20 Top Tips for Beginner Beekeepers - Essential Advice for a Confident First Season
Laurence Edwards walks through twenty essential tips for new beekeepers, from checking for allergies and joining a local association to choosing between National and Langstroth frames. He emphasizes ordering nucs early, keeping at least two hives, and registering on BeeBase for disease monitoring and inspector support.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards and welcome back to my YouTube channel. Today we're going to be looking at the top 20 tips if you're starting out in beekeeping. So first thing to say is thank you for watching my videos. If you have any specific requests for any product tutorials or product reviews, please let me know. Hit the subscribe button below. We've now reached over 100 subscribers so we can have a watermark in the bottom right-hand corner, so if If you're enjoying this video, please hit the subscribe button below. If you hit the bell that's on the home page as well, you'll get notified each time a new video is posted. So what's today's video about? Now, when I first started beekeeping, I read a lot of books, but there wasn't really anything to kind of give me a hit list of the main things that I should be looking out for. So hopefully I'm just going to give you my top 20 tips when you're kind of starting out beekeeping and what to look out for. So quick reminder, who Please subscribe to the YouTube channel. We're going to have lots of videos upcoming this season. If you've never done an inspection before, we're going to be recording them via our GoPro. So we're going to strap the GoPro onto my chest here and then maybe do some live streams of the inspections that we do on a weekly basis. The videos might necessarily might not necessarily kind of COVID specific tutorials, but we'll edit those out and do them as separate videos. But you'll get a real flavor of kind of going through each hive, maybe twenty or thirty at a time. Looking for the different things and get like a real-time view of what we're actually doing during our inspections. So on to the top 20 tips for starting out beekeeping. So number 1, allergies. Now it goes without saying, this is probably a good place to start, but if you've got allergies to bee stings or any other insect stings, then maybe you need to kind of think whether beekeeping is the right hobby for you. You get stung a lot. There's no getting away from it. If you're a beekeeper, you do get stung a lot, especially if you're a beginner. It doesn't matter how many kind of different suits you put on or how padded out you are, you will get stung, even if that's just one hive. So one sting is all it can take if you've got a bad bee allergy. So just, you need to understand, if you've got really bad bee allergies, probably not the best hobby for you. So we get that one out of the way first, and then you can sort switch off if you've got bee allergies. If you haven't got bee allergies, please keep watching. The other 19 are a bit better than that. Establish your priorities. Now, I didn't do this when I started beekeeping. I just jumped in at the deep end, and I know some people will be like that and you won't want to watch all the top 20 tips, um, and that's fine, and that's a really good way, and some people do learn very well like that, um, but for me, I wish I had established my priorities at beginning because it would have helped me kind of further on down the line. And when I say establish your priorities, I mean just kind of have a think about why you're interested in beekeeping. So are you interested in, in helping save the bees? Are you interested in maximizing your honey crop as much as possible? Are you interested in just sitting there and watching them? Do you want them in your garden? Do you want to grow to become a beekeeper? Do you want to get family members involved? Like, there's all these different questions that you need to ask, and until you establish those priorities, it's quite difficult to kind of understand the journey that you're on. So some people, they're not interested in honey, and I get that. They just want to kind of help the bees and put a beehive in their garden or on their bit of land and do their bit just to kind of increase the bee population. Now, if you're doing that, you don't necessarily need a hive. You maybe have like a big old log or something, and you could maybe attract a swarm to go into that log, and then you've got a nice wild feral colony that you can keep in your garden. And for some people, that's great. You know, when you've got a nice wild feral colony of bees in your garden and you haven't got to do anything with them, and they might die and they might swarm, but another swarm will probably come back over and take over that space. So if you're interested in it for those reasons, just, just get a— attract a wild feral swarm. Look at some of the options on the market for that, or try and kind of like maybe create a ply box and ratchet it to the top of a tree or something, attract a swarm, and just leave them to kind of get on with it. I personally wouldn't recommend that. I don't think it's ideal for kind of disease control. You want to have removable frames, you want to be able to inspect your colony. Half the fun for me is getting in and