Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees With Laurence Edwards - Episode 7

Hello, it's been a very, very long time indeed since I last did my, uh, Q&A session on here. Uh, it's probably been about 4 months since I actually recorded a YouTube video as well, so apologies if you feel you're getting hammered by the Shorts. But I thought I'd come on tonight and do a little bit of a Q&A session. I see we've got 4 people on already, so I will just open it up to everyone Uh, if you want to ask any questions, just stick them in the chat. I will just talk for a little bit first about what's going on, maybe some plans for the seasons and how things are going. So it's been, it's been very busy. Normally for me, it kind of goes quiet around January, uh, and then things pick up again in February, and then it's like that throughout the course of the year. So it's always pretty busy. January is definitely the quietest month of the year though. And things last year were pretty crazy in the bee world. It didn't stop. And then we went straight into honey gift sets, and they sold very well. And now we're just preparing and getting ready for next season, because before we know it, it's going to be straight back into it. I was out today and I saw the catkins were already out around here. It was 12 degrees Celsius, the bees are flying. So I thought it's about time I come on here and did a bit of a Q&A session. A number of people have requested it. If you're wondering what I'm drinking today, I've got a cup of tea in a in a B cup, of course, in a B cup. And I've got some squash as well. I always have a nice glass of squash. So yeah, I see some people are coming in. Hi Kushtrim. Hello, first one in. How's it going? But yeah, stick some stick some questions, stick some comments on there. Um, I'm happy to talk about pretty much anything. It's crazy because the last time I did one of these videos, like, Arsenal were a mediocre football club, absolutely rubbish, and now they're top of the league. So I usually deflected any questions about Arsenal, and now I'm more than happy to talk about Arsenal. So I see Jim Number 2. Jim, you've been requesting this for a while. Hello, uh, thanks for sending through your videos. Uh, I hope you're well. Uh, Ollie saying, are your F1 queens you're selling this year from your German queen? Right, so I've got so many different breeder queens now, uh, so probably got like upwards of like 10 or 12 breeder queens. I am selling a few of them. Um, I can take UK F1s from my German. I've got a couple of Danish. I've got some really good UK lines as well that are historically European. Um, but I could— I can do— I can do any of those. Uh, did you like the German ones? Uh, the German ones are very, very good from Lutz Eggert. So yeah, I've got loads of different ones. Um, I'm just looking here. Uh, Ross saying good evening, painted my first new hive today, one down, 2 to go. Very good. How did you paint that one, Ross? Uh, Ian saying hi, uh, from the windy and rainy Cotswolds. It is properly hammering it down here today, going crazy. Hello from Romania. Very nice. Hi, Dan. Good evening. Saying any losses so far? You've lost 2 colonies, right? So do you know what, I've not even looked because the bees have not been active yet. I'm just not, not going in, not looking. And I know some of the videos might look like I'm going in and looking. I have not recorded a video for 4 months, not even a single short, maybe, maybe one or 2 shorts, but I've not been doing anything, and the way that I kind of run my colonies now, I always think that I'm just gonna— if the colonies are dead, then I'll just leave them and I'll sort out the mess in the spring before the bees start, uh, flying. I'm just looking at Bozo the Clown, they're saying I look like a bum, so thanks very much, I'll take the insults, no problem. Oh no, actually no, it's asking me whether I want to show that comment, so there we go, we can show that one. Thanks very much, Bozo the Clown, great name. Is my tea in a beaker? It's kind of not a beaker, but it is a very nice tea, uh, honeybee mug, which is cool. Um, but where were we? So, so yeah, there probably is some losses. I'd be surprised if I didn't get 10% losses. That's what we normally go on. Last year we got less than that, but the big thing that I say is before the bees start flying and working out where those losses are I will be going in identifying the ones that are either losses or completely dwindling, and I'll just be sealing them up. And I know it sounds a bit harsh, and you probably end up with like— I've got 100-ish colonies plus all the nucs now, and you might do one or two that you seal up that could have got through, but I just can't run the risk of any of the colonies that are potentially diseased being robbed out by all the rest of them. And on the topic of disease, like, we've got the all clear but I'm just not running the risk anymore of deadouts going into spring because the first thing that will happen to those deadouts is there's, there's no bees in there. You've just got a box full of honey. The bees, when there's not much out in April, will go and find those deadouts, they'll strip them down. So if you've got one colony that's got EFB and it's a deadout, and then you've got 20 other colonies in that apiary, then, you know, they're all gonna get it, and it's just a really easy way to spread it. Um, I see Bozo the Clown is really enjoying it, so you don't, you don't have to stay, it's fine. It is just me and a wall, there's not really much else going on. Um, right, babies, what's the plan for 2023? You said last year you were looking at downsizing. Is that still the plan or has it changed with the queen breeding? Um, so, uh, definitely either staying at the level that I'm at at the moment or significantly downsizing. Definitely downsizing the full actual colonies. So the queens and nucs will either remain constant or slightly increase, but the main colonies will definitely go down, um, because that, that's the time-consuming one for me, is going and doing the inspection on like 100 production colonies each week, and I just can't do that anymore. Um, Hi, will you ship your queens to Jersey? I don't think we can ship to Jersey. it's just bonkers with Brexit. You can't ship them, can't even ship them to Northern Ireland, so I'm pretty certain that Jersey is kind of another planet when it, when it comes to Brexit now. So I don't, I don't think we can ship them to Jersey. We do Isle of Wight, ship them to the Isle of Wight, but not Jersey unfortunately. Why don't you use a smoker on