Hi Folks, Sorry for the lack of videos over the past couple weeks. I just thought I'd let you know that I was dealing with a compressed/herniated disk in my lower back for most of May and June. For a month and a half, I had pretty severe pain, a depressing lack of mobility and sitting in a chair to edit videos was excruciating. I was able to get through basic beekeeping, but not much else! (Thanks, Bee Barns!) After several chiropractor visits, a ton of stretching, and physical therapy, I have been in much better shape since July 1. Still moving cautiously, but trying to build strength and get back on track with everything I've let slide around the homestead. I'm fine! I have a great, helpful, supportive family and don't need anything, but I just wanted to let you know where I've been. Feeling a WHOLE LOT better and looking forward to a better second half of the year. Thanks for your support and thanks for watching! P.S. LIFT WITH YOUR LEGS, KIDS!
I had something very similar happen to me back in April and it took several months for me to get back to normal. I'm glad to hear you're returning to normal as well.
That was a tough video. I remember starting out and feeling like I had no idea what I was doing, but those mistakes were beyond rookie errors. Either he had some really bad teachers or he just didn’t do any research on bees. I hope he gets help. He’s a smart guy, but he’s way overextended.
Did you see the cups at the beginning of the video? I am pretty sure those were a sign they were planning to swarm. I could let them swarm , but then I'd lose that amazing queen that built the colony. My goal for the year was to have 6 full hives and 6 nucs by the end of the season. The nucs are insurance. They are backup in case anything happens to the big hives. I'm assuming they may not all make it through winter, so it's good to go into winter with more than you need. Also, even after splitting that hive, I still have three supers on there. Most people do not expect a honey harvest in the first year of a new package. I will get a harvest, plus potentially three nucs out of this colony.
@@bieneulm1982 I see random cups like that often. They don't concern me when there's 1 or 2 or 3 spread out across a few frames. But these were 7 in a row on one frame. That's a red flag for me. I've been telling others in the comments that the bees are using these XL frames differently than regular deep frames. My thought was that they put the swarm cells there because they're just doing things differently. Everyone talks about swarm cells at the bottom of frames, but the frames are usually much shorter. If you look at 02:10 in the video, you can see the comb is much more shallow on that part of the frame. It's very concave in that area... a good spot to draw out queen cells!
Just to add clarity to my question - I totally enjoy your videos - I have been there since day 1 - your journey is a wonderful story and what ever video you can produce is appreciated - Do it because its fun, never apologize. I take your journey in it's entirety- a video or 2 back you decided to come up with your own hive design - and I enjoy your desire to build upon the Langstroth hive - you also said you wanted to not to be a slave to your hives but have a 1/2 doz manageable hives - really well managed - so I thought to myself why is he splitting a hive that is doing well - I understand your looking for resources in your apiary now. (I am very guilty of this, as my apiary is over 30 hives now) As for your split - I think those cups were placed there not for swarming (they would be under the frame or at the very bottom with plenty of brood but not packed) I think with the size of your real-estate (Frame size) they will always tend to add cups. I think if your worried about swarms - you could always split if you saw actual swarm cells to simulate a swarm. I see resource hives as hives that need to be split - or lose the bees - you saw it as creating resources needed for your Apiary - your fun approach to beekeeping - your ability to edit and make videos people love and your desire to succeed will get you to the promise land - Awesome channel you have, I hope you feel better - I bet your hive design will be kind to your back.. WTG and THANK YOU..
NO! Still just 6 main colonies! The nucs are resource hives. They are backup insurance. Storage banks... I do not want more hives, but I do like having backup plans.
I have 6 strong hives. I also said I wanted 6 nucs before winter! The nucs are the insurance plan. We still have a lot of season left. If there are queen troubles in August, I'll have queens ready to go. If colonies need a bump before the fall flow, I'll have brood to drop in from the nucs. The nucs are NOT meant to build into full hives. They are storage banks. They may not all even make it to winter. Some may be combined or re-absorbed into big hives. I got this.
Agreed. That is not a very densely populated hive to indicate any swarming will happen. Those look like supersedure as well in my mind. I had 8 cells in one of my hives, and then the same hive made 6 emergency cells a couple of weeks later. I would also not have put back the supers since they will not touch those after you split.
You said there were eggs the next time you went in after finding the cups if she was getting ready to swarm there wouldn’t be eggs. If there was a break in resources coming in, she could have stopped laying and the workers thought she was failing. I’ve also seen that bees seem to always want to make their own queens rather than keeping the introduced queen. Who knows, bees being bees. Thanks for the video really enjoy them!
@@lailaapiary This internet stranger ready my mind. That hive does not have a large enough population to swarm. Those are supecedure cells, that queen is suspect.
Jim, I certainly hope that your raid problems are a thing of the past now. All the effort you put into the videos is really, REALLY appreciated. Thank you.
Yes! It was a dead drive. Luckily, with RAID 5, my 4-disk RAID was pumping along with the three remaining drives. I could not tell what was actually wrong because I could SEE the RAID on the desktop and open files, but the RAID software was telling me all drives were "failed" and kept crashing my Mac. Tech support was able to ID the bad drive and after replacing it, the RAID rebuilt and I'm back where I left off. No data lost... just three days of time and frustration. RAID 5 is a lifesaver.
@@vinofarm Great stuff. I have a RAID 1 (mirror image) of my Windows system and have twice been saved from drives which die due to power issues. Here in South Africa we frequently have power load-shedding. All this due to corruption. 😒
I tryed this with a simular hive 2 years ago and i lost 3 hives due to winter. Here in Canada its a short season splits must be done way before now to grow enough for winter my 2 cents worth.
There is no rule that I can't re-combine them back into the full hives. We have two more months of solid beekeeping weather before I need to make decisions. I'm not planning to make full hives out of the nucs. They are always going to be nucs... or be re-combined. They are storage banks.
A few observations. Does not appear to be a large number of bees in that hive. This time of year they should be boiling out of the hive as soon as you pull the cover off. Disadvantage of that 'deep' style of hive is you just crippled it by pulling that many frames of eggs/brood and resources. One frame of eggs from that style of hive is 1/8 of their resources versus a traditional hive would be 1/16 to 1/20th, and you just pulled, what, three frames? Are you able to recombine these hive bodies come fall if you have weak hives that aren't expected to make it through winter? AKA a newspaper recombine. Swarm cells are usually at the bottom of the frame, not in the center. Cells toward the center usually mean an emergency or supercedure. Do you have an extractor big enough to handle those frames if/when they get honey bound? Too much bee space on the inner cover of your resource nuc. Unless your goal is to harvest wax, they are likely to continuously build comb between the top of the frames and the bottom of the cover. I suppose it's good for adding patties and sugar, but a dedicated spacer would help when you arent feeding them resources. How do you treat this style of hive for mites with anything other than OA vapor? Traditional application of MAQS is placing pads between two 10 frame hive bodies and Apivar places two strips in each 10-frame hive body. Good job with painting your resources hives different colors on each side. From my research, it helps prevent bees from drifting, and particularly helps a virgin queen find her way home after going out to get laid. Please don't remove the milkweek. It's a great resource for monarch butterflies! Thanks a ton for not selling out and pushing ads and products. It's refreshing to watch videos where it's just a guy working his bees without being blasted by a skillshare ad. DOGSPEED!
Well, you've definitely hit all the points everyone else seems to be hitting. Allow me to respond... 1. This hive was pretty packed with bees. It was the largest population hive in the bee yard. I had been watching it for weeks and this was the day I went in to plan the split. The goal was to get another queen out of it. Not to split it into another full sized hive. I wanted to propagate the most productive, fastest building queen I've ever seen. This was that hive. The hive did not seem "Boiling" because I pulled off the honey supers first and also this was the middle of the day on a near 100º day. A lot of foragers were out. 2. Again, the goal here was to remove the queen and get the remaining colony to make queen cells to replace her. The main colony had the population and resources to efficiently build a replacement. The original queen was off to a resource (holding) nuc with a couple frames of her own brood. The plan is for her to spend her time in there continuing to lay while the main hive makes a new queen. If the main hive fails, I just put her back in there. No big whoop. It was a try. I am not trying to build more full sized hives. IF the main hive makes a successful new replacement, I will then have the original queen as a backup. She might go into one of my other, less productive hives before the fall. Or she may just stay as a backup and go through winter in the nuc. Either way, I am left with options. As for the second split, same deal. The bees made queen cells on two frames. If that second frame of queen cells is successful and makes a third queen, I have ONE MORE in the bank. Those little nucs build pretty fast. By the time the fall flow hits, I can probably even super them. Again, those are like free queens and now I potentially have mini colonies raising brood and drawing out frames for me while the large colonies maintain themselves and get ready for the fall flow in September. Then there will be combining and getting ready for winter. The double nucs will probably have pretty good chance of survival over winter and whoever makes it can help replace winter losses or build up weaker hives in spring. The goal is to have 6 main colonies and 4-6 nucs always there as backup. That's it. I really don't want to get much bigger. 3. Yes, of course. The nucs are resource nucs. They will be used to replace bad/failed/lost queens and/or to pump up weaker hives with frames of brood or drawn comb. They are storage banks. They can always be combined with each other or full sized hives if needed. 4. Yes, Swarm cells are USUALLY at the bottom of frames, but that may be because that's where there's USUALLY space to build them in a hive. Supercedure cells are USUALLY built around an existing/chosen egg/larva. They don't build empty supercedure cups and wait for the queen to lay into them. And even if they did occasionally do that, they don't build 7 of them in a row across a frame. Have you ever seen 7 supercedure cells on one frame? How about 7 swarm cells? Let's think about the situation: This was the largest colony in the bee yard. This queen filled this colony with more brood than I've ever seen faster than I've ever seen. The population was way up and the flow was on. Out of all the hives, this one happened to be bringing in nectar faster than the others and they were definitely dropping it into the brood box. I wouldn't say she got honeybound, but there was definitely not as neat of a brood/honey divide as in all the other hives. They did have supers on but they weren't packing them like the other hives were. A lot of the honey was going into the lower brood area. So, the TIMING was exactly right for a swarm. When I did not see as many eggs as I had been seeing, I figured they may have been prepping her to swarm. Then I saw the cups, which looked an awful lot like swarm prep because supercedure made no sense with this rock star queen. If she was starting to "run out" of space with all the nectar coming in fast, they may have just started to get ready to swarm. Also, these frames are different than anything I've used before. The bees are treating them different than I've ever seen before. Brood patterns look different. Drone comb is all in a stripe across the gap between the foundations. Everything is a little different. But think about where bees make swarm cells in a double deep... they'd be on the bottom edge of the upper deep's frames... right in the center of the brood nest. (Not on the BOTTOM of the BOTTOM deep.) Look at these frames... they are almost the same surface area of a double deep cavity. Look where they built those cups... right in the center of the frame, which is right in the center of the brood nest. They were in the same relative location as if they were putting them on the bottoms of the upper deep in a double deep. I really believe these were swarm cups. 5. No, they don't fit in an extractor. So far that has not been an issue. If I have to, I can always just scrape off honey and comb and put them back in or spread filled frames around the bee yard to hives that need them. Or just pull them out and replace them with drawn comb. An extractor would be the simplest solution, but it's not a problem yet and there are other solutions. 6. The inner covers are reversible. One side is 3/8 and one side is 3/4 for feeding patties or sugar. The 3/8 side is not a problem. The tiny bit of comb in that gap does not bother me or the bees. 7. I will never use MAQS/formic. Have not had good luck with it and the temp window never works for me. I plan to use OA right into the front entrance. Apivar can be hung down between frames with a little wire. These are the equivalent of about 13 deep frames. I'll do the math and make it work if needed. 8. I love milkweed and so do the bees. I never remove it and always mow around it if I ever see it in the field. Thanks for the kind words and non-confrontational disagreements.
