorrow morning and we'll just pull these frames out into a nuke and take it to our mating yard uh uh this two jacket situation has kind of got me a little bit discouraged so we just had to plan our day accordingly we're just on the anticipation of a split and we have cells ready to be placed well yesterday so now we're going to be placing them hot looks like it'll be supper so hopefully we don't have any early hatchers and this anticipation of warm weather just keeps eluding us so i can't wait on that fresh nectar to come in i gotta these hives as we're tipping them back yesterday they just keep getting lighter and lighter and lighter as they're developing these monster nests their demand on sugar is quite extreme so we're sending the syrup tank around just to splash a bit of syrup into these colonies just to make sure they keep going we can't allow them to sit back a little bit this time of year they have to keep moving forward they have all the pollen they need in there it's got to maintain the amount of sugar that's available for them so we'll be open feeding some of those and just a little bit we're just splashing just a little bit of syrup just to help maintain that rim of syrup around the nest we're not feeding to store we're feeding to just splash at them just to stimulate just to keep them going that's very important sugar is expensive we don't want to store it we just want to use it as a tool to build to maintain momentum and we'll do that i'll just send a guy around and we're just going to fill up a tote half full just to get some more sugars into the colony they'll be flying today but not very much so i'll be able to grab a little bit of that sugar and if this cool cloudy weather resumes then we'll just go around again in about three or four days and just splash a little bit more at them just to try to maintain this momentum that we've established and established in these nests so any rate hopefully the weather forecast improves we get the warm weather and we can access this free stuff out there across the countryside this afternoon we're picking nukes got a bunch on the truck already and we're just getting in the gear things i was just saying to carrie it's funny how every year it feels like i haven't done this before and we have to figure it out again but things are actually coming together quite nicely what we're doing is uh well we shook the queen down and now everything up top here is uh ready to harvest for a split and we're just making up two bird frame splits with the honey uh some extra comb a little bit of bees and i see that brood frame that's a beautiful frame so that's gonna emerge into a box full of bees so it's supposed to get cold tonight and if anything there's a lot of brood up top here that she laid and maybe they're just a touch shy and beast so i don't know what to think about that so what we're probably gonna do is we're going to take these nukes and we're going to set them inside overnight just to let them settle in we'll drop some queen cells in there and maybe take them out in two days after that queen's emerged see if that works we've never done that before so this will be uh trial and error i just want to protect that brood just in case there isn't enough bees in there but i'm looking down and these girls are organizing themselves quite nicely see that one might be a little shy and bees to cover the brood one two three four seams of bees so i'm sure they would build to figure themselves out to uh to handle the cool temperature coming tonight but uh i think i think we might just give this a try we have the facility for it so we're gonna make uh we're gonna hit up i think we have 51 cells we have to use up today so we'll make up 51 nukes uh go through a couple yards pick those up and then bring them to the honey house and as we bring them in i'll get carried to drop a cell in each one we'll park it in the corner turn off the lights let them sit there for a couple days and then nice and quietly and gently pull them back out early one morning and set him down into its mating yard uh so so um these smell a little which fruity see that queen cell textbook just playing with my bees so it froze last night got pretty cold the day is going to warm up and it looks like warm weather ahead now these nukes are just roaring and the queen's inside i imagine will be hatching now we're scheduled to hatch at noon so one wow he's an interesting color got a crawler this is day 11. so how much jelly's in that cell that's right so that means they would have filled that job yeah she's still got spare she is they must have filled that jelly right down that cell so we can't call him from that oh that's so nice oh that's a nice oh that's so nice oh that's so nice look at that can you see a little queenie again wow what a queen curry it's my favorite color too if i could see colors well you're gonna be welcomed into a new little nest you better get the rest of them in there before you get any more crawlers yeah okay i'm gonna leave you to it here is our bee yard mating yard oh we worked hard today to make these up and i'm moving just a spare little scrap yard to another place she didn't want to go in now she wants to climb up and set it down still quite full of royal jelly but yeah engineering out in the yards first thing this morning come across this colony here and i noticed that the hive isn't really performing very well this is a flag this colony has fallen backwards okay so we come across this colony and i found the queen and i looked at her laying pattern and it was it's you know it's chugging along but it's nothing stellar and i found the queen and i actually have already killed her off but she's uh she's pretty old and worn out she's at the end of her life so as goes my mandate anything that falls back anything that starts to fail anything that isn't performing we go in and we kill the queen and then we simply take this hive and we nuke the whole thing out i'll be able to make one two two maybe three nukes out of this hive by taking it right down and i have three fresh queen cells ready