your hives? So I do generally have a smoker lit, but sometimes I kind of leave it, sometimes I run over it with my truck. And sometimes I find that it's just not really like having a massive effect on the bees, and especially if I'm just not doing videos and I'm just going and doing the bees myself. When you've got the Ultra Suit on and you've got good gloves on, you don't get any stings anyway. So I just see it as another thing that I kind of have to do. I keep my Apisolis in the car. Apisolis is good as well. Like, I'm not— I wouldn't say the Apisolis is better than the smoke. I do prefer the smoke. I find it more reliable, find it more effective. Um, I love having the Apisolis just on hand just to turn on, just to give them a blast. I think it works really well, but it's probably a little bit of laziness why, why I don't use a smoker. Um, says greetings from Champaign, Illinois. Very nice. Uh, have you seen the bee barns from Vino Farm Channel? If so, how do you feel about those super insulated hives? So I've dipped in and out of those. I've seen his update. I think he did a new update, didn't he, on, on some of the, the Langstroth with the super long frames and that are really insulated. And my view is, yeah, love it. Like, deep, long, narrow frames like that on a super insulated hive works very well. I think the bees like that. I really like insulated hives, so I think they're good. Just used a brush, is a lovely pink. Have you any AMM Irish Black queens? Wow, comment like 15 and we got onto Irish queens already. So that was a massive backlash, wasn't it? Bloody crawl back under my, uh, rock with that one. Um, but yeah, I do have an AMM queen from Jonathan Getty, do still have it. Although when you open up the box to look at them, they're either dead or they're just doing what AMM do, which is very, very small clusters over winter. So I did go and have a sneaky peek at the AMM probably 3 weeks back, maybe just before Christmas, and there was just nothing. So when you lift the box on a Buckfast colony this time of year, like, it's covering like 10, 11 frames of bees. But you lift the lid on the AMM and there's just kind of not really anything there. I knocked them, banged in, nothing. But that is what they're supposed to do, which is go down very, very small. So I'm not overly worried, but I was— it's amazing when you see them. If I do get them through, it'd be a really interesting comparison to see how they both run throughout the year. the characteristics couldn't be more different between my Buckfast and the AMM. So I'm quite excited. One thing that was a bit disappointing with them though is they do have quite a lot of chalkbrood. Like, immediately the first few rounds of brood on perfectly clean and relatively new combs, and they got chalkbrood already. So they're susceptible to it, which I know AMM can struggle with a bit. So that's a bit bit of a shame. Saying hi from a wet Wirral. Yeah, I'm feeling you there. It is, it is properly coming down today. Says the colony that has your F1 is very strong flying today. If everybody here has not subscribed to Pure Yorkshire Honey yet, I suggest you do that. Just Google Pure Yorkshire Honey. I love watching new YouTube channels, and his channel is very good, so I suggest you subscribe. Um, Marcel's saying, can you tell us a little bit about drone and congregation areas and importance in queen rearing? So I'm, I'm not the expert in this, but in terms of the UK, not many people are using the same bee. So if you're gonna try and do any sort of queen rearing, you're going to have an influence of the, the mongrel bee that lives in the UK, and that can influence whether you've got nice bees or horrible bees, or using Buckfast, or you're trying to kind of get them as pure as you possibly can. So you're never going to be able to manage that anywhere really in the UK, barring a couple of exceptional locations, without having that influence. But what I would say is, is it worth for you, for the, for the small number of queens that you might rear, or, or for anyone for that matter, to actually try and like congregate drones in an area? My view is yes, it is. It's always worth doing because the drones that you're going to get from an F1 colony going to be pure drones. So as you go down through the F2s, the F3s, that's going to water it down a little bit. But as many F1s that you keep in that colony— and sorry, in that apiary— and you're putting the drone foundation in there and flooding that area with drones is going to be good for what you're doing in terms of your queen rearing. Not to say it's going to be what everybody wants, and I experienced that firsthand. What I think what I'm doing is good for me is not necessarily good for for the person next door, and I do appreciate that, and I've probably come to the point where I'm picking the areas that I do that as opposed to just doing it randomly on all of my apiaries. Right, oh, I love it, loving the comments from Bozo the Clown. I'm just going through and I'm just going to click show on all of them because he says bee farming is gay. Classic insult, I'm loving it. Um, feel free to, uh, just keep on spamming the board. Loving it. Right, uh, nobody cares but Bozo the Clown is still here listening. So, right, next question. Can you please advise whether Demaray Method is successful for swarming prevention? So yes, it is by far and away for me the most effective method. It doesn't mean that you do the Demaray once and that's it, you're not going to swarm again for the rest of the year, but I find it gives you at least 2 weeks where you don't really have to worry about them swarming, but you still have to follow through with the rest of manipulation. But it does end up with huge colonies, and you do end up having to lift very heavy boxes from quite high up. So I think a few people have been caught out on that this year, which is watching the videos and thinking, oh, that's good, they— it helps with swarming, you get lots of honey, and the colony's nice and big, like, what's not to like? And then they try the method and then they realize that they're trying to lift kind of heavy brood boxes up from this height and they're struggling to lift them. So I would say if you're like vertically challenged or, or not very strong, it can, it can be a bit of an issue. But you could convert it and do it with shallows, but it definitely, definitely helps, um, like shorten the amount of time or lengthen the amount of time that you need to worry about them swarming. And I like to do it 2 or 3 times a year, go across a whole apiary, do it to