kind of seeing the progress throughout the season. So you have small overwintered clusters and then they begin to expand and then you see the flows and you can kind of hear the roar of the bees. Like, it is genuinely quite exciting. So for me, those are the reasons. But yeah, establish your priorities. Do you want 1 hive, 2 hives, 10 hives, 100 hives? Do you want honey? Just kind of write it down, have a little bit of a plan. Join your local beekeepers association. A lot of people get bees and then think, I better go and join the beekeepers association association. I recommend doing it the other way around. So there's beekeeping associations absolutely everywhere, so if you just put in your address, I think you can actually search for it on the BBKA website, find your local beekeeper association, go along to a few meetings, meet some local beekeepers, and they can really kind of help you out on your journey to becoming a beekeeper. I'll touch on a number of the other aspects of why that's a good idea later on in this video, but it's just a good idea to kind of register your local beekeepers association at the very beginning. Hands-on experience. Now, this is one of the benefits that you get from joining your local beekeepers association. Um, they have apiaries, they all have apiaries with maybe 10 or 12 hives in, and they use them to do demonstration days. So you— they'll do taster days for free. You could do 1-day training courses, whatever, 3-day training courses. They'll teach you about queen rearing. They offer a huge range of information for beginner beekeepers. The drive from them is to get people into keeping bees and then kind of support them throughout their journey. And the reason I pull out hands-on experience as a specific top tip is that you might not like it. You might kind of find that it's a little bit overwhelming and that you don't like the bees flying around your face. So why wait until you've bought your own bees? Because if you buy your own bees and then you're not too keen on actually going in and doing the weekly inspections, You're more likely to kind of neglect them, and then they'll probably swarm, and then you'll just give up. So get some hands-on experience first, realize that you actually do kind of enjoy the hobby before diving in and getting your bees. Read some books. I've read loads of bee books, and I tend to get to kind of like page 4 or 5, and then I just kind of skip through them and look at the pictures. But they are really, really good sources of information, and if you're the kind of person that absorbs information through reading, then I suggest read as many books as you possibly can. Some are a bit outdated now, some are better than others, so I'll put a list across the bottom of this page and maybe some in the comments below— my top 3 recommendations for bee books. Watch YouTube videos. So you can already tick this one off your list because you're watching my video, which is great. Please hit the subscribe button below and the bell notification, and then you'll get a notification for every single video we put on here. This is my way of learning. I, I will learn really, really well kind of through watching. I've, uh, I tend to kind of work better through doing, but in absence of being able to actually do it, I like to watch it and see it on a YouTube channel. But yeah, watch as many YouTube videos as you can. There are some absolutely incredible beekeepers on YouTube, and they really do document the kind of processes they use very well, um, and It's just good to watch those in advance of kind of coming across them. So you might, for example, watch a video on chalkbrood, and then you'll understand that chalkbrood isn't the worst disease in the world. It's not going to kill your hive unless you kind of do very easy maneuvers and manipulations. So the number one way of stopping chalkbrood is to requeen. If a queen is susceptible to chalkbrood, you will get chalkbrood in the hive. Which can kind of limit the amount of buildup that they do in the spring. So if I find chalkbrood in my hive, I swap the queen out and I put another queen in, and that tends to resolve it. It can also be the way that the moisture and the ventilation moves through the hive. So it might be that you've got a solid floor and that you've got a lot of chalkbrood, so you put a mesh floor on and then that will resolve the issue. So that's just one example of an issue that you might watch a YouTube video on, you know it, you understand it, it, so when you kind of come to review it, or when you come across it when you're inspecting your own bees, you don't panic and you can take positive action. Reserve your bees. A few of the later topics talk about kind of buying stuff. I would reserve your bees first, so I would speak to kind of local nuc producers, maybe speak to your local beekeeping association to see if someone local to you can provide you with a nuc for the upcoming season. We provide nucs at Black Mountain Honey. We have a very limited waiting list this year, so if you live in the North Wales area and you're looking for a locally adapted nuc for spring 2020, please drop me a message and I'll get back to you. But you want to reserve your bees as early as possible in the year. What you're looking for in the spring is that you