Spring Set Up for Honey in Single Deeps

hey Justin Dyson here Dyson aviaries we're about two weeks from our main spring honey flow and today we're going to talk about taking these colonies back to a single deep Brew chamber and supering them and getting ready for the spring flow stick right with us [Music] thank you all right so before we open this Colony we'll talk about just a couple things um again I like to run my colonies through the flows with just a single deep um for a brood chamber and then all Surplus supers above that whatever size they may be uh and you know it makes it a little easier to move a little easier to manage if we have some stuff going on we can we can easily get there and we know where the Queen's at but a single deep honestly is is big enough for for a queen the queen can't possibly lay more than a single deep we do see that you know the the Clusters typically round up into the next box up but what we see when we run the single deeps if we time it just right the bees get really efficient and that bottom deep just becomes plugged out with brood um so that's what we're gonna do and today is kind of we're like maybe two weeks from our main spring flow give or take a week um and so we're gonna be setting these colonies up to just be absolutely busting uh when that flow hits and also we're going to take the entire apery and we're going to kind of make them all the same and if there are any spare resources we'll pull them off and we'll make nukes we'll make uh we'll make you know complete Hive splits whatever and we'll take resources from each other just kind of balance everything up right that way this entire apron is basically the same um it's kind of our last our last time we're going to be digging down through this Colony uh you know as we get until after the flow honestly so big management time right now and and the last one that we're going to be hitting so we're going to go ahead and jump into this colony and we'll talk through it just based off the entrance of this one this one looks like it's a little bit weaker than some of the other ones I've had and again that's part of this strategy is just kind of setting everything up the same yeah this one's definitely weaker [Laughter] so we're gonna kind of take a modified method of whether or not we have to find the queen or not um if we don't find the queen we back up and punt so as we see this colony is all shifted to one side um just not quite as strong as some of the other ones that were just plugged out and ready to swarm so we'll go ahead and work through this one because this is one of our uh one of the things we're managing for here too is kind of getting these weaker colonies up to where they need to be and so these empty frames I'm just going to set them aside I'm gonna get them out of the way what I want to do is I want to find a nice fat frame of honey and honey and pollen mix is great I'm right against this outside wall because we still don't have a big amount of nectar coming in so and that one will do for one side it's got a good solid amount of Honey on one side and that'll Also Serve I like to leave like one frame empty in the middle just to keep that Queen lean because we're still about two weeks away and we don't want that this Hive to go into swarm mode so now we have some nice brood and I am looking for the queen and I just found her which is great um right here is my queen so I'm gonna go ahead and deal with her put her over here because these two frames are staying so now I have honey and then brood and what we're going to do is work to have brood on about eight frames maybe one empty depending on what you call it it looks like um and we're just gonna plug them right across if we have any bad frames to go ahead and get them out of the bottom right now this is like I said this is uh probably the most intensive piece of management we'll do for the year in the spring yeah this colony is this kind of they're kind of weak but we're gonna fix it so we've got let's see what they got in the top I've already found my queen says positive it makes life a lot easier one of the things to be careful about this time of year is robbing they really want to start robbing now this Frame here is not quite drawn out I don't want to put that in the bottom because they seem to never finish drawing it out but it does have eggs in it so we're going to save that you'll see when we get into some stronger colonies one of the things I try to do is you see these frames are a little older than this one I'm trying to rotate some of these newer frames down here in the bottom of this colony because we will uh we will cycle some of the older frames out we always kind of have a mix nice new frame we always have kind of a mix in our nukes that we sell they'll have a few new frames and a few you know only a couple years old frames but we don't sell any frames that are 10 years old or nothing here but I'm gonna have another frame brewed and mixed and so what I've done I've already set some colonies up over here with brood and everything above a queen excluder so I'm gonna go grab a couple frames of brood this is part of the balancing piece [Music] I'm gonna grab another frame of brood from another colony and that fills that out and now what I want to do is find a nice fat full frame of honey make sure his colony is set up nicely and so now they have the same thing as every Colony even though they were weaker when we started a lot of that brood is we're a little more stable in our weather conditions now so we can do a little more spreading like this um so some of those bees I just brought over will stay here some of them will go back but there's a lot of sealed brood in there and and it's going to be hatching and they'll be good as far as keeping all that warm oh my God smoke these beads down one of the things I like to do is get get rid of that Burke home before I put that Queen excluder on because it kind of holds it up now we're going to go ahead and super this Colony I'm just putting one on today I'll be coming back in the next day or two to go ahead and super them on up but I'm getting one on here to give them some room I don't have the built-in frame spacers on this now when I'm supering if at all possible I always like to put the uh the first Super I like it to be drawn out the reason is because the bees sometimes are a little hesitant to come up through that Queen excluder so we'll go ahead and get that that problem solved so what I'm gonna do with the rest of these frames I'm gonna get go ahead and get rid of this feeder the rest of these frames I'm gonna put up here and what I like to do is I like to go ahead and stack them in there because we got space we only had eight frames I like to put the brood together so these are all empty frames here like I say this Colony wasn't that strong