A Simple Method of Making Increase : 25
The entrance of this nucleus box has been stuffed with sappy grass after a nucleus colony containing the old queen has been installed inside. This reduces the return of flying bees to the original site
queen cells, which is necessary for the following procedure.
Making Increase by Splitting
It is important to try to divide your colony in the best way so that each part has enough bees, brood and food to survive. Whether your bees are in a single brood box, double brood or other box combinations, this method should work. However, it is vital that the unit making queen cells is strong with plenty of nurse bees. A weak nucleus can only produce undesirable queens. My method is to find the old queen from the selected colony and put her in a nucleus box with two frames of brood (mostly sealed), two frames of food (pollen and honey) and one frame of drawn comb so that she has plenty of cells to lay in. Move this nucleus box at least five metres away from the original site and stuff its small entrance with long grass. The grass will take a while to be pushed out, so by the time the bees have done this, they will be used to their new position. Alternatively, this box can be moved to another apiary at least three miles away to avoid losing
May 2015 Vol 97 No 5
any flying bees back to the original site.
It is important to leave at least four frames of brood containing plenty of eggs and young larvae in the brood box on the original site, so that the bees left behind can produce a lot of emergency queen cells. Fill in the spaces where you took out frames for the nucleus with frames of drawn comb. Wait for about five days before feeding the nucleus box containing the old queen as this will avoid a situation called ‘silent robbing’. This is where foraging bees go back to the old site and recruit robber bees to steal food from the nucleus and they are not stopped by the guard bees as they all still smell the same.
Quality Queen Cells
In the box on the original site, the tone or buzz from the bees goes up a few decibels and many rush around looking for the queen. The high number of nurse bees of all ages still in this box is vital to produce good quality queen cells. There will be about five to 20 emergency queen cells (described in last month’s article) started from
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very young worker larvae in the old box as soon as the bees realise their queen is missing. Even though there is food in this box, it is important to feed with strong sugar syrup (two to one mixture of sugar to water) as this will encourage the nurse bees to produce an abundance of royal jelly which is the main diet of queen larvae. If there was a honey super on this brood chamber, then remove it, as you do not want to get syrup mixed in with the honey. You could unite it to another colony using the newspaper method. Feeding syrup will also calm the colony down and, with the queen cells developing well, they will be less agitated.
About a week later you can look at the queen cells carefully, making sure that you do not shake the bees off the frames, as this could damage the new queens in the (by now) sealed queen cells. Once these queen cells are sealed you can split this colony again into two evenly matched units, making sure each split has a few queen cells with enough bees and food. If the weather is poor or there
are not enough bees to do this, then forget it! I have seen the result of a four- or five-way split
and it was not a pretty sight. They were all very weak with poor queens and none of them managed to become strong enough to survive the winter.
Using Mini-nucs
Depending on how many queen cells are produced, you may like to save some so that you have a few spare queens as replacements for old ones. There may not be enough bees for full-size nucleus boxes so one or two mini-nucs can be used instead. Spray some workers with water and collect a cupful of these damp bees. Place them in a mini-nuc and leave them shut in for 36 hours. See Clive de Bruyn’s article on page 11 for more details. A ripe (almost ready to emerge) queen cell can be placed inside the mini-nuc. Ripe queen cells can be detected as the bees thin the end in readiness for the queen to bite her way out using her strong mandibles, like a can opener. These cells can be carefully cut out with a sharp knife and placed into the mini-nucs already primed with bees. A hollow is made with your thumb in the drawn comb and the queen cell is held in place with a match or cocktail stick. This
A queen cell has been added to this colony in a mini-nuc. The queen has chewed her way out and the lid is still visible
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