all of them, and it definitely helps. I would— I can't even remember if I lost a single swarm last year. Maybe, maybe, maybe 1 or 2 out of, I think, 150 main colonies last year. We didn't lose any swarms. It was great. So Slovenian Carniolan Honeybee says, how many colonies do you have right now? So lots of nucs, hundreds of nucs, and then we've got, um, like 100-ish, maybe, maybe 95 full-time, full-size colonies, which I am trying to get down. Um, just right. I had 2 of your queens this year. One went mental and ended up on 7 supers and 60 kilograms of honey. What's their usual lifespan, please? I'm hoping for 3 seasons at this rate, but anticipate 2. Um, so, so yeah, that's, that's the one thing with Buckfasts is they do— you're not going to get like 4 or 5 years out of one of them without massively condensing down the amount of brood that they're going to fire out. But what I would just say, and this is the exact reason why I keep them, is that you offset maybe like the earlier replacement of the queen. And your question there, I, I'd say 3 seasons at a push for me. If I had a queen going into the 3rd season, I'd be looking to replace her before she swarmed, or if they superseded her. I'd quite, I'd quite like them just to supersede her, that'd be great, and not to swarm and go off into someone's chimney. But 60 kilograms of honey is pretty good for the sake of a 38-pound queen, and then you've got 60 kilograms of honey, which is like, what, 130 pounds of honey? And if you're selling it in 8-ounce jars, that's 260 jars, and if you're selling it at, say, £6 a jar, that's like, what, £1,400 cash worth of honey for the sake of replacing a £38 queen every 2 years. I never got anywhere near 60 kilograms of honey using local mongrel bees, like nowhere near. We're talking maybe £20, £30, not £130. Which moves me on nicely to Keith. I got £248 off 2 hives. What's the sort of average for 2 hives? So I would say that's a very, very good average, Keith. especially where, where you live as well. Like, for me around here, I would say like the— if you're taking into account like all of the deadouts as well, I do think you need to take into account the deadouts when you're doing your averages. I would say for us we're like £50-60 per colony per year, which is nothing when compared to, uh, the guys down south. That's just Jasper in the background, he'll come and make an appearance shortly, no doubt. But they talking like— I look at Chris Manson, he always gets a shout out, and you're looking at like £250-300 averages across colonies in an apiary, and the weather was perfect last year, and I'm hearing we're going to get some more of the same this year, but it was very, very good. And up in North Wales, we have the luxury that we don't get the issue of kind of depleted nectar availability through lack of rain because the ground's kind of so wet anyway, and all of our crop, or most of our crop, comes from either deep-rooted shrubs or mostly trees. which can cope with those drought conditions. But I would say if you're getting over 100 pounds of honey average per hive, you're doing extremely well wherever you are in the country. If you're getting over 50 pounds average, I'd say you're probably kind of doing pretty well. That's where we are. Hello, struggling to find the location for hives. I'm being picky but do not want to be driving 30 minutes. Should I stay picky rather than settle for something that just gets me going? That's, that's a really interesting question and a predicament I found myself in last year, which was I ended up— and I've left there now— the River Apiary. I handed it over to someone else and I was genuinely gutted as I was kind of giving the guy all of the information and, and telling him like what the amazing flows were there. And like starts off with the dandelion and then you get the bluebell and the wild garlic, and then it moves all the way throughout the year. Like every single week of the year is like a different thing that flows. And then you get Himalayan balsam just to take you through to October. and it was by far and away my biggest cropping apiary, like probably double everything else, but it was like 40 minutes away. And it's funny because the whole like US-UK thing here comes into play. So for me it was 40 minutes drive there, and then you're doing your faffing around there, then you come back, so call it like hour and a half. And I didn't have an hour and a half to spare each week, so I shut down that apiary and I've moved my bees elsewhere. And I've got loads of stick from people on that saying, no, you've made the wrong decision. And I can see why if you're a full-time bee farmer, that extra hour and a half a week to get the extra payback in honey is probably worth it. But for me, when I don't have the time to do it, it wasn't worth it. So my advice to people would be, and I've done a video on picking an out apiary, is it needs to work for you. And if you're thinking at the beginning, oh, half an hour each way is probably not going to work, but I'll do it because it gets me on to somewhere, and then I've got an apiary I'll tell you what, moving colonies out of an apiary is way less fun than moving colonies into an apiary because you get the excitement and you think, oh, this is great, I'm gonna have bees in an apiary and everything's gonna be fun. But doing it the other way around is a real pain. But the bigger ones for me is choosing the right one. Get the right apiary from the very beginning, make sure you can get good vehicle access, make sure it's not going to flood, make sure it's safe, secure. Make sure you're kind of like not just saying like everything's good but the forage isn't very good. Like, check it. If the forage is rubbish, ditch the apiary. Um, I would, I would think you could do closer than, closer than 30 minutes away. Like, all of my apiaries now, every single one, are less than 5 minutes drive from where I live, and it's a lot better for me. Uh, Bozo the Clown says, are you one of those losers that farms bees? Yep. Um, Damien says, hi mate, well, out of curiosity, what's the reason for downsizing the main colonies? I just don't have the time. I don't have the time to be doing like kind of 2, 2 and a half weeks of extraction. I don't have the time to be going and doing those inspections each week. And if you're not going to go in and really commit to it and make sure that you do the inspections each and every week, then you get left in this really annoying predicament, which is you put 80% of your time into something and then you've not done it well enough because you need