just to rear this colony and reestablish it's vigor there's no use me keeping this colony in circulation i mean by allowing this colony just to sit here and linger not only cost me money the inputs we put into it but it's taking up space within my yard it's not going to produce me any honey it's just going to cost me money it costs me time so these colonies we target we call them and we throw all this back into the mating yard and start them fresh so that's the plan and i'm sticking to it today we have three yards left to split off and we'll be done the first round split so it's nice to be able to knock off this first round right off the mark these hives have progressed they've kind of leaped forward on us and if we weren't on time here i think we'd be running into swarm issues but we've gone through and we just slapped down these colonies just harvested a bunch of strengths from them give them some extra space and it'll be holding them next week we'll be going around further skimming and then after that we'll be going around and just you know fussing with the hives to bring them up bring them down just kind of equalizing out a little bit so it's good to be able to have the weather which has allowed us to get a whole bunch of work done these last few days extremely long days uh we've been keeping up to the cells so that's good we haven't had to pinch too many off and everything seems to be chugging along here quite nicely the only uh challenge i guess i would say is while making up these splits we've been always fighting to build to find enough bees to be able to cover the brood as we pull them into the splits i think that's a result of our cold spring uh these hives are just you know lagged and slow and confined for such a long time and then finally the hives experience warmth and the queens it's almost like they went for broke and she stretched that nest out she stretched it out to pretty much the max capacity of that hive and those bees took every single one of those eggs and turned it into larvae and progressed it into developing out into bees so we have sheets of brood in these colonies and that's what we're harvesting off through these splits it's just because she stretched this nest out so far that you know they're using absolutely every colony dynamic within that hive to be able to maintain that brood and we're pulling off this brood into splits and kind of changing the house changing all those dynamics around maintaining that work maintaining all that brood a lot of some of the cases we can't pull enough bees from the colony to build to help out um you know hold maintenance on all that work we're trying to capitalize on so we've been having to go in and pull down uh other units just to harvest a few bulk bees to build to provide enough to maintain all that brood one thing has been helping us is it's been 30 degrees for the last few days so that's that'll help a smaller bee population manage a larger nest and it's just i guess i'll wait and see i'll see in about two weeks whether or not we are able to balance everything out properly or not just by seeing if we uh wasted some brood to chilling but that'll come we'll see if we'll see how things pan out after the work just kind of follows through here the first day we started split i actually brought that first round of bees inside to sell them just to protect them from the cold and then after that we're seeing like a day after that we're seeing 17 15 nighttime lows daytime highs of 30. so it's been just like a whiplash on trying to manage this workload and trying to keep ahead of the growth and just maintaining all those colony dynamics we need to pay attention to to build to allow continued progress forward uh but i think after today i'm going to feel just a little bit relaxed and relieved to be able to get through this first round and to hammer down these hives without experiencing too much swarming no not too much we didn't experience any swarming and then just kind of next week go through take a little bit more time and just even out these colonies skim off more splits and maybe enjoy the work just a little bit more foreign this is one of my favorite mating yards basically because i get the best acceptance from this yard and it's laid out just textbook i mean we have this is a gravel pitch right an old gravel pit so a clear open space these hives have access to clear open sun shine i have a wind break all the way along here it's kind of in a bit of a depression so it's nice and calm down here all the time lots of natural forage around and i think more specifically well i have a bee yard in this gravel pit but i don't necessarily pick that bee yard as being useful for mating with these queens i mean the bees will do what they want but typically this uh this area will be set up with a drone congregation site from that yard because the drones typically fly uh the least furthest they stick pretty close to the yard or the hive that they fly out of and they go up and form a congregation site somewhere and i imagine it'll be somewhere along this area here because they like depressions like that they like elevation drops for some reason and they just pick the areas like this but these queens i imagine these queens will fly up and fly away because their strategy is to do more time flying to the congregation site than hanging up hanging around up in it so i have yards a mile that way a mile and a half that way and this way two miles i guess that's a little bit farther away but these queens i imagine will be booting it that way towards my other yards which they will be establishing the drone congregation sites within those areas so the queen will fly what's the math on it like something like 10 minutes to get to the drone congregation site spend roughly three five minutes up mating with the drone she does it very fast just like pop pop pop pop she's mating and then she flies about 10 minutes back so she's flying roughly 25 minutes 20 to 25 minutes uh on her mating flights whereas you think of the drones they fly maybe five minutes and then they're