Tag: honeybees

How do I make a split / Make up a nuc?

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We make up splits or nucleus for various reasons. It may be that you want to increase your colony numbers and making your own splits, if you have strong healthy colonies is a good cost-effective way of doing this. Depending on the time of the year you do the splits it may affect your honey harvest from the colony. Splits are also made as part of swarm control /prevention.

There are a couple of things you need to take in to account when making up splits. Firstly, if you are to keep the new colony in the same apiary as the parent colony the flying bees will return home. You must therefore ensure you shake extra bees into the nuc to mitigate this.

If you have several colonies, but none that are exceptionally strong, you can make a split up by taking frames from multiple colonies. It would be best practice to take bees from 3 colonies not 2 as it is said that bees from 2 colonies will fight but from 3 or more, they will not as there will be confusion with the different pheromones.

And lastly, you need to make sure that the colony/colonies you are splitting from, are strong and disease free.

Equipment you will need is a nucleus hive, these usually take 5 or 6 frames. These are available in both wood and polystyrene; the advantage of the polystyrene is that they are lighter, which makes moving them much easier.

A rule of thumb is that a split is made up with 2 frames of brood and 1 frame of food. You can of course put in an extra frame of brood but ensure that you have enough bees to cover all the brood. So, all frames of brood that go into the nuc should be covered with bees. Make sure these brood frames have plenty of sealed brood rather than wet brood on them, this will ensure you have young bees quickly which will help the nuc to grow.

If you are making up a split from a colony that is throwing up queen cells and plan to use one of the cells as your new queen, make sure you remove all other queen cells on the frames and only leave one. If you are leaving the nuc on the same site as the parent colony you will also need to shake in 3 frames of bees to compensate for the flying bees that will return home! Do make sure you don’t accidentally shake the queen in from the parent colony!!

Fill the rest of the Nuc box up with new frames and foundation. If you are adding a new queen, you can do this at the same time but do observe the reaction that the bees have to the queen. You may need to leave them for an hour or two before adding her. Some beekeepers will leave the bees for a few days before adding her. The bees will of course start to make queen cells in this situation so, if you do this, ensure you go back through the frames and remove any queen cells they start before putting the queen cage in. Leave the tab on the cage and then check the frames again 2 days later for more queen cells. Remove them all and remove the tab on the queen cage at the same time. Ensure the small nuc has plenty of food, offering them syrup will help them with the new foundation they have to pull, make sure you give them enough food to last them until at least your next inspection. We recommend leaving then for 10 days now before you check to see if the queen has taken.

If you are making up a nuc using a queen cell, select a queen cell that is not sealed. This will allow you to estimate when your new queen will emerge; it will be 8 days after the cell has been sealed. The queen will hopefully mate successfully and start to lay anywhere between 2 to 3 weeks, the weather may affect this. I leave my colonies for 3 weeks before I check them for eggs. Do however, keep an eye on this colonies food stores and offer them syrup if they need feed.

Replace the frames that you have taken from the parent colony/colonies with new frames and foundation.

If it’s in the earlier part of the season that you make your nuc up, you will need to keep an eye on space and make sure you have a full hive ready for when it’s needed. If you are making your splits late in the season, they overwinter well in the nuc box.

Summary:

  • Ensure parent colony is strong and free from disease
  • If you are letting bees make their own queen, make sure you select an unsealed queen cell
  • Ensure the new colony has sufficient food to last until at least the next inspection
  • Make sure you have enough bees to cover the brood in the nuc
  • If you are leaving the bees on the same is site as the parent, shake in an extra 3 frames of bees to compensate for the bees that will fly home
  • Don’t make a nuc up from 2 colonies as the bees will fight, make it up with bees from 1 or 3 colonies

This Nuc is 2 weeks old. It was made from a single colony taking 2 frames brood, 1 frame food and adding 3 new frames with new foundation. Fed with Ambrosia Syrup.

Shook Swarm

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This is a very effective way of quickly changing all your brood frames and will result in removing all pathogens from the hive, it can however be quite stressful for the bees, so you need to ensure you have a good quantity of young bees in the colony before you carry out the shook swarm. 