and I forgot I brought two frames over so that's a completely empty frame so in this Colony we have one kind of partial frame of brood that we can use in another colony now we're just going to leave that for right now and then we're gonna come back now what we're going to do is when we get done here with doing the entire apry like this I'm gonna come back and if you give it like 20 minutes even if you have to shake the bees down to find the queen if you if you look look back at one of my other videos I'll show you how to do a split without without finding the queen and that's where we just shake the bees down and then put a queen excluder in set the box back on top so with this method here we go through and we set our bottom up and then we set that box back on shake shake the bees down if we didn't find the queen and then put the queen excluder on set that box back on top um and if you give that like 20 30 minutes by the time I get done with this apron I can come back and bees will have migrated back up onto that brood and honey up in the top so no matter if we find a queen or not we're good so we have down this road so far we still have several to go but we have resource range on top there's some brood there's some Foundation there's some empty frames there's some honey all various things and what we're going to do with that is those are going to be our our nuke splits or our or full full Hive splits I mean you can mix and match things together so if we want five frames of brood and a full Hive split we'll go down through here and we'll find five frames of brood we'll find a couple frames of Honey a couple empty frames and then we'll we'll take that to another apron slap a queen in there slap a queen cell in there whatever you have and then we're gonna have a couple splits it's not that you know if I have 10 hives that I'm gonna get 10 splits it's not not like that we're just going to use those resources because some of those resources are going to get used to balance up some of these other colonies because every colony is not always the same strength we're gonna move on to another Colony now we want all this brood to be hatching and this Hive to just absolutely blow up right when that honey Club Hits they blow up too soon they swarm this type of it's got a lot of honey that's a full frame of Honey there and that's good that'll get them that'll get them by brood takes a takes a lot of resources to raise I gotta kind of work fast because the bees we want to start robbing this time of year this Frame is uh kind of mixed got some pollen in it and it's got a lot of empty cells too I'm actually going to leave it down here that'll give the queen a little somewhere to lay and you know brood is not all created equal sometimes you have a small patch of Brew sometimes you have a large patch of brood you just got to cut a you got to balance that out to where all the colonies look about the same see this one's got some emerging brood here just capped here and larva here and that's uh that's probably 80 percent full of brood 85 nice new frame I like that going down on the bottom because these are the frames it's probably going to be on here come next spring this time of year right down here these are pretty much the frames this Hive is going to have [Music] until we do this again nice fat frame of brood got a lot of pollen like I said some some frames are not created equal they only brewed that's in this Frame is right here the rest of this is pollen so I'm probably going to yank this one up in the top [Music] this side looks good not to say that's bad it's just that we're trying to set these up to be as strong as possible big airplane there's a good frame of honey so that's going to be our far right frame right there let's go up here and see what we got [Music] a frame of honey let's see we got honey honey brewed a nice big or a nice new frame I love it and it's got some honey in it too which would be good they'll eat a lot of that honey in the next next couple weeks as uh because there's just really not a lot coming in right now that's a mixed brood there has some eggs in it I'll leave that down there in the bottom there's my queen hey hey got lucky I didn't have to shake them down he's missing a Mark I'm on marker real quick with last year's color and I'm just going to put her here between the frames where I don't have to worry about her thank you I'm gonna put this Frame down at the bottom too it's a nice fat frame of brood and there's some young larvae a nice brand new drilling out comb I love to put that right down in the bottom so now we've done that again this Colony we didn't have to rob from anybody else we had plenty right here I'm gonna stick this Quince scooter on here this is not the fastest way to convert these back but it's the way I prefer because I see what's in the bottom I get to make my adjustments in the bottom and set this Colony up the way I like them get some nice fresh frames moved down I can balance the entire Avery it just sets me up to where I don't have to go digging through this Colony so much um after today we can focus on making honey I'm gonna put my honey frames together and The Brood frames together there's a brood frame let's kind of set them in the middle that way if I go to another Colony I need it can jump right in here and grab it but when I get ready to pull my spares out I can so I got one extra brood frame in this colony some colonies you end up with four or five extra brood frames and and no honey and some you end up with no extra brood frames after all from others like that first time we went in but hang with us just a minute and I'll show you what I'll do with those resource frames when we're all done now this right here is what's called a barrier to expansion and often leads to swarming this is another reason we go in the bottom right now I goofed up at some point and put a frame of foundation in the bottom of this hive and if you notice those first three frames I pulled out were basically empty no brood because this queen does not want to cross over and the bees don't want to cross over because they're not making enough nectar and I'm not feeding heavy enough for them to draw this foundation and move on I don't like foundation in the bottom that's a barrier and will often causes swarming and I'm just hearing the Roar of this colony sea new bird got a queen problem rap happens good news is I got right Queen cells right now challenge is they may have a Virgin Queen running around here that's frustrating let's set this Colony back up then got a queen in there now pending that Queen getting back made it a colony will make honey we just balance them up with brood they'll have brood emerging immediately just like the rest of the colonies by the looks over she's either been out to make or very close she may go out today