want preferably a nuc— sorry, preferably an overwintered queen, and it can either be in a nuc or or a full hive. You will pay a different amount for both of those. I would always recommend for beginners though is to go for the nuc. Now the reason I say that is that although it's a smaller package, what you're getting is a fresh colony. If you buy it in the hive, you're probably going to get the hive and the body and stuff with it, and then you're talking about potential kind of transmittal of diseases. You might have to torch the hive. You don't know kind of what disease Diseases have been present within that hive, whereas with a nuc, all you're doing is you're buying the frames and the bees, and then you'll install that into your own equipment. So you know that there's been no kind of disease transfer within the actual equipment. So you could still get disease transfer within the frames, but if you're buying it from a reputable nuc provider, that should be very limited. I wouldn't order the bees through the post. So there's a number of suppliers that will send you nucs through the post, and it does work, but I just I think for a beginner, you probably want someone who you can ask questions to, as opposed to like a big company who's dealing with maybe thousands of nucs in a year. So you're best off kind of going with a local supplier to reserve your nucs. Buying your equipment. So once you've reserved your nucs, you know what standard frame you're going to use. I would recommend for people in the UK to go with the National. And the reason for that is that it's the widely and commonly used frame in the UK, so you can— it just helps and it means that the equipment is kind of a bit cheaper. And a lot of the other frame sizes work really, really well though. I think if I was going to have my time again, I'd probably go Langstroth. I think that that works for a commercial environment. The Langstroth frame works a little bit better and the system works a bit better, and you can use kind of one standardized box all the way up and you don't have your deeps and your shallows. That would be my preference if I started again, but that's again probably time for another video. So you need to buy your equipment and again do a lot of research, but understand when you reserve your bees, you need to know what size frames they're on, and then you need to match that to the hives that you're going to buy. The options are pretty simple. You either have a poly hive or a wooden hive. Again, that's the subject of another video. My recommendation would be to go for a poly hive. Why? Other people would say wooden hives, so it's entirely up to you. Do your research and choose which hive you want. The poly hives work out a little bit cheaper, but not a huge amount cheaper. If you're going to go wood, I would recommend going with seconds equipment, and the reason for that is just it's substantially cheaper than the first quality stuff, and the difference in quality isn't, isn't actually that big. So I tend to go with the seconds quality. But one of the big benefits for the beginner using poly hives though is that they can come ready assembled for a cheap price, whereas the ready assembled cedar hives or pine hives tend to be quite a lot more. What you're looking for when you're buying your kit though, you want to get like a ready assembled hive or like a kit. So you want your floor, you want your brood box, you want a queen excluder, you want a couple of supers, maybe see if they'll give you 3, you want a crown board if you're using a crown board. You want a roof, you want somewhere feeding them. That's really key. I think a lot of people miss that out when they buy their hives. Get your feeder at the same time, because when you come to install your nuc— and we'll cover this in a later topic— the first thing that I want you to do is to feed them every time you need to feed them. There's no problem feeding a nuc, and you need to do it. So get your feeder when you buy your hive. Assembling the hive. So we touched on it in the previous topic, um, Once you've bought your hive, it can be quite difficult to assemble it, so if you're not the kind of person who enjoys putting together wood and doing woodworking, I would strongly recommend a poly hive. They're either ready assembled or they kind of click together in a very, very simple fashion, so you can kind of have your hive put together in maybe 2 or 3 minutes. Buy protective clothing. Now, I went through maybe 3, 3 or 4 bee suits before I settled on the bee suit that I wear often today. And the reason that I went through 3 or 4 is that they failed. So either a zip broke or kind of a hem came loose. And there's kind of so many bee suits on the market at the moment, and some of the quality is quite poor. So spend your money wisely and get a really, really good quality bee suit. I would either go for a BB Wear suit or I would go for a BJ Sheriff suit. They're really the 2 options I would go for. You're going to be spending probably more on your protective clothing than you are on your hive. That's probably a good measure to kind of go by actually, because you don't want the cheap suits. You want to go for a good quality suit by either one of those manufacturers. They've brought out a lot of mesh suits, seems to be quite