82 Minutes Of Live Bee Inspections - Real Time Hive Inspection Walkthrough

We finally got another sunny day in North Wales. So in today's video, I'm going to do another live inspection across every colony in this apiary, checking for space, making sure they've not swarmed, checking to see that all of the colonies are queen right. Since the last visit, I've been in fixing some of the drone layers, but also I've got a little surprise on one that I thought was a drone layer, has given me a real positive surprise. So we'll go through all of them. I'm also moving some colonies from here to make some space in another apiary, make some space in this apiary as well. So let's get on with it. First thing I've got to do, get my veil on. Don't want to get stung in the face. Been quite a while since I've been stung in the face on a video in this apiary here. Super chilled. I know I got done at the very, very end of a previous video, previous live video. I'm chopping and changing. I'm doing these slightly different. Some of them are going to be live streams, some of them are going to be full videos. Just need to find what works for YouTube. So going to get my veil up and let's jump straight in and find out how these bees are getting on. I will have, as last time, my second camera, so my DJI Osmo Pocket 3, which is a pretty cool camera if anyone's interested in what that is. I'll get that turned on now, get that filming as well, and then we're good to go. So let me get this camera over to these ones here. Right, so just checking, what is nice to see at the moment is a lot of these colonies, like this one here for example, was a, was a drone laying queen in there, and it takes a while for a colony with a drone laying queen to recover a little bit. It's not as straightforward as just popping in a new queen and hoping that they're going to get back on track because the proportion and the makeup of the bees in the colony just isn't right. So you end up with this one here, the first one we're going to go into. You've got loads and loads of drones, not enough nurse bees, which impacts the colony's ability to kind of welcome that new queen And ensure that they get a smooth introduction and that they can move forward. But we've been through that awkward period with a lot of these colonies now. You still get the remnants of a little bit of drone brood, but if you want to recap to last time, this one here still had, I would say, 50% drone brood, 50% capped worker brood. And if you pulled out some of those frames, you'd think, well, I think that might be a drone-laying queen. But let's have a look at it today. I reckon we're going to find like maybe 10% drone brood, 90% capped worker brood. And all it is is because the drone brood takes so much longer to emerge than normal capped worker brood, then you get this kind of legacy droniness on the frame. And this is exactly what's happened in the fake Flow Hive as well. So I came very, very close last week to killing that queen, 'cause I looked at it and was just like, she's definitely a drone-laying queen. I'm gonna do that one at the end. Seriously, that is a major, major improvement, that one. But let's get into this one here first. So all of my 14x12 hives are moving away. So at the end of this video, I'm just going to close them all up. Not going to worry too much about the flying bees. Just going to move it in the middle of the day. Flying bees can go into the adjacent hives, and I'm going to take them back to an apiary, and I'm going to get all of the hives ready, and I'm going to transfer them over, just to kind of give myself some compatibility within the apiary, as opposed to keeping Langstroth, 14x12, National, everything all at once. Right, just checking I am actually filming. We're good to go. Okay, let's get into the first one. Just double-check on that one as well. Yep, all good. Right, beautiful day here today. I know this isn't indicative of Wales, the rest of the week is shockingly bad, but today is stunning, really, really nice. So as with this colony previously, looks like it's completely full and probably is completely full now. I was pushing it on this one These are the kind of colonies here where they're this packed, you could trigger swarming, but I'm really pushing just to get these frames and feeders frames completely drawn out prior to actually putting them in their new home alongside wax foundation in wooden frames, because they're just not gonna do anything otherwise and they'll just shun the plastic. It is very, very annoying when they do that, but let's get inside, see what we got. Some people are saying their bees are a little bit touchy at this time of year. You will notice that your bees get more angry as you get throughout the season. Bigger colonies, more bees available to get angry, but also as the flows diminish, the bees do get a little bit more feisty. So, you happy with that? That's a very normal looking frame that you would find. Kind of like a couple of frames of drone brood on there, sorry, a couple of like cells of drone brood even. Perfectly acceptable 14 by 12 frame, and nice to see that they have drawn all of that out. You can see kind of in that corner up there, they're extending it down. They're really, really running out of space, which is good, means they're perfectly primed to go into their new home. So let's grab a couple more out. And again, you can see remnants of drone brood over here where I'm showing you on my finger here, but then all around that side there you've got capped worker brood, and similar on that side over there. Show that up on this camera as well. So this is what we were seeing last week, and it may even be that you've got like some chilled capped worker brood where the colony Was just not able to keep up with what was going on. And then you end up kind of in this scenario where you've just got some capped worker brood that they will eventually clear out if it is dead inside there. But I'm not too fussed about that. And as you can see, or as I can see from last week's video, a couple of weeks ago I think I did it here, where there was loads of capped drone brood and I was thinking, well, is that queen, is that queen a dud? You do need to give them a little bit of time. Same there, loads of capped brood now. Some nice pollen going into there as well. Still like, you know, they've still got space on that frame. They could be working a little bit harder, could be getting on with it. But I do think it's the frames that are slowing them down though. I guarantee if I had to put wax and wooden frames in there, they would be completely drawn out now. So no sign of the queen yet, but I'm not, I'm not too interested in seeing the queen in this one. She was there last time. I've seen eggs, they've got space, they're all good. So you can kind of just see on that one there, you've got a little bit of capped drone brood still, but not that much. Just want to double-check back just to see if the eggs are in a nice pattern there, because they've not, they've not left any cells. I have seen some eggs. Yeah, no, they're all, they're all good. I want to put them back in the exact same format that I had them in previously as well. But yeah, we are all good in here. So let me get this frame back in. Took a sting, sting to the finger there, just a little sting. But it goes to show your bees will get a little bit more touchy at this point of the year. Nothing to worry about, they will calm back down again. Kind of, they start to calm back down again I think when you get to feeding at this point of the year. So from now through to mid to end of August, that's going to be like the time where your bees are The most aggressive they're going to be throughout the whole year. But if you've got nice flows going on, you shouldn't, you shouldn't have to worry too much about that. They should be fine still. Right, let's just tweak the camera a little bit. Let's see if I can get you a bit closer on the second camera, first camera, whatever you want to call it. There we go, slightly different view. There we go, right, let's get into this one here. So I pinched, not the last video, but I came back here the other day and pinched some frames of brood out of here because this one was way overstocked and the one next door didn't really have enough brood in it. It was fine, but it was just a bit of a tactic to— There you go, straight away on the queen. Just to balance them a little bit, kind of alleviate any of the pressure or relieve any of the pressure that was in this hive and give a boost to the hive next door. Not sure how well that's going to focus in, but tons of eggs in there. So this one is fantastic queen, really good queen, brilliant colony, really nice and strong. Like I did that, what, 2 days ago? 3 days ago maybe, frames of foundation like that, and they've just come in straight away, drawn it all out, laid it all up. Really, really happy with that. So we're good to go in that one. So again, not really a huge amount to do in that one. It's borderline too strong. I know it doesn't look it from this angle here, but they are, they're brand new frames of foundation, and if I didn't do anything, if If I just left these now, you've got about a week, I would say, before that next round of brood starts to emerge and they're going to swarm. So I've got some work to do here, but good to see how well