if we'll leave them alone all right so we have the safer area set up now with all of our resource frames up top and now what we're going to do is just go down through here and rip these resource frames off and depending on what you have I didn't end up with as much brood here as I would have liked I wish I would have filmed the apron yesterday I was working in but today what I'm just going to do is I'm actually just going to set up some Queen mating nukes off of what I have left I don't really have enough and uh I got a lot of sales coming off tomorrow so what I'm probably going to do is just set up like a one frame brood one frame of honey and then fill it out with some empty frames um in each of these little cardboard nukes I'm just gonna make some Queens out of them um but you could take all these resource frames and and make up 10 frame hives stick a queen cell in it go ahead and put a super on it and make honey off of it um with two weeks to go so those Queens will be made by the time the honey Flow came on you could just go back and check make sure they made it back and if they didn't you know you do something different with it put another queen cell in it but if the queen makes it back those hives will make honey um you could make up five frame nukes ready to roll um with like three frames of brood frame of Honey one empty and then a queen cell like I said what I'm gonna do here is this one frame of Brew per box and uh one frame of honey and we're just gonna run out there rip these frames off foreign [Music] this Frame of honey that's a frame of brood again we already know the Queen's in the bottom and uh I have three three more frames of brood there so grab another box I'm brewed grab my honey brood going a different box all right foreign honey so this box is done um now know that I have some empty frames and stuff stuff like that down the line so we'll finish filling up these nukes so I'm just going to shake that down and just have is ready for honey other than putting another box on there that the B numbers don't look that great right now but you got to remember we put like seven eight frames of brood in the bottom so they're just going to explode in the next two to three weeks which is when the honey flow starts so that's what we're looking for I don't have much brood on down so pretty much this right here is this one of the next hives about all the brood I have is this rude honey rude say what let's make up one full just for the heck of it rude brood brewed Young Love or brood frame of honey we put another frame of honey in this one and we'll finish that out as we go down the line good let's put this in one of the nukes they'll draw that out well they're kind of queenless now all these extra frames that we're putting in here that are just empty or have honey on them all those bees are going with it that'll help cover that brood where there's not really a a full complement of bees on that brood frame but it'll it'll work out as long as you take an extra frame in there when we're done because we'll have some extra frames right there so now I'm down here to where I don't have any more Broods so I'm just going to fill these hives out from here this is the full Colony we did and I ended up putting uh four good frames of brood in here and then one kind of small frame and then the rest is kind of empty and honey frames and really this this little Colony right here I'm gonna put a queen cell in it tomorrow and that little Colony it's not going to make a lot of honey but it will make some honey if that Queen gets mated and all that good stuff we don't we don't miss um that Hive will make a little bit of honey that may make one super possibly two fennel how to flow is um we could have started it up just like we set these up if we had more resources but we don't um so if we put like seven eight frames and then drop the queen cell in there that Hive will make just as much honey as the rest of them so depends on what you have available one other thing too like this one all the frames I put in here I really didn't get enough bees in there that one has enough because I only have one frame of brood and there's a lot of bees over here that's going to migrate and it'll work for a mating nuke um but this one here there's really not enough bees really to cover all the brood so even when you're taking all these frames out you don't have to use the frames you can just shake the bees in here and then store those frames that works great for later if you need to do a split or something like that you have nice drill knife home so I'm gonna end up shaking a few extra bees in this one if any of these frames aren't going to be used you notice this one right here is full of pollen that's a high Beetle wax moth Heaven um so if you're going to store any frames for use later prefer not to use this frames like this with with the honey and pollen or anything like that um as middle of the summer it's hard to keep them out of there so typically I'll use these up and then I'll save my my empties like this Frame is nice and clean there's nothing in it so that's a good frame we can put in storage that'll be good enough for a mating nuke they don't have that much brood to take care of one final fault on uh when you're setting up nukes like this it's important to close them up for I mean 24 hours preferably because they don't have a queen sometimes when you first put a hive together like this they'll uh let us kind of go out and they'll end up grouping up in one or two colonies and you'll end up with a colony with very few bees in it so you can put them in a cool place you know in a out of the Sun or something something like that for 24 hours if you see if it's hot and sunny outside typically what I do is I start them up today I release them tonight after dark and they'll come out in the morning and do okay but it's better if you keep them about 24 hours like that so well I hope you enjoyed this video kind of talking about how we break our hives back down to a single deep to run through the flow and go ahead and get them supered up and how we set them up kind of equalize the entire apery so the B numbers are a little bit different throughout the apry but by the time all this brood hatches they're going to get really close together and which that's what we want we want to be able to consistently super these colonies and know what's going on with them so anyway thanks for watching like share subscribe appreciate you watching

Channel: Dyson Apiaries

Views: 44,319

Keywords: beekeeping, nc beekeeping, single deep, making honey with honeybees, how to set up hives for honey, how to set up colonies for honey, how to convert colonies from double deep to single deep, spring beekeeping

Id: xzEU002gWGE

Length: 29min 41sec (1781 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023