fashionable at the moment, and these mesh suits, they have 3 layers of mesh that Stop the bees stinging you as per the normal suits, but they actually let the air circulate as well. So instead of becoming a hot sweaty mess come the end of the day of inspections, it's quite like you can just have shorts and t-shirt on underneath and be like quite cool. I've not actually tried them myself, so I think I'll have to get one of those for myself this season and give it a bit of a review. What I've heard though, it can be a bit of an issue kind of snagging on brambles and it tearing, so maybe not suitable for people in extreme environments, but I think for backyard beekeepers it would be absolutely fine, and anything to kind of keep the heat out is definitely a good thing. Another thing you need to look for is gloves. I've tried numerous different gloves, I've tried beekeeping without gloves. You need to get a set of gloves that works well for you. The ones that I use, I use a latex-dipped gauntlet style that comes up to about here, so it stops bees getting in. or up through the cuffs there, and it's a thick plastic. Now, some people don't like that because they say they lose kind of dexterity and the ability to feel stuff. I find they work really, really well. It's all about getting the right fit. So if you go to Seawind Jones, then they have all the different sizes of glove, and you can try them on and get the one that fits you really, really nicely, and they work great. So you need good protective full-body suit. I'd always recommend going for a full-body suit over a smock or kind of a half-fitting one like that, I find the bees can just go up there. And especially if you've got like some bees that aren't particularly nice, they find their way in, and it's not nice getting stung kind of around the torso area. So I always go full body suit. I always wear wellies, and I wear wellies on the outside, so I kind of tuck the trousers down underneath and then the wellies up. That stops any bees coming in through there. And then I wear the full gauntlet-style gloves. And then that gives you really, really good protection. I prefer the fencing-style mask, and then I wear a cap underneath with a peak to stop it coming into my face. And I find with all that protective equipment, I'm relatively well secure from being stung. Buy your accessories. So have a think before you go and kind of like start buying single hives or protective clothing online. Try and plan out a bit of a list of what you need to buy. There's loads of stuff that you need that you probably don't think about. I mentioned one earlier, get a feeder. Now whether that's a frame feeder or an Ashforth feeder or a built-in feeder, think about that. You definitely need some sort of, some sort of feeder for your bees in order to give them sugar syrup. You're going to need a hive tool. There's 2 or 3 different types of hive tool on the market, so if you go down to your beekeepers association, they can show you the different hive tools and you can have a feel. Some people prefer the J-hook ones, other people prefer the standard ones. I'm not fussed. I just, as long as I've got something to kind of crack the boxes open with, that will do for me. Um, there's tons and tons of other accessories that you will need, um, but there's no point going through them all now because you only need them depending on what you want to do in your beekeeping. So if you want to get into kind of rearing your own queens, have a look at the queen rearing accessories page. There's tons of different little mini Apideas and boxes and frames and queen cells and egg cups and grafting tools And there is, there's so many there. So don't, don't go wild and order everything at the beginning. All you need is you need your hive, your protective clothing, your bees, a frame tool, and a feeder, and I think you're pretty much set to go. Timing. As with most things, timing is critical. Um, you don't want to be starting beekeeping late in the autumn or in the winter. Um, anybody selling you kind of nucs or colonies over winter. I'd be a little bit suspicious of that. Um, there's kind of a, a day in maybe April, May that we call the crossover day, and that basically means there's a day where the queen is laying sufficient amounts of brood to keep that colony alive throughout the season. Now you can really tell where that day is because the colony seems to plod along kind of up to April And then it just goes boom like that, and it really expands at a rapid rate. And you can see that expanse kind of over a week. So you come back in and you see that they've kind of doubled in size, you know that they've reached that point. That is when you should be buying your nuc. Um, that's the best time of the year. So the planning is key. You need to kind of— maybe you, maybe you think about it in September or October, say, right, I want to get into beekeeping. That's a good time to go and talk to these beekeepers and say, right, Can I be first on your list for an overwintered nuc for next season? Then it gives you all of the winter to kind of read your books, watch your YouTube videos, maybe do some training courses at your beekeepers association. You're going to get your nuc kind of in April, May, and then you can install it. And that, that's the kind of