The double screen board or snelgrove board and how to use it

[Music] hi i'm peter cowan the bee whisperer today i'm going to show you a couple of ways of utilizing a double screen board for splitting a colony and to maximize the chances of getting a swarmed colony to successfully re-queen itself uh and so i'll i'll show you a few things first during the uh fall i showed you how to use showed you about using a double screen board like this for overwintering nukes two nucleus colonies on top of a bigger colony below so that the heat would go through these screens and into the smaller colony now the clever thing about this is there's a screen on each side of the plywood here so the bees cannot physically touch each other even by reaching their tongues through they can't touch each other and this way pheromones can't be passed from the colony below to the colonies above so it keeps them totally independent of each other but heat and air can pass through that's the key to using this board um now this was that double screen board for overwintering [Music] what this video is going to be about is a double screen board for splitting a colony in two or raising extra queens this is called a snell grove board um but we're just referred to it as a double screen board and basically again screen on both sides of the plywood so the bees cannot physically touch each other and one of these edges has an entrance at one one end of the hive so no other snell grove boards could have various entrances on various various sides but there's just a simplified version of it so let's see what we would do with it first of all let's look at what we would do if we need to split a colony like this let's say it's in maine here it's towards the end of may we've got both brood chambers pretty full of brood maybe four to six frames of brood down below and four to five frames of brood up above this colony is super strong and if we leave it we could put a honey super on by now certainly but we want to split this colony or prevent it from swarming by splitting it so let's go ahead and how would we do that the biggest issue for most people when it comes to splitting a hive is i can't find the queen i've got a lot of bees to go through how do i go about doing that well here's a very simple way to go about it with this way you don't even need to find the queen take the covers off we're going to put it down below the queen is either in the top box or the bottom box we don't know which so what we're going to do is we're going to take these off for now putting them in a separate area and we're going to use another box here now we want to make sure first of all that we've got an appropriate amount of brood in the what we'll call still the original colony they're going in and out of that end here so we'll take our original bottom box we'll go through the frames and we'll check to see that the queen is there and our objective is to have a bit of honey and pollen on each side which will usually be in the outside frames but we have we want to have four or five frames of brood down here for this for this colony the exact amounts will vary depending on exactly what you want to do if you want to have two equal strength highs you're going to equal out you're going to separate the frames accordingly if you want one hive concentrated on your honey production and one hive just being a split which can catch up later you can do that too let's say you're going to put roughly half the brood frames here in and half in the in the other hive so you make sure you you check each frame you go along and you put them in here you're looking for the queen if you find the queen great we want to put her in the hive in this bottom box let's assume though that we don't find the queen initially we're having our usual trouble finding the queen well anyway we gradually go through and we put our frames in here and the reason we have it here is because we're looking for the queen as we go along that's the reason we're using two separate boxes and eventually we go through here and let's say now we've got four frames of brood we have a fifth frame of brood that goes in here and then we're into some pollen and some honey resources in here and okay we still haven't found our queen but we've got half our brood and the other half is still in the super that we've not gone through okay so now what we're going to do you don't need to use one of these this is a just a basically a funnel that i've made here but you can do the same thing instead of using a funnel like this you can just use your empty super and use that as your funnel so what we're going to do now is we go through our other brood frames which are in this super down here so this box will act like our funnel we're going to take some brood and start putting him into here all the time we're still looking to find the queen and we work our way through and what we're going to do is shake the bees off the frame make sure that absolutely sure the queen is not on this frame need another super for this and we're going to put this frame to one side here just temporarily we go through we're shaking the bees in here and that this way we're making sure that the queen is in the bottom box we don't have to find it we just have to make sure that all the bees go in here now if in the process we are looking and we finally now there she is okay let's make sure she's in here give her a shake no don't go really hard let's give it a shake make sure the queen is in there double triple check the queen is no longer there and she's now gone into this part of the hive now we know where the queen is we don't now we don't have to go through any more frames at all we know the queen is in the bottom part here so now what we do is we take a queen excluder take this box make sure the queen isn't obese aren't on here or the queen isn't there so that comes off we know the queen is down below here we we happened to find her this time but if we shook every bee into here that's the other way of making sure the queen is there we don't have to find the queen if we shake all these frames into here we know the queen is in there and now we keep it there with a queen excluder let's say all the bees have been shaking into the box we've got frames of brood here frames of honey frames of pollen we put them back up here we need to get bees back up into these boxes likewise we put these frames back in here and now what we have to do is wait a day while the bees while the bees equal out we know the queen excluder is going to keep the queen below and we're going to just give time for the nurse bees to come back up into this high heart part of the hive and now and get the bees equalized throughout so we come back the next day we come back the next day we know the queen is down here and we've got brood up here so all we have to do take our covers off this part is very simple we take our super full of brood off we take our snell grove board and what we do we've got the entrance here we're going to put it to the opposite side of the hive to where the normal entrance is we can take the queen excluder off at this point i know the queen is still there snow grove board goes on bees go back on top and we can close it up now we can just close it up right there and then and put in a queen cell or a queen so so we've added the bees back on here we know the queen is down below no queen up above now is the time that we can give them a new queen so we can make sure the cork is away from the candy end of the cage and that goes inside the frames there and so now we've got a new queen up here we can close up the hive so what's gonna happen with these bees let's get a bit closer and have a look the original bees are still coming in and out the original bees are still coming in and out of this entrance