Loving this series. It's really helpful to the new beekeeper. Thanks again for a your efforts Devan. I can't overstate the benefit of seeing you manage these hives through the whole season.
Thanks Devan! Starting my second season and the colonies are really thriving! Had several long time Beekeepers tell me that managing single brood chambers is only setting myself up for swarming, but I'm with you it can be done and only makes sense that a colony would be much easier to manage correctly. I would say they either probably aren't taking the proper time required or don't have the time. Thanks for all you do to help us new beeks and especially our beloved lil POLLENATORS!
Very informative. This gave me a better understanding of early swarm signs to look for; from just reading it's not always clear. And of course still enjoying watching the scale hives progress. :)
Devan, I really appreciate your style for presenting information hive management strategy. I manage my bees a bit differently and am only a hobbyist with five hives right now. But it's fun to see how different people approach bee keeping. I'm not sure if you right yourself a script or an outline but it's clear you know what you want to say in your videos without rambling. Keep it up!
Sooooo.... you can take that frame out with the developing swarm cell and create another hive, correct? Asking because I have one very strong hive that I would like to make a split with.
Another super useful vid. Just starting. What is the easiest way to find the queen? I'm seeing eggs and larvae no problem. Also doing inspections every Sunday. Would love to find her and mark her. My eye is getting keener every time.
Good question, I don't really have any great tips for picking her out, it sort of just comes with experience I guess. Often there will be a group of bees sort of huddled around her, if they're all calm. So sometimes that can be more noticeable on the frame.
Another great vid Devan! This is my first year and my bees were ready for their second brood box a few days ago! Interesting technique, I'll have to keep it in mind if I start seeing swarm activity! Really appreciate the time you're taking to create interesting and informative content!
Geetings from Northern Alberta. With out a doubt your videos are the best in bee keeping out there. This one is very informative. I have struggled with swarm control in the last couple of years. Keep up the good work. Some of your videos are even better than the ones from the University of Guelph.
Hey thanks, I'll make sure to tell this to Paul next time I see him, lol. I try to leave a lot of the "how-to" to the UofG crew. Honestly I wouldn't do much different than Paul, and he always has a good reason for his advice. I used to live and work in Guelph so my beekeeping career has a lot to do with the University of Guelph, and the beekeepers that have come out of there.
The uog series was excellent and I enjoyed them a lot. It's great when you can get your information from a trusted source. I'm still waiting for the 2018 series from Paul. Thanks for picking up the slack. I had to deal with a problem bear last night that broke into my honey house and caused some damage to some honey supers and brood comb I was storing. He was staying clear of my hives as they are well fenced. I hope you don't have to deal with bears there. Thanks again.
Ya, I deal with bears all the time. Most of my yards are fenced as well. I just moved out a whole bee yard at the end of april because of a bear crashing through the fence there. It's frustrating.
You're in there with bare arms and shaking bees around, being careful but not all that gentle and I'm just amazed that you don't get stung. Why do you think that is? And you seem to squish a few bees when you put the queen excluder and boxes back on. I would think that would really rile them up. Crazy. You have to be some kind of bee whisperer. Do you address this in any of your other videos?
Well, the day I made this video was pretty much perfect weather, so that helps when all the old bees are out foraging. Decent genetics play a part in it. I don't claim to have the most docile bees, but I certainly don't tolerate really defensive ones and I'll requeen them pretty quickly.
When you add a new super, are you adding drawn comb or foundation? Both my hives swarmed last week despite my efforts and adding supers. I managed to catch one and got them in a new hive, but I think because I don't have drawn comb to add it didn't really fix the issues of them not having enough space fast enough to prevent them swarming. Thanks for your videos. You present the information very clearly and I appreciate how well you follow up on your previous videos.
Thanks so much for these videos! If I wanted to create a nuc or new colony out of a queen cell with larvae or an egg (as you've shown in this video), could I take those frames and move them into a nuc box or new hive box?
If you had found that the bees were making a superseded cell would you have kept it knowing that they were trying to replace the queen? Or would you have cut that one out too forcing the queen to stay in the brood? I want to do a single brood / super but I'm unsure if I should let them develop a new queen if they think that it's "time" to do it. Who decides, me or the bees?