plan that you really want to be on. Anytime throughout the summer though is fine. So if you're kind of coming to it late in May or June and someone offers you a nuc kind of up to June. That's acceptable in my view, as long as it's a nice big strong nuc. But then your aim is to kind of build that colony up and get it nice and strong for winter. You're probably not going to get much of a honey crop in the first year. Apiary. Now you need to think about where you want to keep your apiary. I think most people start in their back garden. I certainly started in my back garden. I had at one point 4 colonies in a back garden that was maybe 10 by 15 meters. That was fun. Um, I'm not sure the neighbors thought it was so fun. And then when we moved to Wales, I had about 30 colonies in a slightly bigger garden, got a considerably bigger garden, but it was still— it wasn't land, it was a garden. Um, and I think that was pretty irresponsible of me, to be honest. So you need to think about where you're going to keep your bees. If you've got suitable land or you've got a suitable space kind of within your garden, then fine. But really kind of look for some nice gentle bees if that's what you're going to go for. You don't want aggressive bees in your garden, um, because your neighbors won't be happy with you, your pets will probably get stung, your children will probably get stung. Like, you see the pictures and the videos on YouTube of nice kind of friendly beehives and people walking past them, and yeah, some bee colonies are like that, But also some are really, really aggressive. So, I mean, we work with our bees and we try and reduce that. If we find colonies that are really aggressive, we just, we requeen them with a different queen, one that's proven to be a bit more gentle. I mean, there's other factors in play. We need to look at kind of like the disease resistance and the ability for them to produce honey, but you don't want grumpy bees in your garden. So just have a think about where you're going to keep an apiary. Is it in your garden? Is it going to be somewhere else? I recommend somewhere else, and I recommend somewhere kind of out of sight. Have a look at my other video, Setting Up Out Apiaries. We go through top 20 tips for setting up out apiaries, and again, if you subscribe to the video below and hit the notification button, you'll see all of the new videos coming in, and you can click on that one and have a look. But I do recommend viewing it and trying to think about where you'd like to keep your bees. Planning. Now you need to have a little think about how you're going to manage your bees. So once you've got them and you've installed them, you need to be doing your weekly inspections. Think about when, when's a good time for you to do your weekly inspections. Try and get a bit of a schedule in place. I mean, bees do need regular inspections. You need to inspect them once a week because you're looking for swarm cells. The idea for me anyway is to stop the bees swarming and maximize the honey crop whilst keeping gentle and disease-free bees. I mean, they're my main objectives. Yours may be slightly different to that, but if you don't inspect them regularly, they will swarm, almost guaranteed in the first year. If you just left them there and didn't inspect them, they would swarm. That is what bees like to do. So you need to kind of plan your time. I have a set day each week where I go and inspect all of my colonies. I work a full-time job, so I have to do that at the weekend. So Saturday is my day. I'll just get up early in the morning, go out, inspect all of my colonies, and then that's the way that I do it, and it works well. If you've just got 1 or 2 hives, it really doesn't take that long. Like, for me, it's, it's absolute maximum 10 minutes a hive. There's no need to be in the hive any longer than that. And a lot of the inspections are probably just 2 or 3 minutes. Like, if I've got a colony that's not even filling all of frames, highly, highly unlikely they're going to swarm. So I might just look at a couple of the centre frames, check to see whether there's actually eggs there, a quick glance for some swarm cells, and then I'm done. So just have a think about how your lifestyle is going to kind of blend in with your beekeeping lifestyle and plan when you're going to do your inspections. Register your bees. Now there is a website called beebase.com, and if you go on to there and register your apiary, the seasonal bee inspector who reports up to the regional bee inspector will get an alert to say that there's a new beekeeper in his area. And now these seasonal bee inspectors go around and do inspections of all apiaries within their area as best as they possibly can, but what they really focus on is going next to any areas where there's been reported outbreaks of disease. They will go and inspect all of the colonies near there. So if you register on BeeBase, you'll probably get in contact with your seasonal bee inspector, and then he'll probably come and do a joint inspection of your bees with you. Now, these guys are— they are fantastic, and they've got a wealth of knowledge, and they're quite happy to do, I mean, a joint inspection with you, and you can ask as many questions as you want, and hopefully your bees will be 