spending i don't know 15 or 20 minutes up in the congregation site then they fly back you know two three five minutes to get back into the hive to refuel and that strategy i guess just provides the drones with the ability to hang out in the congregation sites more often the strategy for the queen is to fly away and mate with as many drones as she can from you know another colony associated there's less inbreeding so that's pretty much i think the strategy behind that very interesting now i got these girls set out here i'm just looking through a few and typically i make these nukes up a little bit stronger that one's alright that's about what i want to see three to four frames of bees but uh we have all this brood and we're trying our best to build to gather enough bees to be able to cover all this brood and just so we don't waste any to chilling when you get a little colony it's a little bit skinny this one's skinny so obviously there's one frame of brood one and a half frames of brood and b is covering that so i'm counting one two three seams of bees so that should be all right these bees can maintain the work and allow that brood to emerge it'll look a lot different in you know seven to ten days this has been a little bit of a struggle just finding enough bees you know you just open up the lid and just first thing you think is you're just a little skinny and if there's any type of drift uh it's not gonna do the small ones any good so we've done the best we can just got to stop fussing we'll drop the cells and if there is losses we'll just take the losses because of that so so so holy is it a hot day today just love the heat working through the yard and we come across a hive it's been marked as blue but the front we're finding a little chalk brood mummies tip the colony back and the bottom board is littered with them so i'm digging into this colony and i'm not seeing anything that really excites me especially the brood nest here i'll give you she's still going she's in here she has about eight frames of brood but as you can see chalk brood has really taken the edge off this colony so either there's a stress event to come through and they never recovered and chalkboard just took hold or i mean it's just poor genetics and i'm leaning towards more towards poor genetics because there isn't another hive throughout the last two weeks that we've been working that i've seen with chalk root and this one is just littered with it so what we're going to do with this colony is we're not going to allow this just to sit here propagate bad genetics and just kind of linger and not make me any money so what we're going to do is we're going to nuke it out so we're going to find the queen we're going to kill her off and then i'm going to divide this colony into two we're going to throw it to the front drop two queen cells in the mating yard and start them fresh so we'll just hunt through look for the queen i've been through once already i can't find her so maybe we'll find her this time so i'm just simply splitting the colony in half there's eggs in here so she's got to be close and if i can't find her we'll just drop the queen cell in and let the virgin take care of her nice to kill her off though because i want to know that she's gone see look at that brood nest it's just terrible there's even chalk fruit mummies in there yet they haven't had a chance to clean them out it's not good so i can't let a hive like this linger in my operation because it just takes up a space within the yard and we're going to be putting money into you know to promote the growth of this colony and it's not going to respond and it's just going to sit here and use up equipment that i need somewhere else and it's not going to give me any type of payback whatsoever so it's one two three four in there and i'll leave four in this one i can't find her we're in the world oh there she is she's a pretty little thing how old is she well this colony's been going since 2016. so she's obviously not that old because she's looks fairly young but she doesn't have what we want within her colony so unfortunately she gets taken care of okay so that solves that so i have five frames in here lots of brood got some honey going on i don't have any nuke boxes to build to put this into so we are using our single boxes as our hive and we're just filling the empty space up with foundation let me get a bottom board two nukes made up so where the old colony sat we took apart we have two nukes we're going to set out into the mating yard to uh to mate and start that colony fresh if you look at the bottom board here just littered with chalk brood healthy at all so that's what i want to get out of the operation i want to eliminate that and we identify units that just show that they're failing just the edge is taken off them i don't want to promote that i want to promote the pure brilliance within my stock so i get them out and i start them fresh at the start and i'm going to find a nuke i have a yard of nukes over on the other side of the apron i'll come and drop a nuke in there and she will light that spot up and make me some money these hives these hives were just set down here this is robbing activity these nests have to kind of settle in before they start defending themselves and the pressure of bees is just a little bit too great here i have a very hungry yard over there so i don't think i'm gonna be setting any more hives to be set up in this yard just the robbing pressure is just a little bit too great night will fall these hives will settle into their nests don't have plugs in these guys that doesn't help things either and they'll they'll settle into their home and then they'll start defending themselves defend or die i guess so tomorrow morning things will be a little bit better these are just freshly placed out but we are at the end of that magical time where we can get into these hives work with them split them off you know we can kind of press our boundaries a little bit where we're stripping resource from these colonies and not have to worry about situations that