Don't Split Bees In The Same Apiary Until You Do This!

in this video i'm going to make splits like i've made up splits all the way throughout the season but i'm going to keep those splits in the same api i've had so many requests for this video everyone watches the making splits video and says i've just got one api so what do you do if you keep them in the same apiary and you can do it you definitely can do it my preference is always to move them to a different apiary because it does make the process easier it's absolutely fine doing it in the same aperture though few really important steps that you need to follow that's what we're going to cover in this video so as with all these videos you will see all of the steps i'll stitch them all together into a single video so make sure you stay tuned to the end of the video to see how strong these colonies get after about two or three months time we'll cover all the key important points from making the splits introducing the queen knocking down the queen cells making them hopelessly queenless releasing the tab releasing the queen building the colony up feeding the colony getting them up to strength for winter so the biggest piece of feedback i've got from people is i talk too much so again none of the talking i'm going to put my bee suit on get the smoker ready let's go and make some splits right so let's make some splits that we're going to keep in the same apiary now as always when you're making splits all you need to do is add some brood add some stores add some frames add a queen and you've got a colony but if you do that in the wrong order or you do it in the wrong place you either lose all the bees the brood dies they don't accept the queen so you just need to follow the right steps and the colony that you can see in front of me here can't see the box that i've got down there so i'll just flash that up now i did a demerit split on this last week so i've just been coming through this one i've got a top box on the top with loads of frames brewed in there and they pulled out some emergency cells up there as well and there were some swarm cells in there anyway so for the purpose of this video forget about the swarm cells i'm just going to pull them down i'm going to use the brood frames in that top box to harvest some frames of brood some frames of stores and some bees and i'm going to put them in my new box so this is the frame of brood that i'm going to use you can see they've drawn all that excess stuff down there as well i'm going to take that off i just want the national deep so i'm going to harvest that national deep frame now and i'm going to take that over and put it into my nuke so there we go i've got my frame of brood i'm going to take that over with all of the bees and because we're doing it from a demerit split up top we know that the queen's downstairs below the queen excluder i don't need to worry about the queen i know that all of these bees up here completely queen free i haven't got to worry about finding the queen or doing anything different so i've got a frame of bees a frame of brood i'm going to go and put that into my nuke now i've just adjusted the camera angle there because i want to show you how close to this hive i'm making this split so here's my frame of brood i'm taking it over here and i'm putting it into my nuke over here with all the bees in as well now in this nuke i've got four frames of drawn cone can do it with foundation but if you're doing late splits the more drawn comb you can put in there the better really does make a big difference in terms of their growth and their ability to expand a quicker rate so here's the nuke now one frame of brood four frames of drawn out comb i'm gonna go and find a frame of stores as well and then that is the split pretty much complete so here's my frame of stores nice open accessible stores amazing how much they pack in here it really is quite incredible one frame of stores you can see the remnants of some brewed around the edges there as well i'm going to take that over with all of the bees put that into my loop so there we go frame of stores i'm just going to move it couple of meters over here taking that into my nuke now now we're pretty much done in terms of making up the nuke couple more things we need to do though the first thing i would do in terms of a recommendation when you're making splits in the same aperry face the entrances the other way around so the original hive is facing out that way on my new hive i'm going to face the entrance in the complete opposite direction i want to confuse the bees as much as possible and make them reorientate as best as they can so at the moment the entrance is facing that way i'm going to turn that round and have the entrance facing the opposite way to that hive the next thing you need to do is when you're making splits and you're taking them to a different apron you assess how many bees you're putting in the splits you put the lid on transfer them off to the new aperi you get there and every single bee will reorientate back to that nuke in a situation like this you will get drift 100 you will get drift and you'll get a reasonable amount of drift as well so i would say a good rule of thumb is to go for about 50 percent more bees than you want to make in the split and assume that 50 of the bees are going to go out and fly back to that old hive so we're going to stock this hive up now going to shake in loads of bees from that demerade split no queens in there gonna shaking a ton of bees 50 more than i normally would making up the two fan split so there we go a really really well-stocked nuke and there's more bees in there than that loads of them were just rushed down trying to get out of this heat really really well stocked so we've got four frames of drawn out foundation drawn comb one frame of brood in all stages as capped as it can possibly be definitely no queen cells one frame of stores and now we're gonna add a mated queen so here's my mated queen you can't quite see her in there but there is a mated queen in there just hiding away near that fondue there she is you can just see her walking along now only a couple of attendants in there but that