to put 110% in. So then the bees swarm and you end up putting all of that time and effort into something that doesn't actually pay you back anything because the bees have swarmed and you've not got any honey. So, uh, like, I'm kind of busy outside of bees at the moment, so I need to make sure that the beekeeper doesn't get and like sap too much of my time. and I need to try and make my time as effective and as efficient as possible. So I enjoy the queen rearing side, I enjoy making up nucs, really enjoy going out. For me, that's quite therapeutic and it's quite an enjoyable thing to do, whereas slogging over 100 colonies I find quite tedious. I find it quite difficult, and I'm kind of sitting there doing the bees and thinking, this, this isn't really fun, I prefer to be playing golf or doing something else. So I'm trying to just reduce that side of it down, ramp up the side of it that I enjoy a bit more. I've said that 3 years in a row and I've not managed to get my numbers down yet, so it is— bees are quite good at playing catch-up with me. How many beehives do you have and do you do it alone? So yeah, I do it all alone and there's like 100-ish production colonies at the moment plus the nucs. I think we'll give Bozo the Clown one more chance. Right, let me jump down. Okay, right, I don't know, I don't know, I haven't banned anyone yet. Let me ban him. Oh, I could do with, I could do with John the moderator to work out how to do this, but he's not here, is he? Right, hide user. I think he's gone. All right, so next question then. Hi, if you were moving bees to a new apiary, when would you move them? So now, now, now is the best time to move bees. They are— it's such a good time because it's not like freezing cold, it's kind of like 10 degrees. The bees are pretty quiet, pretty chilled. They're still clustered up, but they're not like a super tight cluster because you can get that if you go— if you do it when it's like -5. and you move the bees and you put them down, the cluster can fall and it might not get back up again. Whereas if you're doing it now, you've got plenty of time to do it while it's dark. You can go up there kind of half 5, 6 o'clock in the evening, put all of the foams in, and just pick them up and move them. And what you can do at this time of the year as well, which is really good especially when it's chilly, is you can just move them like 50 meters. If you want to go and move some within the apiary and redesign and set up your apiary, you can do that at this point of the year without having to worry too much about the 3-meter or 3-mile rule. Sorry, 3-foot or 3-mile rule. Now just make sure you're doing that in single figures. You don't be doing that when it gets to like 12, 13 degrees because they will start to drift a little bit and wonder what's going on. But yeah, I would, I would move them now. Be a great time. What do I look forward to most this year? Def— definitely— oh, this sounds really bad— like September, kind of like getting everything done, wrapped up. I love that feeling. And that sounds really bad. I should be like, it should be queen rearing or something like fun, shouldn't it? But I do quite enjoy the end of the year, like getting everything done, getting all the honey extraction done, getting the mite treatments on, and feeling like, ah, right, you can relax a little bit again because it does get quite stressful throughout the year. In terms of, in terms of like a nicer answer to that, Jim, I think just being in an apiary, you know, when it's sunny and you've got the sun on your face and you've got like a little bit of time to see your bees and you can see them just going on And going on the plants and getting the pollen in. I'm quite, I'm quite looking forward to that. Another thing I'm looking forward to is I've done quite— did quite a lot of work the back end of last year in terms of killing nasty queens. So you'll see this on the videos that I'm still putting out now, like some real thugs, horrible aggressive bees. I killed loads of queens at the end of last year and replaced them all with really good genetics, so we should see better behaved bees. So I'm quite excited to see once the colonies get up to a good size. And I remember doing this last year and getting to April and having a box full of bees and thinking, ah, they're pussycats, nice calm bees. And then they get up over like 4 boxes and you're like, yeah, they're still thugs. So I'm going to be a bit more aggressive, I think, in terms of killing queens and making sure that I'm getting rid of the duds and the aggressive ones before they become a bit of a problem. And seeing how calm we can get them. Pure Yorkshire Honey says, you can't watch your own video. It is a bit difficult. Go back and watch some of my early videos, they're really bad. They're probably still a bit bad now, but you do, you have to, you have to put up with listening to yourself. Right, so Tev says, do you feed pollen sub? If so, when are you starting this year? So no, I did feed pollen sub for a couple of years, but I think where we are it's, it's too much of a gamble to not really give you a huge amount of benefit. So if we were like building up for maybe all seed rate, I see people doing it now. Chris Manson, again, I follow Chris on Twitter, as I suggest everyone here does. I think it's, uh, Elm Tree Bees, I think, is his handle on Twitter. But he's a bee farmer in— I forget where he lives, somewhere like in the middle Goldilocks zone. But he gives real detailed information the whole time about what he's doing. And I saw the other day he's starting to do like a little bit of stimulative feeding once 1 syrup, just when the temperature allows, just to get the brood up to target that early oilseed rape. So I would say you're talking about kind of, depending on where you are in the UK, maybe just about getting to the point of starting it now, maybe a bit too early. When we did it in North Wales, it was like first week, first 2 weeks of Feb was when we did it, trying to target the first couple of weeks of April for it to have like an effect. But I found it was, it was a little bit disruptive to the bees. They didn't always take it down. It was a bit messy. It was a bit of a pain getting rid of it, and we didn't see a huge amount of benefits. And you look at the cost of a sack of Ultra Bee now, it's like £120. I think I'd spend my money on something else. Howdy. Hello. Wyoming. I love all the, the American people on. I'm guessing you didn't get your tickets to Hive Life Conference. I'd love to be there as well, would have been fun. Um, DSDS, and