fall like this so when robbing starts to occur then you start have to follow different rules it's not as easy to split apart hives pretty much pretty much ends the splitting season which is fine because we are two days away from being done anyways we got to get some feet out captain's logs started june 13 2020 the ants have attacked the beehives we are helping dad kill them hopefully they don't ruin the year got some drones in the queen cage got them named the cell up here and just make more space this yard is particularly bad for ants so we're checking the these little nicks for ant damage we haven't found any yeti that's dandelion honey and the queen has emerged see she's chewed her way out of the front at the top so that's a success that's hive i had to save from ants a while back so we poisoned underneath the pallet it looks like it's helped him oh maybe wrong see the bird nest has brood that's just about to emerge they're very well stored with honey this is dandelion honey i wonder what it tastes like i'm gonna try will you risk taking off your mask i don't want to take off i don't know if we're gonna find her probably the last one there she is a little beauty oh yeah underneath this pile oh yeah there she is look at that gorgeous little queen right so she's struck down she's like hiding underneath the other beach she's gonna be taking a mating flight very shortly she hasn't yet i don't think she looks you know she's all slender and slimmed down yeah she's like trying to hide underneath all the pieces so we better put her back down there's a little queenie so you want to try some dandelion honey charlie sure yeah you want to try you gotta take your mask off so this is some nice dandelion honey straight from the field straight from the pasture where do i get it right here is it kept pretty good eh why don't you make jars of this well we don't have enough to build to harvest so we let the bees use it to feed themselves here i want them to this is really good go try it a little bit more straight from the comb let's look at that stuff we should come out here every morning with a knife to put this in our toast good stuff i wonder if the bees would mind if we did that hey that's all honey we should take this frame home with us yeah yes can we leave um i don't have a space taker for that we could delicious all right well maybe give it back with these so we need to continue our adventure down the line and look for ant damage you can really taste the difference maybe we'll run into one that's super good hi yeah but the ants can sting the bees a little bit more and paralyze them there you go that should help them out let's see if there's trouble with the next one uh yeah just starting to invade there you go okay let's see oh that's a nice one yep can you see a hole through it yeah she's right there yeah she's been released yeah these guys are good let's try to get the cell up without oh it's sticking just to sleep are these all dandy we're going 100 so far for emergency pardon me yeah is this all dandelion ah a little smaller i put the cell in a little deeper eat it so windy that one's a success good deal failure yeah there's a larger right there so what we do okay so what we do put the lid on and then we put this we put that in the plug so we know which ones to clean so hopefully that stays here we'll all right let's go to the next yard you guys ready time to go to the next yard to the b-mobile i'm kind of getting a little bit worried his last few weeks have been terrible mating weather it's so windy and i can't see how this queen can possibly get out there and properly mate in all this wind so i'm not sure what to think of this so i had carrie uh go and do another graph yesterday just to maybe tidy up some failures that we might have come down the pipeline here so i'm not exactly sure what to expect i know the queen so they tell me this is what they tell me the drones they want to spend more time up in their congregation site so they fly maybe three minutes and get up there and wait always flying the queen she wants to get away from her hive so she her strategy is to fly further for a longer distance and then spend less time up in the congregation site the mate and then fly the distance back those are two different strategies the drones are just more available by being up there more often instead of flying and the queen disable is able to get find new genetics by flying away somewhere else and it only takes her a few seconds to make like hop hop hop and she's mated with five or six drones and she'll fly back through her fuel go back out if she needs to so i'm not sure through this wind going into these colonies they're very stagnant they're very slow there's not a lot going on and i often wonder whether or not that queen makes some of her decision whether to fly or not depending on how active that colony is if this colony is really active and bringing resource and excited maybe she gets out there and mates if she can't fly and she's running out of time i often wonder if she would just go straight up to the closest congregation site and make pop-up pop up get her business done get back down and start laying i often wonder if that's maybe that has to be what has has to happen if that's the case that's fine because in actual fact she doesn't have to fly a distance to be able to get away from her nest because we are um we are pulling those eggs and we are creating those queens um in no relation to the hives within that mating yard she's she's at so flat hive is in that mating yard and i have that bee yard just off to the side it won't make any difference for genetic wise for diversity-wise but if if she mates with that hive and that your close yard if she flies a further distance to another yard which is basically the same thing anyways so the natural world would make a difference but for our case for argument's sake she'd just be as far ahead if she went straight up and made it with that closest congregation site and all my mating yards are fairly calm so she'd be able to fly within the mating yard and get up