You Have To Be Cruel To Be KIND

about 10 days ago I shook swarmed this entire a parade don't worry I'm gonna do a full video on a shook swarm showing you how to do it but it is effectively taking the queen out shaking all the bees onto a new kit New Foundation new frames putting the queen back in not feeding them for a minimum of three days trying to get away without feeding them at all and then you eradicate any disease that is present within the frames that can be chalk brewed Sac brewed efb any of those diseases or viruses and it does seem to really help the Vigor of the bees as well and gives them a massive boost okay you're taking away all their Broods so you're setting them back quite a bit as well but hopefully you'll see with this Colony here over the next few episodes in this series The Bees can bounce back from the shook swarm really really well so before we jump in I shook swarmed all of these colonies and they were big strong colonies into pains poly boxes on a 14 by 12 configuration using plastic frames and feeders molded frames I've not fed any of these colonies because the flow here is good but you do need to wait a minimum of three days so the bees can Purge their stomachs and they're not bringing anything along with them from the old equipment that definitely needs to be said at this point as well there was no disease in this apiary I'm doing this as a precautionary measure across all of my aperies and trying to do maybe two or three Apiaries a season just to eradicate any risk or double down there was definitely no disease and you can see mbu came around inspected all of my colonies this year gave me a clean bill of health with no disease whatsoever and also I passed my Dash training so now I'm a fully qualified Dash whatever it is let's get inside see how the bees are getting on so it might look empty from there but believe me it's not the bees are really working hard on those 14 by 12 frames we're going to get inside now take a closer look but see if you can look down the gaps I know there's a bit of glare but that is six 14 by 12 frames full to the brim with bees not bubbling over because all they want to do is get those frames drawn out I can't wait to get inside this colony and see how how they're doing so you can see the bees are drawing them out really nicely starting off quite slowly with the plastic frames I've done some shook swarms recently onto wooden frames the wax foundation and basically after a day they were fully drawn out so these are much slower to get going but they're drawing them out very nicely which is really important so another nice frame there they're starting to draw it out you can see they're drawing out on the other side as well still not found any eggs in this one which is a slight concern really would like to identify the queen and see some eggs being laid hey I needn't had worried both sides of this Frame here are full to the brim with eggs and see if you can spot that queen as well she is a beauty F1 backfire's mated Queen this is one of the queens that we sell and you can see what a nice calm Colony this is little close-up of the queen there because she really is a very good looking Queen maybe we'll see her lay an egg or maybe she'll get a little bit camera shy but she is very good looking I'll shake off this framing a little bit as well I'll put the queen back in there and I will shake it off and I'll show you all the eggs that they're laying but she is a very nice good looking F1 buckfast Queen you can buy them on our website blacklansonhoney.com right so I've just picked up that Queen and I'm just going to pop her back into the hive there but she's into the hive now and I'm just going to shake off this Frame so I can show you the eggs so I'm not sure if you can see it from that camera I will do another camera angle as well but I can see on the back here tons and tons of eggs loads of royal jelly single eggs into each and every sale very well mated Queen I'll definitely come back and do an update on this Colony at some point as well so there we go hopefully you can see the eggs on that as well I know there are a few issues with these frames and feeders frames one I don't like the fact they slide around two they do take a lot longer to get drawn out and three yep there's a little bit of an issue in case you get disease but here is one of the real massive benefits is that if you struggle to see eggs you really shouldn't struggle to see eggs in these frames and feeders frames very very easy to see and I'm very happy with how the bees are drawing that out there we go shook swarms I remember looking back a few years ago and it was really fashionable every single papery you do a shook Swarm at the beginning of the season and I used to look at it and just think no what are you doing that's really bad teaching and as I've developed as a beekeeper I'm not saying you should shook swarm your colonies and your aperies every single year but I can really see the benefits of doing it you're reducing the disease chance the disease loading on that Colony you're giving them a break from ferroa albeit a limited break but if you do have asymptomatic efb which a lot of people might not know that they actually have doing something like this can really help control that efb I'm going to show you these colonies as they build back up because you can see this is like a five or six frame Nuka bees at the moment really small Colony let's see how big we can get these over the course of the season and see if we can even recover to get a decent honey crop I had a couple of super spring crop from this Colony here they've knocked back down to a six frame nuke now I'll upgrade it to a 10 frame Hive and then we'll see how well we do throughout the summer just to be clear I'm not advocating everybody goes out and shook swarms every single colony I'm just showing you what the benefits of a shook swarm can be

Channel: Black Mountain Honey

Views: 4,536

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Id: 4ABZY3pvaUI

Length: 5min 20sec (320 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023