so today i'm going to answer some questions that a lot of people have been asking me my name is
frederick dunn and we're going to take a look at my resource nucleus colonies we're going to
find some queens in here and i'm going to show you how to mark them we're looking at the brood frame
there's brood uncapped right there there's eggs bottom center so we know that there's
a laying queen in here each of these colonies we're going to look at are less than 30 days
old how do they make them this is a foundationless comb we're looking at here and it shows us that
we have an active laying queen and what i do is i've banked four colonies here that i just pulled
brood frames from other hives that were well populated they had open brood and eggs and i
put them in these five frame nucleus colonies and then i just waited for them to develop queen cells
hatch them for the queens to fly get mated and then come back and start laying and guess what
else i didn't do with these this is the month of june 27th to be exact i haven't fed these colonies
this is a queen that i nabbed don't worry you're probably wondering fred why don't you show us
how you got the queen and put her in that one-handed queen cage
well i'm gonna show two different hives here and this one caught me off guard i had the
wrong camera equipment with me so i had to hold the camera and catch the queen so i had to park
the camera now here she is already marked i use this white marker put it on her thorax and we
have to park her for a little while and make sure that this paint is going to dry out really well
before we put her back in because what's the first thing that her retinue of workers those nurse
beats that attend the queen what are they going to want to do they're going to identify that foreign
material on her thorax they're going to want to get it out of there now look she's trying to fly
why can't she because she's in lay and she's too heavy queens that are in lay just can't fly
so here we get a good look at her and you get to see how the system works don't worry in the second
half of this we'll catch the queen and go through the whole process because it traded out cameras
but we're looking inside this nucleus colony look how calm all the bees are by the way this is an
optimum day to be doing these inspections other than the fact that it seems to be pretty windy
but it is 89 degrees and if it says 89 degrees on that temperature sensor then i know it's
actually much warmer than that more like 93 or 94 so we're not really disturbing the bees too
much mid-afternoon foragers are out and these are small colonies so here's our queen marked we have
to get her back in the hive but while she's drying off there she's sitting in the shade on this brick
so that's the other thing don't overheat your queen she doesn't know what's going on
now when i picked her up i picked her up from underneath so i collected her
feet and just marked her quickly there and then notice that the way this one-handed queen
holder this queen cage the way it works it only keeps the queen in so in other
words workers can pass right through so it operates the same as the queen excluder would
and this gives our worker bees a chance to feed her there as they're trying to do
because they don't understand why she was removed from the colony and why she's in that cage in the
first place and then we're going to put her back in after we've satisfied ourselves that
the paint's nice and dry that they won't be able to clean it off the cage is open now
if you haven't noticed already and you have to be mindful when you open it because it slides off to
the side there and there is a couple of there are a couple of catch points there where you could
get a foot or something in if you're not super careful so don't be in a rush open it enough for
the workers to get in and queen to come out there she is with that white dot now the colors that we
paint are queens are not random they correspond to different years so white is the color for 2021.
so all the queens that we hatch out this year we should be marking with the white dot
and there she is again no rush to get out who knows why they're all trying to groom her and
encourage her to go this video sequence was actually much longer than you're seeing here
and i just decided to cut that out because there's only so much queen watching that you could really
do and they're sitting right on top of the open nucleus box these boxes are made out of pine
and there's just five frames in them and as i mentioned earlier when i put them in there
i just want to create queens as a resource for other colonies in the event that they should
go queenless so i don't want to build them up fast so i'm not feeding them they're getting
everything they need and and they're doing fine here just from the environment just the nectar
nectar and pollen from the local floral resources so i think they're doing okay she's nice and fat
what was the original stock that we pulled this from these were b weaver colonies who knows what
they are now because of course it created a new queen she flew out mated with drones
of unknown origin and she just came back she's nice and dark and this just shows the whole cage
here a little bit and i'll go over that again in the next portion of the same video but i wanted to
get a chance to look at them now obviously we're not introducing a new queen this is the queen
that's already in the colony she's already in lay because remember we saw the eggs the open larvae
capped everything else what else is missing we don't have a bunch of drones here so we want to
watch her and see that she goes down now could she fly away no we saw when she was in the cage that
even though she tried to fly she couldn't she's pretty grounded so she can crawl around
and down and she goes so let's move on to the next colony and we'll do a little bit of an
inspection there her pheromone is still on the queen cage so naturally we have nurse bees there
don't shake them out on the ground lay them on top because they have to crawl back to her
this is the paint marker that i'm using and this is the one-handed queen cage i believe that's
what it's called there's several different queen cage types i carry these in my pocket
just in case i come across the queen and since people were asking about inspections and marking
queens and things like that i decided to do this demo today now i have a different camera
and here's the marking pen i want to show that to you again before you go to mark a queen
you want to shake it really well number one and number two we want to pump the tip on it
so that the paint is already on the surface of that felt tip because when you go to put
that dab on the queen we don't want to put any pressure on the thorax we don't want to risk
injuring the queen so here we are in another colony this is nucleus number one the other
one was nucleus number four the initial frame here is foundationless so they haven't done
anything yet remember these colonies are less than 30 days old and they're just like
walk away splits pulled frames with brood eggs larvae and left them to make their own queens
so it's a pretty decent way to make sure that you have some queen's bank there so you can use them