Doesn't look like swarm cells to me for several reasons. The cells are in the middle of the frames, not bottom. The queen is well-fed and big. Possibly, future supercedure cells or just normal cups which bees build a lot just in case.
Hope you recover soon! I enjoyed seeing how the frames have ports the bees can travel through if they choose to as that will enable them to move throughout winter to obtain resources within the hive.
They have plugged a lot of the gaps in the frames that I left for them. Some have left little passage tunnels, but most are caked with comb corner to corner.
@@vinofarm It's amusing to be inspecting a comb only to see a honey bee perform a disappearing act and go through a tunnel within the comb. Even the most industrious of woodland creatures can make you laugh.
Supercedure cells are usually built around an existing egg. And they don't build 7 in a row on one frame. Swarm cells are built first (empty) and the queen lays eggs into them. 7 swarm cells on one frame is not uncommon. Also, in a double deep brood box (which is similar to this sized cavity) the swarm cells will be on the bottom of the frames of the top box, placing them in the center of the brood nest. Not on the very bottom of frames of a double deep. If you look where these cells are, they are roughly in the center of the brood nest, right where they would be if this were a double deep and the cells were on the bottom of the upper frames. I believe these were swarm prep.
@@hootervillehoneybees8664 Bees do not pre-build 7 empty supercedure cups in the middle of a frame. It does not happen. But please keep leaving awesome comments on my videos.
@@vinofarm ... Supersedure cells are always build on purpose. They are build as Queen cells, the Queen gets forced to lay eggs in them and they are nursed like mad. If the new Queen emerges, both Queens live together until the new proved her capability, than the old Queen get killed.
@@alx252 (serious question) Please point me to an article explaining how bees pre-build up to 7 EMPTY supercedure cups on a single frame and wait for the queen to lay into them. I can not find one. You are describing swarm cups.
You are doing much leave the queen in the hove split with eggs and bees you are going to have to much going on and confuse your self and end up in the same boat as last year with them dying off because they are week
6 colonies. All doing better than most any colony I've ever had. Then I have 5 resource banks. Some of those will do OK, some wont. The weak ones will be re-combined. No big deal. I'm focused on the main colonies.
Laying pattern on one frame does not tell the story. These brood boxes are the equivalent of 13 deep frames. There are plenty of areas in there where the pattern looks all nice and pretty. She definitely slowed down laying, which is normal in the heat of summer OR when preparing to swarm. I'm going to let this play out and will let you all know what happens.
You’re splitting these hives a bit too much in my mind, I believe those cells you saw weren’t swarm cells, it’s just wasn’t a heavily populated hive for a swarm. Those were supercedure cells
But bees don’t pre-build 7 empty supercedure cups in a row on a single frame. Swarm cells can be built anywhere there is space to build them and they ARE almost always pre-built. This was the largest colony in the bee yard. The timing suggested the queen was slowing down like they do when they’re prepping to swarm.
Take care of yourself, my man! Videos and bees are important, but as important as your health. I'm glad you're feeling better and that the Bee Barns are helping, your content always brings me joy with out fail, but also know that we as viewers care about you as a person, and not just a content creator. Lots of love for you, the family, and the bees!!
@@vinofarm I was joking Jim - I know there was no plan for a B&B - Glad to hear you're better and a few people I know have had back issue including myself. Getting old sucks but I can't just sit there, I have to start cutting back on things I do around the house and take my time and not try and knock everything out all at one time. I was told just today I needed to go for physical therapy myself but I am dreading it.
It will be interesting to see how everything turns out for you and your new set up. I've always found that limiting the space the bees have causes them to try and expand more. In fact they sometimes become demoralized when adding too much room or by adding too much space splitting up the brood chamber. I hope it all works out. Thanks for the videos.
Insurance. I don't want any more than this. The splits might not all be successful and they might not all build up and they may not all make it through winter. Just having those resources right there in the bee yard is great backup if anything happens to a big hive. The splits are also great swarm control.
And, if he has to many Dinky Split Colonies later in the Bee Season, he can always join more than one together, using Newspaper... And the Best Queen of course. (Choosing a Queen over another, when you raised great ones in the first place ! That's a hard decision... 😏
Splits pull back the colony's population. Hard spliting in the summer is not the same as splitting hard earlier in the season, the colonies will never be as strong as it could have been going into winter; smaller colonies will have higher winter losses than larger population. There's a cut off date for splits in the north; making the bees raise a queen (additional 4 to 5 week set back) with a small population really is asking a lot, also I feel small colony's raise poor queens. Late splits can work well if using mated queens and heavy feeding because not so much of a bloodless period, queen is laying in three days after the split compared to weeks with walk aways. I'd be careful splitting hard and having poor quality queens trying to winter in the north. May is more forgiving than late June.
There was nothing to split in May. July 1 is my cutoff date for splits. I'm not splitting to grow! I'm splitting to control swarms, create brood breaks and bank resources and queens. The nucs are not for sale or for building into larger hives, they are only for resources if I need them later. The main hives will bounce back fine. I don't know about you, but we have our largest flow in September. They have two months to build back up. I now have nucs working to bring in resources, build brood, etc. If the main hives need a boost right before the flow, I can drop frames of nuc brood in them. If I lose a queen or have an underperformer, I can take one of the nuc queens to replace them. My goals are to have 6 big strong colonies ready for winter. The nucs are backup. They will be combined if they are weak or re-absorbed into the full size hives if needed. I only care about the six main colonies, but I wanted backups and I also watched the colonies since I installed them and knew which one was the top performer and the one I really wanted to propagate. If I have a weakling later, I can drop a pine queen in instead of going into winter with a weak hive. I've thought this stuff through! I have a plan. (It might be different than your plan, but it is a plan!)
@@vinofarm Next year you would have May splits, colonies split hard late in the season don't split as early next season. First year colonies and new queens are less likely to swarm; they do however supercede a poor queen, this might be what you witnessed in the video. In our zone, zone 5, the bees supercede their queen just as the flow is coming to an end in early July. I have a full-time job and sideline 300 colonies so I can't micromanage them all. My approach I split in May to control swarming leaving 4 to 5 frames of brood, harvest the surplus brood just a few weeks before the flow begins. The main flow is over in July, if they haven't swarmed by July I take 2 full frames of brood from the really strong, careful not to take more than 2 as this appears to be the right amount leaving strong colonies for winter. The brood makes nucs with new mated queens. These nucs are for colony losses which replace my summer and winter losses. If some production colonies swarm after the May splits or supercede their queens so be it, at least I have a new queen in those colonies. The 40 to 50 summer nucs I make are easier to care for compared to inspecting 300 production hives mid summer in a dearth when robbing is at its worst. I can grantee when I pop the lid I will find hives that have or in the middle of swarming or might just be superceding a queen, its a mess better left to the bees to figure out, they know what they are doing. If a swarmed or superceded hive fails to replace a queen by fall I just shake it out and put a new nuc in its place for winter. I let the bees have the fall flow, it might be 4 frames of goldenrod form each colony but the bees need ample time to cure syrup avoiding winter moisture issues, perfect time to kill those mites also. The bees store a lot of pollen in the fall, I like to see it in the brood nest area not in my honey comb, which spends the winter in the shed meaning supers come off early. I don't need honey as I offer pollination services, I want big strong healthy colonies come spring.
Hey sorry to read about your back Jim. Glad you’re on the mend, I know what a big time drag that can be. Curious how you’re doing with the wildflowers this year...what’s doing well and what’s not.
We’re having a crazy amount of rain so everything is doing as well as it could. Goldenrod looks lush. Milkweed is pumping. My field of clover is spotty, but I think that’s my soil and not the rain. I planted hairy vetch this year and that’s growing like crazy. Should have field of purple flowers in a few weeks when our dearth usually hits. I think it’s going to be a gigantic fall flow.