This is a good question. If I see that the bees are trying to supersede the old queen then I'll assume that something is wrong with her (they probably know better than me at that point). So the question is would I just allow the supersedure to happen naturally or would I destroy all the queen cells (or virgin queen) and get rid of the old queen and finally replace with a queen that I have raised myself. My preference would be to put in a queen of my own. But that's because I breed my own bees, have access to my own mated queens, and have a keen interest in their genetics. If that's not you, then letting the supersedure happen isn't a bad thing. Just keep an eye on them and make sure the new queen is successful in mating and taking over. Things do go wrong occasionally, even in completely natural behaviours.
Devan, thanks for all your videos. I am using flow hives so I wouldn’t keep stacking supers the way you do, I would just drain and let the bees refill the flow hives. Would you still recommend a single brood chamber method with flow hives? Anything different I should do than what you are doing? Thanks again!
I pretty much only remove old frames very early in the spring. when the bee population is low, and there's no brood or important resources on them you can take them out. If you see frames you want to get rid of in the future, move them to the outside wall of the brood chamber. That will make it easy to remove next spring because the bees likely won't be clustered on it.
Thanks for the videos. It seems like you're not really concerned with the drone cells. But you're also not pulling drones to freeze and kill varroa. It was my understanding that leaving those drones cells to be capped and emerge, is allowing varroa an opportunity to rapidly multiply? Am I incorrect? Why are you not concerned?
Dude, you're probably the best beekeeper on RU-vid. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. That method does look rather labor intensive for more than a few hives...do you keep bees full time or is it a side gig?
Thanks for the compliment. I'm a full time beekeeper. Making a video about it is labour intensive but I can manage hundreds of hives on my own. I have to be a bit more clear I think - Not every colony will be showing swarm cells every time you look at them. I normally take a quick look at 3 frames with brood, if there's no cells, I super them (if required) and move on. If there's cells starting then I do the whole shake down and destroy all cells. I can easily get through 75 hives in a normal day doing this, and It's really standard management in commercial beekeeping. In my opinion, to be a good beekeeper, you have to be looking at your brood frames regularly anyway.
Could you expand a bit about swarming? Does it decimate the hive to have a swarm? What do you do with the queen cells you remove from the hive? Do you harvest royal jelly? - how? Thx
A colony can recover if a swarm leaves early in the year, but you will always lose a lot of honey production. Swarms that go later in our summer are a bigger risk to having the colony not be able to sort itself out and get enough young bees going into the fall. I just throw away the queen cells I pick off, I don't harvest royal jelly.
I had a bear attack & destroy one of my hives 9 days ago. He licked everything clean but there were 2 frames covered in bees still so I put it all back together. I gave them a week and then did an inspection. I had given them a pail of syrup (because eating cures everything in my world). They were storing the nectar and there was one full frame of capped brood and larva - I can never see eggs. Can I assume that the queen lived and will they be able to build back up by the fall? I live about an hour north of North Bay, ON. By the way all my hives are enclosed in an electric fence now because the bear keeps coming back.
Best Beekeeping RU-vid channel :)) about the checkerboard method, what is the deference between checkerboarding with empty frames or drown out frames ?
Thanks. I'm really not very experienced with checkerboarding. I Understand what it is, but I never do it myself. If you're doing it with frames that are just foundation and not drawn out, that's a lot to ask of your colony to get a normally functioning brood chamber going again. I guess if they're on a strong honey flow and making wax like crazy it could work.
Every time you shake your bees off the frames it makes the most amazing sound ... when I establish my first hive I can’t wait to experience it, within the context of managing the hive. Have you ever used narrow frames (1 1/4 inches (32 mm)? The theory being that they allow for the spacing that bees naturally make ... it also allows 11 frames in a 10 frame hive. I saw your previous video, which was one of the most informative I’ve ever seen (managing a 1 brood box). Even in this video, it seems like the frames devoted to brood never goes higher than 8 or so, for the reasons that you’ve discussed in your previous video. Double checking ... in your experience, brood box never completely fills the 10 frames?
I've never tried these narrow frames you speak of. I'm pretty dedicated to the classic Langstroth dimensions. Reverend Langstroth was a revolutionary beekeeper and I think we take for granted how well he understood bees to come up with his standards for equipment. Re: your last question - I have seen brood on all 10 frames, but never 10 full frames of brood, if you know what I mean. Likewise in a double brood chamber. Sure you might see 13 or 14 frames with brood on them, but how covered in brood are they? 40-50% max? So then it's just a matter of how many extra frames of resources do you want to have in your brood chamber.