they're coming on. I'm really happy with that. Nice to see those queens. And I've started taking some grafts from some of these queens in our mating apiary now, taking the grafts from all of these selected queens, so either island mated or artificially inseminated queens, getting the F1 daughters, and then I'll run a selection of the F1 daughters for production colonies next year, see how they build up, and then we'll start selecting which ones we want to use for our breeder queens. And obviously Richard will, Richard will get his little selection as well. Right, so this one here, oh, I've pushed this one a little bit far maybe. I've actually brought this one up to the top and I'm Oh, maybe I've gone a little bit ambitious on this one. Let's have a look. Oh no, it's fine. For a second there, I thought I'd made a real catastrophic error and just put 2 frames of brood up top on its own and no bees were covering them, but it's not. I've not done that. Whenever I'm trying to lure them up like that, first thing I'll chuck up there is just a frame of stores or a couple of frames of stores, because what's the worst thing that happens if they, if they don't go for it? Then you've just got a couple of frames of stores that don't really get used. So nothing, nothing lost there. My heart started going, I was thinking, what have I done here? So that box there is just 4 frames of foundation, 2 frames of stores. And then down here, I'll just flip this one around so you can see, little bit of checkerboarding. I say a checkerboard, I've just put 1 frame of foundation in there. And that's always a nice test to see how well the colony is going to respond to checkerboarding. Just stick 1 frame in. See how you're getting on. And that's the one that I'm going to go for first, going to be the easiest one to get out of here, I think. And that's good, they've, uh, they've started drawing it out. Oh, they started drawing it out and they've laid up some eggs in it as well, so there we go. Couldn't ask for more than that. I've not seen the queen in there, but that's a really good sign. That colony wasn't doing that the last time. I'd checkerboarded or I'd put some frames of foundation in and they'd not touched it. So now there's sufficient bees in there in order to draw out the frames, there's sufficient warmth in there in order to draw out the frames, and then there's enough bees and enough kind of energy for that queen to actually get going. Really, really good news, that one. That is a lovely frame of brood, but I'm not sure if that's the frame of brood from this queen because I did add some frames of brood into this one, but lovely looking frame of brood there, really, really nice. I'll just show that to both cameras, and she's fully laid that back up as well. So you've got the emerging brood, the capped brood, sorry, that's emerging, and then around the edges you've got all of your eggs being laid as well. So you can see kind of how far behind this one is to the one next door. And that's all as a result of just the starting strength of the colony really, there's nothing, nothing else. I've not done any fancy tricks, it's not the checkerboarding, it's nothing like that, it's just, it's not even really a different queen. I just started it off with way more brood and way more bees really. You can put tons and tons of brood in a colony, if you've not got enough bees in it you'll just chill the brood. But that one's looking good as well, tons of space on that one, really good. I've been getting like a tiny bit of chalkbrood on some of these colonies, and you do start to get a bit of chalkbrood, a bit of sacbrood, as you get older frames like that. So some of those frames at the bottom there I showed you last time, they were looking a bit dark. And if you're getting chalkbrood, you will get chalkbrood at some times kind of throughout the year when you get dark, longer— sorry, shorter days and it's colder and there's more moisture in the air. The fungus, the fungal spores that exist kind of within most colonies in the UK for chalkbrood will become more prevalent. Now the standard way to, like the textbook way they say to get rid of chalkbrood, is to just kill the queen and put a new queen in that is completely resistant to chalkbrood. But I have found over the years that that's not entirely foolproof, that one, and it doesn't really work because I've got queens that I know are not going to have issues with chalkbrood, you know, like expensive breeder queens where they've put thousands, tens of thousands of pounds into selection, And you take a queen like that and put it into a colony that's got really bad chalkbrood, really odd frames, really high number of fungal spores in it, and the chalkbrood infection might go down a little bit, but it's still there. So it's not solely down to just taking out the queen and replacing the queen. You need to replace the infestation of fungal spores as well. The best way of doing that is a shook swarm, and I know it's a bit brutal, but I am planning to shook swarm some of these ones in here just to deal with that fungal chalkbrood infection, a little bit of sacbrood as well. And they're viral infections that will just kind of be caused by the viral load that remains on those dark frames. If I give them a fresh start, fresh new hives, freshly scorched hives, brand new frames, foundation, then it should remove all of those, all of those issues that come with the small viruses that bees get. Chalkbrood isn't the end of the world, it really isn't. It's not pleasant if you've just got like a few cells on a frame. I'll see if I can find something. We'll definitely find some today because it has been cold and miserable here. And I did see some last time I was in here. But if you are kind of seeing that, you're seeing like persistent chalkbrood issues, shook swarm is definitely going to be the way to fix it, I would say. So that queen knew I was going to say that. She's thinking, no, you're not finding any chalkbrood on me. What a frame! Look at that. I, uh, I do love working with these German Buckfast. They're just So incredibly calm, but they produce these kind of frames here. Get the little ring. You know, some people like the little ring of stores on there as well. I think as you get bigger, or as this colony gets bigger, you'll see less of that. But that is that's the top of two boxes, so the bottom boxes will probably be a little bit more packed. That frame there nice nice as well. Don't don't confuse what we've got on here for chalk. I've seen a few people do this. If you can kind of see any cells there that aren't capped brood and you think, oh, what are they? That's pollen. And it's not 100% sure what pollen that is, but it does— it looks a little bit like chalkbrood, but it's not chalkbrood. This colony here is really, really strong. Just frame after frame after frame of brilliant frames of brood. Like literally frame after frame after frame, like they don't stop. These are all different frames. Okay, that stores there, but brood on that side. Let's just kind of get another couple more frames out. I'd like to show you a bit of this chalk brood because it definitely was here the other day, but maybe just as these colonies are getting stronger— there's the queen. They're kind of a bit better able to cope with clearing it out, and hopefully it shouldn't rear its head again. There she is doing her thing. What number is she? Number 43. Very nice, that one. Whenever I put the queens in, I remember I always put the queen kind of facing away from me, so I never end up with a queen on the face that I'm putting the last frame back in on. Nice little tip there. I tell you that from experience. You can roll queens. If you leave the queen on the face that's adjacent to the one that you're putting in, don't be surprised if you come to a point where you find a dead queen on the bottom of the floor. Keep her on the middle of the face of the frame and put her in somewhere nice and safe, away from where you're going to be putting more frames into the hive. Right, so there we go. 3, 4 colonies done, all looking really, really nice. Taking advantage of the good weather. Which is good to see. If you're thinking, why is this video not a live video but he's filming it as live? I'm just trying out like a few different setups on YouTube. Having— not having issues on YouTube, but like my long-form videos don't get anywhere near as many views as they used to get. Live videos get a decent viewing up front, might get a couple of thousand views and then go dead. And then short form Everyone wants short form at the moment, so I'll be doing a lot more short videos. I'm trying to get value to everyone, but the long form seems to be suffering at the moment. So I thought I would do an as-live long-form video. So if you're thinking, why is this poorly edited? It is filmed as live. There's no kind of cuts or anything like that. So when I drop stuff or trip over stuff, you get to see all of that. But I will just let it run as normal. So let's have a look in this colony here. I do love working with like new frames and stuff as well. It makes beekeeping so much more pleasurable. So let me just tilt that one up a little bit. There we go. So frame of foundation, I reckon this is going to be brood, so eggs on that side. Beautiful brood on that side. So these have still got a little bit of space. That's just like they've started drawing that out but no eggs. So got a bit of space on there, bit of time. Again, nice frame of brood, brood in all stages. And that's it. Like, that is my inspection. I don't bother going down any further than that. I'll just have a look. And I said why in my previous one, and it might have been a little bit— people might have confused it slightly on what I meant. So when I've got brand new queens, good quality, well-bred, brand new F1 Buckfast queens, or any kind of good line of queens, I find in the first year, if you give them enough space, they won't swarm. So we're in 2024. What's the date today? It's like 10th of June or something. 