Bases for queen cells may be a product of feeder bees (feebees :-D) they have to feed but they cant because there is not enough brood to employ them. So they put royal jelly into these bases, which can serve for swarming later, but also as a stock with jelly for later purposes. I think. Maybe wrong, maybe not. I study them and their behave for only two months.
Hi, those are queen cups. Usually if there’s an egg in them it’s a supersedure cell or cells. Swarm cells are usually at the bottom of the frames hanging, and when the colony is over populated.
Have you ever seen 7 pre-built, empty supercedure cells on one frame before? I haven't. These are not "normal" frames. The bees are using them differently than regular Langstroth frames. I'm pretty certain this was early swarm prep.
@@vinofarm yes lots of times they will make lots of queen cups on one frame. I have noticed even in my strongest colonies they are always present. I usually don’t see swarms out of my double deeps until the are erupting with bees. Sometimes lack of food will cause queen to have a bad laying pattern so I will provide 1:1 syrup and a good pollen patty and they usually will kick the queen into gear.
@@triggersoutdoors7084 I hear you and I have seen empty queen cups on frames before. However, when they’re all in a row like that, in my experience, it’s been for swarm prep. After I made this video I wanted to double check myself so I did a lot of searching and most articles I found described supersedure CELLS as being created around existing eggs/larvae. On the other hand, “swarm cups” are almost always pre-made and become “Swarm cells” after the queen lays into them. There are no google results for “supersedure cups”. They just don’t build seven cups first and wait for the queen to lay into them and THEN supersede. I would happily read articles about that phenomenon, but I could not find any.
Those cups look like the beginning of supercedure cells. You're right that it seems weird. The hive doesn't seem bursting with bees, so why would they want to swarm? In any case, good call on moving her. Always something to see in your videos. 💕 #teambalboa
Except supercedure cells are usually built up around chosen eggs/larvae. Swarm cups are made first for the queen to lay into. Also, I have never heard of bees pre-building 7 supercedure cells on one frame. Usually you see one big chosen cell that they put their energy into.
It looked like you had a troubled brood pattern on the Pine Hive and that the bees were working towards superseding the queen. In the initial split update, it looks like the poor brood pattern continued. Have you thought about requeeing the nuc? I'm not sure if pollen would be enough to fix the issue considering it was apparent on the initial pine inspection.
Hey Jim, you sure have some interesting definitions for your hives and splitting approach to your hives, lol, but if it works for you, more power to you. Maybe its time for you to learn to come up with queens the right way, like queen rearing...., this way you have queens readily if you need them and might be able to help other backyard beekeepers in your area. If you like me, in the northern states, beekeeping for us is just couple months if we lucky, so one can't afford to wait 30days from a split to see if the queen is doing a good job, hence produce your queens along side with your beekeeping. I hope your health is back to normal and have fun with your bees. Dan
I don't want ANY more bees than I have right now. If these splits fail, I will just re-combine and go back to the main full-size hives. The splits that work are just insurance. I just have different goals than you do.
@@vinofarm Understood, my goals are no different than yours or any other keeper, just makes things smoother during the season and one can recombine to the desired number in the fall and be done with it; I just think that having queens in your back pocket would make your life more predictable when it comes to splits; in beekeeping there is no between, one is forced to split for swarm management, that weakens your production hives but gives you the opportunity to expend or sell nucs, hence less honey; if one wants honey production, it takes very strong hives to accomplish that, running the risk of swarming, so there is no medium in this business, may it be as a hobby or professional. I do too, have a lot of 3-4 frame nucs into winter as a backup in case any of the main hives queens dies. Be safe beekeeping.
Not hate at all I absolutely love your channel but didn’t you say this year your not trying to have a ton of have and that your just trying to focus on the ones you have and keep them healthy ? Because I feel like you are doing a lot of splits at this rate your going to be back where you were last year buried in hives .
@@cathyhanley8658 I get that but I’ve rarely seen him pull resources from one of those hives for one of the bigger hives and typically I’ve also seen from years of watching him that usually the nucleus grow into big amazing hives . Sometimes a couple die from the winter . But typically a lot of the hives survive so that answers my question but at the same time it doesn’t .
@@jilliandeleon6354 The goal from back in April was 6 hives and 6 nucs going into winter. The nucs will not all survive winter, but the ones that do will help bulk up the main hives early next spring. Then I'll make more nucs. If everyone survives, I'll be giving away bees. I really only want 6 main colonies to worry about. The nucs are like little resource holding banks. If they survive, they survive.
Right? Mine all died last year and I didn't want to get another nuc and have them die, because of another drought/ dearth year they were predicting. ( I live a couple hours north of Vino Farm) I'm kicking myself now, we have had plenty of rain so far. Augh. I will have to live vicariously through Jim.
The thermal behavior of the hive is like of your house. The warm air goes up and if the attic is not insulated it leaves the house. The insulation of the beehive's top is more important then insulation of the walls. I suggest to make sure that this is true before the winter :-). One can learn from Rick Willams on Facebook. He has weeks of -25C during winter with no upper ventilation. About deep frames: Lazutin American way:-) or Polish Ul Warszawski Zwykly or Ul Warszawski Poszerzony or oversized Dadant. About the split: OTS without notching, it works for me, too.
Yes, sir my friend it seems like your apiary is starting to grow once again. I know you had planned to keep the number of hives down but isn't it funny how the bees decide things for us. I'm not sure about your area but we have had so much rain here that we have not had much of a nectar flow at all. Thanks for sharing.
I hope that you're not gonna let us hooked on for too long. What happens next ??? I can't wait to see. I'm happy to see you back on track. Tons of work ahead : new hives + honey harvesting + editing videos + all the rest that you don't show :o)
Just an observation not a criticism I like to see someone thinking outside of the box, because you’re brood frame s are so big I suspect you’re Queens are going to be laidout after just 1 season so your bees are go to supersede in every hive because you’re Queen , the bees will think the Queen cannot keep up,
The brood boxes are the equivalent comb surface area of about 13 standard deep frames. Are you saying that people with double deep hives (16 or 20 brood frames) also face that problem? Because I’ve never heard of this.
When you are making splits you want to focus on giving capped brood not open brood. The open brood is a lot of work that you should make the split do. Instead of giving a Nuc open brood shake the frame because that is the one with nurse bees.
I was going for the frames with the best mix of resources. My XL frames are pretty varied with what the bees are putting in them. Some are solid brood, some are a good mix of capped honey, pollen, etc. The solid brood frames have almost nothing else on them. I hear you, but these are not "normal" frames.
no shade but I fell asleep in the middle of the video and now I'm watching it for a second time to find out what happened. lovey video, oddly soothing.
So I’m new and looking to learn and start bee keeping next March in PA. The question I have is if I just want 2 hives. How do I just stay there. I saw you going for quality over quantity but now you have 4 splits. I’m s it possible to just have two hives and stay at two hives?
Hello. I ve found your channel today and i really admire your journey with your bees. Im interested to become a beekeeper myself, like my late father was. As of late im reading alot about this topic. And i stumbled over the method of Dee and Ed Lusby. According to them modern breeded Apis Mellifera are too big and thats why the mite also goes into the worker cells not into the drone cells only like it is with the original host Apis Cerana which is smaller. They made their bees build smaller worker cells (5.1-4.9 mm instead of 5.5 mm). The mite stopped infecting worker cells, because the breeding time of the smaller bees is shorter, not enough time for the mite which exclusively infects drones instead then. Now im curious if you already heared about this and if so, what your opinion is on this. Best regards.
I thought you probably had built them yourself. I'm a pretty good carpenter so I think I'll give it a shot. By the way you do a good job in explaining what your doing. You would make a good AG teacher.
I think it was a good decision to split the hive. It looked so weak, after 2 month. I think the Queen isn't that good. Now they have the chance to rear a better Queen an gain at least a little bit of population till winter. If you have 2 more month, they can rear 2, maybe 3 complete brood cycles and you have some bees to overwinter. In you new hives, even small populations can survive.
Always appreciate your updates, looks like a banner year for the Vino Farm apiary! Good thing you have your redesigned hives - you'd never be able to do even the basic beekeeping chores with the old cinderblock covered langstroths.
Hey brother. I just thought of a great idea to help your channel. I was thinking if you had a camera watch over your bee hives you could share the live feed every day and get more subscribers. Just an idea. I love the new bee hives. 100 percent the coolest invention I seen yet you should call them the vino bee barns.
New Bees definitely seemed very relaxed and clam I always really liked the Russian videos then background sound was great I bet you don't miss getting stung every time I do wasp removals on the side damn eastern yellow jackets are always so unrelentless I usually take 10+ stings when I remove those
I've been watching a learning for a while, however I am puzzled by shaking bees off the frame, does this pose a risk of harming developing bees or dislodged eggs?
Glad you are doing ok, I understand all that pain in the back as my mom has been recovering from hers. Looks like your apiary is growing in leaps and bounds again…. Go balboa
To propagate the most productive queen in the bee yard. Make a few copies of her... and the splits will be resource banks in case anything happens to the main hives.
See one of his earlier Videos, there you will see the whole story.... Started from a near wipeout of his Apiary (Years of Work... Gone ! 😱) He ended up only having x1 Hive that survived, and he got going on these New Hives, using his old 'favourite survivor Hive.' Hope this helps. 😏 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
Yes. I've made a few videos about my barn. It's not finished inside yet, but I did use it as a workshop this spring to build all these hives and frames.
The frames were covered with nectar. Syrup may have made them honeybound. I thought they had plenty of pollen/bee bread, but after a week, it was pretty empty. They went right after the pollen patties. Probably could have added one at the start.