and mate within that local area but there's no way in hell she's going to be flying through these 50 60 click wins we've been having for the last two weeks it's just absolutely insane so these are all dynamics completely out of my hand we are completely out of control of what's gonna go on here get back in here we just kind of have to let nature take its course and that's the most frustrating thing about this business especially for me because i like to control things i'm very controlling you know you manage to manage and manipulate you get everything working like clockwork you know i focus on the integrity of these colonies and i'm promoting the absolute brilliance pushing the boundaries and making these helpful not making but you know guiding these bees to promote absolutely every ounce of excellence within their achievements and then we go and we make a bunch of queens and we completely leave it up for your nature completely leave it up for chance so it's kind of hard to adjust ah these guys are not cooperating come on guys so i better go set these guys out in the mating yard right now because you're not really appreciating what i'm doing here this is our last graft that we put in we did this sunday you're after boy you sure consumed that was that a half patty put in i put in a third i got to put my bail on these guys are a little cranky we had a wicked storm come through yesterday i just want to check the cells to see what we have going these are going to be used for uh what do you call it the backups backup backups backup yeah just in case we have some bad luck with our mating i wanted to be able to salvage the nukes which has a ton of bees in them so they don't just simply get tossed into another nuke so we can utilize them so this builder is getting a little bit old just want to see if boy that is white wax look at the jelly in those so this builder has been going since the 17th and we last time we boosted this one but we quit boosting because we shut them down all the rest in the yard are shut down no you boosted this one though didn't you uh they had two brood frames instead of one i didn't have to boost this one because bright yellow we had drift okay so these guys have a lot of bees those are some very white cells so these bees uh hypo flangie what do you call those hypopharyngeal gland hypo for pharalangio pharyngeal okay kerry knows how to say we obviously have reactivated those they are building there is no nectar flow right now so they're into the sugar which i can't see might have to put a little more sugar in there they're just about done building those cells anyways nice and nicer two blanks on that one that's pretty good that's pretty typical for you actually they're into the patty so they're just devouring this protein i just love it look at that i think i got the consistency rate on this one on next thursday so that that timing's perfect because if we start checking back in some of these nukes that as we work all next week we'll have 82 cells available to fix up some failures so that's just a little bit of insurance and we'll go with that what so we just started going through the nukes and checking back on them to uh to look for a queen acceptance we've gone through the first 100 so far and we're rushing them just a little bit uh what we're finding is well we did 50 that first day and if you'll remember it was getting really cold that night and i was afraid of i didn't have enough bees because the colonies had really stretched themselves out reared a lot of brood kind of pressed the boundaries on how much that nest could actually maintain with so few bees so we took off the split i just felt we had we didn't have a lot of b coverage on those brood combs so because it was getting cold that that night i moved them inside dropped the cells into those colonies inside and then after a couple days after the virgins emerged we brought him back out to the yard to mate and then the 50 after that the next day we just set straight out into the yard so what is going on what happened what we're finding out here through our uh checks is those 50 hives that we brought inside and drop queen cells in in the building we're going through and we're finding eighty percent uh good laying queens uh five percent are outright shakeouts because of drift issues or whatever happened the queen never made it back so five out five percent outright failures we're finding 15 percent where we're having to leave that colony a little bit longer either just she's taking her time or you know out of that about 10 percent we're finding emergency cells are have emerged and those virgins are now established in that nest so that 10 percent emergency cell situation i think is directly attributed to uh just the disturbance that we caused that hive as we pulled them out of the winter shed after the virgin emerged in the hive in the winter shed we pulled them out into the yard and just that disturbance i think that 10 percent uh queen loss was attributed to that because we're going through the second batch of 50 and we're not finding any type of uh emergency cell problem so that makes a bit of a difference the second batch of queens we're going through uh we're like 80 85 percent uh same thing about five percent that need um that didn't were unsuccessful obviously and then the rest were just colonies that need a little bit more time but no emergency cell situation so i thought that was interesting i don't know if i'll do it again just because of that i just hate disturbing the colony as we're trying to mate them you know that virgin emerges and there's so many things so many variables going on inside that colony at that time that the best thing we can do is just leave them absolutely alone and let them settle that out and not you know shake that colony all the way down the road and drop her into the yard and just hope for the best so it's there's so many things going on that we're not aware of and we just have to let these hives sort this stressful period of time out i think it's best to drop them in the yard drop them a clean