How to Find Bee Eggs - Why Can't I See Bee Eggs - Is My Queen Laying Eggs

[Music] hi I'm Lauren senators from Black Mountain honey welcome to another episode of no-nonsense beekeeping today we're gonna do the most simple of beekeeping videos I'm going to show you how to spot eggs within your colony so this video is part of the series of getting started in beekeeping and one of the things you need to learn how to do is to spot eggs within your colony it's an essential part of beekeeping being able to spot eggs it means that you don't have to go through your colony and check to see if your Queens there you know if there's eggs there the queen was there within the last couple of days it saves you a huge amount of time it's really good for kind of indicating when a swarm has left the colony so if you find kind of CAP cells with eggs chances are the Queen's probably still going to be there if you find a swarm to colony with capsules and no eggs then you can make a judgement and during 99 times out of 100 that swarm will have left the colony also though when you're kind of just doing your weekly inspections like I'm really you know with we're no-nonsense beekeeping here we don't want to go through the colony do a 45-minute inspection looking at every single cell looking at every single bee and giving them a high five we want to be as minimal as we possibly can and if you can learn how to find eggs within your colony then you can do these inspections in three or four minutes you really can open them up check to see they've got their eggs check to see they've got space and then you're on your way so this video what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I find eggs within my colony give you a couple of tips and tricks to show you the way so these colonies got here they're very very small colonies so these are packages that are installed recently I'm not expecting to see any capped brood in these colonies so it should be really really good to show you how to find eggs in them as well one thing I will say though is finding eggs it's a lot easier finding eggs on Newcomb so if you're really really struggling a good tip for you is put a new piece of foundation in the box give it a few days for them to draw it out the Queen will go and lay eggs in it and then you can kind of see straight away if you can see those eggs so that's a good tip or trick if you're struggling to find eggs put that piece of foundation in and it'll make it a lot easier so let's get into the colony see if we can see some eggs right so if you're doing inspect we're the prime reason for that inspection is you just want to see some eggs then the best way of doing that is just to go straight to the central frame chances are that's where the broods gonna be you might not find eggs on the center frame it might be completely brood but very very unlikely to find brood on the outer frames of the colony now it definitely definitely happens you know I mean when the colony gets big and is spread over all of those frames sure you're going to find eggs on the outer frame but while they're building up low-point going for their outer frames might as well just go for that middle frame and you likelihood to find brood and hopefully see some eggs so as you can see with this colony on a 14 by 12 here they're only covering four frames probably equivalent of about six national frames but I only installed these and melis the Queen about a week ago so there's not really going to be any much cat brood in here oh I got the timings a little bit wrong but we're definitely definitely sea pigs in here today so what we do is we'll show you how to find the Queen show you how to identify the eggs and then we'll call it a day so we've got loads of unused foundation in here pop out a couple of frames to make it nice and easy slide them along like I say no need to go for these outer frames let's get straight in but five frames of bees here I'm gonna go for that middle frame hopefully we'll find eggs so first thing is we've found the Queen so doesn't always work like that but there you go there's the Queen we'll do a little close-up on her so she's just there so for the purpose of this video I'm going to do it on a frame that hasn't got the Queen on to the Freak Queens on the third frame I'm going to now take out the second frame and must've got my time is a little bit wrong because you got cat brood on this frame so they'll always kind of start the cat brood in the center and then it should progress outwards kind of through larvae and eggs and then they're gonna have around the edge with pollen intermixed in that as well so if you're seeing capped brood here you want to be looking kind of around here for the eggs it's really really good indication that so if you find a cat brood that's easy to see then you look for eggs around here so again but the purpose of this video I'm just going to shake the bees off if you know that the queen is on another frame it's much much easier to kind of find the find their eggs by shaking the bees off so just shake them into the box it doesn't do them any harm whatsoever so starting off in the middle we've got capped brood and this Queen this is the first cat brood that she's laid so I'm not too worried about the fact that it's a bit patchy the Queen's kind of come in to lay and they improve the pattern of their brood over time so don't worry too much about that as a first thing and then around that outer edges so around here you can see larvae so these are eggs that have hatched they've been fed and then they're ready to be sealed over by the bees so if you were to come in here and kind of two or three days that patch of brood will look a lot bigger than that and they would have sealed it over waiting for newbies to emerge then as you get further further out here you can see more larvae so these are eggs these would have been eggs a good few days ago they're no longer eggs they've been fed and they've turned to larvae and then we jump straight to nectar there so along here we've got no eggs and you can quite clearly see that so we'll jump over to another side so if you look here like I said we've got the capped brood you can see the stages all the way going back and then if you look into this corner you can see the eggs it's really really easy to see those eggs a nice new foundation that's what you want nice new foundation makes the process so much easier and that's what you're looking for just helps to know they remembered you mean you've got your cap fruit in the middle and then it progresses out like that and that's not always the case because once this cap brood emerges you're going to have a ring of capped brood and then the Queen will come back and lay that up again so this is the very first cycle will always be like that but then after that cycle that eggs could effectively be anywhere but if you've got cat brood in the center and no captive loot on the outter that's the way it will work you've got capped brood larvae on that bigger diameter and then eggs all around the perimeter like that that's the perfect frame and then you work your pollen and your nectar as well so let's do a couple more close-ups of those eggs you can see them there you know I mean I always kind of described them as little tic tacs that's what I think they look like tiny little tic tacs if you struggle with your eyesight you can always go and get some kind of magnified magnification glasses that's really really good for identifying eggs as well you can just see him there I mean right at the bottom there there's eggs in each of the bottom of these individual cells so that's it for the video really really quick ones you know I mean with no-nonsense beekeeping here we want to give you the simple videos to help you kind of with your journey into the beginning of beekeeping so we'll do complex stuff as well but we feel we need to do the simple stuff just to help people along when they're getting their first colonies of the season in this video we've showed you how to find capped brood we've showed you how to find larva and we've showed you how to find eggs and we're giving you a couple of tips and tricks as to how to find eggs if you're struggling use magnification glasses do it a nice new fresh comb and that should really really make finding those eggs easy and give you a couple of examples as to when you need to find eggs so like I said when you're doing the inspections just to see that the Queen's laying well and to see whether they've swarmed or not as well it's a really good indication for that so that's it for today's video quick simple video please hit the subscribe button please hit the bell so you notified of every video and I see you next time [Music]

Channel: Black Mountain Honey

Views: 13,436

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Id: GmkbNbU4ejk

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020