Introducing Caged Queen and Splitting Hive (Most Effective Method)!

hi everybody today i want to go over some methods or a method actually of making a split when you're introducing a new queen into a hive that is almost 100 foolproof so uh and it's almost 100 effective i'd say 98 percent usually i very i don't know if i've ever lost a queen using this method so if you want to learn that stay tuned [Music] so all right everybody okay so what we're gonna do today is i got some queens in it's a little late in the year but uh so i usually do this earlier in the year but there were some uh family things i had to take care of this year so i couldn't do it as early as i'd like but i did get the queens in yesterday and usually if you know when your queens are coming in like i thought they were coming in today or tomorrow actually what you can do is do this ahead of time so it's kind of a two-step process but it works really well so the basic principle is that i'm going to pull some some late brood in here no eggs just cat brood or larva and i'm going to put it in this hive body over here and switch out some frames and then i'm going to use that then i'm going to use the nurse bees that are in this hive to come up and cover that and that's what i'm going to use to start my new hive so you can use this for a lot of different things primarily i start them in nukes so that if i come up with a queenless hive or something happens to another hive or i just want to expand i can you can do that so if you you have a an accepted queen and a nuke already you can easily unite them with a queenless hive and there you have it so this is uh mid-summer right now actually summer solstice was just a couple days ago and what i'm basically doing is preparing some nukes for winter so that come spring come fall or spring if i need queens i've got a few little nukes there that i can save the hive with so so first i'm just gonna open up the hive and look for some frames of brood real quick this is noah by the way it's really your preference on on on how many frames you want to take out uh how many frames you want to start your nuke with or your new hive with or your split you can use it as a split or a nuke or whatever in this hive if i can get three frames i'm gonna be happy uh three or four but this these guys uh were very very strong going into spring and then they uh invested all the resources then we had a late frost and basically it knocked them out so they uh lost a lot of bees but they recovered and they're doing okay now they're still building up in fact i would i was about ready to put honey supers on them but i knew i needed to make these splits so i just kind of held off so there's like i got a frame of cat brood there it's perfect i got some larva in there and uh the only thing you want to do this is a perfect frame so this is this is absolutely perfect and it looks like the next one is is that when you pick your frames out you're going to shake the bees off of them because you don't want for one thing you don't want the queen on these frames anymore and i don't see her so always look for your queen first and uh given that she's not on that frame shake them i like i tend to like to look for the queen and find her then i know where she's at this is another frame honey and cat brood it's beautiful and of course usually on a cap root frame you're not going to find the queen there anyway so you just really just need to glance at the at the hive another cap perfectly capped so it's going to stunt this hive so if you do this in early spring it's going to prevent swarming all these frames have basically got capped brood up here so here's some larva but no eggs they're also putting honey in spaces so they're kind of shutting the queen down it's too early for a swarm mentality but i'm going to give them empty comb here and i'm gonna give them one to pull so now we're down now we're over to almost all honey so i got how many frames here i got four frames so i'm gonna make this a four frame nuke i'm going to shake these four frames off i'm going to put them in this hive body over here i'm going to put empty frames or foundation whatever you want to put over here and then i'll show you the rest in a minute so i got a frame of foundation this will give them a little extra nudge so that they don't they decide not to uh swarm any further from here on out and like i said it's mid-summer so it's mid-june so it's not uh it's actually late june so they're probably not thinking of swarming too much anyway i'll put another frame in there the rest of these are pulled have some resources on there and now i'm going to start shaking and you don't have to shake you know in fact i always look for the queen again just to make sure this one had larva on it and lots of honey too so shake them off put your frame in in with your nuke put another frame in so i've moved all the frames and i've shook them it only took me a few minutes here you see now i'm ready to close them back up so make sure you compress all your frames now what we want to do we want to keep the queen down here and out of there all we want are nurse bees in this hive so we're going to put a queen excluder on set the high body on top and then close them up and you can put a brick in the middle so we're going to isolate the queen to this bottom these bottom two hive bodies uh and we're going to now we have three high bodies you can see the doors closed down that's because they were a little weak i'm gonna open up that door in a second tomorrow i'm gonna come back and when i open it when i just i'm just going to pull this off basically and i can put honey supers on or i can close them up whatever i want to do but i'm going to pull this off and i can put it on a bottom board add my queen or what i'm actually going to do tomorrow is pull this off and i'm going to you and i'm going to separate those four frames into two nukes so the nukes will have two combs of cat brood and larva and i'm going to add a queen to each of those two nukes so this is gonna provide me with two extra hives basically uh just slow starters i just want them ready for winter that's all so we'll come back tomorrow show you the rest of the process hi everybody we're back the next day uh sometimes if you wanna if you're doing this method of of queen introduction or splitting or whatever it might be a good idea to leave them on a couple days but we didn't have that much time so it's been in about 24 hours and we're back i got my two nukes set up here so we know there's ten frames in here and there these are five frame nukes let's move five of the frames out of there into here you can also of course you know if you're like splitting a hive and this is the method you're choosing to uh introduce the queen you can also just take this off put it on a bottom board put the queen in give them an inner cover and a lid and there's your and your splits done that's that's pretty easy to do there the reason we do this this way the reason it's so successful is because younger bees tend to accept queens faster or easier than older queen than older foragers and older bees so what's what happened here overnight is that all the all the uh or enough nurse bees came up to cover the four frames of brood that are in here and i'm gonna take just those nurse bees in that brood and i'm gonna put them in this in these uh two nukes i'm gonna give them a queen and since there's two frames i'm going to give them two frames right next to each other put the queen in between them and then you know that queen will be excited i've never had a queen not be accepted that way and and during the entire time until the queen