A Day In The Life Of A Beekeeper – April: Sending One Million Bees In The Post

So I'm going to kill this virgin queen here, and she is now dead. Right, that is it. The 2026 season has definitely started. So take a look at this. Bees. You've got a bee on the lens. But check this out. Got a little path here, Zane. Just run out. There's a virgin queen starting to emerge. Can you see it? We have confirmed that the queen is still inside, which is fantastic, and it is chock-a-block full. Alright, so day in the life of Laurence Edwards. What does it look like? I start off pretty much every morning going and putting the honey out in the honesty box here. I stack it right up. It's a mixture of some old labels and then we've got the new ones, but these are, these are the first iteration of the new ones. They're not the right stickiness. You can see it coming off. It's a little bit frustrating, but it's good value in the honesty box. So if you're passing through Nerkwys, come Come get yourself some nice honey. Okay, obviously, day in the life is going to involve the 2 girls as well. So we've got Lily eating a banana, and then what have you been doing in the garden?

Work.

Work? And what have you done to your finger? You banged it? What happened? Or has it just gone sore? Give us a kiss. Right, see you later. Who's that?

Zayn.

It's Zayn, that was good. If it's not Zayn, it's... Who could it be if it's not Zane? Zane. Oh, that is Zane. Yeah, you like Zane, don't you? Mummy, where does Zane live? Okay, we'll take you in. Say goodbye. Bye. Bye. Can Daddy have a kiss? I love you. See you later. But this is probably where I spend the majority of my time in my new little studio here, doing live streams and doing videos and organizing stuff. All I'm doing this morning is setting up all the labels. We staple these on the side of the nucs using the big staple gun, and then that's what we're going to do now. So the nucs are getting delivered. We'll go through them. We'll check them. Make sure they're okay. Big spray of water in them to cool them right down. My garage has got a nice big AC unit in there. We keep it about 16, 17 degrees. Ideally, I'd go a little bit cooler than that, but with the water, that's plenty cool enough to keep them nice and calm throughout the day. It's interesting because when they come, you'll hear they're like like big air conditioner units. And then we're going to put them in the air-conditioned room, and then it just comes right down. Really, really nice calm sounds in there. We're going to come back around lunchtime then to check on them, give them a little bit more water, and then we're going to go and do some more videos, and then we'll come back and get them all packed up onto the truck for Royal Mail later on. So we'll include all of that in this video. I do think Richard should be here. It's 8:59. We're running it tight today, Zane. He'll be here in a second, so let's wrap it up and get ready for these nucs to arrive. Right, Zane, a few things to show you before we get started. This is my new pride and joy, which is my Makita sprayer. I got so bored and so tired last year of like re-pumping the sprayers and then they'd break. So I just thought I'd get an electric one. So it's quite heavy, 15 liters, and it takes a Makita battery. But look at this, don't get too close.

Yeah.

That's cooling it. But the idea is that we, the nucs come and they're a little bit warm, so we give them a really good spray like that, all on the top, sometimes on the bottom as well. Something about that long and it feels like you're spraying them too much, but it cools them right down. And then we go and put them in the air-conditioned garage And we leave them there from about half 9 in the morning all the way through until 5 o'clock at night. I go back in 2 or 3 times spraying them. The temperature's kept nice and cool, but it's that water that really keeps them good. And then at 5 past 5, no earlier than that, that's our time slot, Royal Mail come in a big massive wagon that you'll see later and they collect them all. But come have a look in the garage. So you can feel in here, Zane, it's not, it's not like freezing cold, but it's definitely like a lot cooler than outside and it stays very, very stable. I've monitored it, stays around like 17, 18°C. But the reason that we do it this way and the reason that we don't just pick up the nucs and take them to the post office is I get to control the day now. I get to control where the nucs are from 9:30 to 17:30 or 17:30, and I keep them at the correct temperature. I can monitor them, I can check if anything's wrong, I can spray them with water. And then at that time of the day, much later on, I send them off through Royal Mail. Because it's so much later in the day, that journey is not in the middle of the day, not in the high sun, not when it's the warmest. So it means that not only do I get that day where I'm monitoring it, they go much, much later as well. And I'm always amazed how quickly they get out. This is crazy, Dan. So they get picked up half 5, whatever, on a Wednesday night, and then they start getting delivered the next day before 1 PM. But generally the post people, they don't want to carry around a box of bees for the entire day, so they just go and deliver them first up half 6, half 7 in the morning. So they're only in the postal service for 12 hours, 14 hours, something like that. Middle of the night, it's really nice and cool. They've had the nice treatment at this end as well. It's a brilliant, brilliant system. It works well. You do occasionally get colonies that fail, but as you can see, this is the setup, and I think that is Richard just turning up now. Right, so nucs are here. We're just going to get on with it because you've got to be quick. First job, getting the water in, giving them a good spray. Right, let's get on with it, boys. So first thing we need to do is get the sprayers on. But if you come have a look, Zane, see how packed out some of these colonies here are? You can feel the heat coming up. So all we do is give them a really good spray. And I would say for these ones here, Ben, like that's about the spray that you want on it, like that extreme. And then I kind of put a bit on the top as well, 'cause it helps just keep things nice and cool.