New to bee keeping, is there a difference between larva and brood? My understanding was brood is capped larva. But, when you inspected the Pine hive without a queen there was brood. You didn't mention noticing any larva. Inspecting my hive I thought if I noticed brood there was a queen. I always looked for brood not larva. Quarantining a queen, I must find larva not just brood. Is this correct. I hope you can help my understanding.
I’d call larvae, eggs, and capped cells all “brood” collectively. Brood is bee babies in all stages of development. But a worker bee takes 21 days from egg stage all the way to emerge from a cell. So a queen could lay an egg and then die or swarm and there would still be “brood” in the hive for 21 more days until it all emerged. When inspecting a hive, you know there was a queen in that hive within the last three days if you see EGGS because they take three days before the larvae emerge. If you only see Capped brood and no larvae, you know something may have happened to the queen more than a week ago because cells are capped around day 9. Study the “bee development diagram.”
I wonder if the Pine hive was prepping for supercedure when you found the queen cups based on the minimal eggs you found at that time and the spotty laying pattern when you moved her to the nuc. I am interested to see if: the pine queen is replaced in her new nuc and if you notice swarm cells out of their traditional bottom of frame locations with your extra large frames. Also wonder that if it was a supercedure how you’ll feel about adding her genetics to the other colonies you’ve started. Love the content. Hope you feel better.
Queens will be put on a diet and slow down or stop laying before a swarm. If they were planning to supersede her, I doubt they would make that many cups.
Definitely tracking the “get the queen in flying shape” activity and less laying just before a swarm. I usually see this after there are larvae hatched in the queen cups turned cells but before they have capped them but not sure what timing others see for this activity.
@@ericduncan3028 Also, supercedure cells are almost always formed around a chosen egg/larvae. Swarm cups are made first and the queen lays into them when they're ready to go. These were all empty.
@@vinofarm you have a lot of patience to hop around the comments to write these responses with a tutorial tone…Kudos for that. I was under the impression that supercedure and swarm were developed a similar way (cup built then laid) and that emergency cells were the one of the 3 types that was built from existing laid worker cells for obvious reasons. That said, I am always open to hear or learn other beekeeper’s takes on the process. Regardless of the reasoning, you ended up with plenty of queen cells to use. I am interested to watch as you learn this new hive configuration and how queen pheromone plays out. If you’ll see the same or different queen longevity based on frame size and in turn colony density/size during the build up months. Good luck and thanks for the conversation.
@@ericduncan3028 Sure thing. I usually love hanging out in the comments on upload day. The bees are definitely using these frames differently than standard langstroth frames. I'm keeping track of all the little new behaviors I'm seeing and will be making a video at the end of the season sharing what I've learned. Regarding the supersedure vs swarm debate, in the end it doesn't matter. I wanted to split them anyway to try to get another queen from this great queen. If those were supersedure cells, the bees got what they wanted... I took the queen away and they made a new queen! I just saved them the hassle of having to kill her. If they were planning to swarm, I helped them along. Win-win.
Would you ever let a swarm simply "escape"? Assuming that all of your bee barns and nucs are occupied by healthy hives, and that you don't want to grow your operation any further by adding additional bee barns and nucs as required for splits, it seems that at some point a hive would just naturally grow big enough to launch a swarm. It seems that beekeepers do a lot to prevent swarms. What happens when you have no room or desire to do a split?
This may happen next year. I am not swarm-phobic. You get a brand new queen when they swarm. It's not necessarily a bad thing, unless it happens in the fall and they don't have time to re-build the colony.
@@vinofarm Thanks for the reply. I love your videos, and look forward to each one. Love your bee barns too, not just because of the design and how they are great for the bees, but also they look great too. I'm looking to see how they do over the winter.
@@vinofarm Sorry, what is a “resource bank”? If there is a queen in the nuc, and the hive she came from creates a new queen, won’t the queen in the nuc be sent to a new hive eventually?
I’m filming everything. Posting regularly on Instagram/Vinofarm but I’ve been busy and not had time to edit footage. All is pretty much perfect! All queenright and not enough mites to need to treat. Fall is looking good. I’ll get the stories up when I get time.
Hey there again from Wyoming!! Sorry to hear about your back; I can truly sympathize, as I've been dealing with 3 herniations in my lumbar and 3 compressions in my neck since the 80's! Still no health insurance, so I can't get anything 'fixed', but if you DO have good health insurance check out the LA Spinal Clinics Pro Disc replacement for your lumbar injury and Pro Disc 2 if you end up with neck injuries down the line: you're UP the next day and fully back to work in 6 weeks or less! Success rate for both Mobility and Pain Reduction/Relief is in the 90%+ range. Great Video as usual, but I MUST tell you that at the end when you gave us the 'Run Down' of which queen/queen cell had went where, when, and how, by the end of it I felt as if I had just watched Abbot and Costello's "Whose on First" routine! The camera POV whipping around, you pointing, the rapid fire oratory; all combined, I was waiting to find out whose pitching and whose catching and on which day! I love what your trying to do with the QC's, but I keep wondering why you don't just transplant the queen cells themselves onto some prepped frames, rather than moving multiple QC's, since the first emerging Queen will seek out and kill the remaining viable competitor queens? Seems like a waste of great potential! (and reward) Mind you though, I'm STILL in 'theory land', whereas you are actually keeping multiple colonies of hard working girls, which is why I hope you'll have the time to explain the dichotomy in transfer paradigms! Remember to THINK BEFORE you move, then move SLOWLY......we get to feeling better and then put ourselves back on 'Autopilot' which quite often puts us BACK behind the proverbial 8 ball! Keep Clam as Ivar would say! Cheers from the Oil Patch in Central WY (97F yesterday and same today, with projected 96F I do believe for tomorrow; this Old Grey Gelding HATES the heat!)
I expect the queen cells to emerge and the queens will deal with things naturally. Survival of the fittest and all... I am not trying to expand the bee yard. I am just banking resources. What matters are my 6 main colonies. If I have 6 strong nucs on the side, I have insurance. If some of those nucs fail, who cares? They are buffers. My goal is to emerge from the winter with 6 strong colonies in the big hives. If the nucs make it, great. If not, I'll make more nucs. And yes, I'm learning the hard way that I need to take better care of my back moving forward. I'm taking things a lot slower these days. And these new hives have made inspections possible, even with a bad back. I can't imagine trying to keep bees with my old hives with my back in that condition! Good timing on the Bee Barns. Thanks, buddy.
Hi Folks, Sorry for the lack of videos over the past couple weeks. I just thought I'd let you know that I was dealing with a compressed/herniated disk in my lower back for most of May and June. For a month and a half, I had pretty severe pain, a depressing lack of mobility and sitting in a chair to edit videos was excruciating. I was able to get through basic beekeeping, but not much else! (Thanks, Bee Barns!) After several chiropractor visits, a ton of stretching, and physical therapy, I have been in much better shape since July 1. Still moving cautiously, but trying to build strength and get back on track with everything I've let slide around the homestead. I'm fine! I have a great, helpful, supportive family and don't need anything, but I just wanted to let you know where I've been. Feeling a WHOLE LOT better and looking forward to a better second half of the year. Thanks for your support and thanks for watching!
P.S. LIFT WITH YOUR LEGS, KIDS!
I had something very similar happen to me back in April and it took several months for me to get back to normal. I'm glad to hear you're returning to normal as well.
Glad to hear that you are recovering! Stay safe!! And as always... THANK YOU for sharing!! 🤓🤓👍👍
Oh man, hope you feel better and are back to 100% soon.
Take your recovery slow and steady. I enjoy your videos but health comes first.
Prayers for an improved health situation, moving forward…
I enjoy how you explain everything so well. I’m learning to spot the Queen before before she’s pointed out.😀 (that’s a big deal for me) 👍
To quote bender on futurama she's got a big fat behind
I’m always over impressed with myself when I locate the queen in your videos. Then I realize that you put her dead center for us.
Ha ha.
@@vinofarm i second this!!! I wonder if your up for a bee spotting challenge! Make a video for us to spot the queens in. Make it HARD!
@@budgiebreder I guess I'll be the outright loser, even when I'm staring right at it, if I lose focus for half a second, I'll lose it.
Hell I thought you were cutting back on the number of hives in the yard. That number is shooting up fast.
Same
Those smaller hives are back ups. He still just has 6 main hives
I have come back to rewatch to see some good beekeeping after the extremely painful video Gold Shaw Farm did.
That was a tough video. I remember starting out and feeling like I had no idea what I was doing, but those mistakes were beyond rookie errors. Either he had some really bad teachers or he just didn’t do any research on bees. I hope he gets help. He’s a smart guy, but he’s way overextended.
We bought a Nuc locally In april and in 2 months it has become 4 hives as well!!
Maybe it's me, I don't understand why you split this hive? Looks to me you split a healthy hive that has no tendency to swarm..?
Did you see the cups at the beginning of the video? I am pretty sure those were a sign they were planning to swarm. I could let them swarm , but then I'd lose that amazing queen that built the colony. My goal for the year was to have 6 full hives and 6 nucs by the end of the season. The nucs are insurance. They are backup in case anything happens to the big hives. I'm assuming they may not all make it through winter, so it's good to go into winter with more than you need. Also, even after splitting that hive, I still have three supers on there. Most people do not expect a honey harvest in the first year of a new package. I will get a harvest, plus potentially three nucs out of this colony.
@@bieneulm1982 I see random cups like that often. They don't concern me when there's 1 or 2 or 3 spread out across a few frames. But these were 7 in a row on one frame. That's a red flag for me. I've been telling others in the comments that the bees are using these XL frames differently than regular deep frames. My thought was that they put the swarm cells there because they're just doing things differently. Everyone talks about swarm cells at the bottom of frames, but the frames are usually much shorter. If you look at 02:10 in the video, you can see the comb is much more shallow on that part of the frame. It's very concave in that area... a good spot to draw out queen cells!