The best time to do the shook swarm is late spring, you should have plenty of young bees by this point. The method is quite simple: Lift your brood box off the floor and move it to one side. Place a queen excluder on the floor then place a a new clean brood box, containing brand new frames and foundation, on top of the queen excluder. Remove 5 or 6 of the center frames to create a gap.  Now go to your original brood chamber and remove the first frame. Shake all the bees off this frame into the gap you created in your new brood box. Repeat with all the frames, look for the queen as you go. Personally I would lift the queen off the frame and place her into the new brood box, you can just shake her in if you prefer. If you didn’t see the Queen throughout the procedure do check the walls of the old brood box and make sure she is not there.  Shake any bees left on the brood box walls into your new box too.

Gently replace the 5 or 6 frames back into the gap in your new brood box, place the crownboard on top along with a feeder full of syrup.  Keep this feeder topped up until your bees have sufficient stores in their new frames.  The queen excluder on the floor will stop the queen from leaving and taking the bees with her. Once your queen is happily laying you can remove the queen excluder (2 weeks is a good bet)

The old frames you removed that have stores in them can be extracted and the wax rendered, any frames with brood in are best burnt. If you do extract stores from these frames, make sure you are confident they are stores of honey and not syrup that you may have offered in your winter preparations.

Carrying out a shook swarm on a colony with a good volume of young bees will very quickly work the new foundation in your frames, you may be quite surprised how quickly this happens. Do ensure they have a constant supply of syrup.

How long does it take for a new queen to come into lay?

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It takes 16 days from egg laying to your new queen emerging. Once emerged the new queen needs time to mature, and then she will go on her mating flights before she comes into lay.

Maturing – When the new queen emerges her outer layer, Chitin, must harden and thicken, this is the same for most insects, and this can take several days. Her pheromones also develop over the first few days, these are essential to attract the flying drones. This whole process may take 5 days before she begins her mating flights.

Mating Flights – Once the new queen is mature she will take her first mating fights, some workers will accompany her, so she has her own royal entourage! She will fly to one or more drone congregation areas, here she will be pursued by hundreds of drones, and if all goes to plan, she will mate with 12 or more drones.

The aim is to fill her spermatheca with sperm from drones she has mated with, it takes a few days for the sperm to travel from the oviducts to the spermatheca and it may require multiple mating fight to collect enough sperm to complete this process.

When will she Lay – So, if we count the days as if all goes to plan, and with her only needing 1 mating flight, the minimum time will be 8 days from emergence to laying: 5 days to mature, 1 day for mating flights and 2 days for her to get ready to lay.

But, this very rarely happens, so a more typical timescale to work with, would be 12 days: 6 days to mature, 4 days of mating flights, and 2 days to get ready for laying. If you have a week of poor weather you can extend this to 19 days.

My rule of thumb is check the bees in 2 weeks, if all looks and sounds well then leave them for another week. You may find that when you check you have polished cells, these are cells in the middle frames of the brood box that the bees have backfilled with nectar but, now their new queen is coming into lay, they will remove any nectar/honey from, and polish them up ready for her to lay in. If you see polished cells but no eggs this is a good sign.

Risks – There are of course risks along the way. The queen may get eaten by a bird on her mating flight or get caught in the rain. Or she may not be able to go on mating flights due to poor weather and therefore she will become a drone layer. So, once you see eggs it’s a good sign, but you need to wait to ensure the eggs she is laying are fertile.

If your bees have swarmed, I hope this post will help you to be patient with the bees and give them some time before you make the decision they are queen-less!

Feeding bees, what, when and why?

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What you feed your bees will be dictated by the time of the year and why you need to feed them. In most cases, with the exception of the winter months, you will feed your bees with a syrup, this may be a manufactured product designed especially for the honey bee, or you may decide to make your own syrup using sugar and water. There are advantages and disadvantages to both which I have listed at the bottom of this blog.

As a rule of thumb, you will feed fondant during the winter months. You can use fondant all year round but if your bees are desperate for food, close to starvation, then offering them fondant is not going to be effective. Offering a starving colony syrup can save them, before you put the syrup in the feeder, trickle some syrup directly onto the bees and onto the tops of the frames. The bees will be able to use it straight away and it can make the difference between life and death for your colony. Make sure you check the colony the next day and top up the feeder as necessary.