See that?

It looks excessive, but the bees will fix all of that. And whilst they're fixing it, it keeps them nice and cool and there's no risk of overheating. So good bit of water going into all of them. There we go. Okay, right, so I'm gonna leave that bit for Ben. If you stack 'em up over here. We were debating last week who's got the best job here, and we all, we all came to the agreement that Ben's definitely got the worst job.

Yeah.

But we change it up, we'll chop it, we'll change it up a bit. So all of the nucs are in. You can see it's very wet. I've got my fan on, I've got the air conditioning. Do you know what? It feels really nice and cool in here now that we've got the bees in. I give it another spray. I go like this. I don't mind it getting a bit wet in here. And then when I come back later on, I spray through there. I think this is the key. Keeping everything nice and wet and cool. So closing all of that up, I'll be there in a couple of hours getting it all nice and wet again. Ben and Richard are back off to go and do some more beekeeping stuff, and we have got lots and lots to go and film. So Zane, let's get on with it. So all of the nucs are packaged up in my garage. The AC is on, it's nice and cool in there. They're all sprayed, the temperature's gone right down, the noise gone right down as well, which is nice. We're going to go out, we've got loads to do today, loads of things that I need to film. But we'll be back about midday, 1 o'clock, to do a check, to give them another spray. I'll go through every single one and spray them through the gaps again, keep the temperature nice and low. But before I do that, I wanted to talk about a collaboration that is very much up and coming, which is quite cool. Now, you know I love my mini mating nucs, and I've got lots of Apidea's, and I've got lots of the kind of fake branded ones as well that are kind of falling apart as well. But Apidea got in contact with me and said, do you want to do some sort of collaboration? Can we send you some of our hives? And I said, well, I've kind of got a lot of them anyway, but definitely send me some if there's anything new. And they said they got some cool new blue Apidaias with blue frames that you can heat up to 130°C and clean them without any deformation. And I thought, that's really cool, I'm really interested in that. So they're going to send some over, I'm going to do some testing versus the old style ones and the fake rubbishy ones as well, and just see how they hold up in the North Wales environment. So I was very excited about that. They should be here in probably a couple of weeks' time, I would say. There are loads and loads of projects like that on the go, but today is more important. It's nuc day and we need to get up there and film some videos. So I always get a couple of extra nucs from Richard, bring them up just in case something goes wrong, but then I fill them up, put them in beehives. And Zane doesn't know it yet, but this is going to be my first nuc led by Zane.

That's what we're doing later on. Okay, interesting.

What does that involve? I'm not 100% sure if it's today yet, but we're going to do— I did my first nuc series, which went through the whole year, like every week, what's going on with my nuc and doing the inspections and swarming and stuff. And I think we get you in a bee suit and you just do it.

Okay.

And I won't tell you what to do. Yeah, but we're just filming. I think that'd be cool.

Why not?

You just got to guess. You can absorb some knowledge.

That's all I do anyway. Yeah, I just guess my way through life, to be fair.

Fake it until you make it.

Exactly, mate.