Just to add clarity to my question - I totally enjoy your videos - I have been there since day 1 - your journey is a wonderful story and what ever video you can produce is appreciated - Do it because its fun, never apologize. I take your journey in it's entirety- a video or 2 back you decided to come up with your own hive design - and I enjoy your desire to build upon the Langstroth hive - you also said you wanted to not to be a slave to your hives but have a 1/2 doz manageable hives - really well managed - so I thought to myself why is he splitting a hive that is doing well - I understand your looking for resources in your apiary now. (I am very guilty of this, as my apiary is over 30 hives now) As for your split - I think those cups were placed there not for swarming (they would be under the frame or at the very bottom with plenty of brood but not packed) I think with the size of your real-estate (Frame size) they will always tend to add cups. I think if your worried about swarms - you could always split if you saw actual swarm cells to simulate a swarm. I see resource hives as hives that need to be split - or lose the bees - you saw it as creating resources needed for your Apiary - your fun approach to beekeeping - your ability to edit and make videos people love and your desire to succeed will get you to the promise land - Awesome channel you have, I hope you feel better - I bet your hive design will be kind to your back.. WTG and THANK YOU..
You can't help but make more beehives, can you? :D
NO! Still just 6 main colonies! The nucs are resource hives. They are backup insurance. Storage banks... I do not want more hives, but I do like having backup plans.
Jim: I want 6 strong hives. Also jim splits balboa and adrian turning 1 hive into 3 and plans another 4 way split
I have 6 strong hives. I also said I wanted 6 nucs before winter! The nucs are the insurance plan. We still have a lot of season left. If there are queen troubles in August, I'll have queens ready to go. If colonies need a bump before the fall flow, I'll have brood to drop in from the nucs. The nucs are NOT meant to build into full hives. They are storage banks. They may not all even make it to winter. Some may be combined or re-absorbed into big hives. I got this.
@@vinofarm I see, well lets hope so and best of luck!
If you lost a lot of hives the last year, stick to the concept.
All my hives make cups. real swarm cells/cups will be on the bottoms. Supercedures are usually in the middle.
I've never seen a row of 7 supersedure cups! I think the giant frames made them adjust where the swarm cells went.
Agreed. That is not a very densely populated hive to indicate any swarming will happen. Those look like supersedure as well in my mind. I had 8 cells in one of my hives, and then the same hive made 6 emergency cells a couple of weeks later.
I would also not have put back the supers since they will not touch those after you split.
You said there were eggs the next time you went in after finding the cups if she was getting ready to swarm there wouldn’t be eggs. If there was a break in resources coming in, she could have stopped laying and the workers thought she was failing. I’ve also seen that bees seem to always want to make their own queens rather than keeping the introduced queen. Who knows, bees being bees. Thanks for the video really enjoy them!
@@lailaapiary This internet stranger ready my mind. That hive does not have a large enough population to swarm. Those are supecedure cells, that queen is suspect.
Jim, I certainly hope that your raid problems are a thing of the past now. All the effort you put into the videos is really, REALLY appreciated. Thank you.
Yes! It was a dead drive. Luckily, with RAID 5, my 4-disk RAID was pumping along with the three remaining drives. I could not tell what was actually wrong because I could SEE the RAID on the desktop and open files, but the RAID software was telling me all drives were "failed" and kept crashing my Mac. Tech support was able to ID the bad drive and after replacing it, the RAID rebuilt and I'm back where I left off. No data lost... just three days of time and frustration. RAID 5 is a lifesaver.
@@vinofarm Great stuff. I have a RAID 1 (mirror image) of my Windows system and have twice been saved from drives which die due to power issues. Here in South Africa we frequently have power load-shedding. All this due to corruption. 😒
What wrong with the queen where they superseding her? She laying weird
I'm so in love with this bee yard. Please take care of yourself!
I'm so attached to the Balboa line 😅 I love them
Seriously same!
They are my babies haha
I tryed this with a simular hive 2 years ago and i lost 3 hives due to winter. Here in Canada its a short season splits must be done way before now to grow enough for winter my 2 cents worth.
There is no rule that I can't re-combine them back into the full hives. We have two more months of solid beekeeping weather before I need to make decisions. I'm not planning to make full hives out of the nucs. They are always going to be nucs... or be re-combined. They are storage banks.
A few observations.
Does not appear to be a large number of bees in that hive. This time of year they should be boiling out of the hive as soon as you pull the cover off.
Disadvantage of that 'deep' style of hive is you just crippled it by pulling that many frames of eggs/brood and resources. One frame of eggs from that style of hive is 1/8 of their resources versus a traditional hive would be 1/16 to 1/20th, and you just pulled, what, three frames?
Are you able to recombine these hive bodies come fall if you have weak hives that aren't expected to make it through winter? AKA a newspaper recombine.
Swarm cells are usually at the bottom of the frame, not in the center. Cells toward the center usually mean an emergency or supercedure.
Do you have an extractor big enough to handle those frames if/when they get honey bound?
Too much bee space on the inner cover of your resource nuc. Unless your goal is to harvest wax, they are likely to continuously build comb between the top of the frames and the bottom of the cover. I suppose it's good for adding patties and sugar, but a dedicated spacer would help when you arent feeding them resources.
How do you treat this style of hive for mites with anything other than OA vapor? Traditional application of MAQS is placing pads between two 10 frame hive bodies and Apivar places two strips in each 10-frame hive body.
Good job with painting your resources hives different colors on each side. From my research, it helps prevent bees from drifting, and particularly helps a virgin queen find her way home after going out to get laid.
Please don't remove the milkweek. It's a great resource for monarch butterflies!
Thanks a ton for not selling out and pushing ads and products. It's refreshing to watch videos where it's just a guy working his bees without being blasted by a skillshare ad.
DOGSPEED!
Well, you've definitely hit all the points everyone else seems to be hitting. Allow me to respond...
1. This hive was pretty packed with bees. It was the largest population hive in the bee yard. I had been watching it for weeks and this was the day I went in to plan the split. The goal was to get another queen out of it. Not to split it into another full sized hive. I wanted to propagate the most productive, fastest building queen I've ever seen. This was that hive. The hive did not seem "Boiling" because I pulled off the honey supers first and also this was the middle of the day on a near 100º day. A lot of foragers were out.
2. Again, the goal here was to remove the queen and get the remaining colony to make queen cells to replace her. The main colony had the population and resources to efficiently build a replacement. The original queen was off to a resource (holding) nuc with a couple frames of her own brood. The plan is for her to spend her time in there continuing to lay while the main hive makes a new queen. If the main hive fails, I just put her back in there. No big whoop. It was a try. I am not trying to build more full sized hives. IF the main hive makes a successful new replacement, I will then have the original queen as a backup. She might go into one of my other, less productive hives before the fall. Or she may just stay as a backup and go through winter in the nuc. Either way, I am left with options. As for the second split, same deal. The bees made queen cells on two frames. If that second frame of queen cells is successful and makes a third queen, I have ONE MORE in the bank. Those little nucs build pretty fast. By the time the fall flow hits, I can probably even super them. Again, those are like free queens and now I potentially have mini colonies raising brood and drawing out frames for me while the large colonies maintain themselves and get ready for the fall flow in September. Then there will be combining and getting ready for winter. The double nucs will probably have pretty good chance of survival over winter and whoever makes it can help replace winter losses or build up weaker hives in spring. The goal is to have 6 main colonies and 4-6 nucs always there as backup. That's it. I really don't want to get much bigger.
3. Yes, of course. The nucs are resource nucs. They will be used to replace bad/failed/lost queens and/or to pump up weaker hives with frames of brood or drawn comb. They are storage banks. They can always be combined with each other or full sized hives if needed.
4. Yes, Swarm cells are USUALLY at the bottom of frames, but that may be because that's where there's USUALLY space to build them in a hive. Supercedure cells are USUALLY built around an existing/chosen egg/larva. They don't build empty supercedure cups and wait for the queen to lay into them. And even if they did occasionally do that, they don't build 7 of them in a row across a frame. Have you ever seen 7 supercedure cells on one frame? How about 7 swarm cells? Let's think about the situation: This was the largest colony in the bee yard. This queen filled this colony with more brood than I've ever seen faster than I've ever seen. The population was way up and the flow was on. Out of all the hives, this one happened to be bringing in nectar faster than the others and they were definitely dropping it into the brood box. I wouldn't say she got honeybound, but there was definitely not as neat of a brood/honey divide as in all the other hives. They did have supers on but they weren't packing them like the other hives were. A lot of the honey was going into the lower brood area. So, the TIMING was exactly right for a swarm. When I did not see as many eggs as I had been seeing, I figured they may have been prepping her to swarm. Then I saw the cups, which looked an awful lot like swarm prep because supercedure made no sense with this rock star queen. If she was starting to "run out" of space with all the nectar coming in fast, they may have just started to get ready to swarm. Also, these frames are different than anything I've used before. The bees are treating them different than I've ever seen before. Brood patterns look different. Drone comb is all in a stripe across the gap between the foundations. Everything is a little different. But think about where bees make swarm cells in a double deep... they'd be on the bottom edge of the upper deep's frames... right in the center of the brood nest. (Not on the BOTTOM of the BOTTOM deep.) Look at these frames... they are almost the same surface area of a double deep cavity. Look where they built those cups... right in the center of the frame, which is right in the center of the brood nest. They were in the same relative location as if they were putting them on the bottoms of the upper deep in a double deep. I really believe these were swarm cups.
5. No, they don't fit in an extractor. So far that has not been an issue. If I have to, I can always just scrape off honey and comb and put them back in or spread filled frames around the bee yard to hives that need them. Or just pull them out and replace them with drawn comb. An extractor would be the simplest solution, but it's not a problem yet and there are other solutions.
