Performance of double brood chamber hives

hi i'm peter cowan the bee whisperer we're going to check inside some of the uh double brood chamber hives that we've got here in hampden uh these are the ones i'll be putting nukes over later in the year part of the preparation preparation for winter really starts really gets started in august you want to have your mic treatments done we haven't done the mic treatments in this yard yet because our samples have been very low for mites but i fully expect to next week possibly the week after given the weather we have i fully expect also use hop guard instead of formic pro in this yard anyway what we want to do is check to see how some of our double brood chamber colonies are doing and we'll have a look at this one we want to put some smoke on there jordan and we will have a look on how things are going on in these yards okay so i can't stand on the other side of the hive because there's nukes in the way there well let's have a quick look at our colonies here we're starting to get a honey flow here now although you wouldn't tell you wouldn't know from this sunny super because there's next to nothing in this one so this colony may not be huge a bit more smoke in here please jordan thank you oh having said that there's a good 10 10 pounds of honey in here maybe 15. the bees aren't oh yeah this they're collecting some honey all right and we'll throw a bit of smoke on top here please jordan thank you okay so the queen's got free reign to go in both brood chambers here we've rearranged a few frames to try and get them to build out some comb i see this frame is foundation in the middle i don't see much progress on that yet but let's see how the upper brood chamber is looking i in the summertime for my double brood chamber hives i almost never go into the lower brood chamber actually jordan if you don't mind you want to bring the cameras and bring right close up where we get the opportunity to the normal pattern that i would expect to see in a upper brood chamber is honey on the outsides and brood in the middle and at this time of year we're gradually changing from having a priority of brood production to honey production now we're just coming out of a dirt so i'm not expecting to see a lot of honey production yet i'm still expecting to see us peeking out of brood production because we've had a very lean period and during that lean period they eat honey resources when they eat honey resources this gives the queen more room to lay if you have a racist bee which is inclined to lay when there's a dearth like italians then you will have much more brood developing at this time now if you put the camera over my shoulder i don't know if you can see how shiny this is but this is actually pretty full of honey i don't know if you can see reflection i'll turn it this way you might see the light better yeah plenty of honey here so the outside comb didn't have some but this has plenty this feels intermediate so it feels like there'll be honey on this side and i'd be wouldn't be surprised to see brood on this side but no bit more honey but i put a frame of foundation here some time ago which is oh a tiny bit built and being built on this side now that we're getting into honey flow i'm fairly confident they will build this comb out this is not one of my colonies that was being fed so any colonies that were not being fed during the dearth they won't build any comb at all but now we're getting into a honey flow and you can start to see they're storing some honey they should start to build home again as well now we've got food stored here and empty space so i can't quite see whether i've got eggs in there or not i don't think we've got eggs in there yet but there's pollen stored here which would infer that we're on the edge of the brood chamber upstairs and here we have some lovely brood lovely cat brood here on both sides a little bit of open brood around it not much a little bit so that's one frame of brood up here another frame of pollen it's mostly honey some drone brood around the edges bit of emerging cat brood there now during the dearth a lot of race is a b and i'd say sasquatches in that group they will cut down on brood production they don't stop brood production but they'll certainly cut down a race like the um like the uh russians will stop all together now i have a reason why we haven't got i haven't been seeing much young brood here i've got a new queen here they could they've clearly just recently superseded this queen and i've got a virgin queen right here this colony hasn't swarmed there's no swarm signs or swarm cells anywhere but we've got a virgin queen running around here so if you want to get close up there that's a virgin queen relatively short abdomen very active on the comb running around a bit there's no signs of queen cells up here there's probably one or two open queen cells down in the lower brood chamber but she's not laying yet and so they're fairly recent we've got lots of cat brood in here still and with a queen running around this is i'm 99 certain what we have is a super seizure queen who will probably be laying by next week we've got some very good mating weather coming up so we're not going to disturb this any further but what we know is we've got a couple of frames with some cat brood in one full of cat brood maybe two um plenty of honey in here plenty of pollen we've got a queen now and she's got a very good chance of getting out there and meeting if she hasn't done already and uh things should develop with this colony pretty well so this colony given the amount of honey up here this i would say two-thirds of this is full of honey this colony is well on the way towards being ready for the winter time usually i'd say in the first of september if i've got five or six frames of brood up here that's just a little bit higher than i want to say i want to see four three or four frames of brood up in the upper brood chamber come early september and that's a clear sign to me then that i won't need to feed but you have to keep an eye on what the honey flows are doing this colony is well on the way to being in that state because by the time this queen is laying and given that there's a honey flow at the moment a lot of this space upstairs is going to be filled up with honey so i certainly want to make sure there's room above them for them to put more honey upstairs in the honey super because i don't want them back filling the brood chamber any more than they need to because i'll still want this brood chamber being filled up with brood before the wintertime comes so that the in the process of changing over that brood the uh producing those winter bees so whilst we have a new queen in here that's great we want if you have a good colony you want and if you have a good colony with a good queen super seizure is actually a good thing because you know what you know you're getting the daughter of an extremely good queen supersede yourselves they usually do a very good job of producing a good queen there's still plenty of drones out there right now so i've got little doubt that she'll mate successfully but i'll keep an eye on it because there's always the chance that she doesn't mate successfully but that's one reason