Easiest Method To Split A Beehive

hi i'm lawrence edison black mansion honey welcome to another episode of no-nonsense beekeeping so it's the middle of april i've got some imported queens f1 buck fast i'm going to make up some nukes i'm pinching some frames of brood some for some really strong colonies and i'm replacing that with some nice foundation or drawn comb so i'm kind of killing two birds with one stone i'm giving the colonies a little bit more space with a slightly honey bound that should suppress the urge for swarming i'm taking some of their brood i'm taking some of their bees i'm leaving the colonies to expand still plenty of time to expand here in north wales so in these six frame nukes i've got some stores that i've got that i've been storing over winter i'm going to add two frames of brood loads of bees mated queen give it a week or so release that queen and then i'm going to feed them slow trickle feeding to get them going i'll do a follow-up video later on in the year showing you how well the bees have come on i think they'll be up to full strength around middle of may back end of may so i'm going to get my bee suit on and i'll show you how i set it up to make 10 6 frame nukes right so what i'm looking to do is to take two frames of brood from this brood box down here and i'm gonna put them into this nuke here i'm gonna replace those frames of brood with some 14 by 12 foundation that's going to really help this colony out because this colony is struggling because it's a little bit honey-bound so it's going to help suppress swarming by reducing the number of bees and it's going to help suppress swarming by giving them something to draw out means the queen can expand and she can lay this up so first thing you need to do is to set up your six frame nuke so i've got four frames some of them are drawn out some of them got a little bit of stores in there and i'm gonna take two really nice size frames of brood i'm gonna shake a load of bees in there as well so first thing you need to do whenever you're shaking bees out of a colony find the queen make sure you find that queen first don't shake the queen in that is a recipe for disaster you'll end up with two dead queens over here and no queens over here so first thing you need to do in this colony find that queen stick her in a cage make sure she's well out of the way so once you've found your queen nice strong plastic cage around her put her off to one side and then you can work the colony really well they might get a bit grumpy when you take their queen away i like to take it outside the colony because sometimes those cages do fall out make sure the queen doesn't go in that box down there so then we're going straight in to identify some brood first before you shake bees in put some brood in there gives them something to cluster around means they don't just go and fly off anywhere so we've kept a couple of national frames in our 14 by 12s and we do that kind of this time of the year to to make some splits um and as you can see they've just filled it out with drone brood at the bottom there so we're going to remove all of that drone brood and then we're going to take the frame of brood and replace it with 14 by 12 foundation so then once you've detached that drone brood or if you're on the right size frame just take the frame of brood you've not got a queen on there you can place that over into the nuke then take your next frame of brood you want really good capped emerging brood here as close to emerging as you could possibly get don't do this with loads of eggs you want capped emerging brood that's going to boost the strength of the colony so that's it we've got two frames of brood in there now we've got some bees we're just going to shake some more bees into this colony and then once you've shaken two or three frames of bees in there get the lid on this colony and close it right up and then all that's left to do is to take the frame that's got your queen on it take your queen cage off make sure the queen's okay pop the frame back into the colony put the frames all back together keep that brood nest all close together then take your frames a foundation or draw and comb and what i like to do is straddle either side of the brood nest so you have all the brood in the middle foundation foundation on either side and then your stores that gets them working it really quickly so that's it i've got nine more to do and then we're going to go to the next aperi and we're going to finish off the video there that's a really important tip for you there don't try and put your mated queen in here because if you leave that colony there all the bees are going to do they're going to fly off over there come back into the main hive that's why you need to close it up and then you're just going to get left with like untended brood and the brood's going to die so this video is designed to move the nukes from one apron to the other needs to be at least three miles away so all i'm doing now going to the colonies taking the lids off as you can see lots of really nice bees remember it's the two frames in the middle that are the frames of brood we're just going to hang that frame in between the two frames of brood i like to just wedge it in this is why i like these cages it makes the introduction really really easy so take your queen double check she's still okay she's still in there do not undo the tab really important don't undo the tab we're going to come back in seven days from now and we're going to check to see whether there's any queen cells they're probably going to raise some queen cells and this is why i always like to do a bit of a delayed release for this queen they will take care of her for the next seven days through the cage no problem whatsoever and then after seven days they're hopeless to queenless i can clip that tab take them out that's my process anyway sometimes you can do it a little bit earlier sometimes a little bit later but that's my process in this colony here we've got two frames of brood four frames of either stores or empty comb no queen and we're gonna add the queen now so really important when you're wedging that in between the two frames make sure it's wedged in well and make sure it's horizontal if you have the fondant above the queen you can get warm weather drips down all over and she is a goner so just make sure you've got it nice and wedged in and it's horizontal and that's it these guys are good to go we're going to close these up we're going to come back in seven days and we're going to release that queen right so one week has passed