will you be buying in Prominsky queens again? So I think it's like the Promorsky ones. Yep, we'll have those available. Um, I've got a couple of those overwintering, so I'm quite interested to see how they're going to go, but I've heard very good things. Same with the, the Italian ones. I'm amazed at those Italians. Um, and I'm, I'm interested to see how many of those get through winter. Uh, Evening. Good evening, Daniel. Uh, Good to see you again. Yeah, it's been a very, very long time since I did this, so, um, it's got to be at least like 6 months since I did a live, a live stream. Um, I will, I will try and do more of them. I think last year I did, I did a few and they maybe went on for a little bit too long and then people got a bit bored, so I will keep them a bit punchier, I think, this year. Fingers crossed for a nice summer, you need some growth and honey this year. Oh, you, you need some growth and honey this year, okay, yeah, good luck. Is there anything we could plant to boost honey production in North Wales? So unless you've got huge amounts of land, which I know you do have quite a lot of land, I wouldn't, I wouldn't bother, especially where you are. Because if, if you're near the heather like Mark is, like, just focus on the heather. Focus on getting your bees up at that point, because where you are, you're so high up, you're like at 1,000 feet. Even if you were to go and plant something like really nice like borage, and that, that is always the one that I'd plant. I just— if I had like 100 acres, I'd just plant like 50 acres of borage because the bees love it, and I love borage honey. It's like my favorite honey. Uh, and the bees do really well on it. But if you planted that at 100 feet, then the bees probably wouldn't work it anyway because it's just gonna be too cold. So I would just focus on what's good in your area, which for you it's heather. So get your bees ready for the heather. And we did that very successfully last year by doing like multiple demerays and then combining colonies for the heather. You get like bumper, bumper crops. You do need the weather to play ball as well. Pure Yorkshire Honey football comment. Do you think Ramsdale should be England's number one keeper? We had him on season loan when he was at Sheffield United. So I would love to talk about Arsenal, but I think most people on this stream won't. But I'm yeah, I do think Ramsdale should be number one. He's great. Rich says got lucky this year and have a farm for Heather. What is the normal time periods I'll be looking at? So it's gone back a while now. So August the twelfth. is like Glorious 12th, it's when people go and start shooting for grouse, and it was traditionally the day where people took their hives up to the heather. And I think the myth's been well and truly debunked now in that it is way, way too late. See people going up on the 12th and you've missed it. It's not even a case of, well, you're a bit late, it's like, nope, you've missed it. So we go up, we're lucky though because we've got a static apiary up there, but when we didn't have a static apiary there, we'd go up like back end of July, but probably like middle of July. And then if you're not taking any honey up there, I'd put them up there middle of July, give them like a round of syrup, and then kind of like get them to build up that brood as best as you possibly can. With the target, you, you tend to get like a week, a really strong week at the beginning of August or the last week of July where they'll put on, if you get the weather right, an insane amount of honey. and then we find that you just get like a steady state after that. You don't really get a massive peak, but if you miss that peak at the beginning, there's probably not any point going up there. So just get up there as early as you possibly can. I would say middle, middle of July, about right. Would you recommend a long hive? I'm going into my 3rd season and I've struggled lifting supers. Last year I started with one hive and ended up with 8 colonies as they swarmed a lot. So yeah, that that happens, isn't it? They do tend to multiply quite quickly. I don't think they don't multiply as quickly in a long hive, and it would soon become very expensive if you're going from one hive, one long hive, to 8 long hives. I like my long hives, like, I do like them, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't buy another one for myself, only because for like kind of like commercial beekeeping, they're not, they're not really what works for me. However, like you said there, if you're struggling to lift supers, they're perfect. Like, there's, there's certain scenarios for me that the long hives, you can't really get much better. And one is, yeah, you're struggling to lift. Another is you're maybe disabled and you can't stand up, and you can get one that's a little bit lower down. Another is you want like a nice looking beehive to go in your garden. Uh, so, so I think it ticks all of those boxes, but for me, not, not commercially. But I do, I do like playing around with them. Hutchinson Honey says, evening, hi Sam, what do I prefer, wood or poly boxes? Right, so I've kind of toed and froed all the, all the time with this one. Jasper's just heard another dog, so he's gonna bark. Oi! So I've always much preferred poly boxes. Poly boxes, for me, the bees do so much better in them. Always said that. However, the cost of poly boxes now has just gone crazy, really, really expensive. So if money was no issue, I'd always go for the poly boxes, but now I've kind of settled on a bit of a halfway house, which is if I'm— if I was buying any more, which I'm not, but I'm almost trying to convert, uh, what I've got from the stock that I've got into this format, which is I build my own floor. Wooden underfloor entrance, which is really good for the bees, really good for moving them. I would buy, if I had to buy this new, a second cedar box. So the cheapest wooden cedar box that you can get. Don't get pine boxes, and don't get cedar boxes that have got pine runners or whatever they call them, because that's the bit that's going to rot first. So just get entirely cedar boxes. But then I would combine that with a polyashworth feeder because that is the most versatile piece of equipment that you can have, because you can use it as a crown board, you can use it to feed sugar syrup, you can use it to feed fondant, and then you get all of that nice insulation on the top. And then I would either kind of go really cheap and make my own roof out of whatever, but with a steel kind of box section around it, or I've done it