100% disease-free. I've never had a seasonal bee inspector find any trace of any major disease at all, other than maybe a bit of chalk brood. So register your bees, talk to the bee inspectors. It's actually quite a fun day. They'll have a cup of tea with you and kind of chat if they've got time as well. So it's a good idea to get them registered. Inspections. Now, touched on inspections before, but that really is kind of like a critical part of beekeeping. Please don't be one of these beekeepers that buys their bees and just lets them get on with it. If you want to do that, try and attract a swarm and let them kind of be a feral hive. You're much better off planning your inspections and kind of getting in there and doing it on a weekly basis and actually managing the bees effectively. Then you're a responsible beekeeper because you're looking for disease and trying to stop disease and the spread of disease. You're stopping them swarming, which if you're in an urban environment is good. You don't want swarms kind of going flying around the neighborhood. beekeepers a bad name. And all of these issues can be prevented by kind of a regimented and suitable inspection regime. And it takes no longer than 10 minutes per hive, as we spoke about before. So just get in there, do your inspection, and that'll keep everyone happy. What I will do is if you subscribe to the button below and hit the notification, we're going to do a video as soon as it allows us to in the spring We'll do what a 10-minute inspection looks like. So we'll go through one of our colonies and we'll show you exactly what we do, kind of from the beginning to the end, show you exactly how you complete an inspection for the bees. Double up. So my advice is don't buy one hive. If you can afford it, go for 2. Go for 2 nucs, 2 hives. It makes a lot of sense managing 2 hives. You get the economy of scale in terms of inspections. You only have to light the smoker once, for example. But what it enables you to do is that you can swap elements of the colony between the 2 hives. So, for example, if you've got one colony that's weaker than the other one and there's no kind of diseases present, you can kind of balance them out a little bit, even them out, and then you should have 2 relatively strong colonies. But the bigger one is that you reduce the risk of both of them failing over winter. So if you've got one hive and it fails over winter, you're back to square one and you need to buy another nuc and start again. If you've got 2 hives and one of them fails over winter, it's very easy to make a new colony from the hive that's made it through the winter. Do you know what I mean? You could, you could just do like a walkaway split if you wanted to let them create their own queen through the emergency impulse, or you could buy in a mated queen and do a split. Like, there's numerous things that you could do. But it just gives you that bit of insurance to stop all of your bees kind of collapsing over winter. So I'd always recommend, if you've got the money to do it, double up and go for 2 hives as opposed to 1. Don't be afraid of your bees. It can definitely seem a little bit daunting at first keeping bees, and especially doing the inspections, but as I've said before in this video, you need to do your regular inspections. So if you're going to find beekeeping to be a daunting pastime, then you should probably work that out before you go ahead and buy your bees. So join your local beekeepers association, get some hands-on experience, and work out if it's like the right hobby for you. But then just kind of generally, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to try different stuff out with the bees as well. So they're very, very resilient. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll see a post that I put on recently with a Some bees overhanging, um, completely exposed next to a church. So they weren't even in a hive. So you can kind of mess around with bees as much as you possibly want. They're a very resilient, um, organism, and they will kind of handle most things that you throw at them. Now, that's not to say let's go and experiment on them and see how difficult we can make life for them. Your, your kind of role as a beekeeper is to make them as healthy as possible and make them live kind of like a good thriving life and give you honey at the same time. But don't be afraid to experiment, don't be afraid to do splits, and if you've got those 2 hives, you can kind of experiment a little bit more. So like I say, don't be afraid of the bees and don't be afraid to experiment. So we're moving into a couple of topics now about actually when you get your bees. I thought it'd be quite a nice way to finish off the video is actually kind of getting your bees and showing you what to do with them. What we'll do is we will, once the season is upon us, we'll post a couple of videos showing you exactly how to kind of, how to install a package of bees, how to install a nuc of bees, and talk you and walk you through all of the steps. So again, hit the subscribe button and you'll see those videos pop up on your feed. But yeah, once you get this nuc, you will need to install it. The best way I found of installing the nucs is you generally get it in a container, so maybe like a Correx nuc container, I