Thanks for your response... it helps me fully understand how the mathematical equations you shared in your previous video reflect what you observe in your hives. Even when the brood chamber exceeds 10 frames, the total service area of actual brood can still fit within 10 frames. Your discussion of swarm prevention is a perfect 👌 addition to a great series of videos!
Sorry, I need to ask another question. What kind of cage is that you are putting the queen in? It looks easy to use, opening with one hand. The only thing I can find that looks like it is a Hair Roller Cage. What would you recommend? I'm practicing by picking up Drones first. Definitely not ready to try it with the queen.
Ya, It's a hair roller cage. these cages are made by nicot, and they're actually meant for their queen rearing system if you ever want a virgin queen to emerge from her cell directly into the cage. I just plug the one end that is open when you buy them. Actually what I do is buy them from paul kelly after he has done them very carefully, haha.
thanks ... Trouble ahead for me ..... I dont have any extra boxes to build a new hive. This is a lot of work. Maybe not work, but attention to detail. My two hives have got way too many bees running around the outside face of the box. I got no boxes to move them around.
Thank you for another great video and taking the time to show us what we may find in our hives. I'm new to Bkeeping and your info about the fact that the queen was still laying eggs and not being prepared for swarming was a great tip to add for things to note when watching for swarming. Would it also be a good indicator for doing a split. Meaning if she'd stopped laying and was preparing to swarm would doing the split prevent them leaving?
Generally if they're showing strong signs of swarming, it means they're populous enough for splitting. The queen really only stops laying eggs a few days before the swarm leaves. So if you get to a colony with capped swarm cells, no eggs, but still has a huge population and you're able to find that queen in there - I would definitely split the colony apart, really weaken them down, probaly take the old queen away with one of the nucs you made out of it. then requeen the original hive in it's place. Or something like that.
Mr Rawn, keeping a single brood box like this, how often do you have to go through and manage them this way? is it a weekly occurrence? I have issue with swarming using one deep and one medium brood box. my third season with bees.
Ideally, if you're not going to split or wnything, I get into them every 7-10 days to see if they're making any swarm cells (from now until the first week of July). But you don't need to shake them all down every time, this was just a demonstration. I just go in and look at a few frames of brood. If you see cells with eggs or developing larvae, then inspect very carefully (aided by shaking bees off frames) every frame and destroy every queen cell. PLEASE NOTE - this would not change for me if I was managing doubles or any other style of brood chamber. Your bees need to be checked, and swarming needs to be managed for.
Devan Rawn excellent thank you. Never thought about the swarming mentality being genetic and I’m actually “breeding” for that trait by using swarm swarm cell queens
Could you prevent swarming by trapping the queen in the brood chamber between two queen excluders? I've always wondered if this would work but it seems so obvious that there must be some consequence I'm missing that would keep it from being a viable solution.
Ya, it's a complicated subject, but it can work. My cell-builder colonies have a queen confined to the bottom brood chamber with a queen excluder on top and also one between the brood chamber and the bottom board. This is because we try to keep these colonies as populous and resource-full as possible (on the edge of swarming) to raise the best queen cells. Sometimes when the bees are really frustrated and want to swarm for week after week I have seen them sound out a small swarm of workers (obviously no queen because she's trapped), but they end up coming back to the colony within minutes. But that's very rare and I haven't seen my bees do it in a few years. Anyway if that was your only method of swarm prevention in a standard colony, eventually they would raise cells and virgins would emerge and queens might fight or the bees might get fed up and end up killing your old queen. Not recommended.
I have cut the cups and the developing queen cells. Only to have twice the number of cups created within a week. I figured that they want to swarm so I split them. I did make a mistake of allowing 2 queen cells to exist in the new split, I thought that the first queen to emerge would kill the other. Apparently they hatched at nearly the same time, instead of a battle of dominance the newly created split swarmed.
Yikes, this sounds like pretty poor genetics in my opinion. Maybe buy some new queens from a breeder that does some selection against swarming behaviour.
Great content thank you! I just did a check of my hive and found a number of queen cells and cups- some of them with larvae inside, but I put on a new honey box a week or so ago and there’s no bees upstairs. Should I put on another honey box even though they haven’t gone into the first one?
you need to get them up into that box with a frame of brood or leave the excluder off until they begin to work it a bit then add it back on. the bees dont like the excluder
Ya, temporarily moving a frame of brood up can help them go through the excluder. What's the population like? Are they filling the entire brood chamber? WHat did you do when you found a number of cells and cups in there?
