Making Splits With Swarm Cells

I'm just going through this Colony here it's jam-packed full of bees on a double brood configuration in one box I found the queen in the other box I found swarm cells what I'm going to show you today is the easiest way to do an artificial swarm if you're on a double brood configuration so there's my queen she's walking around on the frame always nice to find open charge swarm cells and also find the queen means you can do this split so in case you didn't see the queen there here she is on that frame around the center at the moment she's not marked but I'm going to leave this queen in the original spot and then I'm going to make the split with the other half of the box so I'll take my frame with the queen in and I'm going to put it back down into the original brood box so at this point here this is the original brood box in the original position and then over here I've got a second brood box and as you can see jam-packed full of bees as well gonna be the easiest split in the world this one in this box over here this is where we've got the Swarm cells in this box over here this is where we've got the queen so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through both sets of boxes now and I'm just going to inspect and see how many swarm cells we've got what we want to do is we want to leave one single open charge swarm cell in the box that hasn't got the queen in it dimple as that we're going to put the boxes next to each other we're going to load one of them up with the majority of the brood we're going to load the other one up with the majority of the flying bees and the queen then we're just going to leave the colony that hasn't got the queen in it to finish off making that swarm cell the Virgin Queen can then go out and mate she'll come back and then we've made a really simple split using an artificial swarm so I think you'll agree the queen there has mated really really nicely both sides of the frame they're very good I'm just going to shake through see if we can find some more frames of brood so no frames of brewed just yet but what I have found is a brood frame here that's completely jam-packed full of stores you can see the bees there doing the waggle dance as well I love it when they do that but that means I there's a heavy flow on but B this Colony doesn't have enough space that is the reason that these bees are trying to swarm you'll also notice in there I've got an app of our strip shouldn't have that in there still missed one because there was three in that because it was a 14 by 12 box take that one out now dispose of it properly so I've been through this half of the colony now and all I've got is about three frames of brood no Queen cells one Queen but lots and lots of congestion lots of nectar so I can't just leave this Colony as it is I need to add my supers at the same time don't think by doing the split the bees won't continue to try and swarm due to congestion they definitely will and these bees here are way way too congested so I'm gonna get a queen excluded on this half now and add a couple of papers on what that'll do is that will give the bee some space to store the nectar but it will also mean that they can bring the nectar up from that brood chamber giving the queen loads more space to like so there we go got my queen excluded I'm gonna place that back on the original Hive now and as it's spring I've always got a good supply of drawn out supers in the truck for situations just like this I'm doubling up those supers there because I need the space the flows on you'll be amazed how quickly the bees will come up there and also the fact that this colony is so cramped the bees need space just to come up to relieve that congestion in The Brood Nest so there we go nicely drawn out supers the bees are going to get in there clean all of that up any pollen mites in there any dust they'll clean it up and they will work that very very quickly indeed these frames here they've been stored dry so no remnants of Honey on them get a little bit more damage like this way they're very very fragile but the Bees Still Works and really good excited to see how quickly the bees are going to fill those up so the original half of the split is now fixed I'm gonna get the feeder back on there I use my feeder as a crown board and then I'm going to get my roof on there as well so what we have now is the original brood nest with the queen and some brood Queen excluder two supers empty feeder as a crown board and the roof all of the flying bees will return there because that is the original Hive location so what we're going to do now is even simpler we're going to create a new Hive just next door and we're going to use those swarm cells to give the colony the ability to re-queen itself so take a new floor I've got an underfloor entrance here put that either right next to it or about a meter away from it it really doesn't matter here you can do this at any position in the a parade I do find it works a little bit better the closer it is to the original Hive try and get it right right next to it then we're going to take the incredibly heavy brewed box on this double brewed configuration and we're going to put that on the newly sighted underfloor entrance now we need to go through this Colony here this half of the split and make sure that there is only one open charge swarm cell if you leave more than one they will almost certainly swarm and leave you with half the bees that are in there and what you need to remember at this point is that all of these beads that are here are going to go out they're going to fly they're going to come back to the hive over there they're not going to go to this one because you're using the three feet or three mile rule this is why I like to keep them within that three feet because then when the bees come back they have to make a decision and generally they go for the one with the queen in it but you do get a few that still come back to that so I do find you get better success keeping these two hives as close as you possibly can literally six