10th of July, something like that. So if you've got queens that have been mated six to eight weeks ago, and you're putting them in a colony like this, for me, all you need to do is make sure they've got sufficient space in the hive. They shouldn't swarm. Doesn't mean they won't swarm. I reckon it's like below five percent. If you had a hundred colonies, maybe five would swarm using this approach. But this approach kind of works for me. And as you can see, none of these have none of these have swarmed yet. But I will try and balance things. So I'm trying to give the good colonies or take away. the resources, the capped brood from the good colonies, and give it to the weaker colonies in a sustainable way, in a way that isn't going to give the smaller colonies too much to do. But this is the reason that I don't need to go down to those bottom boxes, and as you can see, the bees aren't swarming. Now, if I opened one up and they were like pouring out the top, and I go in and I don't see eggs but I find the queen and she's clipped, I'm definitely going to go through and I'm going to look, because I'm thinking, well, they could have swarmed. I want to go and actually see what's going on down there. But I've not had any colonies like that yet. Just in terms of getting frames out as well, like you look into this one here, I think you can see it on that one, yeah, which frame would you go for first? I normally go for the 2nd or the 5th frame, but the way these frames have been drawn, I can see that this one over here, I've got the most space to be able to get it out without rolling anything. So I'm going to go for that one this time. Always wary of that when I'm doing stuff, when I'm going into my colonies. And nice frame of eggs there. Always check the first frame for the queen before I put it down like that though. And it's weird, people say you squish the bees if you do that. You don't, because you've got the runners on the side, but also the bees, if you give them kind of like a gentle laydown like that, they've got time to get out of the way. Right, so here we go. Here's one of the darker frames that I've got. So let's see if— oh, so there's the queen. Let's see if we can find any chalkbrood on this one. It's very interesting, chalkbrood. It's one of those things that you'll find it on one day and then the next day it's gone. And it is nice and warm, we've had a couple of days of sunshine, so they, they would have had time to bring nectar in, they would have had time to try and clear out the hive a little bit, do a bit of tidying up, but I can't find like a Oh, there they are. He says. Right, so there is— oh, do you know what? Oh, there we go. Just, I'm just thinking maybe I should do this on a frame that's not got the queen on it. So there is one cell of chalkbrood just there, and I don't know how close that's going to focus, but it's basically that cell there. I'll try and like zoom in on it. So, but you can see, look at— whoa! I told you I'd fall. There we go. But you can see this frame, this is an old super frame. Look how dark and manky it is. That one needs to be wiped out, needs to be melted down. And they're the frames that you're going to find chalkbrood on. It's much more rare to find it on like a brand new frame like that. Let's have a look, see if we can find a frame that's got a bit more chalkbrood on. Well, you see, like, I've put a very, very expensive Buckfast potential breeder queen in here, hundreds and hundreds of pounds that queen cost, and now there's chalk brood. And I could ring up the breeder and say, excuse me, you've sold me a very expensive queen and she's clearly not resistant to chalk brood. But you know what, if I had the old queen in here, there'd be hundreds if not thousands of cells of chalk brood, that queen there is resistant to a point, but when you get like a heavy infestation of it, then they're saying, come on, like, give me a chance. I need to build up my colony first and build up enough bees to be able to like support your ambitions of having no chalkbrood. And the same will apply to our queens. If you put our queens in a heavily infested chalkbrood colony, you're not gonna— it's not a silver bullet, doesn't work overnight. And you need to do other stuff as well, like fixing out all the old frames. Right, so this one here, really, really good strong colony actually. I know it doesn't look it, let me just show you it from here. It doesn't look like it's boiling over, that's just me, what am I doing? Oh, here we go, it's 3 presses, not 2. But all of those frames there, they're frames of brood and the bees are covering all of them. They're not bubbling over because they're just like super chilled bees. But that one there really does need hiving up. So that's my job for the rest of this week. I'm preparing these hives as best as I can in terms of the hives that these are going to go into, and then I'm going to be transferring them over when I get— doesn't need to be like a warm day, but it just needs to be not pouring down. You can even do it in the drizzle. In the drizzle's fine. Best to do it in the dry if you possibly can. There we go. So looking really, really nice, and if you've got colonies like this at home and they're on like double brood like that, perfect time to make a split. You could turn a double brood like this where you've got, say, 10 frames of brood, you could easily convert that into 4 or 5 frames of nucs at this point in the year. Just don't do it in the same apiary. If you're going to do it in the same apiary, just split it into 2. And it's much safer. You'll end up with a much better balanced split and go like from 1 to 2 to 4 and do it kind of like in a bit of a phased process as opposed to going from 1 to 5 or 1 to 6 in the same apiary. But if you're going to different apiaries, you can, you can just go wild, do what you want. I'll have to say, I'm really happy that there's not that much chalkbrood around. There was definitely more. Like, I was coming into colonies and finding, you know, like 6, 7, 7 Cells on a frame, and I knew that over time they would fix it, but I am still going to shook swarm all of these colonies here. What I really don't want to do though, and this is a good tip for shook swarms, what I don't want to do is I don't want to sacrifice all that brood. So if I shook swarm that colony now, I'll be going through shaking off every single frame like that. I'm not going to burn brand new clean frames like that because there's no disease risk in this apiary. There's always a disease risk in this apiary, but there's never been any EFB in this apiary. There's never been any EFB anywhere near here, so I'm not concerned about EFB. I just want to get rid of the old rubbishy frames. But if you are doing a shook swarm and you don't want to burn your brood and you've got a little bit of time, brilliant technique is just get the queen, put the queen in a cage that they can't get into, they can't get the fondant out, just put her back in and then just let all the brood emerge. And then shook swarm, and then just put the queen back in. And then that way you're not burning any nice capped brood, which can be— it can be, you know, just imagine putting that on the fire. I'm not going to do that, am I? Beautiful frame of brood. Now, if you've got disease risk, then you're going to want to do that as soon as you practically can, but I don't think we have to worry about that here, at least until we get any signs of it, you know. But there's nothing telling me on any of my colonies at the moment there is anything wrong. All looking very, very nice. No sign of the queen in this one, but there's loads of eggs. So interesting, on the bottom there, just got the signs that they're running out of space a little bit. Not, not anything imminent. But you've got on the bottom there the beginnings of swarm cells, so play cups at the moment because there's nothing in them. But over here, just got a couple of little play cups. You can see they're empty, one over there as well, and that is where they'll almost certainly lay them or load them up. Just get that over. And as I speak to Richard a lot about bees, you know Richard's supposed It's all about reading your bees and saying, where's this colony going to be next week? What's this colony going to look like in 3 weeks' time? And I can tell you what will happen if I don't do anything with these bees. Next week you'll come and there will be some swarm cells in a couple of them. A few of them will have swarm cells because they would have run out of space. Fast forward 3 weeks, if I left all of these colonies, they'd all be swarming because they've not got enough space, regardless of the age