Year 3 May - Yard Trashing 🖊️

Ever heard of yard trashing? It’s a quick, simple way to transform a bee yard into nucs.

• Unload a truckload of empty nucs in a disease and pest-free bee yard.
• Face the nucs in a different direction than the parent hives.
• Split the hives apart late in the evening or at night.
• Equally distribute frames of brood, eggs, food, and bees.
• Don’t put frames from the same colony in the same nuc.
• Don’t bother searching for queens.
• Place a sealed queen cell in each nuc.
• Remove the parent hives.

A couple of weeks later, check the nucs for mated queens and combine any dinks or failures.

It works like a charm, with half the lifting and one-third the travel time. The bee yard is getting a makeover:

• New equipment is all set.
• Zia queens are on their way in a few days.
• It’s a cool, dreary day with no bees in flight.

The process is pretty similar with a few tweaks:

• Use singles instead of nucs.
• Reduce entrances.
• Place green grass to obstruct flight.
• Do it late in the afternoon.
• Set frames in sunlight for 30 minutes per Brother Adams.
• Cut all queen cells.
• Don’t insert any new queen cells.
• Four days later, dethrone the queens in singles with eggs.
• Place new caged queens in each single.

Immediate results:

• Ten fresh singles.
• Ready for Zia queens.
• No bee brawls.
• No confusion.
• The old, worn-out equipment is now empty and loaded onto the truck.

-Cheers, D 🌸🐝