Splitting Beehives using the Walk Away Split Method to Stop Bee Hive Swarming | The Bush Bee Man

well don't you just love beekeeping we've just come around the corner after a busy day out blooming looking after a major bee bloody population and what happens we find this boxes is trying to do a bit of exercisation i think it's thinking about swarming by the look of all the bees on the front here either that or they're just having a hell of a good time on some young citruses across the way but if you see this it's worth having a look because if you don't really want to climb a ladder and get the swarm out the tree you might as well get the swarm out the box before it becomes a swarm save anyway we'll find out together it might be a bust it might not be being that i'm in the backyard is not too imperative to remember everything but you're probably going to want to get yourself a bloomin little queen cage just in case you find the boss lady hopefully we can find her and then we can do a nice little split once upon a time that would have been a pack of really winny red not a queen's cage but you know it is what it is got our smoker got a hive tool we've got you to follow along so you know what happens go over here and check out what sort of excitement we've got going on you're going to want a box to put the extra ones in too by the way either either a couple of new boxes or a or a bigger or another bigger box to put them in oh it could be really painful until you can get a splitting board and all that but we're not showing that today so just ignore i said that that'll be another job right all right let's just go over here and see what we can find shall we you never know what mysteries you're gonna find when you pop the lid of a bee box what are we up to ladies busy busy busy busy you are maybe you're all just sitting at the front because you can't quite get all the neck the back that you're collecting but i don't know i hope there's no new queen sitting out front here that'd be crazy but there wouldn't be here in the land where we eat vegemite or the land down under which is oz of course it's spring at the minute so the lady should not be beating out the front like that because it's not necessarily a good sign in spring in the middle of summer when it's screaming hot and they're doing their thing quite often they'll have a big cluster sitting out the front to keep cool i don't know maybe they're all around the living back pool you know having them having a barbie of their own but anyway i'm a bit concerned because it's spring which is definitely a time when they like to swarm anyway and i'd rather they didn't swarm and you happen to be here so we're going to have a bit of a look what's going on we're just going to pop the lid off our little box here and see what's going on what have you done chicks well i think they've even built up into the lid maybe they are they might be a bit full in here i think i actually didn't put this super on here that long ago so you ladies must be enjoying their new plus home they must be look at that lot bye lord even with a hive mat they're being using their resources have a look at that lot i think they're hectic i think there's a few of them in this box somehow we'll leave them ladies in there to do their own thing pop them back here we'll just smoke a bit off here and see how much honey we have up the top yeah golly ladies you've been busy you have been busy gals well it's not it's not that full of honey there's a queen excluder in there no there's not even a queen excluder mr slack ass okay let me shake you there for a minute maybe i was thinking i was going to split this one anyway oh here we go look at that they are quite full young john probably not completely ideal because i haven't got a queen excluder but it might be a good thing we maybe we'll just do a split regardless with that happening oh there's only one frame of brood up here though look at that they're filling that all up with nectar you can see this would have been the brood nest around there for the winter now i think we have to find the queen to see where she actually is we'll just have a bit of a rough perusal up here make sure she's not up here first of all but oh girls girls girls what are you doing oh my gosh i'm sorry my own fault i guess but anyway i've got to blame somebody oh that's heavy wow you are definitely looking for some room hmm flooping flumeneck eh i only got myself to blame you reckon right okay now the being that we haven't got a queen excluder in here would be a bit more a bit more precaution going on pop that back in there it's going to give him a bit of smoke see if i can't make sure she decides to run away from that hopefully she's not over here on the roof that would suck so we're just going to pop our well it's meant to be our super but we're going to pop the top box off oh wow they are full i think they are definitely looking to have a bit more room to move wow okay chicks you do look full wow we're going to have a bit of a peekaboo to see if we can find any queen cells for a start hopefully we well part of me hopes we find a queen seller that'll save the problem and then what we're going to do is make sure we find our majesty and then we'll have the job sorted but might not be that easy we'll find out oh my gosh okay chicks you anyway you're a bloody look good looking queen if nothing else wow have a look at that lot would you and that's the outside frame jeepers mrs mrs mrs boss b woman now as a general rule they'll usually have some swarm cells down towards the bottom of the frame they're not always they can be anywhere really but you look along make sure you check the bottom of the frame and where they've all been laying up we're gonna sit that over there for a minute and keep our investigation going i don't think that's going to it's not shouldn't be on that frame being on the outside but she might be they might be building a frame out there but what do you reckon ladies you are very hectic in here no yeah i think you'll make a good split though because you're nice and busy then the bloke should have his glasses on where are you boss woman you gonna find you are we yeah definitely choppers here if they're not gonna swarm they're thinking about it soon i think we should do a split regardless anyway i think this is what you call