since we put the mated queens into our made-up nukes and what i'm going to show you now is what the colonies look like inside so what we're expecting to see is a lot of that brood will have emerged hopefully the queen is still well sealed in her cage and hopefully she's still alive and also almost certainly you're going to see drawn emergency queen cells and this is the reason why my process has a one week gap between introducing and popping that cage to give you the chance to get in there and take down all of the emergency queen sales before you take the cage off the queen so that's what i'm gonna do in this video i'll show you every single frame i'm gonna take down the queen cells show you that the queen's still okay pop the cage and you could probably get away with leaving them for a couple of days here this is just my process i get around here once a week the following week we'll cut to it later on in this video you will see the queens have been let out the cages are empty there's no queen cells and hopefully we've got eggs so i'll get my hood on i'll get into the colonies and i'll give you an update so what you can see here is that the colony has expanded a little bit and you can see they're condensed over those middle two frames of brood that's their purpose they want to keep that queen warm and they want to keep that brood form so if you looked at that from the last video they're kind of a bit scatty they're a bit all over the place not sure what's going on they have real purpose now and their purpose is to draw out queen cells to protect the queen and to keep that brood wall so you can see in there really nice behavior from the bees there there's no frantic trying to kill that queen trying to ball her trying to overheat her they are passing food through into that colony because they have very much accepted that queen now do not confuse that with the queen has been accepted and you can open the cage and just let her walk in or the risk of them still balling her is still there so you want to do what's called a slow release and that's what we're going to show you in this video so no cells at all on this frame that's good you wouldn't expect them on this frame this was just a honey stores frame lots of nice fresh nectar in this frame though so really good to see that the bees are bringing in nectar there's enough bees to keep the brood warm and to bring stuff in so then next frame is a frame of brood it was a frame of capped brood and is now pretty empty because a lot of that brood has emerged still a bit emerging what i suggest on all of the frames though where there is brood any signs of brood shake the bees off make sure you don't leave a single queen cell hiding because they will protect one of their own queen cells over accepting a mated queen so i'll go through all the frames first and i'll shake them off at the end just so they don't go a bit crazy at me so then another nice frame of brood and at first glance it doesn't look like they've made any queen cells and when i shake off this frame you will see why i recommend shaking off the frames because they hide them so well so there are at least four i think that i can see at the moment queen cells on this frame i'll do a before and after shot see if you can spot where they are with the bees on it's very very difficult just goes to show though they were queenless for about an hour and they've drawn out queen cells so you need to be on top this is the belt and braces method and it gives you pretty much guaranteed success rate other than if there's something that's gone horribly wrong so let's not say guaranteed let's say a 99 success rate much much better than if you don't go through this two-week process of releasing the queens so there is the queen cage as you can see you can see that queen running around in there with the white spot on her back just over to the right hand side she's coming through now there she is up by the fondant so we've got a healthy queen in the colony still they haven't killed her through the cage we still got lots of attendance which is really good and a good sign of how healthy the queens were now if you look here the cage is still intact i haven't opened that tab there and that's what we're gonna do today so then next frame mostly honey again may have had some brood in there um and it's it's emerged fully and they've gone back over it i'll shake this one off as well just to be sure so i think this is probably just a frame of stores and then the final frame definitely a frame of stores won't bother taking a picture of this one i never put brood frames at the edge of my nukes that i make up they're two frame nukes and a couple of them are free frame nukes in terms of the amount of brood that i put in so no need to take a picture of that one that's definitely stores so i think you'll agree they've come on loads in a week um that's what you get that's why you want to go for the emerging brood because you get real good growth like this that's only four of the frames there another frame over here so plenty of bees what we're going to do now though is we're going to go through each one of those frames and we're gonna shake off all the bees and we're gonna take down all of the queen cells now it doesn't matter that you're gonna damage all of the cells by shaking this frame because you're trying to take them down anyway so obviously if you're gonna keep any of these cells or you wanted to use them to make up other colonies you can do that not my preferred method but they're they're viable cells so if you want to chop them out use them for something else go ahead obviously don't shake the frames because you'll potentially dislodge the lava so here is the problem like i said they were queenless for one hour and they've drawn out two emergency cells there i know they don't quite look like emergency cells because they're on the edge of the frame but they definitely are there was no swarm cells in there before everything else looks pretty good though but you just need to go over every single part of the frame if anything's in doubt crush it down make sure there's no lava in it and then you've got a really really good chance of acceptance so there's the queen cell there you can see i've taken them away bees trying to attend to it there but yeah there's a lava in there probably a nice healthy lava but yeah that's going to be discarded check all over the rest of the frame make sure there's no other queen cells there same again on this frame you can see starting at this end all good nothing to see here all of that brood has emerged and