why i produce lots of late summer nukes because if if we do have a problem i could put a new new queen in here right away through by putting one of my new nukes in there so this looks good let's have a look inside another double brood chamber colony let's look at a slightly bigger one let's look at that predominantly green one over there uh pink and green and red here's another double brood chamber colony they're getting busier now they've stopped clustering at the entrance the bees are starting to bring in some food resources so the honey flow is getting going for today you may want to change move your position because you're blocking traffic to that hive there jordan we've got quite a bit of honey storage capacity on this hive let's see if they've been using it well certainly got the population to the store plenty of honey just by the look of it i would say that they're filling these supers up with honey quite nicely you don't really need to go through the frames of honey super to tell how much how well they're filling them up you should usually be able to do it by weight or if you've done it for a while you could certainly do it by weight i usually save a lot of time i don't usually go through honey super frames anymore as a hobbyist i always used to do it i used to love doing it because i used to love seeing all the honey they're producing but basically you can get just as much information by doing that and i can tell right now there's a good 30 pounds of honey in here and it'll only hold 35 so this super is pretty full we're ready for another honey super on this side this deep brood chamber looking closely in the top you can see how they've drawn the comb that you can see the foundation the comb is drawn right out especially where we put foundation in between frames they haven't quite built out the foundation but uh again rather than going through all the frames to see how much honey is in here i should be able to tell by lifting it whether it's full or not and the empty ones are this one and this one these and that one these are for three frames of foundation maybe four the other frames look pretty full of honey has also about 30 odd pounds of honey in it so this super and that super are about the same in terms of how much honey are in there so it's looking good now into the brood chamber you may be wondering if you have a look closely down here you see these things see you might wonder what these are they look like berries well actually these are pieces of drones because clearly when we put that this queen excluder in there was some drone lobby upstairs and here's one of those drones who are trapped drones are too big to go through the queen excluder so a drone that dies up above the queen excluder has to be taken apart to be removed from it so those are bits of drones that never made it out to find a queen poor things as if a drone's life isn't hard enough who'd be a drone there we are so this upper brood chamber looks great i can see honey at the top of the frames bit of space with foundation on this one here but otherwise this looks pretty full this brood chamber is a lot of food in it full of honey and pollen a few drones good healthy colony a healthy colony that's not been starving will have plenty of drones in it this time of year if they've been starving they'll have been kicking their drones out so if you've got drones in your hive your bees have been pretty healthy over the summer to some degree and of course they're producing drones here as well look they're still producing some drones here some emerging right here but plenty of worker brood coming through as well so we're only the two second frame in we've got lots of cat brood here and lots of young open brood as well so there's one frame of brood mostly honey and pollen on this one i'm going to move this to the outside now that they've drawn the comb keep the brood together some of these frames have been rearranged in order to for me to accelerate the drawing of comb lovely frame of brood here nice emerging brood nice shiny white lobby around it so this is a sign of a good healthy brood chamber producing plenty of bees surrounded by plenty of food and that's key after a death if you have lots of food around your brood and it's nice and shiny and wet looking your bees have come through that dirt really nicely lots of brood of all stages here that's three but every frame also has a fair amount of honey on it too it's another combination had drawn out mostly honey don't worry i'm not worried about these queen cups queen cups get built all the time i'm going to put this in the outer edges as well i'm not going to separate things out of my brood chamber now looking to prepare consolidate things so the brood is nice and together surrounded by pollen surrounded by honey there are this frame is full of eggs lots of emerging brood here emerging workers here and this area is full of eggs [Music] on this side lots of emerging brood population growing nice and quickly that's four frames of brood [Music] there's a fifth frame of brood but they're really back filling this with honey now on the other side there's and there's a lot of brood on this side here so that's five frames of brood in the upper brood chamber they're busy building comb out here so this colony is coming along very nicely we've got uh storage and comb being built here i may have been a little early putting my honey supers on but look how well developed those honey supers are i've been getting them to draw the comb out here and they're doing it so this super here is about half brewed half honey maybe yeah about half brewed half honey which is exactly where i'd like to see them right now as we're only in the mid in just getting into the middle of august now things are looking great i don't need to go into the lower brood chamber to see this is in great shape so our queen exclusively go back on [Music] and our honey supers can go back on let them continue to do a great job filling them up i want those bees pouring in the entrance uh we're unblocking the traffic control so this room this is the equivalent of a one super honey in one empty box so i'd say we could leave it for a little bit longer uh considering that this comb to be built in here but i'd say within a week if we have a honey flow we'll want more space on here so we'll probably do that in about a week's time so two colonies looking at the two double deep brood chambers they look pretty much on schedule one of them was re-queening but there still still plenty of strength they've successfully reared a new queen question is will she get out and mate but within a week we should know and this colony clearly is just roaring along and will probably produce a bit more honey than the other one because uh well first of all it already has but secondly it's still got its queen laying flat out so things are going well in my uh hamden yard uh i will look at more hives and let you know if there's anything else to report i'm peter cannon the bee whisperer see you next time

Channel: Beekeeping with The Bee Whisperer

Views: 8,005

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Id: 3F_PvBgImqI

Length: 20min 18sec (1218 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021