6. The inner covers are reversible. One side is 3/8 and one side is 3/4 for feeding patties or sugar. The 3/8 side is not a problem. The tiny bit of comb in that gap does not bother me or the bees.
7. I will never use MAQS/formic. Have not had good luck with it and the temp window never works for me. I plan to use OA right into the front entrance. Apivar can be hung down between frames with a little wire. These are the equivalent of about 13 deep frames. I'll do the math and make it work if needed.
8. I love milkweed and so do the bees. I never remove it and always mow around it if I ever see it in the field.
Thanks for the kind words and non-confrontational disagreements.
Doesn't look like swarm cells to me for several reasons. The cells are in the middle of the frames, not bottom. The queen is well-fed and big. Possibly, future supercedure cells or just normal cups which bees build a lot just in case.
They don’t pre-build 7 supercedure cells in a row, though.
Hope you recover soon!
I enjoyed seeing how the frames have ports the bees can travel through if they choose to as that will enable them to move throughout winter to obtain resources within the hive.
They have plugged a lot of the gaps in the frames that I left for them. Some have left little passage tunnels, but most are caked with comb corner to corner.
@@vinofarm It's amusing to be inspecting a comb only to see a honey bee perform a disappearing act and go through a tunnel within the comb.
Even the most industrious of woodland creatures can make you laugh.
Your milkweed looks so beautiful. We had our first monarch visit our yard yesterday. Glad your feeling better.
We have more milkweed than I've ever seen, but unfortunately, fewer Monarchs than normal. I've only seen three this year!
They aren't swarm cells in the middle of the frame. They would be supercedure cells.
Supercedure cells are usually built around an existing egg. And they don't build 7 in a row on one frame. Swarm cells are built first (empty) and the queen lays eggs into them. 7 swarm cells on one frame is not uncommon. Also, in a double deep brood box (which is similar to this sized cavity) the swarm cells will be on the bottom of the frames of the top box, placing them in the center of the brood nest. Not on the very bottom of frames of a double deep. If you look where these cells are, they are roughly in the center of the brood nest, right where they would be if this were a double deep and the cells were on the bottom of the upper frames. I believe these were swarm prep.
Right not even close to swarming .. But hes got feeling again lmbo
@@hootervillehoneybees8664 Bees do not pre-build 7 empty supercedure cups in the middle of a frame. It does not happen. But please keep leaving awesome comments on my videos.
@@vinofarm ... Supersedure cells are always build on purpose. They are build as Queen cells, the Queen gets forced to lay eggs in them and they are nursed like mad. If the new Queen emerges, both Queens live together until the new proved her capability, than the old Queen get killed.
@@alx252 (serious question) Please point me to an article explaining how bees pre-build up to 7 EMPTY supercedure cups on a single frame and wait for the queen to lay into them. I can not find one. You are describing swarm cups.
You are doing much leave the queen in the hove split with eggs and bees you are going to have to much going on and confuse your self and end up in the same boat as last year with them dying off because they are week
6 colonies. All doing better than most any colony I've ever had. Then I have 5 resource banks. Some of those will do OK, some wont. The weak ones will be re-combined. No big deal. I'm focused on the main colonies.
Second year bee keeping, you have been an inspiration!
Sounds like they need space to build you are splitting hives like crazy just destroy the cells
Sounds like you keep bees differently than I do.
Pine queen need replacing I see the laying pattern is not even so needs replacing because she may fail toward the fall
Laying pattern on one frame does not tell the story. These brood boxes are the equivalent of 13 deep frames. There are plenty of areas in there where the pattern looks all nice and pretty. She definitely slowed down laying, which is normal in the heat of summer OR when preparing to swarm. I'm going to let this play out and will let you all know what happens.
You’re splitting these hives a bit too much in my mind, I believe those cells you saw weren’t swarm cells, it’s just wasn’t a heavily populated hive for a swarm. Those were supercedure cells
But bees don’t pre-build 7 empty supercedure cups in a row on a single frame. Swarm cells can be built anywhere there is space to build them and they ARE almost always pre-built. This was the largest colony in the bee yard. The timing suggested the queen was slowing down like they do when they’re prepping to swarm.
Take care of yourself, my man! Videos and bees are important, but as important as your health. I'm glad you're feeling better and that the Bee Barns are helping, your content always brings me joy with out fail, but also know that we as viewers care about you as a person, and not just a content creator. Lots of love for you, the family, and the bees!!
Here we go again the drama queen
Hi Jim, thank you for the video. Is Vino B&B ready to open yet :) - I'm sure you'd have a ton of people that would love to come to visit and learn.
Not sure why you keep asking... There's no B&B planned, man!
@@vinofarm I was joking Jim - I know there was no plan for a B&B - Glad to hear you're better and a few people I know have had back issue including myself. Getting old sucks but I can't just sit there, I have to start cutting back on things I do around the house and take my time and not try and knock everything out all at one time. I was told just today I needed to go for physical therapy myself but I am dreading it.
It will be interesting to see how everything turns out for you and your new set up. I've always found that limiting the space the bees have causes them to try and expand more. In fact they sometimes become demoralized when adding too much room or by adding too much space splitting up the brood chamber. I hope it all works out. Thanks for the videos.
My brain hurts
Weight training advised for those honey frames😂👍
Several videos ago you mentioned you only needed 6 hives for your area so I was wondering what your plans were for all the splits?
Insurance. I don't want any more than this. The splits might not all be successful and they might not all build up and they may not all make it through winter. Just having those resources right there in the bee yard is great backup if anything happens to a big hive. The splits are also great swarm control.
And, if he has to many Dinky Split Colonies later in the Bee Season, he can always join more than one together, using Newspaper... And the Best Queen of course. (Choosing a Queen over another, when you raised great ones in the first place !
That's a hard decision... 😏
Loved the video, as always! Glad you are feeling better!
Splits pull back the colony's population. Hard spliting in the summer is not the same as splitting hard earlier in the season, the colonies will never be as strong as it could have been going into winter; smaller colonies will have higher winter losses than larger population. There's a cut off date for splits in the north; making the bees raise a queen (additional 4 to 5 week set back) with a small population really is asking a lot, also I feel small colony's raise poor queens. Late splits can work well if using mated queens and heavy feeding because not so much of a bloodless period, queen is laying in three days after the split compared to weeks with walk aways. I'd be careful splitting hard and having poor quality queens trying to winter in the north. May is more forgiving than late June.
There was nothing to split in May. July 1 is my cutoff date for splits. I'm not splitting to grow! I'm splitting to control swarms, create brood breaks and bank resources and queens. The nucs are not for sale or for building into larger hives, they are only for resources if I need them later. The main hives will bounce back fine. I don't know about you, but we have our largest flow in September. They have two months to build back up. I now have nucs working to bring in resources, build brood, etc. If the main hives need a boost right before the flow, I can drop frames of nuc brood in them. If I lose a queen or have an underperformer, I can take one of the nuc queens to replace them. My goals are to have 6 big strong colonies ready for winter. The nucs are backup. They will be combined if they are weak or re-absorbed into the full size hives if needed. I only care about the six main colonies, but I wanted backups and I also watched the colonies since I installed them and knew which one was the top performer and the one I really wanted to propagate. If I have a weakling later, I can drop a pine queen in instead of going into winter with a weak hive. I've thought this stuff through! I have a plan. (It might be different than your plan, but it is a plan!)
@@vinofarm Next year you would have May splits, colonies split hard late in the season don't split as early next season. First year colonies and new queens are less likely to swarm; they do however supercede a poor queen, this might be what you witnessed in the video. In our zone, zone 5, the bees supercede their queen just as the flow is coming to an end in early July. I have a full-time job and sideline 300 colonies so I can't micromanage them all. My approach I split in May to control swarming leaving 4 to 5 frames of brood, harvest the surplus brood just a few weeks before the flow begins. The main flow is over in July, if they haven't swarmed by July I take 2 full frames of brood from the really strong, careful not to take more than 2 as this appears to be the right amount leaving strong colonies for winter. The brood makes nucs with new mated queens. These nucs are for colony losses which replace my summer and winter losses. If some production colonies swarm after the May splits or supercede their queens so be it, at least I have a new queen in those colonies. The 40 to 50 summer nucs I make are easier to care for compared to inspecting 300 production hives mid summer in a dearth when robbing is at its worst. I can grantee when I pop the lid I will find hives that have or in the middle of swarming or might just be superceding a queen, its a mess better left to the bees to figure out, they know what they are doing. If a swarmed or superceded hive fails to replace a queen by fall I just shake it out and put a new nuc in its place for winter. I let the bees have the fall flow, it might be 4 frames of goldenrod form each colony but the bees need ample time to cure syrup avoiding winter moisture issues, perfect time to kill those mites also. The bees store a lot of pollen in the fall, I like to see it in the brood nest area not in my honey comb, which spends the winter in the shed meaning supers come off early. I don't need honey as I offer pollination services, I want big strong healthy colonies come spring.
Hey sorry to read about your back Jim. Glad you’re on the mend, I know what a big time drag that can be. Curious how you’re doing with the wildflowers this year...what’s doing well and what’s not.
We’re having a crazy amount of rain so everything is doing as well as it could. Goldenrod looks lush. Milkweed is pumping. My field of clover is spotty, but I think that’s my soil and not the rain. I planted hairy vetch this year and that’s growing like crazy. Should have field of purple flowers in a few weeks when our dearth usually hits. I think it’s going to be a gigantic fall flow.
Bases for queen cells may be a product of feeder bees (feebees :-D) they have to feed but they cant because there is not enough brood to employ them. So they put royal jelly into these bases, which can serve for swarming later, but also as a stock with jelly for later purposes. I think. Maybe wrong, maybe not. I study them and their behave for only two months.