I use 2 brood chambers and both are full of bees/brood. And I honestly watched this video and did a very similar treatment (so thank you for the help!); found and caged my queen, shook bees off of frames, and looked for and pinched off all queen cups/cells. But was disappointed that they hadn't moved to the top boxes. I'm going back today to take off the queen excluder and I like the brood frame up top idea as well
nope drones are natural. You can purchase special drone frames then put them in the freezer to kill them then add it back for the bees to clean up. it does help with varroa.
As long as your queen is good and also laying lots of regular worker brood, there's no problem. If there's ONLY drone brood, then you've got a problem.
When you have a few hives(under 10) and you want to expand, could you make a note of a frame that has a queen cell with very young larva and make a nucleus hive out of it? Or would that make the hive swarm? As long as you take it out before the queen cell is born
If you're using swarm cells as your new queens, you're potentially spreading swarmy genetics. Which I try hard not to do. But, just understand why your bees might be making swarm cells. Did you force them into it by not giving them any space during 2 weeks of honey flow? In that case It might not be particularly bad genetics, just natural bee behaviour.
Cesar Mijares That’s exactly what I do. I allow one of my hives to make queen cells each year. A little more than a week ago, one of my strong double deeps had 9 capped queen cells. I made 5 splits and now have hatched virgins in them. One queen has actually returned from her mating flight. I simply moved the entire frame with the queen cell on it into a nuc (didn’t move the original queen), gave them a frame of honey and some other frames to fill the box, and let them go. I then checkerboarded the original hive with frames of foundation. My queen didn’t swarm. I’m not saying that always works or that I know everything, but it works for me. Worst case, I lose honey production in that hive. Best case, I gain 5 new hives. If I can get them through winter, it will be well worth it for me.
No, but most year I use oxalic acid in the late fall just before I wrap using the trickle method of Oxalic acid dissolved in sugar syrup. I'm not a fan on the vapourizing.
Inner cover prevents propolizing of a telescoping outer cover to the upper box, where the overhang would make it impossible to get your hive tool in to leverage for separation. The center hole primarily is for use with a hive-top feeder. An inner cover is commonly omitted when a “migratory” outer cover is used (one with an overhanging piece front and rear, nothing on the sides, like on most nucs).
Good Question. There's still a few dandelions. Apples are mostly done now, but the bees were on them for a good week. Black Cherry trees are in bloom now (not really sure how much nectar the bees get from those flowers), and lots of our honeysuckle bushes have just come into bloom. There's lots more out there if I go look hard enough
Um, no. Our dandelion flow has just ended recently, apples were in bloom during great weather, honeysuckles have just come on in the last couple of days. Black cherries have been blooming, and lots of other wildflowers.
They bring in nectar. Then turn it into honey. It's hard to separate the two when explaining sometimes. And explaining to new beeks it is typically just easier to say honey, and not have to explain it.
I think we all do it to one degree or another lol. There is so much to take in, remember, learn, and make sense of. Haven't been at it long myself, just 3 years. I find everything I can weather It's books, videos, other beeks, it is all info that I need to become a better been myself. And so I can help others learn or craft. Always looking, always learning.
Remember, Devan keeps all his brood in a single box (10 frame deep). His vids on the subject of the method are excellent. Those not using the technique would likely move some brood frames up into a second box, alternating with frames of drawn comb (checkerboarding), to expand the brood nest, or take a split off the hive when early signs of swarming appear. I planned this year to go with the single brood box method, but chickened out when the boxes were packed with capped brood on all frames. I run 8-frame boxes, and all the info I’ve seen on single-box brood management involves 10 framers. Would love to hear from anyone successfully using it with 8-frame gear.
I typically look at 3 frames of brood on a normal inspection. If I see nothing irregular, I close them up and move on. In this case I was demonstrating a full shake down as if I saw evidence of swarm cells right away. I guess I wasn't clear enough. In my opinion, "poor bees" are bees that end up swarming away because of their beekeeper's lack of attention. If management is temporarily a little disruptive to the bees, but it saves them in the long run because I've stopped a swarm or noticed some disease or picked up on a queen issue early, it's worth doing.
Devan Rawn yup. You could also just tip the brood box up to check, so long as you leave your queen cups on the bottoms of the frames. I also just pull the drone frame + 2 in my hives.