inches apart is ideal so you can see there that's the original Hive and then I've just brought that next one right up next to it really nice and close now we're going to go through see if we can find any swarm cells so we just need to go through every single frame in here I've already gone through and taken these down I wasn't going to do this video so all I've done is I've left a single open charge swarm cell in here there was about 20 at one point I immediately started doing this and I thought you know what I'll do a video show in the process I'll double down on that though do not leave any more than one single swarm cell if you do you still risk losing them as a swarm so you can see the congestion in this Hive as well as I said before you've got your ring of work abroad and then in the middle what you would expect to see there is eggs definitely at this time of year you're not expecting in the middle of the day to see nectar there that indicates to me that the bees do not have enough space so this half of the split will get a super as well but because a lot of the bees will go back to the original one I'm just going to give this half of the split a single Super A word of warning here don't go blindly shaking all of the frames and especially don't go shaking the frame where you're a lava that you're going to use in your swarm cell is going to be really easy way to dislodge that lava you can see it here I will try and get the bees off without shaking it but it's around this corner up here one single lava charged in a swarm cell I've chosen this Frame here because I like to choose a swarm cell on a friend that doesn't have any other swarm cells on it because in that way I don't have to shake that frame and I can shake all of the others off and I can make sure that I get every single one so this one here definitely only got one cell on here I'm not going to shake it off but I'll give you a little zoom in now close up see if we can see that swarm cell there it is you can see at the top just above it that is a queen cup and that's got nothing in it and then below there that is a swarm cell if there's only one or two there might be a super seizure cell but in this case I don't think it is because there's absolutely loads of them my rule is if there's more than two I'm treating it as a swarm just having a look down here at the bottom as well I hadn't noticed those before but they're just cups there's nothing in them as of yet oh actually I tell the light there we go we've got something in that one as well so I do need to fix that one that's actually a really nice one to get a close-up of right there I can show you inside a swarm cell before I take it down so as I said before bees are sneaky they put these cells in really really awkward places and this just confirms to me that they're definitely trying to swarm and not super seed you can see in that there that is a lava and that is a lava in a swarm cell can't resist just having a look over here at the moment look at those drones trying to come out there that is beautiful desperate to come out it's really funny drones seem to emerge all at the same time and you do tend to get this you get loads of drones all emerging at once whereas workers you just find like one or two emerging very very strange so that's going to be the cell that I'm going to keep I'm just going to make sure that all of these ones down here are squished as well especially that one there that's a really ripe one look at the amount of royal jelly in that cell perfect demonstration of how much royal jelly really does go in to create these swarm cells so there we go shows that I can't count either there was actually a frame in there with some more cells on there so you can see hopefully on this Frame here got a cell up in that corner there got another cell there I'm going to go through and take down all of these cells now so taking them down really simple but impossible to show you on camera all I'm doing just going in just trying to create not that much damage and just taking the whole cell out like that you can see it there single cell in my hand and I'm just going to pop that into a feeder back on this colony because that is a biosecurity risk don't just go chucking that in the grass so as I said going through shaking off every single frame taking down anything that looks like a swarm cell now I've just gone back to the van and I've run out of Queen exclude it's really annoying so what I'm going to do is I'm going to double Brew this Colony again need to make sure you give a colon and you like that space they're swarming because there's not enough space in the colony worst thing you want to do is just further restrict them like this definitely need to get some additional space in The Brood Nest can do that by either supering up and clearing all that nectar upwards or just by adding more fresh Foundation Into The Brood Nest now you might not have seen these frames before got a few of these that I'm using this season only about a hundred but they are beehive bits frames plastic frames with wax Foundation we'll see how good they are we'll cover them in a separate video right so here's our second split this is the new Colony this one over here is the original colony this new one has got lots of brood one single open charge swarm cell and we put an additional box on top to act as additional space within the brood Nest I'll get a cover on that close it or LARP and within the few weeks that we would have been out hopefully mated if the weather's good and we would have come back and we'll have a nice New Colony on the left-hand side the original hive's still there the Queen's in there they're going to clear all of that nectar upstairs now onto those new supers and we've effectively turned one Colony into two so I hope you enjoyed that video really simple method artificial swarm what to do if you find swarm cells in your colonies

Channel: Black Mountain Honey

Views: 4,186

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Id: nMPvFYvRvPQ

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023