We're getting there. So chucking these nucs in the back here, you can see they're quite well wedged in. I could strap them in In the back of the boot, but it's a lot more work. I find just taking the chair back, putting them in there, getting the windows open, fine for a little 5-minute trip up to the forest. That is where we're finally going now though. We're gonna go and do it. Let's do it. So we're on the way up to the forest. The nukes are in there nice and chilled out. The thing that I wanted to talk about on the way up there is the 14-day Beekeeper Course and HiveQ. Now I've already done this and gone into a huge amount of detail both on social media posts and email, so I won't go into it here. But just a heads up, if you want lifetime access to the new HiveQ community that we are building, it's going to be on Circle, it's going to have all the live streams, it's going to have all my channel membership videos. You potentially get access to the course if you bought that as well. And then if you sign up before we transfer over, you're going to get Lifetime access to that. It is a heads up. I'm not going to go into any more detail because we are very, very close to the apron now. Lots of people seem to be taking advantage of that, and hopefully we'll see you inside Hive Q. Right, so first thing, don't. ever do what I've done in the past, which is put nucs in the back and then forget to get them out. So come have a look at this because there is lots going on up here. So if you're ever getting yourself a nuc, this is, this is how you install it. We're going to cover all of this today, but check this out. Got a little path here, Zane, seating areas.

This reminds me of when I was in school. Yeah, they had like the, uh, the outdoor area.

It's got the school vibe, hasn't it?

Yeah.