cell and leave them alone for two weeks or 18 days or 20 days afterwards but the colonies that have checked as queenwright and erlang are doing an absolutely phenomenal job right now it's quite exciting kerry's going through we're seeing patches of well they've just come come online so there's eggs like a frame frame and half eggs and any colony that's you know four or five days laying we're starting to see the development of that brood nest and it is just full of jelly it is you know pull the frame is pretty much glistening white in front of you it's quite exciting these bees are motivated to re-establish that nest and to drive forward so we're gonna give these nukes you know it's gonna take them roughly two and a half three weeks now to get through the first round brood cycle we're gonna get him into that second one where she's gonna start laying that second round of brood and at that time we're gonna think about boxing these guys up give them a little more space so you know we're looking into july probably after we get through the whole april shake the bees down and get our third honey boxes on so we'll be into that first week of july probably after that work after the main april work is settled we'll probably come do a round on the nukes and just provide them a little more space as this nectar flow starts to come in then anyways and as they start getting a little bit tight inside because of the all the surplus stores we want them then to so we want these nukes to build out we want that inflow nectar to start coming in and just kind of pressure that nest just a little bit not a lot because we don't want them to swarm but just pressured a little bit so then when we put the space on top they just take it all and put it up top and provide it to us as a honey crop dropping cells into failed mating units i just got back from a yard that i run 65 success and i'm not very happy with that that is probably the worst i've done so far in queen rearing but it's just a yard of 50. so now i'm in a yard of 60 here we check 60 and we're running a 86 acceptance on this one so hopefully things improve as we go so these failed units we drop whoops that doesn't help we drop another cell into them only the units that look like they're viable obviously this one is it has one two three four frames of bees yet in it so they're likely young bees so we will drop another cell into this failed unit and try it again this is why we are making backup cells just to salvage failed units like this uh why did they fail who the hell knows you know something happened it's quite frustrating especially because i've been selling cells to a whole bunch of beekeepers in manitoba here and not just little bits like hundreds at a time and guys are starting to check and i had an email this morning from one beekeeper he said the first hundred he went through a 97 percent acceptance he's very happy with that and i just got another email after i finished that terrible yard driving up here he shot me an email and he went through his first 102 that he picked up for me and he also got 97 so i'm not sure if the b gods are just toying with me and trying to play with my spirits a little bit but i want 97 percent not sure why we're not getting it so we started with you know 80 then 82 percent and then 65 percent and this one's what i say 86 or something like that so i think at this point i'm gonna be happy just to be at that eighty percent success mark and you know just kind of prop up these uh these failed units with another cell and just give it another shot one it is sure nice picking up these nukes when there's three to three success because there's no work i mean you just pick them up put them on the truck there's no shifting around this yard is all right it's just like christmas morning when you're going out and uh checking for acceptance you know open the lid you're not sure what to expect and when you see that present of lush frames of brood it's very gratifying three to three there three to three there three to three there the center one was out so i'll just have to find a spot not to find a uh hive to fill in that center one these ones i can just load right up so that uses up the cells for the season down to more well except for thursday we have another 90 coming at us just for emergency but that's this is the last of the main graft and we run extras so i had i'd advertise these last ones and they got snatched up pretty quick so it's easy when making these videos it's really easy just to show the good you know but it's also equally easy and i find this with myself to just show the bad you know misery loves company so what i try to do within my little blog project here is trying to show a balanced truth like what's going on so that involves sometimes showing negative aspects of what's going on but it also involves showing the positive and i truly believe in balance i truly believe when any story is being told regardless of what it is there needs to be a balance to the story otherwise it won't resonate and that balance is extremely important bill just so we can get the big picture so i'm out early this morning picking nukes and i was bitching and complaining a few days ago about inconsistency in our matings it's just all over the map and it's frustrating because we put all this energy and time and energy and and we kind of set the plate to be able to achieve pure brilliance and just situations like environmental weather whatever just kind of wipes it off the table i blame the weather plain and simple so anyway we're out i'm out picking up these nukes this particular yard we lost probably five just to the ants they just overwhelmed them but anything we put a little bit of time and we treated underneath the hive with heavy-duty permethrin i think it was that active ingredient in the ant poison and it had it allowed these hives to survive without this huge ant pressure on top of them so it feels good carrie went through this yard the other day should come back just beaming with 100 success i mean there we go that's what we're after that feels really