on a couple of hives this year, which is, you know, they're like the horticultural trays that you can get black horticultural trays, they're about £7 each. You can use them over the top because all you, all you need to go over the top of a polyash forth feeder is something just to keep the rain out. Doesn't need any insulation, can be zero insulation. So that would work quite well, and that would work out at like £7 for the, the roof. Polyash forth feeders are expensive, like call it £45, that's £52, and then add on the £15 for the box is like £67. and then I'd make my own floor, call it a tenner for the floor. So you're talking maybe like £75, £77 for a really good hive, um, with, with no supers. So you could add the supers on, so it's comparable price-wise to a normal wooden one, but I think it's much, much superior, especially with that polyash forth feeder. Uh, Jim says, are you looking to go, go into any of the other bee shows this year apart from the one in February? So no, I'm just going to the one in February this year. I'm, I'm properly excited about it because I, I love going to see like all the equipment, and there's loads of different companies going there. Um, so no, just going to one. Um, I think— I don't know if people have seen it, there's like a Q&A session. So me, Griff, and Richard Knoll are all doing a Q&A session there at half 2. Uh, so that should be fun. Dan says, can you confirm also that in your apiary Buckfast queen is the best bee line that you worked? So for us, yeah, definitely. I've not had a huge amount of experience from the other ones, but like some of the Carniolans I've had have a bit swarmy for me, but I'm not saying that they're all swarmy, maybe I just didn't get the best out of them. I like Buckfast. Ian says, my runny honey sells very well but struggle to sell the soft set honey. Do you have the same problem? Yeah, interesting, isn't it? Because what I always find is people are really put off with any sort of set honey. They think it's inferior and they think it's honey that's gone off. But we find that when we go and do like market stalls, which we hardly ever do, but if we ever go and do market stalls, we'll always bring tasters, like little lollipop sticks, wooden lollipop sticks, and then a few jars at the front and just make sure people don't double dip, but always getting them to taste the different ones. And the biggest sellers on market stall days, or maybe like 50/50 but probably just a little bit more, is like, is the set honeys. So either the set borage or the set heather blend or the soft set honey, because you can talk to people about it and you can say, oh, that's not off, we do this, it's creamed and blah blah blah, and then they love it. So I think it's more just educating people that it's not honey that's gone off, it's honey that's meant to be set, and it's nice. I really like set honey. What happened to the bees in the tree? I went up there and they were just gone, completely gone, absconded. So I should have— I kind of think maybe I should have gone in there earlier and done something, but I've done that before where you try and do that in January and you end up doing more harm than good. So that I didn't, I didn't do anything to that colony. I put some, I put a bit of wood over it and I made it a bit more airtight and, and they just went completely absconded. So whether an animal had got in and had a go at them or they just died, I don't know, but they are no more. Oh, how weird is that? Karen's asked exactly the same question. Yeah, so no video of the follow-up because they were just dead. James Crouch says good afternoon from Indianapolis. Hello, James. Alive, yeah, finally, 6 months later I've done another live. Tina says she's in Glasgow working with Scottish Fire and Rescue, very good. We have 2 1-year-old hives at one of my stations and we're getting a hive at my other station in the spring. Cool, love to see it. It's probably good for me to do some promo for me, isn't it? Send me videos, beekeeping videos, I and I'll post them on my channel and you can win £350 of credit on my website. So you can have like a nuc or 10 queens, or if you're in the US, I will just pay you the cash. Um, that is not to everyone who sends me videos, that is to the person who gets the most views. But it's good fun, you get your name on the Black Mountain Honey channel. Uh, right, let me read the next one. 5 years in, 34 colonies, and still not treating, but I do have a management system which I've not had to Yet lost just 2 colonies, one to starvation and the other was too small in November. Thoughts? Amazing, great stuff, great effort, Chris. I really hope you continue with that positive news. Be interested to see, like, are you isolated from other people and did you have like a phase where you were losing more? But there's definitely like a peak when it comes to non-treating in terms of like year 1 fine, year 2 fine, year 3 maybe not getting so good, year 4 not looking good, year 5 dead. Like all of them, you do get that trend, um, like a general trend, which it doesn't, doesn't seem, uh, appear to be applying to you. But yeah, in terms of my thoughts, just, just keep a close eye on it. Do you do like any counts to kind of see like how many Varroa are in there? because they'll definitely be there. But I love this. There's no— I don't know, I'm not trying to sell you Apivar or make people do treatments. I think it's great that people don't treat, but I don't think it's ever going to come to a point where nobody has to treat for varroa, although that would be great. Although I was very interested to see the AFB vaccine. I think that's really good, really clever, especially for AFB as well. It's interesting because it doesn't seem that EFB is taken like that seriously in the US. From what, from what I see, it's more AFB is the one that they focus in on. But it would be good if you could get vaccines for it. I think that'd be good. And the vaccines looked quite good in that it was— it, it wasn't like a chemical kind of antibiotic-based vaccine. It was more of a, you know, here's a little bit of, uh, I think it was like a part of the spores that were like not active, so it didn't result in an AFB infection, but it meant that they could tolerate it and then battle it if it did start. If it did start, sorry. So I thought that was really interesting. Oh, sorry, I'm, I'm really behind. I'll speed up on these questions here. Right, okay, so, uh, Hi Lawrence, I had 2 queens in one hive going into winter. What do you think is likely to happen come spring? spring. So, um, almost