of the queen or anything like that. They are covering probably 10 frames of brood. Oh, as live, you know, covering like 10 frames of brood. Once that emerges and you get the bees die off that would have normally died off, you're talking 20 frames of bees in a 12-frame box. 100% going to trigger swarming. So you need to just kind of look ahead like that and don't, don't leave it too late. Leaving the bees to swarm and then trying to deal with swarm cells Is hard work and it only leaves you with a few options, which is splits. And I don't want to do splits at this time of the year in these colonies here because kind of getting ready for winter, we're like 2 or 3 weeks past the solstice now. I want to just start kind of keeping my bees in hives, beehives, and letting them get ready for winter and getting the last bit of honey out of some of them. So you just got to think ahead. Right, so I'm going to leave the fake Flow Hive. I'll just quickly show you what I've done on the fake Flow Hive though over here. So since last time, I switched the boxes around. So that was the top box last time, and that was— no, sorry, that was the bottom box last time with the queen in, and then that was the top box. And what I've done is I've taken the queen excluder out, and I know I've left a big gaping hole there, but the robbing at this point of the year doesn't seem to be bad, and this colony can definitely cope with But that box at the bottom there was full, absolutely full to the brim with honey. And then we've got a positive news story in that top box up there, so get to that in a bit. Right, next hive. So these are some of the hives that I'm going to be moving, um, 14x12. I just want to remove all of the 14x12 from this apiary because I've got a I've got loads of 14 by 12 hives that are kind of cleaned or bleached or scorched and ready to go, and I just want to have a good old cleanse up here and give myself some space. Basically, the issue I've got up here is I've not got enough space to split those. Well, I've got 7 nucs on 2 stands where really I just want to have 2 hives per stand. So I'm going to do some rejigging, but I can't do rejigging because basically all of the stands are full, and then it doesn't make sense to keep All of the different frame sizes in a single apiary. So I'm just going to move stuff around a little bit. But that was foundation last time you saw, and that's now fully drawn out. Not as quick, or not quite as slow as the wax, as the plastic ones, is it? Fully drawn out, fully laid up. And they do that and then they shun the plastic, which is really annoying. I've been seeing some brilliant frames of brood posted on social media at the moment, and there is something kind of like really special about a 14x12 frame of brood, just the way they do the rings. I really, really like it. This one isn't anywhere near as good as some of the ones that I've seen being sent in, but we'll get there. If I find a particularly good one, I'll get it out for the competition maybe. Let's have a look at this one. It's not bad, it's not bad. Really nice frames, and 14x12 even more so. You know, a frame of 14x12 like that, that's going to be at least 3 frames when that all emerges, and these bees, these colonies here, they need space. I do like making splits up in nucs though. It's It's easy and I think it gets them going quite quickly. There's the queen. So see what I see? The queen, centre of the frame there, and I'm putting her back in away from me. So I know that then I can put something in that slot there without killing the queen if I do it pretty quick. Really good habit just to get into doing it that way. And again, I'm saying it from experience. I didn't always do that. Just used to kind of chuck them in. And hope for the best and not come back to emergency cells. But that one's looking good. Other thing to say, you might, you might have noticed actually, is I had a good tidy up here. I'm generally okay with keeping on top of the apiaries and keeping them tidy, but this one had got out of hand. It had become really overgrown, but then also my box of emergency fondant had been attacked by, I don't know, badger or fox or something like that. So that needed That needed some cleaning up, so it is all nice and clean now. Right, just checking that feeder's not got a queen underneath it. And this colony here has really come on. If you remember a couple of weeks back, they just hadn't touched any of these top frames up here, and now I'm on a double brood space in the middle, which is really annoying. It means that they connect everything together, but you can see they're drawing out all the frames now. And we've not— we've still not got eggs up there. Oh no, there we go, just my eyesight. Okay, we got— we got eggs up there, so it's easy for me. Eggs in the top box, I'm not bothering checking because I've still got 3 frames of foundation there. We're all good to go. Hopefully this might speed up some of your inspections if you're kind of going through every single frame every single week. And you've got brand new queens in there and you've got plenty of space for the bees and you're thinking, this is a bit time-consuming, I wish I could do it a bit quicker. You can, you can cut corners at this time of the year as long as you've got good queens, as long as they're nice and young, good quality queens. blackmountainhoney.co.uk, always got queens available. Then as long as they've got space, you're good to go. I won't say it anymore, I know people get annoyed me saying the same thing again and again. Right, so we'll jump over to these ones over here now. I'll come back, I always do, I like to do the biggest ones last. I like to do the angriest ones last as well. And that's a good tip, if you've got colonies in your apiary that are angrier than the rest of the bees in the apiary, then don't do them, don't do them in order, don't do them first, just do them at the end. Makes your life loads easier. I used to do it, you just start at the left and work to the right, and then you come across an angry colony and you think, oh, it's annoying, and then the rest of the inspection is really, really angry. Whereas if you do it this way, you can get all of the nice, chilled, friendly ones out the way and then move on to the feisty ones, and then they're not that bad. We've got some good news stories in the other ones though. Right, so I did one frame checkerboard last time, that's the outside frame. So that's the inside frame, and the fact that they've not touched that outside frame shows that the checkerboard was speculative at best. Let's see if they've touched it. So, right, they haven't even touched it. Interesting. So if, if they do that with a checkerboard, that's 2 weeks ago they've done that, and I can just see the queen there, reverse the checkerboard. Tail between your legs. You got it wrong. I got it wrong in that instance there. The colony was not ready for that checkerboard. Now, everything's fine with the colony. Queen's there, loads of brood, loads of pollen. No chalk brood on this one either. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to reset that configuration. I just want to turn that queen round, get it on the outside frame, outside face going in. And then all I'm going to do is I'm just going to reset that config. Yeah, because I can see downstairs as well there's the checkerboarding. I don't think it's worked, the checkerboarding downstairs either, so I'm just gonna make life a little bit easier for them, give them all their brood in one go, let them get that emerged, and then we'll come back and we'll try again. You really do need to bear that in mind with beekeeping. You need to have confidence in your conviction when you're doing something, but then never have an ego, never think, oh, come on bees, like, I've showed you how to do that, you should be doing it. I made the wrong call there, and I've fixed that now, and we'll be good. Right, fake Flow Hive. Let's, let's do the fake Flow Hive now. They are a little bit touchy, these ones, but how confusing. How confusing was the fake Flow Hive last time? That was the most baffling. I'm not going to go in. I noticed the, the drop-off when I was checking for virgins in here. So last time, what happened? We didn't think there was a virgin in here, couldn't find one, spent ages looking for it. Found three superceder cells, but no brood, and all of the superceder cells had larvae in. I took down all of those cells, couldn't find the queen, chucked an introduced mated queen in. I'm pretty sure she's in here running around now, so let's have a look. So similar situation on this one here where. I brought a frame up to the top and the bees are really— not got many bees in this one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to reverse that and I'm going to take that down. That's an old frame that needs cycling out as well, but I'm just going to pop that off to one side and then I'm just going to move that over here and then we'll have a look, see if I can get this camera on it. See what's going on now? A lot of these frames need— they really need fixing in here. There's The spacing is terrible. And you just get yourself in a mess with this spacing here. What I should have done is I should have just scraped them all back, started it all again, and bought myself a dummy board, and that really would have fixed what was going on in this hive. You can see there, look, the spacers are not touching each other, and that's resulting in ever-increasing chubby frames. And frames that look like that. So really what I should be doing there is just kind of— I'm going to shake that one off and I'm just going to put foundation in it, and then I'm going to put that one upstairs and hope that the bees just ignore it for a little bit. But how about that? Look, we've got it back on track. Sometimes you need to have a gamble. So we've got eggs in there now. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna talk too confidently until I see my green-marked queen trotting around on the frames, but if I see my green-marked queen and we've got eggs, then, you know, I'm confident that all is good. And there she is, well happy with that. That is a colony that was causing me a huge, huge amount of issue and a lot of frustration, but what we have now is a mated queen, Eggs. I will come back and check to see if those eggs are turning into capped brood. I will just look on the last frame to see if that was the first frame that she laid on. No, so it's not. She's not been long introduced. I thought there might be some capped worker brood in there, but I'm confident. Lovely pattern on that one, and obviously it's one of our queens, so I'm confident that that would be good. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to put these back together again. I'm going to shake That horrible frame off, that needs to be fixed. I'm just going to put these frames of drawn-out comb that I've got upstairs back in there, just to try and create some, you know, some normality in here, get the frames actually touching each other, get the bees working them properly. And then I'm going to take that nicely drawn-out pollen frame and stick that at the end, just to get it all nice and together. You see, you've still got the gap at the end, but But that's looking loads, loads better now. Good news story, that one. That wasn't a good news story last week, but that is a good news story. Managed to fix that one. I'm just going to take my naff frame and place it— what we'll do is I'll place it there and then just turn that box around. I don't want them working that frame because I want to cycle that out as best as I can at the next inspection. I'll bring some additional frames with me, I think, and just start cycling out some of the old ones. So there we go, fake Flow Hive is done. I know this is a real Flow Hive. Real Flow Hive is done. Happy with that. I do— I said last time about how I didn't enjoy the solving of it and trying to work out what was going on, and I didn't solve it in the end. I just had to make a wild punt. But I do enjoy the, yes, we fixed it, we got We got it back on track, brilliant. I really do like that. Right, is that one— are we good to go? Okay, another 14 by 12. This is the most awkward 14 by 12 in the world, so hopefully this is fully drawn out now. This one definitely needs a new home. Let's hope I can get the frames out today without squishing the queen. I worry most about this colony here. It's got a very, very good queen in it and some very, very squished frames, frames that are just too close to each other in terms of the spacing. So I'm just going to super gently pull it out. Once you've got the— Oh, why is she always on the first frame? Every single time she's on the first frame. I don't think I squished her. But you see how they're still not drawn down to the corners. Lovely, lovely frame, really nicely drawn out in terms of what they have drawn out, really nicely laid up, loads of larva inside it. Oh, I have to do something funky with this one now as well. I really don't like putting down a frame that's got a good expensive queen like that. See if we can get her back down to the middle. Come on. Kind of, I'm checkmate now, innit? Bit snookered. What do I do? I've just got to wait for that queen to walk on. Here she goes. Don't, come on you, don't be silly. Right, that'll do. I can get her in like that. And again, putting her facing away from me, she's in. There we go. Right, happy with that. So queen's in. Let's get this camera up a bit. Nice looking brood, and they are drawing it out. And this is the, this is the trick, I think. You can see all that new Kind of comb that's drawn along there. This is the trick with plastic frames, you just need to just starve them, completely starve them of space, and they finally do draw it out, but it's so slow. Like, I reckon I could get 18 frames drawn out in the time that it— of like wax and wooden frames— in the time that it takes me to get 6, maybe even 24. Like, that's the difference. And once they're drawn out, I like them. I really, really do like them once they're drawn out. But it's just way too slow for me, especially in like a commercial operation. But then I guess you could argue once— what I'd like to see is what they do after you scrape down a frame and start again. Is it rapid build-up after that, or is it just the first one that's super, super slow? Be interested to see that. Right, these 2 here, these were full-size nucs last time, these 2 Langstroth nucs, but I've taken nucs out, so these I had to I sold a couple of nucs out of here, but you can see still got plenty of bees left. They were basically filling a double, so they were on what, 14 frames, and I just sold a nuc out of them. Introduced an F1 Buckfast queen from Black Mountain Honey, and the queen is not in the cage. So proof again, the queens can get out of the cage. And she's a monster queen, this one. I remember it's an Elgon queen. And she is huge. So let's see if the introduction was successful. Always nice to see, isn't it, if they're successful or not when we're doing them live. And you'll see I'll just cut off to the next one now saying, oh yeah, no, I couldn't find her. No, we won't. We'll do it as live. If we can't find her, I will show you. And there we go. I've missed queen cells again. I'll try to force things a little bit early. So still got the remnants of emergency cells. So that would be me coming down, knocking cells on maybe like day 6, day 7. But it's not as foolproof as doing it on day 8 or day 9, but I reckon it would still have worked. And if you're asking me, why didn't you just wait till day 8 or day 9? That's not how it works in a commercial beekeeping setting. You don't always have the luxury of that. And there we go, queen's been introduced. So, you know, take my advice with a pinch of salt if you like. It will still work like that, but I've had instances where it's not worked when I've done that. But if I leave it at day 8 or day 9 taking them down, it works 100% of the time. There's definitely a TV quote in there somewhere. Right, so I'm not going to bother looking for eggs. First time queens are introduced, it's nice to see eggs, but you know, she's only been out of her cage a couple of days, so Give her her time. I'm sure she'll be good. But that's a really nice strong colony already now, that one. It's covering like seven, eight frames. See what? No, seven, seven frames. That's fine. And pop the cage back in there so I know what the queen is. And let's have a look at this one over here. See if this one's the same. Always nice to get introduction successes. Successes, I should say. Let's get that one going. Not as many bees in this one, probably 5 or 6 frames, still a good amount. Queen's gone, so she's either in here or she is dead. Going to be the same, I suspect, with timings. Yep, so there we go, same. Just put that one up a bit. So it's still got some emergency cells there, so let me just get rid of those. Nervous now. So brood, all nice emerging brood, looking good. No eggs in that one. Oh, come on! Where's that queen? Need to find that queen, don't we? It's uh, if we can't find the queen, it's it's bad beekeeping. Really bad beekeeping. Like I know. I say I have like a schedule to run and can't come on here on certain days, but it's my fault if the queen isn't here and she's dead, she's on the bottom of the floor, then it is my fault. But I reckon we'll find her still. The cage was completely cleaned out, which is an interesting sign when they're cleaned out like that. Not necessarily The most positive of signs. Hmm. Yeah, I'm losing. I'm losing hope a little bit on this one. Oh, right. There we go. I found her, and the bees do not like her. I remember what this colony was about. So I'm going to get this, and I'm going to show you what's going on here. So basically, I had a few queens sent from Melita bees. that were really badly marked, and I mean like shocking, and I just couldn't bear to kill them because, you know, it's not nice killing queens, is it? But she's in there. I just saw her running around in the bottom down here, and I don't think she's— there she is. I don't think she's been accepted, and look at the state of her. So they are just— they're running around and they are going to try and kill her, I reckon. Yeah, they're trying to kill her, which is a little bit sad. So what shall I do here? Yeah, trying to kill her. So she will end up dead. So the best thing to do here is if I get that out. So you see her there, how badly marked she has been. I feel Quite sorry for her, to be honest. Just got to be careful that I don't kind of squish her. Just going to take that away. I don't want it to track that the whole time. It's supposed to track me. Here we go. Okay, it's got me again. Right, so I'll just show you on that camera as well. Oh, it's gone the other way. Well, that's why it wasn't showing it. See how badly my She's been. So I just wanted to give her a chance, you know. I didn't want to kill her. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get a cage. I'm just going to get a cage from the car and I'm just going to re-put her in a cage and try and reintroduce her. And sometimes that will work. Let me find a cage from somewhere. So I got her in a cage. You can see there. But I've not got any fondant to go in the cage, which is a bit annoying considering how much fondant was on the floor in this apiary before. But if you're in this situation, the second best thing is just getting some honey. I'm trying to get a bit of honey and a bit of wax in there like that. And then that will slow things down a little bit again. And if the introduction's failed, I've taken down all the cells, so if I come back and she's not here, they're immediately hopeless and queenless again. But I just, I like to give a queen like that a little bit of a chance. I don't just want to kill her because she's been marked so badly. But I had 3, 3 in the last batch. I reckon they let the apprentice have a go on them. Obviously not going to send those ones out to customers, but I do like to give them a go. So I'm just going to wipe that off, pop her back in. She's going to be thinking, come on, don't put me back in there. What are you doing? But you never know. I've had this before. If I had to hedge my bets, they're going to kill her, and they might, they might let her lay, and then they might supersede her. But you never know. I have occasionally had a situation like that where they'll just go on to be like, yeah, all right, go on then, whatever, and kind of accept her, which would be really nice. It'd be really nice if they did that. I'd be very proud of them. Right, Paradise Smart beehives. Again, we introduced a queen into this one as well, so I can remember which is which now. So I think on one side, on the— what are you looking at? I can't remember. For your side, back to front, never doesn't work very well. Just check that display is working still, right? I always get so worried that I'm not going to get it working right. There we go, I think that's working okay. Let me just put it up a little bit. Do you want to come and be a cameraman for the day? Camerawoman? Give me a shout. Always welcome. Especially if you've got experience, even better. Right, let's have a look here. I had a tidy up, you can see. Got all my ancillary bits. These are brand new, never used. No risk of any disease spread. And then my additional boxes, supers, not supers, sorry, feeders. Right, so this is the one with the queen, and then that one there has got a new queen introduced. So let's go into the one with my queen in first, or the original queen, I might add. Let's feel what this top— whoa, yeah! Okay, so we've got honey in the top box, definitely. That's loads heavier than the week before. These kind of beehives are always a challenge, I think. So like Flow Hives, fake Flow Hives, Paradise Smart Beehive, because that brood box there is super congested. But what do you do? Really not much that you can do other than extracting the honey. I've not got another brood box that I can put on because I've used it. That's probably what I would do, but then you're— all they'll do at this point in the year, another brood box is just fill it with honey. So all I've really got at my disposal with these is either take some frames out, make a split, or extract the honey and try and give them sufficient space and bruise the stores down here to give them space. They're my 2 options. Let's take a look though. I think we're going to see in here that they are honey-bound. That's going to be my guess. Certainly a lot of bees in here. And certainly very heavy frames. Yep, okay, so we're going to have honey in here. Wow. So there we go, honey bound, super honey bound. Just going to take that off and pop that somewhere. I don't want to smudge the honey, don't want to get honey remnants anywhere. This time of year is terrible if you get honey out. of the hive, they just start robbing it. Hmm, yeah, Buckfast queens, they do like to produce some beautiful frames of honey. Look at that, could be happy with that. Might have a taste. So that's 3 full capped frames I can see already of brood— of honey, sorry. How many frames do you think you've got there? That's— oh, what's happened there? So another full frame, and then I've got what looks like a supersedure cell there, but it's not. It's the remnants of an old emergency cell. So that queen definitely not superseding. If we see more cells like that, it's swarming, and I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of swarm cells in here because there's just not enough Nice space right there, swarming. Yeah, okay, so you saw that first cell, which was one cell in the middle. People say that's a supersedure cell. I say that's a load of nonsense. But you can see here we've got another cell, and we do actually have on that side there a capped swarm cell. So you could make a split on that one. I might. What have I got? I could, yeah, I could make a split. I'll take some boxes out. I think that's the best thing to do with that because that is— it's an artificially inseminated queen there, so that swarm cell there is not as a result of them trying to swarm. They're trying to swarm. It's not as a result of them being swarmy bees, it's as a result of me packing them in a bit too tight. So that's a perfectly viable, nice cell as well. So we can make a little split with that one. Might as well do that while we're here. Hopefully the queen's still here. So not as many eggs as last time, but this is a clipped queen, so she has really, really slowed down her laying. You can see at the bottom as well, telltale sign that they're out of space, making, making their own drawn-out comb on the bottom. Oh, tell a lie, this isn't the one. What have I done here? I could have swore this was one of my queens. Uh, one of the— oh, I must have got it the wrong way around. So this is the newly introduced queen. Okay, still, still the same though. We'll still, we'll still use one of those. Why not? But the queen's there. But this, this will be an F2 Buckfast split. So that is an F1 Buckfast queen. Oh no, no, no, no, it's not. I remembered I was going, I was going wild. So it's not— this is the one, one of the things fell off. So that is, believe it or not, an F0, a pure island-mated queen. And they are swarm cells down there, so we're good to go. So we'll make a split. It's a pretty easy one to do, and I do have— what have I got here? So super, super simple splits. Find a queen. Hopefully she's on the same frame. No, she's not, she's legged it. Brilliant, thanks queen. So first job for me is find the queen. Because it makes your life loads easier once you've found the queen. Wow, they are so honey-bound in here, it's unbelievable. Goes to show what I was saying before though, in terms of you don't need to, don't need to worry about inspecting your colonies when you've got this year's generation queens in. And then you come across a queen here that's a green queen, but they're swarming. But the reason they're swarming is because they've not got enough space, so it's my fault. It's not the bees that have done that, that is entirely me. And you'll notice again they've got capped swarm cells, but the queen's not gone because I've clipped her. So there she is, right, so the queen is there. Sort out that camera a little bit so you can see both. Right, so what I want to put in here is the queen but no swarm cells. So you don't want to shake off the Oh, I don't know. You know what, they're probably nicer, those cells, than the other one. So what I'll do is I'll just find the queen. There she is. Put that there. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put her on another frame. So I'm going to shake some bees in, make sure that frame there has not got any swarm cells on. Good to go. Find my queen. It's weird, you know, I'm right-handed, but I like picking up queens in my left hand. Weird. Could do it with the right hand as well, but I just, yeah, I don't know. Right, so there we go, pick up my queen and then just pop her over there. She wanders straight in. She's fallen off, but then we're good to go. So then, then it becomes easy. I've got the frame that I want with the cells on, means I can shake off all of the other ones. And in the split, I don't want any swarm cells going in because all that will happen is that they'll just swarm. They'll still go. So I'll share up all of the honey stores as well, and I'm just going to put more brood if I've got it. I don't even think I have got it, you know. I was going to say I'll put more brood in the split. I've got a little bit of brood on that one as well. Okay, we'll do that because what will happen is all of the bees are going to fly Fly back and come to the original hive. So I need to make sure that I've got some way of keeping them interested in the nuc, and I'm going to do that with brood. Also going to do it with the queen. So I'm just chucking a bit of stuff in there. I know this is going to look really, really messy, but I need to make sure these