find that if you take your hive off the stand where it's going to be in its final position and put it somewhere else, take your nuc that's in a Correx, like a transport package, and put that on the stand with the entrance of the nuc facing out to where the entrance of the beehive will be. And then you open— normally has like a little sticky tab or something— you open that tab, tape it up, and walk away and leave it for a couple of hours. And what will happen is the bees will start to kind of orientate. They'll start to fly out. You'll see tons of activity. They don't know where they are, so they do these orientation flights to try and triangulate that position. So it's very important to get them in the position that you want them in. Now, once you've done that, you leave it for a couple of hours, you come back, you, you remove the nuc, put it off to one side, and you take your hive back and you put that on the position where the bees have triangulated in on. Now, what that means is that all of your nuc bees are over there in the nuc, and all of the flying bees are coming back into your hive. So they found where their home is, and that's, that's exactly how you need to do it. And then what you do is, is you open up your hive, you take out your 6 frames because you've got 6 frames in your nuc, and put them to one side. And then you take out your frames from your nuc one by one, and you transfer them over into your hive in the same order that they were in the nuc. And what I always like to do, and if I'm installing a nuc for someone, I will always make sure that they see the queen. Just spot the queen, make sure she's there, make sure she's not dead, and I'd look for some eggs as well. So you want to kind of see brood in all stages— capped brood, eggs, larvae. You want plenty of stores. That's what you should get in a good quality nuc. That's what you get in all the nucs from Black Mountain Honey. Transfer them over, put a crown board on. And then we move on to our next topic, feeding. Now, I always, always, always recommend feeding your nuc as soon as you get it. If you've installed it into a hive, you've got 6 frames of either stores or brood in all stages, and then you've probably either got 4 or 5 additional frames in that brood box that, if you're a beginner, it's going to be foundation. That's all you're going to have. So there's absolutely no harm whatsoever, and it really really gives them a good boost to get some liquid feed into them at that point. So you want to go for 1:1 sugar syrup. So that's sugar syrup that's 1 litre of water to 1 kilogram of sugar, and you just heat that up to kind of 40 or 50 degrees, let it melt, let it cool back down, and then you feed that to the bees. And you probably want to give them 4 or 5 litres of this, but you need to monitor it and see. You don't want to overfeed them, but what you're trying to get to the point at is that they expand within that brood box And all of that foundation is drawn out. Now, you don't want to get to the point where they start filling the drawn foundation or the drawn comb with the sugar syrup. You're taking it too far then. But you just want to get them to that point where all of that foundation is drawn out into comb. That means that the queen can start laying in there. She'll expand her brood nest and then hopefully expand up into the honey supers and get you a honey crop. Have fun! It's supposed to be a hobby. Now, I have it all the time where I'm cursing about stuff going wrong with the bees or dropping buckets of honey over, or I don't know, the amount of mistakes you make in beekeeping can be a real frustration. Losing colonies is also like a real frustration as well. But do try and understand, like, it's supposed to be a hobby. You're supposed to be having fun. I find it very kind of meditative. So if you're in a nice quiet location and you're there with your smoker, And you can just kind of work the bees. Like, it's a real therapeutic hobby and good for people who maybe like suffer with depression or stress. So just try and remember that it's supposed to be fun and don't get kind of too like caught up with all the issues and mistakes that you no doubt will make. So thanks, that's it again from today's video, top 20 tips for starting beekeeping. I really do hope you're enjoying these videos. Again, if you have any specific products that you'd like me to review, any specific tutorials, any other top 20 videos that you'd like to— you'd like me to do a review on or talk about, please drop me a message or make a comment below and we'll, uh, we'll do our best to kind of get back to you. Watermark in the bottom right-hand corner, please, please, please subscribe to our channel. It really helps us kind of get more videos out to you. If you're interested in being notified about new videos, go to the home page, click on the bell, and every time we upload a new video you'll get a notification and you be one of the first people to see it. Keep an eye out, we've got some really good videos upcoming. So like I say, we'll be doing inspections in the spring, we're going and doing a couple of supplier visits, um, so where we'll talk to the suppliers, see what new products they've got coming up for the season. Loads more on the agenda, so do stay tuned and we'll see you next time.