Right, so I'm going to just set up my nucs up here. Probably going to put another one. I'm going to put this other one. I want to keep that as a little path, but check out this nuc here. Look at these. These were the spares from last week, so I had a few spares in here and you can see all the pollen coming in, coming out. If I take the lid off, come have a look at this. Don't worry as well, they are very chilled. Look at these little clues they're giving you, little bits of wax there. Hopefully I've not left this one too long. We're going to go into this one today and take a look through all of the frames, but I'm going to go get the other one out of the car first. So on the messages and the emails I send out, I say to get something nice and solid to cover up that mesh there. It can literally be anything. So I've got some metal sheet here with a bit of wood inside. That's good. Or you can use like a poly roof or a bit of Correx. The idea is to keep the moisture out and as much heat in as possible, but don't worry too much about the heat. What you don't want to use is like cardboard or something like that. And what you definitely don't want to do is just leave it open because all the rain will go in. So as soon as you put your nuc in the apiary, I know I did that one previously, but as soon as you put it in, get something solid on it like that. A couple of stones to stop it blowing off, and that is all good. And then the final thing you need to do, don't forget this bit, really important, is open the entrance. Let the bees settle for about 5 minutes or so, and then just go in, take the screws out. It's about the deadest Makita battery ever, that one, but it worked. And then the bees will be a little bit buzzy when you let them out, but they're pretty chilled bees, so hopefully all should be good. And there we go, there's the first one coming out. Don't worry too much about them not all coming out because we sprayed these ones with water, so they're going to be kind of hunkering down, getting rid of all of that water at the moment. I'll go and open the other one, see if we get any bees coming out of there, but we'll pop back later and I'll show you that all is well. So my nucs are up there all settling in, and I just wanted to show you around what's going on. The embankment is kind of greening up a little bit, but come this way because we have a new path. So I've been doing loads up here. This is my therapy up here, coming up and just digging and doing stuff. All of that there is a wildflower bed that it's not raining on, so it's quite dry. But come and have a look, this is really, really cool. I just wanted A little place to sit and kind of watch the bees and stuff. But the real reason for doing this is where I've got my bees over there at the moment, I've got them big long, like 4 or 5, maybe even 6 to 8 hives per stand. And really what I want and what's best for the bees is just having 1 or 2 hives here and 1 or 2 over there. So if there were any ever— if there ever were any issues, you can kind of isolate that little mini section. It's going to reduce any sort of drift, which is transferring varroa and potentially diseases as well. So all of this is just Modification to the apiary and the sounds are so nice. But listen to this bit over here, the crunch walking through. I was thinking we could have like, I don't know, a little hive in here or something, Zayn. And then when all of these plants come out, you get some amazing pinky purple flowers on that and we can just sit there and like look after the bees. I think I'm just gonna hang out here for the rest of the day. The problem that me and Zayn have a lot of the time here, we've already experienced it this morning, is, is the glare. And working in the full sun, not the best for the beekeeper, probably better for the bees, but filming in the full sun is really, really difficult. So little shady bits like this that we can get up, get out of the shade, get cool, just means it's a lot easier for everyone working up here. So that takes you off to quite a cool little zone up here. My little seat is cool, isn't it? Nice little view as well. So then the idea is that we're just going to continue The paths around. You've got like the containers and stuff, all the forestry buildings behind, and we've got our beehives here. But the idea is just create lots of nice little areas where the bees can thrive in this beautiful, beautiful woodland. It's run out. When did that happen? Here's the challenge, let's see if we can get it going. I think it's way gone. Big guns. This has definitely got gas in. Bit overpowered. Mind your fingers. Okay, I think we're good. This is the thing for YouTube, try and make it a little bit dramatic and then you end up making yourself look like a fool a lot of the time. Right, should we do the