Ideally you will always leave your bees with enough stores to get them through the winter months, but if something has gone wrong and you find, as you are preparing them for winter, that they are short of stores, then you must feed them. There will be no forage out there for them once the Ivy has gone, so if they are short of stores, they will not survive. At this time of the year you should be offering your bees a syrup feed in a rapid feeder or some other sort of top feeder. They can easily move the syrup down and store it in the brood area ready for when they need it. A colony needs roughly 40lb honey/stores to get through winter months, I have a blog dedicated to how much stores do my bees need for winter.

Winter – If your bees are short of food during the winter months you offer them fondant, not syrup. You assess what stores they have by weight, the process is called hefting. Read the blog mentioned above for more detail on this, you must feed them fondant which is placed directly over the central hole in the crownboard. The bees will not leave the cluster to move up into a feeder to take syrup, they will only be able to access food that is directly over them.

Spring – Spring feeding is often needed most because the colony has come through winter and is starting to expand. The weather is unpredictable and we often find that stores are down to a minimum. If your bees need feed in the spring this is most commonly done with syrup however I do know of some bee farmers that only feed fondant all year around. I don’t really understand this as fondant is more expensive for the bees and generally, but not always, they will feed off the fondant from the packet rather than move it down into the brood nest.

Mid-Season – You may need to feed mid-season if there is a dearth in the nectar flow. There is something called a “June Gap”, it’s not always in June, some years its earlier and some years its later. The June gap can be for just a few days, and you barely notice it, or may last for a few weeks. It’s the time of the year when the spring flowers end but the summer ones have not quite got going. This is a critical time for honeybees as the Queens will now be laying at the maximum, the colonies will be full of brood which needs feeding, and the bee numbers will also be very high. If you have taken a spring harvest off and not left enough on the bees and we do get a June gap your bees may be a risk of running out of stores. At this time of the year you should be feeding syrup. I recall one year we didn’t do a spring harvest, as we just didn’t have time, and that particular year the June gap was long, some of our sites were more badly affected and the bees had eaten through all the spring forage. It was fortunate that we hadn’t harvested or we would have had to feed the bees.

Nucs/Splits – If you are making up a nucleus/split then the chances are your going to give the bees new foundation to draw out, or you may have drawn comb but it won’t have stores in it. In this situation you will need to feed your bees, again, syrup would be the best feed for them.

Swarms – Offer any swarms you take in a feed by way of syrup but, don’t feed them for a few days. If you feed them straight away you may find they have gone when you next check! A swarm carries enough food with them, in their honey stomachs, for 3 days. Leave them to settle into the new home you have chosen for them for a few days then put a syrup feed on to help them. If they are on new foundation they will need a lot of food to draw the comb.

Shook Swarm / Swarm control – If you carry out a shook swarm onto new foundation you will also need to feed the bees. Likewise, if you carry out some swarm control methods like an artificial swarm, and you use new foundation, you will need to feed the bees; syrup would be the choice.

Pollen Substitute – This is a type of fondant that also has pollen in it, your bees need protein and carbohydrates, the pollen is the protein. If your bees are short on pollen stores this will affect colony growth and colony development. You can offer your bees pollen patties on the crown board or directly onto the tops of the brood frames. You will most often hear of pollen substitutes being fed in early spring. It will help the colony to get going.

I have listed below, what I consider, to be the advantages and dis-advantages, of feeding honeybees syrup that is made especially for them, against making syrup with household sugar and water.

Pre-made Syrup for Honeybees (Ambrosia)

ADVANTAGEDISADVANTAGE
Made for bees, is close to nectar in composition, therefore could be considered to be better for your beesSlightly more expensive than mixing your own
Has a very long life
No aroma so can be fed anytime of the day
Is ready to use, no mixing required
Bees can use if straight away it has very low water content

Mixing your own Sugar and Water

ADVANTAGEDISADVANTAGE
Marginally cheaper than buying pre-madeDoes not keep long before it starts to ferment – fermented syrup can give the bees dysentery
 Has an aroma so can encourage robbing if fed during the day
 Needs preparation time. You don’t to make too much and waste it
 Can be toxic to bees if overheated
 In order to store it they need to be reduce the water content, this uses more energy, which in turn means they consume more

How do I do an Artificial Swarm?