here our snow grove board is separating these two groups but not allowing the pheromones to pass through now here we have an entrance for this hive as at the opposite side so any field bees that we're used to traveling in and out of the front of the hive they're going to come out of here and fly back and when they return they're going to come back to the original entrance of the hive whereas the nurse bees won't fly they won't know the difference when they do eventually fly they'll be using this entrance in and out as normal but it's the older bees those older field bees they're the ones that make it much harder for a colony to accept a new queen old bees are really cantankerous they don't like new change they don't like new queens and so they're the ones that would more commonly turn on the new queen so if we have our queen cage in the upper part of the hive here and our queen cage is there as soon as she's out by the time she's out in two or three days by the time they've eaten through the candy all the all the older bees have actually left they've gone out of the entrance here and they're going to come back into this entrance here populating this area now very often depopulating a nuke like that can lead to problems very often depopulating a split like that could leave this box short of bees and not enough bees to keep that brood warm but this is where that screen screen separator really helps because the heat from this cluster which is pretty big still goes up and keeps this box nice and warm but when that queen emerges she's going to be accepted by this split and now we're going to have two hives and we can take this split and move it and just have the entrance facing here and they are going to um you're now going to have two successful splits here the original hide and the split hive here now there's another good use for these snell grove boards as well let's have a quick look what we do [Music] let's take a different scenario let's take a different scenario you've come across this big hive and it's already swarmed you're kicking yourself because this morning you saw the swarm up in the tree and it flew away before you could catch it so you're stuck you didn't manage to get a split what's going to happen to this hive well you usually have swarm cells in this box and swarm cells in that box usually the most of them are at the bottom of these brew chain this this brood chamber and what's gonna happen is the queen will emerge she will fight it out with the other queens in there and five days later she goes out to mate and it's about a 75 or 80 percent chance that she will successfully come back and repopulate uh be the new queen of this hive the other 25 percent of times she gets eaten by a dragonfly or a bird or doesn't successfully make for some reason at any rate doesn't come back so you've got a 25 chance of losing that colony once it's swarmed because you your queen is gone so what you can do to increase your probability of having success now is you can split this hive just lift the super up you've got queen cells in both hives put your snell grove board on with your double screen board on and put it back on now what's going to happen now what's gonna happen is a queen will emerge from here and go out to mate with a 75 chance of coming back and a queen will emerge from here go out and mate with a 75 chance of coming back and that means that you've got two 75 chances so what this means is that you've got a three-quarters chance that this is going to have a queen and a three-quarters chance of this uh having a queen if one of them if the queen doesn't return and you end up with only one with a queen well you just take that snell grove board out and now you have hive just combine it with a sheet of newspaper just to get them used to each other again but they're from the same hive it's a very quick separation in all probability you're going to end up with two colonies with a queen so you can separate them entirely and this way you can make uh a new colony out of those swarm cells now some people will are going to tell you that if you breed from colony from swarm cells that you're breeding you're selecting for colonies that swarm that's true in some circumstances but not necessarily true on others if if you've got a yard if you've got a yard with a lot of hives and this is the first yard that wants to this the first hive that wants to swarm then yes this is a colony which has a tendency to want to swarm it's probably not a good idea to breed from that particular colony but if you're if you go into your yard and you've got five or six out of ten wanting to swarm well that means that they're all doing the same same thing it's probably they're all getting too filled with honey you've been a bit slow getting there now what you've got is queen cells which is what the colonies have to do to compensate for being overcrowded and swarm cells are actually usually the best queens that you can generate because they really plan those swarm cells and they really charge them up with uh royal jelly very well so you end up with very good queens so while some people tell you that you're selecting for swarming bees that's true under some circumstances but not true if you do it if you're planning when to do that so generally speaking i would say that breeding from your swarm swarming colonies is a perfectly good idea and what's more is you are breeding from bees that have done very well the way you look after them your colonies are good and strong but you're looking after them and you're perpetuating the genes of the colony that's done well for you and i would say that outweighs the potential tendency for breeding for swarming so that's what you can do with these double screen boards or the snell grove boards i'm going to be using these to be making nukes with fewer bees up top i'm going to show you this spring a lot of uses that i'm going to be putting these boards to um there's a lot of videos out there about using snell grove board or double screen boards and you'll see that there is a great deal of potential for manipulating your colonies in order to get the most out of them using these boards so for example if i have a colony that i really liked but it's swarmed and i've got six frames of queen cells on well i could if i've got six of these boards and five other colonies i can go along and put this on top of five other colonies and put a uh frame with a queen cell in each one and i'm gonna end up with uh three seventy five percent of those six colonies end up with four or five new colonies that way so it is a great way of a great tool to use when you're wanting to increase your apiary you wanted to split hives or you wanted to make colonies out of queen cells i hope you found that useful it may have been a little bit confusing what i'm describing here but i'll be going over splitting colonies many times this spring and i'll be showing it to you with bees but this will just set plant the seed in your heads so that you'll be knowing what you're watching uh or what to watch for later in the spring i'll probably be doing a lot of that in the month of may and probably just as much in the month of june here in maine i hope you found that useful uh if you did please press that subscribe button i'm just just about to hit my 1000 subscriber on youtube so thank you all very much uh i cannot believe how complimentary you are about all my videos i've only been doing this for 90 days now but uh i really feel some terrific warm feedback from sending these uh videos out so thank you very much for that feedback i really appreciate it i'm peter cowan the bee whisperer see you next time

Channel: Beekeeping with The Bee Whisperer

Views: 32,895

Keywords:

Id: rPKBT5e82JE

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021