How To Split Bees

we have several different techniques that we use for making nukes throughout the season um it depends on the the weather the time of year if it's early and cool or later and hot like it is today and of course the all the techniques are for a different purpose and what we're doing here today is beginning the process of creating nukes that will be queen mating nukes we'll put queen cells in them we use a deep box over an excluder we shake the bees off of brood and honey and put it above the excluder and then come back the next day and harvest those assets we call them assets and create the nukes knowing then that it's queen free there is an extra step here but it means we don't have to find the queen so we think it's more efficient today's the first step we actually normally do this first step on a thursday but we're doing it on a wednesday this week because it's supposed to rain a lot tomorrow and we we need these nukes to be done on friday so today we're going to create the first step where the brood and honey is above an excluder queen free will come back on friday harvest those assets into a nuke box and then take them to a location where we'll set them up with a queen cell and that queen cell will hatch and mate on saturday it's pretty simple there is an extra step but i think it's more efficient and we'll show you how we do it okay this this technique's really pretty simple and what's cool about it is you don't have to find the queen so a lot of beginner beekeepers might find this attractive we just get one frame out of the box make ourselves some space of course we want to make sure the queen's not on that frame take a glance what i want this colony to be left with is about two frames of brood and a frame of honey everything else can go into nukes and when we're finished and come back and harvest all the assets we'll put a two gallon bucket on this and get it back to growing rapidly so i want to create frames that i can use for nukes and put them in this upper box i need good frames of food so i'm just going to shake these off that way i know the queen's not there that's two frames of food starting to see a little brood here that'd be a good one to leave behind that's a nice frame of brood that could go into a nuke i always like to make a fast glance see if the queen's on there if you find the queen your shaking is over you can just place her back in the box and you don't have to shake that's a nice frame of brood i can leave that behind in the colony that's a nice frame of brood another nice brood that's about half a frame of brood i'll leave that with the mother colony put a queen excluder on that gave me two frames of food and two frames of brood when we come back we'll use assets from all of these colonies and combine them into what we want in the nuke boxes one colony might give us several brood and not very much food another colony like this one might give us more food and not as much brood it's all okay because when we come back we can combine all those pieces and parts into the nukes building how we want we can do another one here martin would you grab me a deep box please i'll see what this one told you see what this one will give us okay there's about a half a sheet of brood i think i'll leave that behind for the mother colony that's a pretty nice frame of brood that looks like a good frame that we could start nukes with there's a lot of larva and eggs on that one a lot of pollen i've already got the good beginnings of a restart for this colony here's the queen so now that i found the queen and i put her in the colony i don't have to shake anymore i know she's in there i made that job a little easier so this box was much different than that one i've got five frames with brood in this box with the frame of food left the colony of the original colony two frames of brood and a frame of food and uh we'll restart them like that that's a lot of assets that we can use when we come back on friday that combined with that will make several nukes i always like to keep those green drone frames against the wall when we have them in a box if the bees want to rear drones they'll go over there and use that no problem okay day two uh we're gonna harvest the assets we have in these upper boxes and make nukes it goes really fast because we know the queen's not there each box is going to get two frames of brood or at least a frame and a half and a couple foundations [Music] that's a big fat food frame that's a nice frame of brood right there another nice brood and another foundation that nuke's done as you can see there's not a lot of bees in there but it's so hot out that that's going to work it's late july so it doesn't take as many bees to keep a nuke going brood brood foundation i'll just get into the next colony and see what they have apparently this was a stronger colony it's got a lot more stuff in it obviously there's some nice extra bees that's helpful slip that in there instead of that foundation and i think i'll put these extra bees and this one is they could use it [Music] and there's a nice food to go with our two broods that one's done so it's really as simple as that you can see that all of these colonies here in this yard are set up and ready to go we'll come out of here i think there's 39 colonies that are set up like this we'll probably come out of here with 70 nukes quick and and they need easy need to be full if they're like down a little bit they'll drip quite a bit before they catch their vacuum okay okay [Music] [Music] little puff of smoke before you pull the screens off always helps keeps them from barreling out we'll pull the screens and then put cells in these and we'll be done [Music] [Music] [Music] so i like using this spot as a mating yard because it has all these little features that the nukes can zero in on little pine trees stumps sticks mounds clumps of weeds and grass it's a good spot we routinely get ninety percent take on our mating here and sometimes even better any place that the nukes have nice features they can tune into when they're flying back home is a good thing oh they're done okay time to go when i was reviewing the footage for this video getting it ready to go and doing some editing i noticed one clip that showed these geometrical forms on the front of many of our nuke boxes i thought it would be sure to raise some questions so i thought i would address it here decades ago i read an article in a bee magazine written by a researcher that had done a study on putting marks on the front of nuke boxes to see if it increased queen mating success or in other words help the virgin queens find their way home to the proper entrance and he was convinced it did his research seemed to point in that direction and i picked up on that it made sense to me i thought well why not can't hurt anything right so several years ago i had an employee by the name of terry terry will love this if he's watching and i asked him to print the alphabet on all of our nuke boxes and that was a lot of nuke boxes several thousand nuke boxes he did that too one winter i think terry got bored halfway through because he started putting happy faces on some of them and other colorful figures anyway one thing terry did really well is he picked the right colors these are excellent colors for bees if you research it you'll see that bees see a different color spectrum than we do we see some of the same colors but their their vision reaches into the ultraviolet range where ours does not and our ability to see color reaches into the red side of the spectrum where theirs does not we see we see red but bees do not and that's why many beekeepers ourselves included use red lights on forklifts when they're loading bees at night because the bees don't see red and they don't swarm to those lights as in not nothing like they do with the white lights and then we don't see the ultraviolet side and these particular colors right here are excellent for bees because the best colors for bee's vision is violet purple and blue and terry picked these colors he did an excellent job anyway that's the story behind the happy face and that's the story behind the colors and the figures on the front of our new boxes you

Channel: Bob Binnie

Views: 82,150

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Keywords: Bob Binnie Bees, bob binnie bees, how to splits bees, how to split a beehive, bob binnie blue ridge honey, beginner beekeeping, beekeeping 101, splitting bees, splitting hive without finding queen, splitting beehives, How to make a nuc, making splits, Bob binnie blue ridge honey company

Id: -vFYqZ7Ojwk

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020