non-dramatic versions then? Okay, there you go, as easy as that. I like a bit of, bit of drama. Do you know what, there is, there is method in the madness, it does, it kind of gets it a bit hotter and if you can get it in quickly it does work well. So a few pellets. These are a mix of— you can see the different colors. I've got maple pellets and lavender pellets. No, no reason other than I like the lavender pellets, but maple was just what was cheapest. You see it go, and then a few puffs. That should be good to go now. Leave that to burn 5-10 minutes and that will go All day long. Green plug in, and then we'll get into the bees. Okay, that's a couple of videos done. I've done the update on the Hive Watch winter video, getting through to 27 kilograms at the end of the year. I've also stuck the queen excluder on, I've stuck some supers on, I've set up some new experiments. Now I can just leave the bees to it, but I've got tons more videos to go and do. Next up, then, we're gonna stick some nucs into some Abello hives back over in that lovely spot in the apiary. So I've just taken one of the nucs that we brought up here and installed it into this Abello poly hive here. Frame of foundation in there, couple of frames of stores. The bees have got plenty of space. Found the queen. We've seen eggs. Oh, I really do like putting nucs into hives like that. But this one here is good to go. And then the idea is that we're going to come back to this one regularly throughout the season. We'll probably do it weekly. And I just want to show when the supers are going on, when I do my demerest splits, when I take my honey off, when I do my treatments and revamp the entire My First Nuc series. So hopefully you're interested in seeing that one. If you are, definitely hit the subscribe button. It feels like we're getting a lot done today, Zane, but I'm looking at my list, we've still got tons and tons more to do. But I think we need to get back, check on those nucs, make sure they're nice and cool in the garage. Let's do it. Right, Zane, we're back home. First job is to come and fix these nucs. And when I say fix them, I mean just get in there, give them a really good dousing with water. This is where you notice how well the AC works, 'cause it's warm. We've been out doing the stuff, and then you come in here, and how nice is the temperature in here, Zane? Like instantly cool. Very, very happy with that. And then looking at the bees, this is exactly what we want. You start to see when you put the water on them, they come down and you can't see them on the top bars. And then as the bees get warm, they kind of come back up again because this is the area that's nicest for them. So when I see them coming back up like this, it's good. And the majority of them are still a bit lower, so it's just a case of going through and spraying them all again. So I'll go through every single one, and then what I do for any of the ones on the top, I go there, and then if you just spray water in through the gaps, and that's what Keeps it perfect. I'm going to go through every single nuc here, stacking them up, make sure it's cool. We'll close the garage back down again, get the AC on, and it's not until 5 PM that Roarmail are going to come here and collect them. And by that time, it's much, much cooler outside. I don't know about you, Zane, I could hang out in here for the rest of the day. It's very, very chilled, but lots more work to do. Let's get it sorted, close them up, and we'll have some lunch. So the nucs are nice and chilled out in the garage. I need to take a couple of queens up to the apiary because what I did about 2 weeks ago now, I took 2 nucs out of 2 colonies and just took the frames out. So they would've gone hopelessly queenless. They would've created emergency queen cells. The virgins almost certainly would've emerged. And the weather now is actually quite good for mating, but I'm not sure. I might need some mated queens. So Black Lantern Honey, obviously we've always got mated queens on hand. I've learned now that it's a good idea to try and keep a buffer from week to week. So this is last week's queens. They've been in here for 4 or 5 days now. So this one here is a premium F1 queen, 2026, from Black Mountain Honey. All of the premium queens come with the cages like that marked up, and that queen there is good to go. So without taking them all out, they're the queens that are left over. I've got 13 queens left over, and I just give them a tiny little spray, not directly on the cages, and then close them back up. 30 degrees in there, about 65-70% humidity. But these 2 queens here, I'm going to take them up to the forest, and we are going to requeen 2 hives. All as part of this video. Oh, I've got to remember we've got a— it's blocked in there, isn't it? What's that? What was that?