Does your wife know you have fallen in love with the Balboa line. I told my wife about my fixation with my Queen Amidala and her daughters 🤣
I estimate those frames to be 21 3/8" is that near correct❓👍👎
I sympathise with your back problem❗❗
Hi, those are queen cups. Usually if there’s an egg in them it’s a supersedure cell or cells. Swarm cells are usually at the bottom of the frames hanging, and when the colony is over populated.
Have you ever seen 7 pre-built, empty supercedure cells on one frame before? I haven't. These are not "normal" frames. The bees are using them differently than regular Langstroth frames. I'm pretty certain this was early swarm prep.
@@vinofarm yes lots of times they will make lots of queen cups on one frame. I have noticed even in my strongest colonies they are always present. I usually don’t see swarms out of my double deeps until the are erupting with bees. Sometimes lack of food will cause queen to have a bad laying pattern so I will provide 1:1 syrup and a good pollen patty and they usually will kick the queen into gear.
@@triggersoutdoors7084 I hear you and I have seen empty queen cups on frames before. However, when they’re all in a row like that, in my experience, it’s been for swarm prep. After I made this video I wanted to double check myself so I did a lot of searching and most articles I found described supersedure CELLS as being created around existing eggs/larvae. On the other hand, “swarm cups” are almost always pre-made and become “Swarm cells” after the queen lays into them. There are no google results for “supersedure cups”. They just don’t build seven cups first and wait for the queen to lay into them and THEN supersede. I would happily read articles about that phenomenon, but I could not find any.
Love it, but all this house moving has got me confused. I just hope all goes according to plan 😎
Dude are you and your bees ok, I was really looking forward for this season new brood boxes to see how they performed
Good luck
Adrian the first is a descendent of Balboa right? What generation is she again? How many generations have the balboa line had now???
looks like supercedure prep to me.
Curious why you think that. Have you ever seen bees prep 7 empty supercedure cups on one frame?
Those cups look like the beginning of supercedure cells. You're right that it seems weird. The hive doesn't seem bursting with bees, so why would they want to swarm? In any case, good call on moving her. Always something to see in your videos. 💕 #teambalboa
Except supercedure cells are usually built up around chosen eggs/larvae. Swarm cups are made first for the queen to lay into. Also, I have never heard of bees pre-building 7 supercedure cells on one frame. Usually you see one big chosen cell that they put their energy into.
It looked like you had a troubled brood pattern on the Pine Hive and that the bees were working towards superseding the queen. In the initial split update, it looks like the poor brood pattern continued. Have you thought about requeeing the nuc? I'm not sure if pollen would be enough to fix the issue considering it was apparent on the initial pine inspection.
I'm gonna let it play out for a few days. I'll have updates when I go back in there.
May I ask what the dimensions are of your hive stands and what you used. Thank you
those big screens must also help when it comes to shaking the bees in. able to put them in and shake so many get in there and less get out.
Can someone explain to me whats the difference between swarm cups and queen cups?
I'm glad you're getting better. I was really worried.
Just can't get over how funny looking those hives are😄😂Looks like something from Star wars. Glad things are going well for you!!
I like them :)
Cue in Star Wars theme song. .
These aren't the hives you're looking for....
@@vinofarm 😄😂
I enjoy watching your videos. I like the way you explain how and why you do everything. Thank you for sharing your videos. Your hives are beautiful.
I appreciate that!
Buckshot brood. Queens gotta go my friend
The bee yard is growing again! Great!
Where did he buy buckfast queen from?
Thank you for such great details
Hey Jim, you sure have some interesting definitions for your hives and splitting approach to your hives, lol, but if it works for you, more power to you.
Maybe its time for you to learn to come up with queens the right way, like queen rearing...., this way you have queens readily if you need them and might be able to help other backyard beekeepers in your area. If you like me, in the northern states, beekeeping for us is just couple months if we lucky, so one can't afford to wait 30days from a split to see if the queen is doing a good job, hence produce your queens along side with your beekeeping.
I hope your health is back to normal and have fun with your bees.
Dan
I don't want ANY more bees than I have right now. If these splits fail, I will just re-combine and go back to the main full-size hives. The splits that work are just insurance. I just have different goals than you do.
@@vinofarm Understood, my goals are no different than yours or any other keeper, just makes things smoother during the season and one can recombine to the desired number in the fall and be done with it; I just think that having queens in your back pocket would make your life more predictable when it comes to splits; in beekeeping there is no between, one is forced to split for swarm management, that weakens your production hives but gives you the opportunity to expend or sell nucs, hence less honey; if one wants honey production, it takes very strong hives to accomplish that, running the risk of swarming, so there is no medium in this business, may it be as a hobby or professional. I do too, have a lot of 3-4 frame nucs into winter as a backup in case any of the main hives queens dies. Be safe beekeeping.
Awesome to see! It will be interesting to see how they do through winter.
Not hate at all I absolutely love your channel but didn’t you say this year your not trying to have a ton of have and that your just trying to focus on the ones you have and keep them healthy ? Because I feel like you are doing a lot of splits at this rate your going to be back where you were last year buried in hives .
He said "The nucs are insurance. They are backup in case anything happens to the big hives".
@@cathyhanley8658 I get that but I’ve rarely seen him pull resources from one of those hives for one of the bigger hives and typically I’ve also seen from years of watching him that usually the nucleus grow into big amazing hives . Sometimes a couple die from the winter . But typically a lot of the hives survive so that answers my question but at the same time it doesn’t .
@@jilliandeleon6354 The goal from back in April was 6 hives and 6 nucs going into winter. The nucs will not all survive winter, but the ones that do will help bulk up the main hives early next spring. Then I'll make more nucs. If everyone survives, I'll be giving away bees. I really only want 6 main colonies to worry about. The nucs are like little resource holding banks. If they survive, they survive.
Right? Mine all died last year and I didn't want to get another nuc and have them die, because of another drought/ dearth year they were predicting. ( I live a couple hours north of Vino Farm) I'm kicking myself now, we have had plenty of rain so far. Augh. I will have to live vicariously through Jim.
@@vinofarm ahhh I see thank you for answering my question!
The thermal behavior of the hive is like of your house. The warm air goes up and if the attic is not insulated it leaves the house. The insulation of the beehive's top is more important then insulation of the walls. I suggest to make sure that this is true before the winter :-). One can learn from Rick Willams on Facebook. He has weeks of -25C during winter with no upper ventilation. About deep frames: Lazutin American way:-) or Polish Ul Warszawski Zwykly or Ul Warszawski Poszerzony or oversized Dadant. About the split: OTS without notching, it works for me, too.
There will be plenty of insulation for winter. Do not worry about that. Yes, this was exactly OTS without notching.
Yes, sir my friend it seems like your apiary is starting to grow once again. I know you had planned to keep the number of hives down but isn't it funny how the bees decide things for us. I'm not sure about your area but we have had so much rain here that we have not had much of a nectar flow at all. Thanks for sharing.
wants going on with the you and the bees?
Great video! Thanks for sharing
I hope that you're not gonna let us hooked on for too long. What happens next ??? I can't wait to see. I'm happy to see you back on track. Tons of work ahead : new hives + honey harvesting + editing videos + all the rest that you don't show :o)
If you had the space, couldn't you take two queen cells and some resources/bees and make even more splits?
Yes, but I would also need the desire to have more bees.
Just an observation not a criticism I like to see someone thinking outside of the box, because you’re brood frame s are so big I suspect you’re Queens are going to be laidout after just 1 season so your bees are go to supersede in every hive because you’re Queen , the bees will think the Queen cannot keep up,
The brood boxes are the equivalent comb surface area of about 13 standard deep frames. Are you saying that people with double deep hives (16 or 20 brood frames) also face that problem? Because I’ve never heard of this.
Love ❤️ from India.
This dude is crazy. How does he keep up with all this stuff in his head. Lol good luck guy. It's a little late to be splitting
This video was recorded in June and July. Splits all worked just fine!
No vid in 3 weeks hope all is good
When you are making splits you want to focus on giving capped brood not open brood. The open brood is a lot of work that you should make the split do. Instead of giving a Nuc open brood shake the frame because that is the one with nurse bees.
I was going for the frames with the best mix of resources. My XL frames are pretty varied with what the bees are putting in them. Some are solid brood, some are a good mix of capped honey, pollen, etc. The solid brood frames have almost nothing else on them. I hear you, but these are not "normal" frames.
@@vinofarm I I thought this what you might say and it makes sense. Hope you back continues to improve. Good luck this summer!
no shade but I fell asleep in the middle of the video and now I'm watching it for a second time to find out what happened. lovey video, oddly soothing.
I fall asleep editing all the time. Rewatching hours of beekeeping is pretty tedious. Thanks for making it through.
So I’m new and looking to learn and start bee keeping next March in PA. The question I have is if I just want 2 hives. How do I just stay there. I saw you going for quality over quantity but now you have 4 splits. I’m s it possible to just have two hives and stay at two hives?
Hello. I ve found your channel today and i really admire your journey with your bees.
Im interested to become a beekeeper myself, like my late father was.
As of late im reading alot about this topic. And i stumbled over the method of Dee and Ed Lusby. According to them modern breeded Apis Mellifera are too big and thats why the mite also goes into the worker cells not into the drone cells only like it is with the original host Apis Cerana which is smaller.
They made their bees build smaller worker cells (5.1-4.9 mm instead of 5.5 mm). The mite stopped infecting worker cells, because the breeding time of the smaller bees is shorter, not enough time for the mite which exclusively infects drones instead then.
Now im curious if you already heared about this and if so, what your opinion is on this.
Best regards.
Love watching you do your bee-thang! But how are all your new hives doing? Thanks Vino!! Smiles and blessings...
Hope you feel all better soon. Don’t get over extended with hives. I worry that you’ll get overwhelmed with so many hives.
I'm curious if you think the honey flow will end early this year, or how it would compare to how it should be?