starts laying there's always going to be brood hatching out so um or close to it not 100 but i tried not to get any eggs in here but i did try to get some young larva and some older larva and some cat brood mostly cat brood though because it'll build the force up quicker so let's get started i already by the way i already have the queens over in the shade over there make sure that when you do this that you take the queens out of the truck or uh wherever you have them and that you put the queens in a safe place where they can get some air and it's not in the sun so they don't overheat now these two nukes are going home with me and so i have let's see six frames of foundation in here and four good frames so i'll need to give these guys some syrup and or pollen uh substitute so consider that now on the other splits that i'm doing today they already have all those resources in the frame so i don't need to worry about that but you can see here as the first frame there's not a whole lot of bees on here but there's enough and then there's a cat brood and there's honey in there too it's actually easier to do this with out this without one frame in there other than the brood frame there's not many bees in here and that's that's what i want i just want nurse bees up here nothing else so and of course this is a late nuke and this is a nuke that's going to be used to re-clean queenless hives if need be so i don't really want a whole lot of bees in this but if you put younger brood in here you're going to get more bees covering that when you come to uh pick them up when you come to just make the actual split you can just pull this off and i'm going to give these guys a honey super as well so okay so the next step is just adding the queens to the nukes so let me reposition the camera we'll do that here's my queen cage it has a caucasian queen in there that's marked white you can see here walking around in there and uh you know their queen cages come in different styles but this is a candy plug here usually takes them about three days to get through that plug so it's kind of a time to release thing you leave this in the hive for three days they chew through this they release the queen and then life goes on swell as long as everything happens so what you need to do though is give them a little start so there's a cork in here pull the cork out and then there's a little candy plug in there focus on that okay sometimes that candy gets a little hard so what i'm gonna do is poke through it with a little toothpick okay so i just take a toothpick or a nail or something and i just start through that canyon now you want to make sure you don't impale the queen in the inside but just put poke a little hole in there until you kind of you'll see candy kind of just come out and that'll give them a little head start so that'll make sure that they get released in three days so before you put your queen cage in that's i would recommend doing that especially if if you if you have hard candy but if you're not ready to release the queen in three days if you think that you have a drone layer or some other type of problem in the hive you probably want to just leave the cork in and self and release her later when you know the bees have warmed up to her okay so once you have your queen cage prepared there's a few different ways methods of that that people recommend that you put them in there the most common way is down with the candy down and my the problem with that is right now it's it's going to get to 100 degrees today and if they maintain a certain temperature in here but that if that candy is too soft it starts to melt out it melts out too quick the queen may be introduced in in the wrong way so i don't do it that way never ever do it candy up because if it does melt it drowns if it does melt it drips down and drowns all the bees in the queen in there so the method i like to use is a method where the bees can get to the bees in the hive can get in here and nurse the queen and at the same time the candy can't drown anybody or leak out too fast so i put it in just like just like this just lateral like this and i just put it right under find it kind of an empty spot of the comb and i find it right there just push it in getting that no push it into the comb a little and then nestle it up against the facing comb and then just squeeze and then you don't have to get it all the way in there but just enough so it won't fall out so that's probably as good as i'm going to get it and if if the frames won't fit in there as long as you're going to come back in three days it won't matter but you can't let them go forever like that so so try to close as many gaps as you can so all this side is closed and then these ones just have the the gap where the with the frame now i could close that all the way but i don't see a need to do that so that is how i recommend putting the queen cage in some of the queen cages aren't square like that they're totally plastic and you can hang them down in there and that's that's fine too the problem with those are that the candy is always at the top i don't like those cages i actually like these cages more than the others so uh and now this one is done i already covered you know screened them in closed their rear entrance they've got air but as soon as i put this queen in here these two splits are done and i just need to get them home the comb by the way where the where the uh where i put the queen cage that comb will be dimpled of course for a little while until these bees start to to pull comb and then they'll just repair it so especially if you're using beeswax foundation if you're using uh if you're using plastic foundation that's not always the case okay so that is the easiest way to introduce a queen get a queen accepted and then once once they're accepted in this nuke if you get a queenless hive you know you can you can unite them much easier than introducing a new queen into a hive that just lost their queen or a drone laying hive or something like that you want a body of bees around the queen to protect her there was one time in my entire career where uh they let that the the unite was successful the queen went down was laying some eggs then they superseded her about about three weeks after she was in the in the hive but they did raise a successful queen after that and everything was fine with that hive but uh so the key thing to remember if you're uniting a nuke with someone else once the queen wait till the queen's laying eggs and she has some brood because brood emits a pheromone and the queen emits a pheromone and those pheromones together are what suppressed laying workers so and make sure you don't have a drone layer in a hive once she's laying and she has some brood pheromone some queen pheromone you can you can unite them a heck of a lot easier with a lot more success and using young bees to introduce the queen in the first place uh is almost 100 so i hope you enjoyed this method of splitting a hive it can be used to split a hive it can be used to re-clean a hive whatever you want to do with it it's kind of multifaceted but this is the best queen introduction i think technique available thanks for watching you

Channel: Honey Bee Honey

Views: 102,080

Keywords: beekeeping, honey bee, honey, bee, lessons in beekeeping, beekeeping lessons, how to, Honey, Bee, Re-Queening Honey Bee Hive, Honey Bee Queen, Splitting Hive, Dividing Hive, Installing Queen, Honey Bee Honey, Honey Bee (literature), Queen Cage, Caged queen, Re-queening, Requeening, accepting queen, Queen acceptance

Id: 4vCVFvHOfJM

Length: 19min 56sec (1196 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2016