if another colony goes queenless so we're looking at drawn out comb here and that is better comb
just to make things easier for them
go on to the next one here not wearing gloves for this if you're gonna grab queens it's best to do
it with your bare hands and make sure your hands are clean and another thing you can do
is rub your fingers on wax to make them just a little bit tacky to help you grab onto the queen
nice calm colony of bees looking it over really quickly here just to see if i can spot the queen
when you're trying to spot the queen look for the most populated frames generally
there's capped brood on this frame open brood so somebody's laying in here so that's a good
sign so the queen must have flown away mated come back and she's doing what she needs to do
so remember this is the second nucleus this is not the one we started the video with
and the capped root is over to the left there and there's lots of room for expansion
gonna carefully look at both sides here clouds are coming and going no rain in the forecast today
and the other thing we don't see here we don't see a bunch of uh drones for example why well because
this is not a booming colony yet they're still in a state of increase so the other thing is i
rotated that frame because the brood concentrates towards the entrance now that we have lots of hot
days ahead i flipped them over so that they'll uh be encouraged to go and lay towards the entrance
a little cap brood on the right there there's some bird comb on the bottom and look at these
long empty cells what do those line up with when you're looking at that they line up with the wires
that reinforce the frame so looks like on this side the bees avoided using the cells that had
the wires running through them that reinforce the better cone there there's some bur comb again on
the bottom i don't see any evidence of a clean cup no queen cells here it's looking pretty good
over on this side look at the bottom nice clear shot there everybody's calm capped brood
and we've got to do some population considering that while i'm doing this even there's a whole
cloud of bees off to the camera left here waiting to get back in this hive
that's because i've parked my cart right in front of it there it's got all my stuff on it
so now we get to this acorn frame on the end look at the population on it things look good there so
look for the frames that have the most bees on them and your chances are pretty good that you
just might find a queen there looks like we've got some queen cups on the bottom there to the left
got a little bit of a uh what looks like a tiny super seizure cell
right on the frame not fully developed
nothing in it so that's okay sometimes they make uh queen cups or super seizure cups that
are empty just in case things aren't going their way and they need to make an emergency queen again
and remember that these are kind of emergency queens to begin with because i just pulled frames
now i'm going to flip this over to the back side but this has lots of brood on it cap brood there's
this little super seizure bump out that i'm going to keep an eye on and you can tear that out if
you want to if you're trying to keep the colony but remember these are resource colonies for me
so if they actually superseded changed out and created another queen that wouldn't bother me
at all because i don't necessarily want a big population of these in these what i want are
queens and resources to help out with other colonies if i need it i went out of focus
there because i'm on manual focus i didn't recognize while i was out in the sunshine
but so the bees are calm he's going you move slow and steady sorry about the
spider web there i did not notice until i got this up on the there's the queen right there see
our little golden abdomen so we get her by the wings there she is super happy to be picked up
in opposite land so we'll lay the frame down here and we're going to put her in our one-handed queen
show you how that works put her in there and hopefully get her to grab on to that uh little
spongy surfacer she can get her footing close it up now remember this acts like a queen excluder
so workers could get in there and now we're going to marker but to do that i want to use this little
plunger here we'll slide it up and we'll press her against that queen excluder grid at the top
and we'll mark the queen so i'm going to show you that in great detail
slow and steady is the key here just enough pressure to arrest her movement not enough
pressure to damage the queen and remember that your marker needs to be wet so all you have to do
is touch that thorax and transfer paint from the felt tip onto the queen there we go she's lined up
let's mark that thorax there which is the shiny part just behind her head
and that's enough of a dot right there that worker trying to inspect my job there so now we're going
to set her in the shade for a while let's get the pressure off of her slide that down and
make sure the paint dries before we go to reintroduce her we don't want it to make
it easy for those groomers in the hive to clean off that white dot and like i said i recommend
this is a great beginner tool so you could just get her by the wings marker and let her dry but
then you've got to put her somewhere anyway so you might as well have a queen cage somewhere so that
you can put the queen in it and dry her off the other thing is you can put them in these cages
while you inspect hives and rearrange frames or pull frames to reinforce other colonies and things
like that and the queen will be ready for you to put her right back in so you could do a couple
things at the same time save the queen from the movements that you're doing in the hive inspection
and then of course marker if you want to and now i move that foundationless frame over here
right next to the brood area there so they can expand and draw that out
they've got better comb in the other frames so they've got lots of resources already and that
frame that's empty now is on the west side of the colony and the colonies entrance faces south
so now winter time comes what would i do with these small colonies well we'll combine them
together and make sure that they're big enough to make it the pheromone of the
queen is strong here so the workers are coming out so we're going right inside to feed her
and we're going to release her of course but i want to take time to just show you give you
good look at the queen show you the workers see what they're doing and they're even fanning now
by the way that's how hot it is today and they're in direct sunlight so we want to move this along
this entire event on this particular colony took less than 10 minutes
i think that's a good amount of time to have your colonies open on a day like today
and they're getting in there they want to feed her
they're also spreading her pheromone around and making sure the others know
they haven't lost their queen she's right here so to close this out we're going to open up
this queen cage let her out and we're gonna watch her go down in and again she can't fly she's too
heavy but if she flipped off at the edge of this you would get her crawling on the the bottom there
so put the lid on we're done
thanks for watching you