Time for a split!

all right guys today we're going to check out the bees and do a split on one of these hives that is just covered up with bees uh they got so many bees that they're pushing a lot of them outside to uh be on the lens there get out here anyway they've got so many bees piled up on the outside that uh they're finding it hard to keep the hive regulated on temperature so they're pushing a lot of their bees outside and uh so I'm going to show you uh how I do the split and let's go ahead and get [Music] started I think they're a little bit hot with this insulation still on them rest of the hives aren't doing that but uh this Hive here is pretty packed they're even hanging on to the back corner back here and down on the bottom down there I'm going to split them put them in this five frame nuke so I know they're two packed in there and uh I might even split them a second time but uh we're going to thin them out just a little bit this evening here's what I'm going to do on this side just use my scraper tool and kind of break them loose all down in there it's working all right since I can't get the box all the way over here because of that uh bolt right there I'll just hand scoop these gals just kind of get them a little gentle lift put that in there guys yeah got a few Stingers in there or one Stinger it looks like rest of these will just scrape off of here here all right they're down in there I don't think they're very happy about it but [Music] activity there got some bees back there get them all in this box all right after pulling the top off that box is packed and here the top pack we're just going to give these girls a new home here all right we'll do some digging around in here and see what things are looking like here's a the frame I pulled out got a lot of brood on it all right now on this Frame I am seeing a good bit of brood a circular pattern pattern I'm seeing some Queen cups focus camera some Queen cups there Queen cups basically they put an egg inside there and a special kind of food and uh it transforms the larvae into a queen bee uh don't know if there is an egg in there or not it's hard to see but uh that's what those are for and once the larvae starts to develop they will cap it into something that looks like this Behemoth this big whole thing and you see how that's capped off completely so there is a queen larva growing in there that's what you call a queen cell so we have a queen cell on this Frame all right so I've went through this box completely and I cannot find the queen that doesn't mean she's not in there that just means sometimes they're hard to locate so it's possible since I saw the queen cell that they may have swarmed already but as packed as this box is I'm kind of doubting that uh but not out of the question anyway I'm doing a little split here into this nuke so basically what I'm doing is I'm taking two frames from here and moving into there and inside this box I have frames that look like this they're just blank with comb so the bees can immediately start using this and storing resources or having babies or whatever you want to do so out of this box I'm taking the one frame that has the queen cell on it and sticking it in here and I've got the empty comb the empty comb and Another Empty comb so I want to stick one more frame in here that has brood and some resources on it I'll show you one of these empty Combs uh since I put the bees in here they're hanging all over it so there're they seem happy in that box I think they'll be able to get off to a good start here uh now that I know of there's not a queen in that box unless she's mixed in there in a pile somehow uh so they'll have to let that Queen cell hatch out and uh build their own Queen shouldn't be a problem uh but I'm going to use this Frame right down here and as you can see it's loaded up with brood on both sides and some honey and stuff so everything they need so they should be able to get going real easy with this setup we'll just slide that down in here that's a good bit of bees in that box so we're not going to leave them in here too awful long we're going to let them grow a little bit and then we're going to come and move them up into a full size hot but uh for now they're going to live in that now I didn't see a lot of pollen in there so I'm going to put this pollen substitute that they haven't finished off right on top here so that they can use that if need be all right so now that I pulled two frames out of here I've added one frame with just comb on it and I'm going to do the same thing over on this side so I just make a little Gap here what's up girls just going push that over both sides I usually use a tripod for this but today I just hand hold so empty comb here and if there's a queen in this box she can start right away using this extra space to grow the hi bigger I've had problems that here in the past with hi beetles I want to make sure I put my traps back in there and off these little square traps keep those in here too all right girls they're out [Music] here all right just like that now on top of things I'm going to add an extra box to this hive because they are Plum out of room uh in the past I have ran uh what's called a deep this is a deep box it has deep frames and it go all the way down uh I've ran two deeps uh to make a full Hive but from here on out I think what I'm going to do is use a deep and a medium because it's an awful lot of work uh to dig through two deeps and they get pretty heavy when they're full with honey so I'm going to add this medium box let me get it on here and I'll show you all right so just like that Medium will sit on top and uh this gives them plenty of room to uh to build and stuff this comb here is just empty uh stuff that they can start using right away now this isn't going to be a honey super there's no Queen excluder on here to keep the queen out in a honey super you would want to put a queen excluder on on keeps Queen from going up and laying eggs in your honey uh so she'll be able to come up here and use this extra space and hopefully that will discourage as much swarming as possible now I didn't cut all the queen cells out of there because I didn't see the queen so I don't know if they're Queen right and I don't want to take all their opportunities to make a queen and I also looked for eggs uh to see if they had enough eggs uh you know early enough eggs to make a queen and it's evening time out here the sun's setting and I just cannot see the the eggs uh through my veil so I'll have to come back later and look at that uh but we'll readdress it later so if there's Queen cells in here then when the Queens hatch uh you know they they're going to have an issue to deal with there so anyway um I'll come back readdress that but right now I'm going to set them up like this this and uh they'll they'll go a couple days in this configuration all right so we're going to set this new split up right over here and it came from The Hive on the end down there so furthest over that I've got and uh Wide Open Spaces last thing to do is button them up for the evening got the uh inner cover and then the outer cover now the outer cover on these nukes uh actually will cover up the top hole I've pulled it out a little bit so they still have space they can go down kind of like you see that one B peeking out there but I have built uh little screen uh air boards I guess you would call it ventilation boards uh to go on top for these I just don't have one with me today I'll be bringing that out here and adding it to them so that's the setup I think we've alleviated some of their issue but uh they still still need a little bit more done to them and I'm going to have to look into this Hive also so there you have it basically did a little split today and uh go check the hive out and see how things were going so they're looking good and we'll be back to visit them here in a week or so

Channel: Ryan Grady

Views: 932

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Id: YNHA80vB2PI

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024