frames fit. Beauty of the Payne's Langstroth is that I can just use that feeder as an insulated dummy board. There we go. Get the roof on. And I'm just going to pop that over here, I think. Keep it as close as you can to it. You don't want to give them too much. You want to almost give them a bit of a chance of going into the new one. There we go. Get that nice and open. There we go. My screw there just to stop it closing. So there we go, the split's done. I know, I know that looks messy, looks really messy, and I need to come back and I need to fill that as best as I can. Wow, I've got a snail in there as well. Now normally what I would say in this situation here is take down all of the cells and just leave one, but look how close those 2 cells are together. If you're in that situation, you can't start trying to take down one of those cells because you're just going to potentially break both of them, and then what's the point? So it's a small split now, so I'm going to run the risk. I'm going to take down that additional one there, chuck that inside. I'm just going to leave those 2. None on that side. Just going to move that bit of brood underneath. There we go. Just going to try and tidy that up. Like, you might wonder why are you chucking all that stuff in the bottom of the hive. I like to collect that. I wouldn't just normally leave all of that at the bottom of the hive like that, but I've got nowhere to put it today. Let me just show you what I mean. So just trimming off all the stuff, that's, that's the safest place for it in terms of apiary hygiene. And then I've just got 5 frames of bees left now, 2 cells, 2 swarm cells, and most of the flying bees are going to come back to here. And if you come around here, that's where the other one is. Most of the brood over in that one. I've left 1 frame of brood in the other and the queen over there on a 4-frame. And I'll just come back at some point and sort out the amount of frames, kind of put the additional frames in that I need over there. There we go, easy as that. So let's get this super back on. As I said, don't worry about leaving gaps like that. If you left that for 2 weeks, they would just go wild and fill it with wild comb. A few days, no issue whatsoever. Right, so this one here, this is the one that has the introduced F1 Buckfast. So the other one was an F0— shouldn't call it an F0— pure, a P Buckfast queen. And then this one here, you can see we've got our introduced F1 Buckfast queen because we did a walkaway split on that hive. So it's empty, so she'll be in here somewhere, which is good. See if we can find her. So again, loads of honey. These are loving the honey in these hives. Let's hope they put some upstairs for me. And there we go, there's my queen. It was quick, wasn't it? The goosica, that one, definitely. Is she laying yet? She is. So she's already laying, so we're good to go. So happy with that. Need to clip her. Really important to clip the queens in these style of hives. Because you've seen how easy it is for them to get congested there. So I'll come back with my scissors when I come back tomorrow to do all of these, make sure I get them. Let's have a quick look inside here. It's a bit difficult. The one thing that I was struggling with on these hives is to see— yeah, the bees aren't up there yet— is to see if the bees are working them yet. They're not working that one. Let's have a quick look on this one. Felt a bit heavier, this one. Oh yeah, we've got bees working these frames now. It was just a bit of a challenge trying to get them out. But you hear people say, oh, my bees won't touch my Flow Hive frames, or they won't touch the plastic frames in any of these hives. But you can see the bees are, the bees are up there doing stuff. Not doing a lot, but you need, you need the density in the hive in terms of enough bees to do that. So making a split from this hive is not Not ideal for a honey crop, but these are— I've run these for a few years, we'll see how we get on with them. Can't really base them or judge them on the world's— the UK's worst honey season in decades, but I reckon that one there, I reckon we'll get— I reckon we'll still get honey. Plenty of time in North Wales, we've still got like 6 weeks, maybe 5 weeks, something like that. That's loads of time to get a nice honey crop. Right, let's go back to some of the other ones then. I think you'll agree though, we're kind of solving problems in this apiary step by step. Every single time we come back, we do something different. Every single time I come back, I have to, I have to like bodge something again, or like put some frames in where there shouldn't be frames, or leave gaps or something. But we get there in the end. Ultimately, we get there in the end. And if the weather stays like this, we should be quite nice. Right, so let's go into the keeper's hive. Keeper's hive was a real problem hive from last time, in so much that it didn't, um, it didn't have a queen. This one went drone laying a couple of times. I had real issues getting a queen in this one, and then last time I couldn't find the queen again. Couldn't find her. The time before, I found her But I didn't kill her because I thought we'll give her a little bit longer. And then this time I went in and there was no eggs and couldn't find the queen to kill her. So I came back and I just put a queen in. So I'm pretty sure we've got a caged queen in here now. If any of them are going to have failed, it's going to be this one. And I can see already from the behaviour there that she's still in the cage, which is potentially a good thing. Because I might find the other queen knocking around on the frames again. So let's just show you it here. I don't think you got a close-up of this hive last time. It is so cool being able to go into a hive, but you can instantly tell, or I can, that there is a queen still in the cage. I've said that loads of times and been wrong, so you never know. She's definitely in there. So queen's still in the cage there. Changing the camera around that way. There we go. So that's good, not killed her yet. We might find another queen knocking around on the frames here, and you never know, we might find capped worker brood now. Let's see what we find. And we do, we've got capped worker brood. Oh, it's a bit droney. Oh yeah, no, it's difficult to judge on some of these, you know, like they are honey-bound, but that's probably 95% capped worker brood. There are eggs in here as well. Can't judge it on that frame alone. If I had to hedge my bets, I'd say it's a drone layer. And that frame there shows me it's a drone layer, so there we go. At least we know. But there are still eggs in there, so I'm quite glad they hadn't got through that fondant yet. I need to find the queen that's in here and kill her. I don't think it's laying workers, but you never know. It's got a nice laying pattern. No, it's definitely not laying. It's like single eggs, nicely laid. There is, there is a queen in here. Right, we're going to— and then they chuck in a frame like that, because that's not bad. It's clearly not perfect, and it's clearly not something that I'm going to let Slide because the queen's not up to scratch, and the colony is dwindling. But I do need to fix this one, and I do need to find this queen. Sometimes I wish I was like fly on a wall, fly on the wall, or be on the wall inside the colony. So you could like understand and read exactly what's going on. So you can start to see on here a little bit of untended brood coming in as well, because there's not quite enough nurse bees just consistently coming out. A little bit of chalk brood, not much. You know, you've got to properly go looking for it. But the queen is definitely not mated well, so I've got an issue with the queen. So I need to find that queen, I need to kill her. Right, so I'm gonna have one more pass and then I'll come back to this at the end, I think. Save, save people watching it all. You can see people weren't too interested in me just constantly searching for queens last time, so we'll give that a swerve. But there is eggs. So definitely a queen in here. So I'll put it all back together again. I'll just leave that queen on the top there, and I'll just come back. I'll leave everything open, and I'll come back at the end and Fix that one. Won't let you suffer. But look, properly propolis-y. Is that a word? How much propolis there is on that hive is crazy. So I don't want to get it everywhere, so I'm kind of grabbing my camera in a different way. Right, so last hive. If you remember last time, this one here was, I thought was a drone layer. I said, right, that is a drone layer, and I'd gone through and was looking at it and there was loads of drone cells. Similar to the one that we've just looked at there, the keeper's hive. But then I remembered the timings. I've just done the camera wrong there, brilliant, sorry everyone, it is live, filmed as live. I remember the timings and I remembered that there can't really have been a situation where she'd laid eggs and they turned into drone brood yet, so I gave it a chance. That was a couple of weeks ago. Let's have a look inside it now. Also, this was the one that had a couple of nucs, overstocked nucs next to it, and I took the overstocked nucs away and let all the flying bees come into here. The most propolised down hive in the world. So there's