-Hi there.
I'd like to talk to you today about our four way mating nucleus colonies.
These are made up with a medium depth box, divided into four with partitions that are
built right into the box.
We've been working with these for the last couple years to try them out as an alternative
to our styrofoam mini mating nucleus colonies that you may have seen in some of our other
videos.
There's some advantages and disadvantages of these larger units.
Starting with the disadvantages, they're bigger, heavier to move around, a bit more expensive
and when you are going through them to find queens it's a little bit slower cause they
are a little bit larger.
That said we quite like these nucs and we find they work really well.
Their chief advantage is that they're more robust than the mini mating nucleus colonies.
Last summer we had poor weather.
We had a lot of rain, cool temperatures, and these units outperformed because they had
more bees, more food, and they were able to ride through those periods of poor weather.
Let's have a look at, see how we load them up in the spring.
Around the beginning of May we start loading these up because by the middle of May we'll
be raising queens and we'll have cells ready to go in them.
So we want several weeks to get everything set in place here.
Starting from the bottom here we have our single brood chamber hive than we put a queen
excluder on that and than we take the bottom board off the four way nuc and install it
above the queen excluder.
So bees have free access up into all four of those chambers.
Above that we have a hive top feeder that we fill with sugar syrup.
What we're accomplishing by, with this set-up is we get the bees to move up, access the
sugar syrup, they come back down, they build a comb on the foundation in these frames.
Fill that comb up with sugar syrup and we are loading bees up into these boxes at the
same time.
When we're ready to go with our queen cells we then take these units off and we move them
to the location that we're going to have our mating occur in.
So they get built in one bee yard and moved to another bee yard.
Just before we move these colonies to another yard we install this little strip of queen
pheromone.
It's called TempQueen.
So we put one of these strips on one frame in each of the four nucleus colonies and that
helps hold the bees in these boxes when they get to their new location.
Then we put the bottom board underneath the four way nuc and secure it to the nuc with
screws.
This bottom board is made up in a way that we have partitions down here that correspond
with the partitions in the box and that seals things up really well.
Which is really key cause if there's any way a queen can get at another queen they will
and then they'll start eliminating each other.
We tape the entrances shut on all of them.
So when that's screwed on to the bottom of the four way nuc there's no way the bees can
get out.
There is however ventilation holes here, one on each side of each nuc, so they have cross
ventilation, and that way they are able to keep cool and breathe while we're moving them
from one location to another.
Let's go open up one of these units and see what they look like inside.
Here we are in the mating yard.
We've moved they nucs in, set them up on cinder blocks and then what we do is we put a queen
cell into each of the four units.
We wait til we get to the new location to put the queen cells in because we don't want
those queens damaged during the transit.
Early the following morning we open up the entrance by cutting a little slot in there.
Bees chew their way out through that, do their orientation flights and settle down in their
new home.
We're gonna have a look inside here just to see where we positioned the queen cells and
where that TempQueen is positioned as well.
Here is the partition dividing two of the four nucs.
There's frame number one, frame number two, the queen cell goes in between frame number
one, frame number two.
Right beside it is the queen pheromone, and our goal in positioning those two close together
is to have the bees clustering around that pheromone and thereby incubating the cell
properly.
We'll just close that back up.
Whenever we're closing the canvas up we push it down like that to the partitions to seal
it up well.
This is the same canvas we use for our regular inner covers, it's number eight duck or 18
ounce canvas.
Works really good to seal things up.
We're gonna have a look now to see how we manage our colonies through the summer.
So two weeks ago we installed queen cells into each of these four units, and now ow
we're coming back the queens should be mated by now and laying eggs.
Taylor and Stephanie are gonna go through these units to find and cage the queen.
It's one of favorite jobs, right?
-
- So we will take the lid off, set it on the ground.
We leave it right side up in the same orientation just in case we need to write notes on the
lids that correspond to the nucs that we're going through.
We peel that inner cover back, you can see how well it's sealed down there with propolis.
Then we just set that on the ground.
Here you can see the cell bases.
We put those down in between the frames here so if they sit up on top of the frame they
prevent that canvas from sealing along the partition there.
They have to fit down in between those frames there.
The first thing Taylor and Stephanie are going to do is loosen up those cell bases, and try
to take them out with the cell intact so we can see if our queen has hatched out.
Now if we know our queen has hatched out, there, you can see that one the hole has been
opened up.
So we throw that over our shoulder.
This one kind of fell apart but looking down in I can see that it did hatch out.
So that's good.
Now they'll go through those and find the queens.
Just looking at the strength of these colonies they're relatively uniform but once we've
found and caged the queens, removed all the queens from all four units, that's an opportunity
for us to equalize the four units.
Having four open at a time like that is a real advantage.
You can shift a frame here to there or from there to there.
If one of these doesn't have a mated queen it won't have any eggs.
So it's population will dwindle.
So what we would do is switch a frame over that has eggs and larvae on it to the one
that was queenless and that will help keep that population up.
They also accept the queen better if they have brood inside the colony.
If one of them happens to be a little bit weaker we would just transfer a frame from
a stronger one over.
So we fix these up as we're going along and finding the queen.
Once the queens are found in them all we then reinstall a new cell into each of the four
units, close it back up and come back in two weeks time to repeat this process.
At the end of the summer, usually for us that's about middle of August, we're done with mating
queens so the last round of queens come out, we let the brood hatch out, and then we shake
the bees out of these boxes and store the comb for the following year.
We don't find it's worth trying to winter these small units and it's so easy to fill
them up with these in the spring that there's not really much incentive to try and winter
them over.
This is something we find that really works well for us I think it's easy to fit in, in
any kind of scale for other bee keepers so we highly recommend these mating nucs.
Thanks for watching, see you another time.