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You have just been through your bees and have found lots of queen cells. Most of them are probably along the bottom of the frames. These will be swarm cells and if you have been doing weekly inspections they should not yet be sealed and the original queen should still be in the hive and you should still have eggs. If however you have delayed checking your bees and its been longer than 9 days since you last inspected them you may well find you have sealed queen cells and no eggs and your queen has probably gone already with half the bees from the colony. If this is the case then you are too late to perform an artificial swarm. All you can do now is remove all but 1 queen cell, we would normally leave the best one we can find, we would normally leave an unsealed one if possible. By removing the other queen cells your colony is less likely to throw off any casts, (or anymore casts as it may well have thrown some already!) Now close the hive back up and leave the bees to it. All being well the new queen will emerge and go on her mating flights and start to lay. This can take a few weeks and you do not want to disturb them during this time. I always leave mine for a good 3 weeks but I do keep an eye on the entrance. If the bees are bringing in pollen this is a good indicator that all is well. Check them in around 3 weeks time and you should see some eggs. If you don’t see eggs look for polished cells as this means the queen is imminently going to start laying.

If you have been doing weekly checks then the queen should still be there and you can perform an artificial swarm, also known as the pagden method however this is simplified version. You will need an additional hive with stand and brood frames. Feeder and syrup.

What you are aiming for is to create the situation whereby your bees think they have swarmed but without them actually swarming. The main different between what you are about to do and what actually happens when the bees swarm is that you will be separating the queen and the flying bees from the main colony and the brood and you will leave all the none flying bees in the original hive, on a new location, with one queen cell and the brood.

When bees swarm naturally the swarm will consist of bees of all ages not just the flying bees. In a swarm the bees also fill their honey stomachs with honey just before they leave, this is ensure they have food to start off their new colony. In this procedure your bees won’t do this so you will also need to feed the bees.

So, you are checking your bees and you have lots of queen cells but the queen is still there and you may or may not have eggs. Gather all the equipment you need before you start and then move the existing colony to one side but over 3 feet away. Now set up your new hive in the exact spot where you have just moved the colony from. You should already see flying bees returning to this new hive. Remove 1 brood frame from this new hive and take it with you to the colony you have moved.

Go through the colony you have moved and find the queen, she should be on a frame of brood. Take the queen and the frame with open brood and put these into the center of new hive which is located where this colony was before you moved it. Check the frame to ensure there are no queen cells on it, remove any you see. If the original colony had super with honey you can move these over to the new hive as well. If you don’t have supers with honey in them instead you will need to feed the new hive. Use a rapid feeder or something similar with syrup. All the flying bees will be returning to this hive and thus you have created an artificial swarm.

Now go back to the original colony and go through each frame of brood thoroughly and remove all but one good queen cell. It is best to find your good cell first before you destroy all the others, to help with this you could mark the top of the frame with the good cell on as you go through then you know which one has the good cell on it. Once you have left only 1 queen cell close this hive up too. Once that has been done you can leave the bees get on with it. All being well the new queen will emerge and go on her mating flights and start to lay. 3 weeks is a good measure from the time you took the nucleus. Keep an eye on the entrance to see when the bees start to bring in pollen. Bringing in pollen this is a good indicator that all is well. When you do check them, you should see eggs. If you don’t see eggs look for polished cells as this means the queen is imminently going to start laying.

In pagans method a week after you have created the artificial swarm you move the original colony to the other side of the new hive. This is so that the flying bees return and their hive is not there, they will most likely enter the closest hive which will be the new one with the old queen. The flying bees will boost this colony but also deplete the original colony, which had all the brood, of more bees. The theory of this is that this colony may throw a cast and by depleting it of bees this is less likely to happen.

You now you have 2 colonies, if you intended on increasing your numbers then you have achieved this. If however you already had a number of colonies and you really didn’t want to expand you could unite the two colonies back together. This can be done more or less at anytime in the season. To unite them remove the old queen so that your united colony will be headed by your new young queen. Use the newspaper method to unite the bees, more can be read about this on our How to Unite Two Colonies page.