Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey highlights his 2021 season: TV appearances on James Martin and Ainsley Harriott's shows, launching queen sales with breeders Murray McGregor and Yolanta, harvesting 60 lb of heather honey per colony in North Wales, trademarking Hotfire Honey and Black Mountain Honey, and growing his YouTube channel to nearly 10k subscribers with 1.1 million views.
In this video, I'm going to give you my highlights for the 2021 season. Hi, I'm Laurence Ederson, Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Just going to give you a quick snapshot of my 2021 highlights. A lot of these videos that I do, they're quite negative, talking about my regrets and my mistakes and my problems. I never really focus on the positives, so I'm going to do a real quick roundup 2021, show you all of my highlights of the season. Right, so number 1, 2 television appearances. I won't go into loads of detail though. Saturday morning with James Martin, that was loads of fun, got lots of orders from it as well. And Ainsley Harriott came and cooked in the garden here. We had some pizzas, had some hot fire honey. That's definitely my highlight of the season, 2 television appearances. My second highlight, and it really is a big landmark moment I think in the Black Mountain Honey business, which is We started selling queens, and I look back and I think that was only in June that we started selling queens. Feels like I've been doing that for years. Takes a lot of work selling the queens in terms of doing the work, getting them in, changing the cages over. Going to be doing queen rearing this year as well, talking to people on email, managing all the comments that come back. Quite a lot of work, but I really, really enjoy it. Get such good feedback, get to work with Murray McGregor, who the The quality of the queens coming from Murray and Yolanta is phenomenal, so I really, really enjoyed that. That's definitely up there with my top highlights of the season. Number 3 highlight, I was so kind of in two minds as to whether I was going to go to the heather this year because we went up there the year before and we just didn't get a drop of heather. Absolute nightmare going up there, all the effort. We made the decision to transfer over to a static apiary. We left them up there And we got rewarded massively. It was the best heather yield since I started beekeeping, and you speak to people around here as well and they say it was the best heather yield in the last 25 years. Absolutely crazy for this spot here in North Wales. Got the colonies up to strength at the right time, got the weather at the right time, and the bees did the rest. So we averaged around 60 pounds per colony, which for North Wales is really, really good. So that's definitely up there with the best highlight of this season. My next highlight is that we trademarked both of our businesses, so Hotfire Honey and Black Mountain Honey. Took us quite a while to do that, a lot of work went into that in the background, and finally got the trademarks through kind of around October-November time. So to have that security of the trademark on both of those businesses, it's a really kind of momentous occasion for me. It stops anyone stealing that Black Mountain Honey brand. And then my final highlight of the season, and obviously this one goes without saying, doesn't it? It's the success of my YouTube channel. I really can't get over it. Like, YouTube sent me a bit of a description the other day talking about like how the channel has grown over the past 12 months, and it made me think, I've really not been doing YouTube for that long. Look back at some of the earlier videos, and even some of the videos now, they're a little bit naff, just me talking to the camera. I look forward so much to those summer videos where we can get inside, do talk about the bees, talk about what I'm doing, and it means I get to build this community with lots of beekeepers across the world. And this is one of the big things that I notice is where the comments come in from. Like, I get them from Canada, New Zealand, the USA, UK, all across Europe, Africa, India, China. Like, a lot of people watch the channel, and I just sometimes have to take a step back and look at that and think it's quite a big achievement. 1.1 million views we got in the past 2 years. We've nearly hit 10,000 subscribers, and the biggest one for me is the watch time. Can't believe this. So the channel has been going for about 2 years now, and we've got 12 years worth of watch time. Just find that a little bit staggering that people will watch that amount of YouTube. 12 years, really, really crazy. So I'm going to promote that one up. I think that is the biggest highlight of my season, which is the continual expansion and success of this YouTube channel. So I just want to thank all of you for doing that because that's my biggest highlight. And without any of you here actually coming in, watching the videos, commenting on them, sharing them, liking them, I wouldn't have had anywhere near as much success as I have. So thank you to everyone in the YouTube community. So there you go, that's my top 5 2021 highlights. I do this every year because I do think it's a useful thing to do— take a look back, try and be positive of what's going on And not just me moaning all the time. So I hope you enjoyed that video. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