then whoa four big queen cells in the corner and the bees they will they'll choose these queen cells over accepting a mated queen they can sense them they've tended to them they've grown them they've filled them up with royal jelly you can see the bees there over them doing a little bit of feeding sometimes it happens sometimes it doesn't but what you definitely don't want is these swarm cells or these emergency cells in your colony when you're opening them out to the queen so once you've got them to a position where you've eliminated all of the queen cells you can take your mated queen in a cage and you can take off that little cap there so then the bees have got access to go in here and they're going to release that queen and they release the queen really quickly like it is a really quick thing to do um what you don't want to do is go back into this colony and check at a later date so i'm just working quick now because it's starting to rain so i've taken the cap off here and i'm just going to place that back in in the middle of the colony put it back to where they were clustered before and then i just want to get that lid on just so the bees aren't annoyed by this rain so that's that part of the manipulation complete it's a long-winded process in terms of the duration of the process but in terms of the actual effort it's really really quick like i can do each one of these nukes this part of the manipulation in about 30 seconds so it doesn't take me long at all i get straight in there clip them out take the clips off shake off all the bees take out all the cells do them back up again come back later in a week and then you'll see hopefully we've got the queen hopefully we've got the eggs no more queen cells and then the nukes are good to go so we'll fast forward another week and i'll give you an update then right so here we are seven days after i popped the cage of that queen and i just re-emphasize it again leave it a good while at least three days after popping that cage to going into checking to see that's how i find i get a really really good introduction rate so it's seven days after we're gonna finish the video off here i'm going to open it up hopefully we're going to see the queen hopefully we're going to see eggs hopefully we're not going to see any more queen cells if we see all of those three things so eggs queen and no queen cells we've got a successfully introduced queen and the startings of a nucleus colony so let's get inside and see what we've got so as you can see here further expansion of the colony they're over about four or five frames now not paying as much attention to that queen cage because more than likely she's been let out but lots of bees in here really really nice temperament let's get inside see if she's in that cage so we've got a nice empty cage nothing inside that cage whatsoever and you can see there they have taken out all of the fondant eaten that all the way so they've either killed the queen or she'd been successfully introduced into the colony and there she is hovering around the top there i'll get a little close up for you the queen is walking around on the frames really really happy to see her there always great to have a successful introduction a little bit cold so i'm going to get this bees back in there but the queen is on the frames really good to see and then the final thing we're looking for is eggs and as you can see from this image here we've got eggs in the middle two frames of the colony so i've ticked off all of my objectives here no queen cells i've seen the queen and i've seen the eggs and that is the end of the manipulation i made a successful two two-frame split and introduced a mated queen and i've checked all of these colonies and i've got 100 acceptance and there you go that's the end of the video so what i have showed you in this video is a step-by-step process on how to make splits using two frames of brood and a postal mated queen it's a really really simple process it doesn't take that much effort but it does take about two two and a half weeks to get through all of those steps my advice don't rush it i've done it before and you try and do it you try and condense that process down and you could end up getting that queen bald and then all you end up doing is starting the process again and doing it properly from the beginning so my advice is just follow those steps religiously take your two frames of brood give them a week let them draw out their queen cells go in take down all those queen cells while the mated queen is pinned into her cage once they are hopelessly queenless release her from that cage with a slow release let the bees work in through that fondant to release her and then give them that week that is i'd say the biggest mistake that people make is that you do the first bit you take down the queen cells they're hopelessly queenless and then you unpop the cage and then you go and check after a couple of hours or you go and check the next day to see whether they've accepted her that disruption can really annoy the bees and it just puts them off the queen i don't know the reason why but it definitely does so my recommendation is like i've said in this video just give it one week after you pop that cage hopefully you'll go back in you'll see the queen you'll see eggs and then you know she's definitely been accepted so that's it for the video i hope you found that one useful we're going to do more videos like this throughout the year where we split them up so this video was shot over about three weeks we're gonna piece them together and try and give you a nice long consistent video that shows you all of the way through the process as opposed to feeding you out off into separate videos so if you've got any feedback if you've enjoyed this video format please let me know and we'll do more of them again but i hope you've enjoyed watching as always please hit the subscribe button please hit the bell so you're notified of every video and i'll see you next time

Channel: Black Mountain Honey

Views: 20,110

Keywords: how to split a beehive, making beehive splits, how to make 2 frame splits, splitting bees, queen rearing, mated queens, how to make a nuc, making queen bees, mating queens, splitting beehives, nucs, swarm cells, making a nuc, how to split bees, how to split bee hives, splitting a bee hive, queen cells bees, queen cells in new hive, making two frame splits, splitting a beehive, making splits, two frame splits, making splits with mated queens, splitting a hive

Id: zPw0Fdsc124

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021