[music]
OK so here we are today we're making up double
nucleus colonies.
These are colonies that are
divided into two with a partition here,
they have vent holes at each end of each nuc box
and what we are going to do is fill them up
with five frames.
We are splitting up hives so
that we are putting two frames of brood on
each side, we put one really good brood frame
and then maybe a partial frame of brood,
a frame of honey, an empty frame and a
foundation frame so each side will get those
same five frames.
We do this in kind of an assembly line style;
we'll be carrying a hive to this location,
dividing it up and we leave one frame of brood
in the hive, they get the returning field bees
and they get the original queen.
We find the queens as we are going along,
so you'll see how that goes once we get started.
This is a little bit rougher than some of our other
jobs so we are going to put a veil on.
This should be a good strong colony.
So we'll just take the super off that.
That super is almost completely full.
It's about 15 degrees today,
so there should be a lot of bees inside the
hive and that'll make our job easier splitting
today because there will be a lot of bees
on the combs that we want to split.
So now we'll take a frame out here,
I'm going to have a quick peek for the
frame and then I'm going to either pass this frame
to either Brooke or Dave and they will be stationed
on the opposite side of the table
and I'll call out the frames as I go
look for the queen and I'm going to pass that to Dave.
So Dave that's a honey frame no queen yet.
And Brooke can step up here.
Brooke that's a honey frame, no queen.
So you can see Dave has positioned that honey
frame leaving lots of room to put brood frames in.
So a quick look for the queen.
We happen to have a frame of drone brood.
I'm going to leave this with the original colony.
Lots of drone in there,
but don't see a queen.
So we'll look at the next frame and then look here.
Beautiful brood frame, so this will be a full
brood frame, it will go next to the partition.
Lots of brood in that frame there.
Haven't seen the queen yet.
There you go Dave.
There's a lot of open brood on this one, not a lot of
capped brood so that will be what we call
a second frame of brood and I am going to
give that one to Brooke so she's got
something to do, looking for a queen there.
We still haven't found the queen
and that will go in the second position
so not right next to the partition.
Look, look, look for the queen.
Don't see her here, don't see her there
I'll give that to Dave, that's a first brood frame,
so it's a full frame of brood.
He's going to check for the queen.
And that's another beautiful full frame of
brood, so I'll give that to Brooke
and she is going to have a good look for
the queen because we still haven't found her,
and Dave has already spotted the queen for me
right here, so I will just pick her up.
She is right there.
OK so we are just going to pick her up
and pop her into a cage.
Great, here you go Dave, you can
figure out what one that is.
Just call it out.
Dave: That's a one capped brood got a full frame
of brood so we'll probably go with a second.
Paul: Sounds good to me, great.
Now we do have to leave something for
this colony here, and as you can see
we are not going to fill up all these boxes
with one hive,
but now we don't have to look for
the queen.
That's a second brood frame
actually let's give that to Dave
we'll finish this one up and he'll finish his two there.
Here's a nice good solid brood frame
to leave for this hive and they've got this
brood frame, we'll give them a frame of honey,
put it right here and then fill this up
with empty frames.
Dave: Two frames of foundation on the outside.
Paul: So Stephanie can you start filling some
frames up for us please?
OK so we are going to put our empty in there
and our foundation in here, so this one is complete.
We've got a good solid frame of brood,
a partial frame of brood, a honey frame with bees
on it, an empty frame and a foundation frame,
so that is our split.
If we look over on this side, we've got that one
filled up, but we are only partly full on this one.
We'll continue to fill it with the next hive,
although we just need a honey frame there right?
That's more of an empty frame there's a honey frame
and a wax moth, we'll get rid of that,
and I'll get that in there first.
Dave you want to put that in?
So our honey frame in there,
our empty frame,
OK we've got one box done.
So now we'll give them a little bit of smoke.
Those frames actually had a lot of bees,
sometimes we end up shaking some frames out
of the honey supers on here to add in with
that but this one will be ok like that.
So we get that on here.
Now what we are going to do is take this back
to or take this to another location.
You can see the entrances are taped shut
so the bees can't fly out.
We'll keep them nice and cool, we'll move them to
our other location, we'll put a queen cell
in each side and then we'll
cut a hole in here as you'll see when we do
the rest of that.
So that now can go to the truck.