a fairly full box of bees i think something needs to happen and i'd like to keep her because that's a pretty good bloodline that is if she's going to breed up like this man hey have a look at you lot yeah anything in that no well i'm looking for the queen and i'm also looking for queen cells that's a start of a little queen cell but they're not actually done anything with that so don't get too excited when you see them but that's we're looking for that with a bit longer end wow where would we be anywhere would we be young lady you would be anywhere you want to be [Music] right well i haven't found the queen so we're gonna have to go with plan b which is pretty much shake all the bees into the bottom box and we're gonna take about four there's four of these brood frames out eggs or really young larvae about three days old which is so you see a patch of larvae and generally the queen will lay the edge of that out so you want some you know white grubs and then on the edge of that if you look really carefully you'll be able to see the eggs at the bottom with some jello and they're the ones that you want the girls to raise because if they're they're up too far along as a grub they can't turn it into a queen anyway and yeah technically that's an emergency queen but you know what we're going to have an emergency here in a week or two anyway because these girls are going to not be not going to stay in this box this full this is intense plan b here we come i just thought of because i haven't got a queen excluder and i haven't found the queen i'm a little bit concerned that she could still be up that top box so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to shake the girls out of the top onto this bit of a mat try not to shake them straight in the dirt because it's not ideal for them you know they don't they're not really designed to run around in the dirt so i like to put a bit of a mat down and then we'll just shake them out of the top and of course they'll run back into their home hell you never know i might get lucky and find the queen as well part of me would like to find her and the other part hope she's not up the top because it gets complicated then but anyway let's see what happens so we're just going to have somewhere to put the empty frame well not empty frames are going to be full frames but hopefully empty of bees is the plan righty-o ladies let's see what we can find my righty-o so now the next part of the plan is is because we didn't have an excluder in here anyway there's quite a bit of brood up the top here but we're going to take a few frames out of the bottom box which are going to have some young larvae and a bit of cat brood put our queen excluder on and then in the morning we'll come back and the little nurse bees will be up the top and then we'll flip the box around with a dividing board which you'll see in the morning and hey presto we'll have a new box of bees so we're going to find ourselves a couple of frames that we'd like we'll find the three frames we want to take out we're going to use this one up the top here that's a nice bit of cat brood but what i want is two more that are basically got some young young stuff or eggs are better and then the girls can raise themselves a new queen i think that's a little bit old that one it doesn't look like it's got anything real young on it we don't want that what do we got here this is a nice mean that's that's how we're going to hatch out the beautiful young worker bees but on the edge she's laid some new she's got some new larvae those big white dots they're too old next door to those you could probably hope that there's some eggs and that they'll be able to turn into a queen in there in this corner in here in this little bit in the middle where it's hatched out earlier and she's laid some new stuff that might be right and we're going to go and have to look in the sun because the sun's getting out of the way wait a minute you need your sun over your shoulder when you've got no eyes actually you know what that's going to be perfect i reckon that one will work looks like there's some nice young stuff in there if you wanted to get real excited some people say you can run a knife through there so then you'll actually get them to create a few more queens but we don't need too many queens at the minute we're just we're just trying to make this one a split so that looks like it's a good one i reckon we'll grab that we'll shake our ladies off of this one because this is a bit older frame got a nice lot of cat brood on it as you can see it's a pretty full box we didn't find a queen cell but we found plenty of pre pre-queen cells that they're going to lay up shortly this is what you call pre-emptive swarming if you're doing this and you're taking those frames out keep all the brood together don't put your new frames in the middle of where the brood is because then you'll end up although with this many bees it doesn't bloody matter too much you'll end up with them trying to warm two separate areas and some light will get in trouble so just try to keep it all together so we'll just push them across because they look like their frames that they're breeding in i'll just check this one and see that it's not just honey yep so that one can stay on the outside because it's just honey anyway we had one frame there with brood in that we want to push together then you want to put your new stuff because you'll work backwards and forwards but you don't want your brood separated if you can possibly avoid it so we'll just give them this honey frame am i going to have too many frames they all come out of the same box didn't they i'm not actually counting how many we got here one two three four five six seven eight nine well okay well i've got too many frames so now john how do i manage that did we get some from somewhere else what have i done think we might have had too many in here so we might get rid of one i think we're only going to put nine back in here anyway space them out a bit give them a bit more room to wriggle have a bit of wriggle room you think that's a technical term wriggle room for bees i don't think so alrighty ladies it's all good it's all good you're gonna figure this out i've got great faith in your ability in the wild sometimes the bees will bloom and their branch will fall out the tree