That was a can of Monster.

What, underneath the wheel?

I put it next to the wheel so I didn't forget.

Oh, sorry, mate.

You want to see what happens to a can of Monster when you run over it with a pickup truck?

I was going to say, are you going to drink that other can or are you going to put that under the tire as well?

Um, should we go to second time lucky?

I want to know the reasoning for it though. Was it just laziness because you didn't want to put it somewhere?

No, your car was locked.

Car was locked. You're thinking it's a nice gimbal in my hand.

I thought I'll put it next to the wheel. I thought that's surely I'm going to see it before we get in the car.

I thought the logic was in the shade, you've got to make sure it's cold.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so that's fine.

Yeah, yeah.

It made a cool sound. We were kind of thinking before, what should we do for this segment here? But we got the monster segment, so all I was going to say was Two queens. This will be fun going and doing this video here because almost certainly the cells will have emerged. So I'll be able to show you what the cells look like. Hopefully some capped, hopefully some emerged, and then we can go hunting for the virgins as well, which would be pretty cool. And then if we find the virgins, there's even though it's nice weather, there's going to be no drones up in the air. They're not mature yet. So I know I have to find the virgins. Ah, kill the virgins. I do not like doing it. And then add those queens in, and we'll get those colonies back up and running.

Right.

So it was about 2 weeks ago I came up here and took a 6-frame nuc out of both of these hives here. I didn't replace the frames, I didn't replace the queens, and I know there's going to be a little bit of a mess inside. What I'm going to do now is go through both of these, check them out, take down any queen cells, kill any virgins, add in mated queens, and get them right back on track. So because the colonies are queenless, I will give them a little bit of extra smoke. You don't need to go wild with it. And then I'll leave the smoker up there, and then obviously veil up for these ones as well, full-size colonies. Right, so let's get in. Okay, looks like it's not gone too crazy. With any burr comb. Come in here, Zane, and have a look close up. So you can see over this side here, you've got gaps over there that you shouldn't normally have. You should never leave gaps like that in a beehive, but because I've knocked this colony back so much, they're not filling it up with drawn comb because there's just not enough bees. Now this colony here overwintered on a double brood. It was a big, really nice, big strong colony, and all I've done is I've just taken a nuc out and sold it off to someone. So what I'm expecting to see in here is An excessive amount of stores, which is what we've got, which is great because we'll use that making up some splits. But then also, I know there's going to be some wild comb knocking around in here because I did leave it in a strange configuration. And just as I started pulling this frame out here, Zane said, whoa, whoa, there is something down there. So take a look at this. And this is what I mean in terms of clearing up wild comb. The bees will just go and do stuff like that. And what's really interesting here is not only is that wild comb, but that is wild Drone comb. So take a look at the comb at the top up here, Zane. The size of the cells, all the hexagons are pretty much the same size apart from a couple down there, but then compare the size of the hexagons up here and down here. Now this is standard worker brood up here, standard hexagon size. These extended, these bigger hexagons, that's drone brood. And if I left that and there was a queen in here, she would go around at this time of the year and fill that up with eggs, unfertilized eggs that would turn into male drone bees that will go out and mate with virgin queens in the Now I don't want crazy wild comb in my hive because it makes it very, very difficult to manage. Now you could argue that I should have done this when I took the nucs out, but I was in a real rush at that time. No excuses, but I'm back up here doing it now. So if I shake the bees off here, you might have seen a little bit of nectar coming out there as well. And what's brilliant is that on that side of the frame is everything else that I wanted to show you. I didn't even see that there were all those cells on there. How funny is that? So I'm going to take off this bit of burr comb first, and then we'll talk about all of those cells. Any bits of comb like that, stick them in your wax bucket, melt it down at the end of the year. You'll be amazed just how much wax you get. But when I was talking at first about this video, what we were going to find, we were definitely going to find emergency queen cells because I left it with brood in all stages, but I took the queen away. That means that all of the bees in here used the emergency response to create themselves a new queen. And that is exactly what we've got here. Now unfortunately, the chances of those queens getting mated at this time of the year where we are in North Wales are incredibly low. If I allow that to go through naturally and those queens go out and they fail to mate, every single bee here will die. So I'm making the decision today to take down these cells, to kill whatever is inside, and add in a new mated queen, knowing that the colony is hopelessly queenless. It's a tidy-up operation. I could have done this at the beginning, but I'm choosing to do it now so I can show you what's going on. But this is really interesting, Zane. I want you to get as close as you possibly can to this here, because what you can see here is a virgin queen starting to emerge. So if I give her a tiny hand, watch this. One virgin queen. So I'm going to kill this virgin queen here and and she is now dead. Now, I hate doing that. It is the worst possible thing in the world to do, but I know that that queen cannot survive. The chances of her keeping all of these bees alive is next to zero. So having the confidence to make that decision, although it's really, really difficult and it's something that I do not enjoy doing, I know it's for the greater good of this colony here. I'm gonna go through and do that to the rest of the cells that are in here as well. I'm gonna shake all of the bees off. I'm gonna render this colony hopelessly queenless, which means it's not got a queen, It's not got any virgin queens, it doesn't have any cells that are alive, and it doesn't have any of the resources to create themselves a new queen. At that point, I will add in my new queen, and because everything is now reset into a hopelessly queenless state, by the time the bees eat their way through the fondant to release my new queen, they should accept her, and this colony here will be successfully requeened. This is a virgin queen that cannot get mated due to the timing of the year and the weather, This one here is a pre-mated queen that doesn't need to go through and tolerate any of that risk. Literally, as we were just talking there, I went to go and do the second one and it was open, and I thought, well, that wasn't open before. But if you come and have a look here, Zane, I managed to find her and get that one as well. So we are 2 queens in. I'm not going to let the same mistake happen again. So that is 2. And then I can see just from the way that the bees are behaving, these 2 here, that one there is open. So this one is another one, Zane. I feel really, really bad at kind of letting them out like this and then killing them, but it's the only way to make sure that they're all dead. No, I'm deciding that one there is underdeveloped, so all I'm going to do with that one is just squish it. And then this is what you have to do at the end, once you've made sure that there are no virgins in the cells, is you shake the bees off like that. And you inspect to see if all of the cells have been killed. Now look at these three over here. That's a cool shot, Zane. So their emergency cells naturally emerge. Pretty cool, yeah? But then the job is I need to go through every single frame and do exactly the same thing. So the reason that I'm shaking the frames off like that is that I need to make sure that there are no bees. You've got a bee on the lens.