certainly one of them will be killed. Um, you might see them both on the first inspection. I definitely wouldn't do anything in that scenario there, just leave them. Don't go and kind of think, oh, one of them looks better than the other one, I'm going to kill one of them. They will ultimately either kick one of them out or kill the other one, and I've never ever seen 2 queens go through the winter and then they swarm in the spring, so I would just let— leave them to it. It's clearly a supersedure, and one of the queens will just leave. Happy New Year, Laurence. Do you stimulate feed for nuc production? If so, when do you start feeding? So we, we don't stimulatively feed to boost up our production colonies to make splits, but as soon as we do make splits, we stimulatively feed. We consistently and constantly feed our nucs to keep them going. because we make very small splits and then we build them up. So, so we do it that way around. Arctic Beekeeping says, we also use polyboxes here in Norway, it's a must up here in the Arctic. Yeah, I can imagine, I'm sure they do very well up there. Don't get the Chinese cedar, ask me how I know. Yeah, I can imagine that one as well, it's kind of like cedar spelt with an E as well. I always get scared with stuff coming out of China. Like, it says it's stainless steel or it says it's cedar, and you just think, how do you know? There's a lot of fake rubbish that comes out of China. And that's not to say that there's not a lot of amazing stuff that comes out of China as well, but you do need to be— suppliers and manufacturers do need to be kind of well on top of the QA and the QC side of things. Um, Dan Brooke says, have I used the Bee Gym? So yeah, I've used a Bee Gym. I put it in my colony and I don't know, didn't really do a huge amount. I, I love the idea of it, it's a great idea. I'm not sure how effective it is, and it's definitely not something that I think that you could just use on its own. I think it needs to be used in, in conjunction with other things. Uh, Reality 2 says, do you have a website where you can buy some hives like mine? Um, so no, we don't sell anything apart from like honey and queens and nucs. Uh, which, which hive are we talking about? If you're talking about the, the polyhives, I would recommend the Abello ones, and I do do Abello social medias, but I, I, I didn't do Abello social media prior to buying all of their kit. Um, but for me, they are so good, and you will see I'm definitely going to do some videos on this next year to show you just why you should definitely not buy Swienty polyhives. And I'm just a bit gutted by that because Swienty are a really, really good beekeeping company, and like, I think a lot of their polyhives are really, really good, not the national format. And their honey extraction equipment is superb, like it is some of the best in the world, but their national polyhive is absolutely shocking. And I'll show you some of my hives next year just to show you how bad the bees have chewed their way through the top, they're just a joke of a hive. So definitely don't think I'm going to save a little bit of money and use like a Suyenti poly hive, they are rubbish. The Paynes and the Maysmore ones, they're fine, really, really good hives there, they've not got the same design issues that the Suyenti ones have, but they have that weird external footprint which isn't an issue for me, I have no issue with that, but they've got pretty expensive Used to be a point where there was like a difference in, you know, the density of the polystyrene meant one was a lot more expensive than the other, where I think now it's quite clear that the Abello is the market-leading poly hive. Um, and if I could scrap all of my equipment and just have the Abello ones, I definitely would. And I've got some boxes where I bought them at the same time, bought Suyenti and I bought Abello poly boxes, and the Abello poly boxes literally look brand new. if you wash them down and got like the mud off them, brand new. Whereas the Suienti, they're barely like in one piece because the amount of chewed stuff out of them. I've seen that Beer Equipment have started selling cedar with pine locking bars. It doesn't make sense to me either. No, I'm really confused. It's obviously a cost decision, but it's the locking bars that have like the really small piece of wood where it locks in And if they're pine, and they're just gonna, they're just gonna rot, and then they're gonna be— make very expensive kindling. James says the bees' propolis is stronger than the bonds between the wood fiber. Okay, I'm missing something there. Set honey doesn't run off your biscuit. Yeah, that is the exact reason why I like it. Same with toast. Winter treatment, vape or trickle? Definitely for me, vaping. I do have a new toy. I'll do that on a video soon. I've not got around to doing it yet, uh, and it's probably a bit— it's probably a bit late, so I'm going to be stuck in multiple treatment mode. But I do— I, I bought myself an InstantVap to go along with my Sublimox. But I just think, I just think for me, vaping is so much easier on the bees, really is. And it's kind of easier on me as well in terms of like the setup for it. But I certainly wouldn't like kind of oxalic acid to be sprinkled all over me in the winter. I think they deal with the vaping a lot better, and I think the vaping is more effective as well. But that is anecdotal. Jim saying, so have you got any more extraction room plans, or are you happy with your setup still? So it's weird, isn't it? Like, I've got such a— like, I've compulsive personality in terms of, right, I need to get this, I need to get that, I'm gonna have 6 of those. And I just had a really small honey extraction room and it became so congested, like absolutely just built up to the rafters and it was unusable. So I sold loads of stuff. So I sold my 100-liter creamer, I sold my pump— I didn't sell my pump, I sold my 100-liter creamer, I sold my sump, I sold my 100-liter tank. I sold my cappings spinner. So I sold all 4 of those, and I replaced my 100-liter creamer with a 200-liter creamer, and I bought another 200-liter tank. And this— the difference it's made in that honey room is amazing. Really has made things so much easier because I'm not struggling for space in there. And it goes to show you, I didn't need any of those things. Like, the sump was a nice to have but really didn't speed things up. And meant there was more to clean. The capping spinner was good for spinning cappings, it was really good for spinning cappings. It wasn't very good for spinning heather