good uh i think we're gonna wait till monday to go through the second half of nukes and i anticipate better success more consistent success on our way forward so hopefully that windstorm damage is is done and away with we've taken those hives that failed put new cells into them so we're looking at success moving forward uh they'll be a little bit late but you know these these nukes are pretty much they're not being prepared for this year's production they're being prepared for next year's so we just got a bit of a foster environment to provide you know the uh the brilliance within those nests that we want them to achieve and if we need to we just give them time so oh so it's that time here again we are shaking bees down into the bottom box we are inserting excluders so i have the guys working behind me i just get everything set up and we shake shake shake all the bees out of the top box down in the bottom box and throw in an excluder so things are looking all right i haven't had to do a lot of evening out between colonies things seem to be right on target i'm looking down and the bees are nicely in the top box moved up the queen is like looking at you know she's laying in three two three frames just perfect and just set up exactly the way i want to so it's going pretty quick i'll have the other two join me later they're doing other things in the april and once we get a full crew going on here we'll build a knock off a bunch of yards a day and hopefully get this done by the weekend look at the nectar down there shaking nectar first day first day honey flow checking that out for me it's time we started where do we see that it's a start let's take a random look these are variable cells where an older builder well you boosted this builder with that brood and it's still not like it's still like that's old faze stuff so this is it we have this many spoken for now within our own use and depending on our checks in the next couple days hopefully we don't need those we can sell them okay let's leave them alone use them on thursday and then that's it that's it for it 35 degrees and the bees are bringing in nectar we are shaking bees we have another three yards to do before we're finally done putting excluders in and these boxes are filling up i don't know where all the nectar is coming from i'm looking around there's no flowers yet canola is just coming out but it's just all the clover around the edges it must be dripping nectar i just love getting a start like this because these hives are primed and that canola it's going to be another two weeks before that blooms we have canola close to blooming now and i have a box full of honey already so we're going through and we're trying to even things out the best we can we see smaller ones which need you know a little bit of boost so we'll sort a couple brood frames into these units by pulling from these units so it's going fairly quick i have two working with me today and then i have two new recruits on the farm and i've sent carrie out with four with three so i carry over three and they are putting supers on they're putting thirds in absolutely everything so hopefully by the end of tomorrow we should have the whole apron in three and just give these hives a little bit more space to build to store this nectar checking back in one of the yards we shook down this morning and we have thirds on it now and on the way up here now all of a sudden i drove by three fields that are in bloom canola fields in bloom these hives like this is in the evening these hives are in full foraging right now they're getting to work you know well before five o'clock in the morning and i mean they're working there i bet you they work till about nine or ten o'clock tonight they're putting in a full day and they're able to do that because it's so hot nighttime low is above 20 degrees it just allows these bees to work and work and work and work so we shook these guys down it was this morning and they're right to the top filling every seam with bees so they're obviously cleaning the boxes cleaning the frames and they're up there storing we'll take a look these guys go they're rightful i don't i don't have my smoker with me nor my gloves so i'm just going to spare myself the punishment i was going to pull the frame up to see if they're storing any nectar but nah i'll just assume that all act activity means positive things yeah so you know we have two more yards to put excluders in bastard and then by the end of tomorrow we should have all the hives and thirds just like that we got space for them right when they need it so i'm hoping that it wasn't too late in some of these where they're going to prepare for swarming but there's only so much we can do oh i just love it when a honey flow hits hard and fast like this i mean they're going they're ready before the crops come in bloom and now when the countryside turns yellow we are going to have to stack boxes and just like that my apiary is in threes helps to have a crew which you can just send in every different direction and get a whole heck of a lot of work done these hives we just pulled into a yard we're picking up pails which have been sitting here for a little while since uh since we were feeding last time we haven't had a chance to come around to pick them up and we're just poking around in this yard is finding nectar somewhere and they're up in the third see what we got that foamy needs to be replaced these were put on yesterday and it is a third full of nectar already look at that i don't know if you can see that so they're storing nectar up in that third already that's good we didn't get these third zone a moment too soon you can see the activity in the front of the hives it's about 30 degrees today so they're fanning to cool down the hive but they're also you can smell that sweet nectar they're fanning to dry down all this nectar coming into the colonies very healthy looking organized nest you can tell nest that's busy actively storing nectar because they're spread all across every frame i'm seeing good things this is really this is great