and this will sort of happen to them naturally so they're adapted to doing to do and this is what we're trying to achieve the main purpose of the exercise of course is to just avoid them having a swarm so if we can avoid that i'll be most impressed what to do with my box i very cleverly put my blooming frames on top of the queen excluder that i want to put on here now so i don't know all the best laid plans right so i'm going to just pop them in the middle drop them in there give the chicks a little bit of smoke off the edge and we're going to slide our queen excluder across try not to crush too many people come on everybody yes i know with it's like a blooming earthquake isn't it it's been a typhoon it's been a bush b-man typhoon come through right yeah and we're going to pop this up here so now we'll put the rest of the frames in the box we've got the queen excluder we've theoretically well we should have we've got the queen below the queen excluder we've got some brood that looks like it can be raised as a queen above the queen excluder now the little nurse bees are going to run up here because they've got an instinct to look after these little babies and they're they're you know they know what their job is so they're going to run up here and then in the morning the nurse bees will be up the top and then we'll be able to just put a divider board in here and we'll create ourselves a new box and so reduce some of this congestion so they won't swarm but they will be just easier to keep them in our workforce [Music] well here we are the next morning this is the easy part of the project this doesn't take very long well of course doesn't take very long if it's one it takes a little while when you've got a few hundred but anyway i've got these little divider boards that i've made up so you can actually do your splits a bit easier you can even use a bit of cardboard if you want to get really crazy or you can take that super off and just put it on a new base i like these boards because it lets a little bit of heat come up from the bottom brood chamber into the new hive and so they don't have to work so hard also i don't like smoking too much in this project unless you've got angry hive i guess i haven't even got my smoker lit i'm just going to use a bit of residue smell give it a little puff in the front door to make him think about something else for a minute but i'm not going to smoke them at the top because i don't want to chase any bees off the frames that i want them to be on because the goal of the exercise is to keep enough nurse bees in the top box to raise themselves a new queen so then you'll have a new box of bees so i don't want to scare anybody out of there that doesn't want to already go so so then all we're going to do is we're going to lift this super up and we're going to pop this board between the two boxes of course you want the opening you know so that the top box has got somewhere to get out yet otherwise that will be defeating the purpose you'll kill everybody that's another really cool idea is if you play when you do your split put your put your new entrance the opposite side of the box because in a minute we're going to turn the whole box around and confuse the out of everybody and give the top box some worker bees if you're introducing a new queen you might not want to turn it around because sometimes the field bees are the angry old cows that don't like the new queen but you're making a natural split yeah i think it's a good idea bring home some workers so now what we're going to do is we're just going to have a bit of a peekaboo hopefully not everybody will get excited right so we're just going to lift that lid off very nice we've got a nice box of bees here which is what you want okay so we're just going to take this off pop that over here for a minute nice and gentle try not to bang everybody just be nice and chilled out now we're going to take our bottom box and we're going to spin it around so as the entrance is at the back and we're going to put our new board on here we want our entrance facing where the old entrance was like that right and we're going to put our box back on and put our lid back on now we're going to have a bit of mass confusion but the girls will come back here thinking this is where they're supposed to go but they'll run up here and go in this little hole plenty of the others from around the back i'll still orientate back to the other side of the hive and if you go about it this way you can actually leave them as a set together going forward you can actually lift this box up put a super there leave the dividing board and put a super on this one and leave everybody as a nice warm stack for a little while that depends on where uh what time of year i mean this time of year and you know it's all a bit weird as you can see the storms blowing in so tomorrow is going to be crap so hopefully they all be happy inside here making a new queen because it'll be a bit hectic to do anything else so in about 10 days time i'll come back and i'll have a look and see what queen cells they've managed to raise if you have a look at your split and they haven't actually even got a queen cell because the the larvae and the eggs that you put there they didn't like or they couldn't use just get organized and take another frame from downstairs and put in the top box that you're trying to organize as long as there's enough bees of course so in roughly about two weeks we're going to have a mated queen and she's going to be laying away in here and we want to come back and make sure she's laying and all things are going as planned and that's what you call a walk away split because we're about to walk away and i'm not going to do the splits because i'm too old [Music] you

Channel: The Bush Bee Man

Views: 49,612

Keywords: walk away split, stop bee hive swarming, splitting beehives, the bush bee man, bee swarm, how to prevent bees from swarming, how to prevent honey bees from swarming, how to stop a bee swarm, how to stop a hive from swarming, how to stop bees from swarming, how to stop honey bees from swarming, how to stop swarming bees, preventing bees from swarming, walk away bee hive split, walk away split beehive, bee hive splitting videos, beekeeping, beekeeper

Id: u4GfrY8EM2M

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020