Jump!

Right, there you go. Need to make sure that there's no cells on any of the frames. That's the most important thing here, because otherwise the queen that I have in my pocket might not survive. Okay, so that top box is good. And then a good way of moving a top box and isolating queens is putting it on the queen excluder like that. And then we just need to do the same on the bottom box. But check it out, there's a lot of bees in here. This is a big, strong colony, and you can see, I would say there's some brood down here, so we're likely to have some frames here as well. Well, so there we go. We've got brood on that one, mostly worker brood, little bit of drone brood, but no queen cells. But you wouldn't have known that had I not shaken them off. See what I mean with the frame there though, then? If I was to say to you, right, on this side here, find all the queen cells.

Yeah, no chance.

You just like, you might find some, but on that other one I wouldn't have found any. So let's flip it round and I'll shake that off again. I'll try not to shake them on you. Okay, I'll do like a slow shake. And yeah, nothing on there. But look, Zane, you see it? And it's really easy to miss. So a lot of people say, I don't need to shake the frame, but I would have missed that one there. That is a definite emergency cell. Try looking in them. I'm just going to take all the cells down. So a bit of broken foundation there. Drone brood on that side, a little bit of worker there but no cells. Right, so I'm going to compress everything back down again. I'm just going to take some of the frames over there. I'll be able to double brood something else. I'm going to give them some of these frames here just with a bit— make a bit more space for them in the brood nest. Right, so queen excluder on like that. So before I put the supers on, I'm just going to pop open the tabs here. So my queen is in there. F1 Buckfast queen. This is a premium line from Black Mountain Honey, which is us. You can see they're starting to consume that fondant, and all I do when I'm doing my own bees, I take both of these plastic tabs off here, and what I'm doing there is I'm exposing both sides of fondant. And as long as the colony is hopelessly queenless like this, you've taken down all of those queen cells, killed any virgins, then ideally you want you would wait 24 hours before popping these tabs. So put it in, come back and pop them. But do I do that? No, I just put it straight in. So once they're in this state here, I take my cage, I make a little bit of space, I pop it in between 2 brood frames, I push everything back up together nice and tight, and then I leave the bees to it. And the bees will just eat their way into that fondant and release that queen, and this will be a successful introduction. So also, at the same time, these bees definitely need space. I'm going to make use with the additional brood frames there, but what they do need is they need a super, they need some space. I'll pop this miller feeder back on as a crown board and then we will strap them back up. That colony is set up for success this season now. We've taken a colony where I've taken a nuc and given it to a friend, got them back to a point where they're hopelessly queenless, killed a lot of virgins. I really am sorry about that, but we've introduced a new mated queen, added some supers on top like that. Hopefully before we get to the June gap, these ones will be filled and we can harvest some wonderful Black Mountain honey. So this is the nuc here that we put in a few hours ago, and remember when I opened it up and the one single bee came out and made me look like a bit of a fool? But this is what happens after a few hours, after the sun comes out. The bees will go out, they'll do big circles and even bigger circles and orientate themselves to this spot here. Once you've placed the nuc down, there's no second chances. You can't just move this nuc now because it causes all sorts of issues. So know exactly where you want to keep your bees, Know where you want the flight path to be and then just enjoy it. This time here when they're in the nuc, you haven't got to do anything, just sit there, cup of tea, put your veil on if you're worried about getting stung. I'm just used to getting stung anyway, but these bees really are very, very chilled. So just walking around the apiary there doing a little bit of an update for the paths that are going around and the embankment and the flowers that are growing, it has made me realize how much I truly do love this forest and I'm very rarely up here. I'm kind of up here for 3 or 4 hours a week doing some management with the bees, but I think the decision to take away those big stands and not have 10 colonies all stacked up next to each other and have them dotted around is going to be much, much better for the bees. And that's the driver behind it up here, which is just making things work for the bees, making things work for the beekeeper. But I'm most excited about the next phase, which is making it work for all of the other creatures up here as well. So we're going to put together some cool things in the forest. We're going to try and focus on some of the other pollinators and help them along the way, investing in some cool homes and things for them to live in. I really, really am excited about that part of it, and we'll cover all of that on the channel and make it as fun as we possibly can. Okay, so we're coming back over to do these 2 videos again because when we were doing the video after this, Zane realized that my mic wasn't working, and then we checked back and this video didn't get done. So we're back here and we have no idea what's happening inside this Abelo nuc, but we do— we know that it's all good. But what can you do? That's the reality of it. So The queen in there is fine. We've got all the B-roll. I don't even need to take it out, do I? I can just talk to you on the camera and we'll just go through the process again. So inside this nuc here, the colony was a complete and utter mess. They were close to starvation through my own stupid errors. I found them just in time, literally, I would say minutes before they were going to die. You could see the wings like flapping around. And I know if I hadn't done anything that night, it would have got cold next morning. The colony wouldn't have got through. But what I did and tried to fix them was take out the frames, drizzle some of that invert sugar syrup on there to get it to sit in the frames, but also coat the bee, coat the queen, give them that urgent carbohydrate that they needed. I put some feeder in up the top as well, and then I stuck everything back together. And I came up in the next day and I looked at it and I thought, yeah, they're definitely getting robbed out. So I came back in and closed that entrance and turned it around a little bit like that. And then after 2 or 3 days, I started to notice a couple of bees coming in with pollen on their backs, and you don't often get that with colonies that are being robbed out in any way. So I don't think it was robbing, I think it was just quite a lot of frantic activity, maybe a little bit of defense in there as well. But the signs were good 2 or 3 weeks ago, and then going in today we have confirmed that the queen is still inside, which is fantastic. There's eggs, there's brood, there's not that many bees. I'd like to see more bees in there, but they will build up naturally now because there's brood in all stages, there's a queen that's laying, they got everything they need. So that's a really good news story, and I have to say it's a good news story, or a story that I didn't think I'd be talking about. I don't know about you, Zayn, when you saw those bees a couple of weeks back, it was pretty grim.

Yeah.

