[music]
So this stage of managing these double nucleus
colonies we're coming back to check to see
if the queens have mated and we will find
and mark the queens.
We come back at about 27 days after we put
the cells in.
The reason we don't come back after two weeks is that
in some cases our queen cell didn't work out
and the bees will have raised their own queen,
so if we go through these hives now
if they have capped brood just because of
the timing, we know that that is our queen
and we can find her and clip her and mark her.
If we find that the colony is queen right
but the brood isn't capped, we know that that is a
cell it's a wild queen one that they have raised,
and we can keep track of that in our records,
but if we come back after two weeks, half of
them or three quarters of them are fine but
then we've got virgins in other ones,
it's just a confusing situation, so it's better
to wait until about 27 days and then check
on things, then you can work right through them
and finish them right up.
So Dave's going to take this hive apart now
and check to see how the queens have done.
So peel back one inner cover,
the inner cover on one side,
we can see this partition inner cover here
as you can see this is a good strong one.
There's the queen cell right here,
so he'll pull that out first,
and does it look like she hatched out Dave?
Yep, alright.
So everything looks normal here,
let's hope that we find that she's mated then.
So we'll take out some frames, start at
the very outside here, loosening everything up.
This frame was foundation when we put it in
27 days ago and they have drawn that out nicely,
lots of comb there and they've stored some honey.
So now we're looking for the queen, and we'll
look to see if we can find eggs, larva and pupa.
They have to be in kind of a shady spot here,
a littler trickier to find the queen in the
shade like this, but Dave is pretty good at
finding queens, so I think he'll do alright.
There she is. Good work Dave.
Nice buckfast markings there.
Pretty heavily striped.
So now Dave will pick her up
and mark her and clip her.
You've all seen that in other videos, so we'll
just carry right on.
So he'll mark her and clip her, put her back in there
and then work on this side and do the same thing.
If this side is pretty strong,
and it is,
then we will be able to super the colony.
So we are going to just move over here
to this hive
and we've marked and clipped the queen
on both sides here, lots of bees on both
sides, so now we are going to super them
and we will take this excluder,
and this is a wire rimmed excluder,
they tend to get a bit of a bend on them
so we don't put the bend up
or the queens would be able to go back and forth
like this to get at each other and you'd only
end up with one queen.
So what we do is we kind of fluff up
this cloth here,
so we'll just raise it up a little bit there
so that it is nice and sealed down in here, but raised
a little bit there and what we are trying to
accomplish by doing that is to make a good
seal so when that queen excluder sits down there
there's a when that queen excluder sits
down there it fits nice and tight up against
that cloth down below.
And now we can add a honey super on top of this
and close it up.
The bees from this side of the double nuc
come up and work on this side of the box,
the ones from the other side come and work
on there and then they work towards the middle
and as they fill that up we can then add another box.
So we have two colonies sharing the same
honey supers in common, and by doing that they
can put all the honey up in the honey supers
and the queens have room to lay down in those
small five frame units down in the bottom,
but it's important that they don't get clogged
up with honey down in the bottom or there
won't be any room for the queen to lay,
and so we can harvest honey from our nucs
the first year that we make them up.
At the end of the year we take that honey off,
winter them as a double nuc and as you will see in
the next section of the video, we can divide
those in the springtime into two separate hives.
So that's it. We'll just close the hive up.