there's pollen coming in we are making honey 30 millimeters of rain last night just absolutely ideal i don't want to jinx myself by saying this but we missed the severity of the weather last night and we were provided with just absolutely the most beautiful rain that you could ask for and it's a good thing we have our hives in three now because while we're going through and that bottom the second is full of honey and they've half filled that third already with nectar now we've had all this rain we're driving by fields are just nicely freshly in bloom and we're gonna see a flow here so hang on we gotta get fourths what we're doing now is with my continued fuss throughout the april and my continued you know building of these colonies into massive honey producing units what we've done is we've taken that queen we've moved her down to the bottom box put the excluder in that job's done we've added space on top got the third going uh but what we need to do is because of all the disruption we provided by moving that queen down out of that second there's brood in that second box my crew is fairly trained with her eye and spotting uh cells but we cannot allow any type of queen development in that second box because she's to be trapped up up there over the excluder and cause us headache later on when we try to pull this honey off to harvest so what carrie and i do is we go through very quickly and we just take a quick peek into that second box just to see if there's any developed queen cells some of them are super seizure cells right some of them are emergency cells because there is casualty to that queen like we try our hardest to work these hives as carefully as we can but we get going we're working we're going through the colonies pretty fast we do occasionally kill a queen through this work so in that case we'll find emergency cells up into that second we've got to make sure those are all killed off and only leave the cells down the bottom basically what we're doing is i'll show you what take that third box off we shift it to the colony behind us so we're kind of shifting bees back and forth this helps with a little bit of merger how many days are we after we shook this yard down it was last week yes yeah so we're at least seven days five days seven days since we've moved the queens down so we if there's any trouble up top here with cells we should be able to see the evidence very obviously with little peanut shaped protrusions going down so we just go through leaf through if we don't see anything back on top if we see something just strike it with a knife nothing's going on in this colony all the larvae is too old to now develop into a queen so it is good to go we shall have no virgin trouble there at all so on to the next hive and it's basically just taking that third this is just helping us with our lifting a little bit throw it back into the colony behind us those bees you know they're gonna maybe complain a little bit by all of a sudden being thrown on top of another colony but there is like three four frames of bees up there they will mingle with the rest of them just as we merge back and forth through drop frames of bees back and forth tip it back you can see the cups at the bottom the cups are not really of any worry we like to strike them down anyways just so those bloody bees don't bring eggs up into the top but you just kind of work through like pages in a book that looks like cells to me no those are just very well defined cups nothing in there nothing going on all the brood is mature and we just flip the page in the book and nothing going on that's what we want to see so about half an hour later i out of this yard of 40 i struck down maybe three cells which would have been a real pain in the ass when we try to come through and pull the honey off so this work is pretty important work seems like a lot of fussing but we have to make sure that there is no type of brood nest or virgin queen up in these top boxes as we're trying to pull these boxes away when we're trying to harvest them later on in july nothing screws things up like little virgins running around where you don't want them so we're going through and find emergency cells every once in a while so i have a one percent rule as we go through the colonies as we do our work within the april especially with this intensive work where we move the queen down and we're a little bit forceful with it i do expect i call it a one percent rule where we do have casualties of these queens from time to time and that one percent rule seems to be following suit through our work right now we're through a few hundred hives already and we've found two so there's my one percent so we'd obviously accidentally killed this queen through our work for whatever reason it happens and they're making emergency sales now and we've spotted that so i've struck down all the emergency cells in this colony up in the top box i'm going to take that one frame i'm going to move it down to the bottom i don't want to disturb them too much i'm assuming they're making emergency cells below but i want to make sure they do have that resource of a new queen coming so in about a week that queen's gonna emerge here and hopefully she'll go out mate come back and reestablish his colony and you know salvage everything that's going on in here and we'll check back maybe in a few weeks just to see the to update to see what's going on to see if she was able to mate properly and reestablish and if she has we'll just mark it as a salvage if not just a casualty then you get going through colonies that a simple super seizure cell was missed beautiful little cell about to emerge so that is going to be struck down because it's been shaken me um ah um you

Channel: a Canadian Beekeeper’s Blog

Views: 61,665

Rating: 4.8569298 out of 5

Keywords: commercial, beekeeping, honey bees, a Canadian Beekeeper's Blog, northern beekeeping, apiary, how to manage bees commercially, Canadian Beekeeping, Ian Steppler

Id: rCLIHF57tcM

Length: 187min 44sec (11264 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021