doesn't matter the cap is well and truly still on i'm going to take that queen now and i'm going to pop that into the middle so important when you're making splits in your same a parry make sure you put a queen in there don't leave them seven days to go queenless and i know that these have been used on a demorae split anyway so that that frame of brood that i put in there these are effectively hopelessly queenness already but the technique that i use when i'm doing splits in the same apiary is the same technique i'm gonna leave this queen in the nuke sealed for seven days i'm gonna come back check to see if there's any queen cells which i know they won't because they're hopelessly queenness already and then i'm going to pop the cage and then i'm going to let the queen come out by putting the queen in at day zero on the the second that you make the split you're going to attract and keep so many of those nurse bees because they've got capped brood but you need something else to keep them in there to attract the bees to stay here if you don't put the queen in they're very likely to abscond at least that's what i've learned from my experience so i'm going to pop the queen in now in between the frame of brood and the frame of stores with the cap on close it up leave it for seven days so there's my nuke now i know it doesn't look like there's lots of bees in there believe me that is full to the brim with bees they've all just gone down to get out of the heat i've got my queen in the middle there she's fully capped and all i need to do now is close that new car so then take your lid get the bees off and round the edge get your lid on and then you think that's it job's done definitely not if you leave it like this you will lose i reckon 90 to 95 of the bees you'll still get a few stragglers in there hanging on to the queen but what you need to do is you need to confuse the bees and get them to reorientate you need to do it or they'll just fly out over there and come back to the old hive and there's numerous ways you can do that one way i would suggest is you just block them in for say a weekend definitely don't go blocking them in when it's warm like it is at the moment because they will just overheat it's just not worth the risk so you can do that you you can block them in um for like two to three days and then they're just so confused that they will reorientate and you'll probably lose only like 10 or 20 backers drifting the way that i would prefer to do it though especially when it's warm is take some loose grass fold it over a few times and just jam that into the entrance and the idea with that is that you're blocking them in temporarily it might take them a good few hours might take them 24 hours to work out how to get through the grass they'll push it out but what will happen is as they're going out through the grass they're thinking this isn't normal we need to reorientate and like i said you're not looking to get 100 of those bees to stay back there you've put in an additional contingency to enable you to lose some and that is the key to making splits in your a3 so here's the grass stuck in there now got a few bees still around the edge but what you need to make sure is that when you're putting the grass in you're not stuffing it right in and making it really difficult you're kind of stuffing it in like that and just leaving it just there see how it's almost falling out what you want is the bees to to manage to get that out within say 24 hours and in their efforts to try and get it out that is what's going to help them reorientate so there we go we've successfully made a split and we've kept it in the same aparry and as with all these videos don't go anywhere yet i'm going to show you this process all the way through so i'm going to leave that seven days i'll come back check for queen cells probably not going to be any i'll knock down any queen cells if i see them pop the cage release the queen give them another seven days just because i'm here every seven days and i don't like checking them unnecessarily and then after 14 days i'll come back i'll show you the amount of bees that we've retained in this split i'll show you the frame of brood the frame of stores and hopefully we'll see the eggs and we'll see the queen so i'll fast forward a week and we'll come back see how we're getting on right so it's eight days later i've got my two splits that i made in the same aprov let's get inside see if the queens are alive see if there's emergency sales and the big one see how many bees have stayed in the splits so here we go here's my first nuke and as you can see not that many bees and this is why i always recommend going and making your splits in a different apron because it's just a case of balancing how many bees you want in that nuke taking it to a new aprily and you keep all of the bees in that new nuke and they reorientate to that spot when you're doing splits in the same april it's always a little bit of a gamble but don't worry about this this is what i expected to see i had two frames of brood in there and i've kept enough bees to keep two frames of brood wall that's all i needed here it's a two frame split i'm not expecting anything bigger than that and you just need to take that into account when you're making the splits if you're doing it in the same a3 you will get a huge amount of drift but as long as you open it up and they're covering the brood it's mission accomplished really they will grow and grow from there so here is the other nuke that i set up at the same time i didn't cover that on the video but i did exactly the same process a couple of frames of brood and again two or three frames of bees in this one this one here ever so slightly stronger but as long as the beads are covering those frames you're good to go so next thing we're looking for has the queen survived and in the second one yep she's definitely survived she's wandering around there you go you can see her there all is good we have an alive queen same with the first one you can see the queen there nice big white spot on her they will have fed her kept her really good health in that cage both still sealed in at the moment and we're