loads of bees in here, and there is loads of honey in here as well. Yeah, they started moving it up, so the flow, the fake Flow Hive frames, we'll have a look in there as well, they're definitely up there. So this box here, this was the previous bottom box. I've taken the previous top box, put it underneath. I haven't capped, I haven't uncapped or bruised the stores, but I will do that if they continue to not move it up. But I'm hoping that just doing that will be enough to get them to start working the honey upstairs, and then once they have, we should be good to go. What I might do on here is do a split as well. So you'll see, it's so interesting, you'll see it again here. Look, that side not so much, but look at that side there. Still got that remnants of drone, haven't you? And you look at that and think, ah, it's drone laying queen, but it's not. It's a perfectly good laying queen, this one. And like, I'm confident of that. Let me shake that one off. So like, that is a freshly laid up side. That's not a drone-laying queen. There's not a single drone in sight, but over there you've still got some drones, and I reckon those drones were there 2 weeks ago as well. So you've probably got some like chilled drone brood that the colony's just not got around to clearing out yet. Let's have a look at some of the other frames though. You can't judge a colony from a single frame. Let's take a look at some of the others. What do you reckon? Pretty good. Oh, these are trying to— these are trying to swarm as well. Brilliant, that's just what I needed. So we've got swarm cells in this one as well. They have run out of space, and again, brand new queen, but you can't really blame this queen. The queen's only been in like 3 weeks. But they— it all comes down to space. Give them enough space and they're alright. So that was the old droney frame, and you can see it's still an old droney frame, so I reckon there is some chilled brood in some of them, but they will eventually clear it out. And then you've got them next to frames like that, perfectly nice frames. Again, nice frame. All looking good. So how am I going to do this split then? Let me think. I've not got another floor for this one. Um, first thing I'm going to want to do is just find the queen. Because if the queen's gone, I don't think she has because there's a lot of bees still and none of the cells are capped just yet. But if she's gone, I'll just knock the cells down to one, let them requeen, and hope that we get some nice weather. You can see on that frame there though, look, classic, always do it there, don't they, swarms? I thought it was going to be a nice easy end to the video just to show that this queen here hadn't turned drone laying, and then This is clearly as a result of these bees accepting all of the additional bees from that, from those nucs, and they're just, it's just way too congested, which is, it's a bit of a shame because I thought that I had this one in perfect space just to have enough bees to produce like a good crop in the fake Flow Hive and to not swarm, but no, they are They are definitely gonna try and swarm. The only thing I'm thinking is, did I accidentally squish the other queen? They're not emergency cells, but they might have started doing them anyway. Oh yeah, that does look like an emergency cell, that one there. Maybe I squished the queen. That'd be annoying if I did. I remember when I pulled this one out last time, the frames were very, very tight, so I could have just rolled her. Now we've got eggs though, so she's definitely in there. Hadn't really been looking for eggs up until then. Right, so how are we going to do this split? Let me think. I've got my Technoset hive over there. So we're gonna have to do it with the Technicet hive. So let me just go and grab that. That's the only one I've got spare at the moment. I'm gonna have to take some of the bits out of it as well though. I'm probably just gonna do this one, take the queen out on like a super little split, and this way I can try and keep a bit of honey going in this one. So if I find the queen, I'll take the queen out, make up like a 2-frame split or something, really like a small split with her Whoa! In the TechnoSet hive right next, so basically a walkaway split, and then knock all of the cells down except one, and then we should be good. That should be a relatively easy way to do it and a way that isn't going to impact the honey crop too much. Just checking what I've got in here. It's quite cool. I've been wanting to stock this one up for a while, but I've just not had the the time or got round to it. If you've not seen the TechnoSet hive before, let me give you a little close-up of it. Like a little mini mating nuc hive, but uses folded-up Langstroth. But there's loads of different configurations on it as well. If I do that this way around, you could be able to see this. It's the other way, isn't it? There we go. So these are all like little mini feeders. You can have it in— it's called a TechnoSec 8, but you can take out basically everything. So wherever to take this out, take these out like that, and then take these frames out. People haven't seen them before, they just kind of, you know, clip out into a full Langstroth frame. So I'll get some of those going as well because they're pretty cool. But then the Langstroth frames just kind of slot in like that. So just put like 3-frame splits in. Don't know if it's 3, it might be 5. Let's have a look. I will, I'll put that one over there. Let's get this sorted. Right, there we go. Right, so Operation Find the Queen is back again. I'm going to go through the top box one more time. I will just give myself a little bit of space, so one frame of brood, one frame of stores in there. That's going to be my entrance there. In fact, probably going to be best doing it on that side. No, no, no, I'll leave it there. That's all right, a little bit of separation's okay, especially if I put the queen on that side. So we're looking for a nice big fat golden Lagoostica queen. Should be pretty easy to find, marked green. Is a double brood though, so they do often, when you open the top box, they leg it downstairs. A lot of bees in here as well, so this is the kind of one where you might struggle to find A queen? I certainly do. It's nice to see lots of waggle dances going on. Good flow today. You can feel it in the frames, you can see it on the bees. Lots of dancing, lots of open nectar, lots of activity at the entrances. Does make finding queens a bit more challenging. Just because of like the sheer movement throughout the apiary. All the bees are busy; they're doing stuff. She'll be in here somewhere, and I guess this is the kind of part of the beekeeping that I do. Ow! They, they knew I was going to say that. I was going to say I do enjoy, and they just said, yeah, bang, stung. That is, that is the only problem I find with the Langstroth. When, when you get a sting on the thumb like that, they are easy to drop. You could hold— I find you can hold a National kind of one-handed a little bit easier, whereas the, the Langstroth, the smaller lugs Yes. Can make it a bit more difficult, but I do, I really do like the Langstroth. Wow, that's a heavy box though. You can see, look, even the bottom box is full to the brim, but it's basically full to the brim with honey. Huge amount of honey down here. So it'll be interesting to see if what I've tried to do with these has actually worked, which is put the honey I didn't uncap it, but put the honey underneath the brood and see how the bees react. I'm not expecting to come back and see all of the honey gone. And no, they haven't. You do need to bruise and uncap, so you need to go across and, you know, bruise it like that, and then the bees will— they'll get in and they'll lift that up. It is crazy, like this— most of the colonies here just not fussed with propolis, and then this one is crazy how much propolis it's got in it. Just every single frame is jam-packed full, and my fingers get so sticky. You can see like just frame after frame of honey. Really good flow on, but definitely makes my life more difficult for this manipulation anyway. So no, it's not looking like there's any brood down here at all. I was thinking they might have just cleared out the central few frames and started chucking in a few eggs, but it's just frame after frame of lots and lots and lots of honey. I'll just complete the inspection down here just to make sure. No, she's not there, so I'm not going to bore you with the rest of the inspection. Basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to find that queen in there, I'm going to put her next to 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, and the queen. No swarm cells. And then in this hive here, I'll knock down all of the swarm cells and just leave 1 remaining swarm cell. That's it. And then I'll let them requeen naturally. Hopefully still get a decent honey crop from that one. I'm going to go back to the keeper's hive as well. I'm going to find the drone-laying queen in there, and I'm going to kill her and then reintroduce that mated queen. Hope you enjoyed it today. It was— how long are we on? 1 hour. Quite long, 1 hour 23. I like doing these videos. Hopefully they're enjoyable. Hopefully you enjoy the new format as a long-form video. Let me know in the comments what you want to see next.