And they did not look good. And in my experience, when they're like that, it's quite difficult to get them back from the brink. Not that I did anything special, like you can do exactly the same thing, which is just drizzle them, or drizzle sugar syrup all over them. This queen in here is now affectionately known as Drizzle because of that reason. But doing that, giving them the sugar, coating them, getting them sticky, putting them all back up together again, putting up a defense so they don't get robbed out and just giving them the chance to eat and consume and survive has got this colony of bees here back on track. And it's always a really good thing for you to have on standby, which is a spray container that you can fill up with some sugar syrup, 1:1, 2:1, whatever you've got, and just spray it all over the frames. Even better than that, don't let them get like that in the first place. Make sure they've got enough food, enough fondant to see them through. But I'm quite proud of that. Not that I messed it up and got close to starvation, but I'm proud of getting the Mini Plus National through. It's not easy to get colonies of this size through the winter, and it means that we can just go again and raise a queen in this one here along with the other boxes we've got. So it's good, it's very, very good news. I am very relieved to see that the queen is back to her best condition in this hive. So while Zane was sorting something out there with the cameras, I was just opening up this hive here because it's a double brood configuration and I wanted to start setting up my first Double brood, 10 over 10, start to finish a colony. So I just opened it up to take a look, thinking, okay, I'll have a look. Double brood colony, what's going on? Have a look at this. So just opening up this double brood colony here, and it is chock-a-block full of bees building all of the comb up there, which means that yes, the spacing issue is wrong, so we'll have to fix that on here. But also it means they need supers, or they need space, or there's Definitely going to be swarming going on. So I'm going to jump inside this colony here, full double brood, do a full inspection. I'm going to put this off over to one side for a second, and then I'm going to set this colony up here as my first starter finisher for 2026. It's the 7th or 8th of April today, something like that, and I always have to set one up early just in case we get good weather, which we've got. So I'll go ahead and I'll see if I can raise some early season grafts this week using this double brood. But now I'm going to go through and get every single frame out, see how the bees are going on this double brood into 2026. Right, so we made it back home. It's half past 4. Wall miler here, just setting up all of the Yorks. I'm gonna go back in, see how nice and cool it is in here. We'll do a final really good dousing. I like to do it when they go on the Yorks so they're wet on the ride back to Chester. Which is only like 20 minutes. It's really, really nice. But you come back in here, you can hear the sound. Yeah, nice, calm, relaxed colonies, not boiling over. You've got the odd one that's got a few bees on the top, but we'll get in there, we'll do the water again. Every single colony here is going out to a customer today. 83 nucs. We've got to get them soaked up, check the labels, get them on the Yorks, get them into the back of the van, and then they will go out for delivery tomorrow.

Bravo.

So last trolley load here. We've got an odd number going out today, so we've got 5 on this trolley. But it really is a wonderful day for doing nucs. And Zane hit the nail on the head just as we were coming down here and he said, so much cooler now than it was earlier on in the day. That's the exact reason that we do this with the nucs. Keep them nice and wet, keep them till late in the day when Royal Mail get them. Give him the best chance of getting there safely. See you later. So another nuc day done. As you can see, nuc day is a very hard day, but it really is very rewarding. There is so much hard work that goes into those nucs at the back end of the previous year, and then Richard getting them all prepped and doing the checking and marking the queens and even just screwing on the ventilation boards. When you start doing it in quite a lot of numbers and even moving nucs there, it becomes quite an arduous task, as Zane would definitely attest to. But I love it. I love it. And it's my favourite day of the year. And even better is seeing the journey that those nucs take over the next few weeks. Customers getting them and putting them into their beehives and doing their first splits and putting their first supers on and getting their first honey. That is the reason that I do all of this. But there's definitely been a theme going on today, which is breaking stuff. Zane zapped his Monster Energy. I wrecked my terrarium. I think we broke some other stuff as well. So Zane, probably time to run those outtakes. That's that's in the outtakes, isn't it? Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. Ah yeah, well let's get out of here. I'm going to close up. We're going to go to the forest. Keep that completely.

Ah! Ah!

Look at this nuke because this is called your nuke. We carry on. Just run out. Like Batman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I look forward to— I don't know what I'm talking about. It's too YouTube. And I've always used—

ah!

Inside this—

ah!

I'm just talking nonsense now. Should we start again?

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.