Catherine can you and Stephanie carry that?
These are frames that came out of a hive
that's died.
We've checked it over, everything looks fine
to be reused.
So we want 10 frames, three, six, nine,
we'll put one frame of foundation in here
get a bit more new comb built up.
Alright that one can go back and we will reintroduce
that queen and put the honey super back on.
So that's it that's making up these double nucs
first step of it anyway getting them made up.
These frames weren't hanging straight up
and down, so I'm just reorienting them a
little bit.
There we go.
So here we have the nucs that we've
made up, the double nucs.
So there's two hives in each side here with
the partition down the middle and we've
loaded them up with bees.
We've brought them to another yard,
so when we open these up they won't recognize
the landmarks and they will relocate to their
new home, they won't be trying to fly home
to their original hive.
We don't leave our splits in the same yard
so we don't lose half of the bees in the original spot.
So we'll be setting them down on the ground,
we space them out fairly evenly, give them lots of
different orientations, they have different
colours that helps with the queen orientation,
we'll put them down on the ground, we'll introduce
the queen cells and then we'll partially open
up the entrance.
So we'll just set them down first.
When we are carrying bee hives we are
either carrying them two persons to a hive
or one hive, but you don't want to tip
them to the side, like you wouldn't want to
pick them up this way and tip them
or the frames swing and can crush bees.
OK so here we have our queen cells in a queen
cell incubator, we've set our nucleus colonies
down, we've cut a notch in the tape over the
entrance and now we are ready to put our queen
cells in.
We can transport our queens in this incubator
that keeps them at 34 Celsius,
we can plug this into the cigarette lighter
in the truck in the 12 volt power source in the truck,
or carry a battery pack for more remote locations.
And when we handle this we handle it
very gently and we keep it out of the sun.
If the sun gets shining on the incubator
it can overheat the queens inside the incubator,
so we always keep that in the shade.
But if we open this up
we can see inside
and so these are our queen cells
if I take one out
you can see the cell there.
It's a cool day today, so we'll get these in
fairly quickly, but again we keep them at
34 Celsius inside this incubator.
So we are ready to go, we are going to put some queen
cells into our newly made up double nucleus colonies.
And we'll start with this hive right here,
we'll open it up
and remove the inner cover.
You can see lots of bees there,
we've got our two frames of brood here
two frames of brood there
and on the outside our honey frames,
an empty frame and our foundation frame.
We are going to put the queen cells right
in the middle in between the two brood frames.
Dave's going to put those in now.
Have to handle them very gently
sometimes you even need to poke a finger
in just to make sure there is a bit of space
to get that cell into place.
Then we put on a canvas cover
and that canvas cover is sealed down
against the partition and that keeps
when those queens hatch out
if they could get at each other they would fight
and one of them would die.
So this seals the bees up from one side to another
and then we put on a canvas inner cover
over top of that.
When we come back in a month we will open
this up to see if there is a mated queen on
this side and a mated queen on that side
and then we are all ready to replace this inner cover
with a queen excluder, so that we can super
these colonies in common.
We'll show you that a little bit later in the video,
but for now we seal that up tight,
we'll put the lid back on and carry on
installing the cells in all the rest of the
nucleus colonies.
So the next step that we are doing here is we
go around and we cut a small slot in the
entrance here just to create a very small
entrance for the bees to come out, that way
they just gradually come out and
orient to their location.
So we'll start and go through all the colonies
and do that.
You have to double check
that you've done that for all of these colonies
if you don't they will suffocate
inside the hive especially if the weather is hot.
So just a small cut
and then when I am done doing this I will walk back
to the beginning and I'll check to make sure
that all of them have been done.
So whenever we introduce a queen
or a queen cell we put a tag on the front
of the colony.
This tag indicates the year the queen was
reared, 2016, the colony number that
the breeder queen lives in, so UG 16
and then the mating status of the queen
this queen is being open mated locally
so we have OP for open, but some of our queens
are mated on islands, so we indicate that on
this position on the label.
On the double nucleus colonies, we need to
put one of these labels on each front of the
hive since there's bees in two sides of the hives.
So we just as soon as we put the cells in
we go along down the row
and we put our queen tags on.
It's very easy to lose track of what queens
are in what colony, so we have to do this right
at the beginning to make sure that we keep track.