Thanks. And good luck to you this year.
I thought you probably had built them yourself. I'm a pretty good carpenter so I think I'll give it a shot. By the way you do a good job in explaining what your doing. You would make a good AG teacher.
how do you know how many honey supers to have and do you just add 1 after one gets filled up or could you just have 3 to start
also what food do you use
I think it was a good decision to split the hive. It looked so weak, after 2 month. I think the Queen isn't that good. Now they have the chance to rear a better Queen an gain at least a little bit of population till winter. If you have 2 more month, they can rear 2, maybe 3 complete brood cycles and you have some bees to overwinter. In you new hives, even small populations can survive.
Always appreciate your updates, looks like a banner year for the Vino Farm apiary! Good thing you have your redesigned hives - you'd never be able to do even the basic beekeeping chores with the old cinderblock covered langstroths.
Sorry to hear of your back issues - glad you are feeling better but take care of yourself! Really enjoy, and miss, your bee keeping updates.
Hey brother. I just thought of a great idea to help your channel. I was thinking if you had a camera watch over your bee hives you could share the live feed every day and get more subscribers. Just an idea. I love the new bee hives. 100 percent the coolest invention I seen yet you should call them the vino bee barns.
New Bees definitely seemed very relaxed and clam I always really liked the Russian videos then background sound was great I bet you don't miss getting stung every time I do wasp removals on the side damn eastern yellow jackets are always so unrelentless I usually take 10+ stings when I remove those
I've been watching a learning for a while, however I am puzzled by shaking bees off the frame, does this pose a risk of harming developing bees or dislodged eggs?
Glad you are doing ok, I understand all that pain in the back as my mom has been recovering from hers.
Looks like your apiary is growing in leaps and bounds again…. Go balboa
Sorry, I did not get it, why Will You make a split?
To propagate the most productive queen in the bee yard. Make a few copies of her... and the splits will be resource banks in case anything happens to the main hives.
Hayley says 🙋♀️
Interesting…..
Those hive are gorgeous! You have a woodworking workshop where you do this kind of thing?
See one of his earlier Videos, there you will see the whole story.... Started from a near wipeout of his Apiary (Years of Work... Gone ! 😱)
He ended up only having x1 Hive that survived, and he got going on these New Hives, using his old 'favourite survivor Hive.'
Hope this helps. 😏
🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝
Yes. I've made a few videos about my barn. It's not finished inside yet, but I did use it as a workshop this spring to build all these hives and frames.
Any reason you didn't feed the split syrup and patties from the start?
The frames were covered with nectar. Syrup may have made them honeybound. I thought they had plenty of pollen/bee bread, but after a week, it was pretty empty. They went right after the pollen patties. Probably could have added one at the start.
New to bee keeping, is there a difference between larva and brood? My understanding was brood is capped larva. But, when you inspected the Pine hive without a queen there was brood. You didn't mention noticing any larva. Inspecting my hive I thought if I noticed brood there was a queen. I always looked for brood not larva. Quarantining a queen, I must find larva not just brood. Is this correct. I hope you can help my understanding.
I’d call larvae, eggs, and capped cells all “brood” collectively. Brood is bee babies in all stages of development. But a worker bee takes 21 days from egg stage all the way to emerge from a cell. So a queen could lay an egg and then die or swarm and there would still be “brood” in the hive for 21 more days until it all emerged. When inspecting a hive, you know there was a queen in that hive within the last three days if you see EGGS because they take three days before the larvae emerge. If you only see Capped brood and no larvae, you know something may have happened to the queen more than a week ago because cells are capped around day 9. Study the “bee development diagram.”
@@vinofarm Thank you, great information especially with bee development diagram.
Stay healthy. Do PT and aren’t you glad you made these no lift hives
I wonder if the Pine hive was prepping for supercedure when you found the queen cups based on the minimal eggs you found at that time and the spotty laying pattern when you moved her to the nuc.
I am interested to see if: the pine queen is replaced in her new nuc and if you notice swarm cells out of their traditional bottom of frame locations with your extra large frames.
Also wonder that if it was a supercedure how you’ll feel about adding her genetics to the other colonies you’ve started.
Love the content. Hope you feel better.
Queens will be put on a diet and slow down or stop laying before a swarm. If they were planning to supersede her, I doubt they would make that many cups.
Definitely tracking the “get the queen in flying shape” activity and less laying just before a swarm. I usually see this after there are larvae hatched in the queen cups turned cells but before they have capped them but not sure what timing others see for this activity.
@@ericduncan3028 Also, supercedure cells are almost always formed around a chosen egg/larvae. Swarm cups are made first and the queen lays into them when they're ready to go. These were all empty.
@@vinofarm you have a lot of patience to hop around the comments to write these responses with a tutorial tone…Kudos for that. I was under the impression that supercedure and swarm were developed a similar way (cup built then laid) and that emergency cells were the one of the 3 types that was built from existing laid worker cells for obvious reasons. That said, I am always open to hear or learn other beekeeper’s takes on the process.
Regardless of the reasoning, you ended up with plenty of queen cells to use.
I am interested to watch as you learn this new hive configuration and how queen pheromone plays out. If you’ll see the same or different queen longevity based on frame size and in turn colony density/size during the build up months.
Good luck and thanks for the conversation.
@@ericduncan3028 Sure thing. I usually love hanging out in the comments on upload day. The bees are definitely using these frames differently than standard langstroth frames. I'm keeping track of all the little new behaviors I'm seeing and will be making a video at the end of the season sharing what I've learned. Regarding the supersedure vs swarm debate, in the end it doesn't matter. I wanted to split them anyway to try to get another queen from this great queen. If those were supersedure cells, the bees got what they wanted... I took the queen away and they made a new queen! I just saved them the hassle of having to kill her. If they were planning to swarm, I helped them along. Win-win.
What is that blooming in your bee yard?
Milkweed!
Haven't been this early on forever!! Yay!!! 🤓🤓👍👍
Would you ever let a swarm simply "escape"? Assuming that all of your bee barns and nucs are occupied by healthy hives, and that you don't want to grow your operation any further by adding additional bee barns and nucs as required for splits, it seems that at some point a hive would just naturally grow big enough to launch a swarm. It seems that beekeepers do a lot to prevent swarms. What happens when you have no room or desire to do a split?
This may happen next year. I am not swarm-phobic. You get a brand new queen when they swarm. It's not necessarily a bad thing, unless it happens in the fall and they don't have time to re-build the colony.
@@vinofarm
Thanks for the reply. I love your videos, and look forward to each one. Love your bee barns too, not just because of the design and how they are great for the bees, but also they look great too. I'm looking to see how they do over the winter.
Love the videos, keep up the good work. You’re inspiring people!
Why nucs and not barns with spacers to reduce the space? Will the bees in nucs move to barns before winter?
The nucs are resource banks. They will not become full hives.
@@vinofarm Sorry, what is a “resource bank”? If there is a queen in the nuc, and the hive she came from creates a new queen, won’t the queen in the nuc be sent to a new hive eventually?
itching to see some follow up information about how your new hives are working out for you! Hope all is well. Cheers
I’m filming everything. Posting regularly on Instagram/Vinofarm but I’ve been busy and not had time to edit footage. All is pretty much perfect! All queenright and not enough mites to need to treat. Fall is looking good. I’ll get the stories up when I get time.
@@vinofarm That is great to hear! Knowing things are going well is good enough to hold me through. Thank you and wishing you continued success!
Love listening to this, I would do my own but wife hates bees
Hey there again from Wyoming!!
Sorry to hear about your back; I can truly sympathize, as I've been dealing with 3 herniations in my lumbar and 3 compressions in my neck since the 80's! Still no health insurance, so I can't get anything 'fixed', but if you DO have good health insurance check out the LA Spinal Clinics Pro Disc replacement for your lumbar injury and Pro Disc 2 if you end up with neck injuries down the line: you're UP the next day and fully back to work in 6 weeks or less! Success rate for both Mobility and Pain Reduction/Relief is in the 90%+ range.
Great Video as usual, but I MUST tell you that at the end when you gave us the 'Run Down' of which queen/queen cell had went where, when, and how, by the end of it I felt as if I had just watched Abbot and Costello's "Whose on First" routine! The camera POV whipping around, you pointing, the rapid fire oratory; all combined, I was waiting to find out whose pitching and whose catching and on which day!
I love what your trying to do with the QC's, but I keep wondering why you don't just transplant the queen cells themselves onto some prepped frames, rather than moving multiple QC's, since the first emerging Queen will seek out and kill the remaining viable competitor queens? Seems like a waste of great potential! (and reward)
Mind you though, I'm STILL in 'theory land', whereas you are actually keeping multiple colonies of hard working girls, which is why I hope you'll have the time to explain the dichotomy in transfer paradigms!
Remember to THINK BEFORE you move, then move SLOWLY......we get to feeling better and then put ourselves back on 'Autopilot' which quite often puts us BACK behind the proverbial 8 ball!
Keep Clam as Ivar would say!
Cheers from the Oil Patch in Central WY (97F yesterday and same today, with projected 96F I do believe for tomorrow; this Old Grey Gelding HATES the heat!)
I expect the queen cells to emerge and the queens will deal with things naturally. Survival of the fittest and all... I am not trying to expand the bee yard. I am just banking resources. What matters are my 6 main colonies. If I have 6 strong nucs on the side, I have insurance. If some of those nucs fail, who cares? They are buffers. My goal is to emerge from the winter with 6 strong colonies in the big hives. If the nucs make it, great. If not, I'll make more nucs.
And yes, I'm learning the hard way that I need to take better care of my back moving forward. I'm taking things a lot slower these days. And these new hives have made inspections possible, even with a bad back. I can't imagine trying to keep bees with my old hives with my back in that condition! Good timing on the Bee Barns.
Thanks, buddy.