»My First Nucleus – Episode 3 – When to Add a Super and Queen Excluder«
When you identify the queen and notice that every frame has something in it, check how much stores are in there, how much brood is in there, check for diseases and then add a queen excluder.
When checking on the frame of foundation that you put in earlier, expect it to be fully drawn out and backfilled with eggs. Wear your bee suit and have your smoker with you and open up the colony. When going into your colonies, ensure that the temperature is not anything less than 13 or 14 degrees. Ensure that you do weekly inspections frame by frame checking for swarm cells. and the progress with your bees.
Adding an excluder
The first thing you want to see in your apiary is a good number of workers hitting like 80 of the frames if you have kept huge hives.
In a 10 frame brood box, when you realize that the bees have covered like 9 frames in a week, this is your trigger to add a queen excluder on your super. When adding that queen excluder, ensure that your bees are all flocked over the frames.
Maintenance
Check your frames one by one to see the progress on them. You will notice that what you left as a sheet of foundation is now completely drawn out, laid up and full of eggs.
When you have inspected every frame and you cannot see any disease, pop the queen excluder on and pop a super on as well. Ensure they have got plenty of food and no swarm cells. Close them back up, put the queen excluder and the brood box and the bees are good to go for another week.