going to cover that in the next part of this video i hope that's really interesting and i hope that's useful to see the amount of bees that we threw in there was enough to cover a six frame nuke and make it a really strong six frame look the bees will have gone out they've gone forage thinking everything's okay they won't have remembered that i've transferred them to a new nuke it's just not how bees work they go out they know the surroundings and they go back to where they're originally oriented to the bees here would have been nurse bees they would have been blocked in they would have been confused you would have got a few of them would have reorientated to this spot and then you've got some nurse bees that have just come on a little bit as well so don't be disheartened if this is what you see if you try this manipulation this is what will happen so just take in mind don't put too many frames of brood in there i think when you're doing it in your same apiary one or two frames of brood absolute maximum so what we're going to cover now you need to go through the frames of brood shake off all the bees there will be emergency sales almost certainly we're going to take down those emergency cells we're going to open the cage and then that's that part of the manipulation complete so let's get into the nuke see if there's any emergency cells and then on the second colony here we've got emergency cells so like i say the bees they just go and do whatever they want i tend to find at least make a couple of emergency sales but sometimes they do sometimes they don't all we're gonna do if you find emergency sales get them in take them out with your hive tool just remove them like that you need to make sure they're completely gone you're moving the colony into a state of hopeless queenlessness and then we can release that so same again with this nuke here taking off the tab placing it down in between the brood frames or the brood friend in the stores we're going to close that up give it another seven days and then we'll come back so it's as simple as that i told you you were going to have a dramatic drift from the nukes that you've made up back to the hives and hopefully that's kind of what you were expecting but it's end of july at the moment that size colony there which is two frames is going to expand a crazy crazy rate these will be very very strong nukes going into winter so don't worry about the size of the nukes they're perfectly acceptable for this time of year so when you're doing your introductions of the queens like that we've popped the tabs now they're going to do a slow introduction the worst thing you can do after all this time is go back in after 24 hours just to check to see how they're getting on i've seen it happen with my own eyes you go in the queen's walking on the frame you lift the lid up you take out a frame and they ball the queen and i don't know why they do it and they don't do it all the time but just don't give the bees a chance to mess things up give it seven days there's nothing that you can benefit from by going in early to check this they will eat through the fondant if you've got that amount of bees in there they will get through the fondant give it seven days hopefully you'll go back in you'll find the queen you'll see she's laying eggs and everything's fine if they've released the queen and she's not laying eggs don't worry about that at all queens don't lay eggs all the time it might be that it's really bad weather it might be that she just needs a couple of weeks to come into lay don't worry about that just close them back up seven days later see how they're getting so fast forward seven days see if both of these queens have come out and if they're laying eggs right so it's been seven days we're going to check the splits that we made in the same aperi hopefully the queens have been released hopefully they've started laying and then we can look to see how these colonies will expand so there's a little bit of growth from last week that's just due to all of the brood emerging from those two brood frames we've probably split over three frames now with a decent sized nuke at this point of the year very early august at the moment let's get inside see if that queen's been released and see if we can find any eggs so we've got a completely empty queen cage they've eaten through all of that fondue and then on this side of the frame over here we've got a queen so we've got a successful introduction in this first split over here and then when you look into the middle which is always impossible to do you can see that she is laying up the center of that frame with eggs as well straight into split number two and there we go the queen is in split number two as well really good looking queen two successful introductions for making splits in the same opening so there we go that's two successful splits in the same aparri two successful queen introductions now i'm not going to fast forward the video any further than that because all that's going to happen with these colonies now is they're going to grow and expand they're on three frames already and this apiary here we're so close to the himalayan balsam they are going to be absolutely booming by the time it comes to winter probably going to be looking at extension boxes for both of these because they're big colonies already so there's no need to cover it any further in this video but i've showed you how to make splits within the same aperi take into account all of the points we've discussed in this video and it will leave you with really strong splits going into winter

Channel: Black Mountain Honey

Views: 46,653

Keywords: making beehive splits, Splitting Bees in the same apiary, how to split a beehive, splitting bees, beekeeping 101, split a beehive, making splits, how to splits bees, splitting a beehive, how to split a hive, splitting hives, splitting a hive, splitting a bee hive, splitting beehives, splitting hives in spring, splitting hives with queen cells, splitting hives with new queen, splitting a hive into a nuc, splitting a hive with a new queen, Amking beehive splits

Id: ocs4LxoJQaE

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021