honey though, which it wasn't designed for. Um, and then the tank— the reason I got all my tanks exactly the same size, because I've got 2 bottling machines. I found that I had my 200-liter tank set up to one bottling machine and then my 100-liter tank set up to another one. and then there was 2 of me and my nephew doing it, and then his one would finish like halfway through my one, so he'd just be like twiddling his thumbs. So, yeah, I've upgraded it. I'm not buying anything else. It's done, completely done now. The treatments? No, just lost the 2 in 5 years. That's really good. I'd be very interested to see how you get on with that. So Keep me in the loop. Hi, I have 2 supers full of ivy honey and 2 supers of runny honey. If I warm up the ivy honey and mix them together, will that make a set honey? Yeah, it should do if you can get them, if you can get them out of the combs. That would be a really good video to see that. So you, you're saying you've got 2 supers at the moment full of ivy honey, like off, off the colony or in the colony? We need to, we need to explore this further because I think you might, you're going to have a little bit of an issue getting that ivy honey out. I would wager it will be set as hard as concrete now, so you'll probably have to sacrifice the frames if you want to get it out. If you don't want to sacrifice the frames, you can just put them in between the brood once it gets a little bit warmer, maybe in March or April, and they will definitely work that and clear out the frames for you, but then you will get brood in them. If it is still runny, be amazed if it is, if it is still runny, yeah, mix it with some mix it with some runny honey. You probably wouldn't even need to mix it with runny honey, but get a drill in there and do go through the set method. It makes a really nice set honey. It's a bit hard, um, and it's a bit, it's a bit of an acquired taste. I quite like the taste. It's a bit— people think it's a bit like stinky feet, which it's not. Yeah, that's not the best marketing term for it, um, but yeah, should work, should work okay. Uh, We Purple Haze, nice name. Should I clean out the door of dead bees a bit clogged behind the mouse guard? 2 1-year-old caught swarms in a full brood box and super overwintering in Northumberland. So I'd say yeah, there's no harm in just kind of getting, getting the mouse guard out for 2 minutes, clearing out all the bees and putting it back on again. You will get lots of dead bees. You think about it like in October, say September, October time, you've got what, 8,000 bees in your colony. get to March, they're all going to be dead, or maybe April, get to April, every single one of those bees there is going to be dead. And throughout the year when it's warm, the bees go and fly them off and drop them like 50 meters away, 100 meters away, but in the winter they don't because they're just kind of thinking, well, I'm not going to clear that dead bee out because I probably won't make it back, so they just put them on the entrance. So a lot of people get this like February, March, loads of dead bees outside the front, And they're really concerned, then I just say it's perfectly natural. However, if it's getting clogged and the bees can't get in and out, then yeah, I would just clear it out. No harm in clearing it out. Oh, I'm struggling to get through all these questions. It's great to see so many people, and we had nearly 100 people on a minute ago, so just— I'm gonna keep on going until about half 6, maybe 7. And then I'm gonna go have some dinner. Wow, there's lots of questions I've missed, right? So here we go. Right, so Peter— hi, Peter— sends me like a— I don't want to put the pressure on, like, you got to do this every year now, Peter— sends me like a watercolor Christmas card for the last 2 years in a row. I've got them here, I've got them downstairs in the kitchen, but they're like the best watercolor colors ever. So thank you, Pete, that's very nice. I really hope you enjoy them. Uh, he says, evening, my 2 colonies are okay, so I hope to do a few splits in the spring, a buckfast nuc full of bees. Excellent, because your, your bees died last year, didn't they? So you're, you're back up with new bees. Uh, Mark's saying, hi, when are you selling your UK queens? So you, you can pre-order them now, but they're probably like, I think it was like June, middle of June, like first week of June. got the first round out last year. I'm not— do you know what, I probably could have got them out earlier, but I've, I've had my, my fingers have been burned trying to do it too early before. But if I'd have done it that early last year, I would have, would have had great success. So I might try around a little bit earlier, see if I can get them out middle of May, back end of May. But it's around then, I'd say. Safe guess is first, second week of June. In my experience, USA have much more liberal antibiotic use. This is true. You can't treat over here if you get AFB. You can't treat with antibiotics at all. It's a simple policy, which is AFB means you kill it all and burn everything intact. Can't keep anything AFB-wise, and you're not— there's no legal treatment. And I think previous bee farmers have been caught up in, uh, issues with using antibiotics. Um, yeah, that's what I was saying. Uh, ARC says hello, Laurence, from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hello, how you doing? All I think of from like Albuquerque is Breaking Bad. Um, but yeah, I bet it's nice and warm in— how warm is it in Mexico now? I'm guessing it must be like 15 degrees. Oh, you do Fahrenheit, don't you? Maybe like 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Like, it is— I hate winter. I love a bit of sunshine. Uh, Dan Schneider says hello from Wisconsin. Um, I guess— I don't know, my geography is not the best. Someone once said to me, um, they went on holiday to Copenhagen for the weekend, and I said, oh, it's nice, nice weather in Germany at the moment, and they gave me a really funny look. So my geography is not the best, but I think Wisconsin's pretty cold. Is that right? Maybe this time of year, cold. When should I vape my bees? I'm in the south and my girls are still coming in and out most days. So if you're going to go for a single vape, I think you've missed your opportunity to go in and do a single vape now. So I would suggest it, if you've just got a few colonies, just do it, do it in the evening. You could— it can be too cold to vape and it can be too warm to vape as well, so there is like a real perfect spot Like, the perfect scenario, I think, for a vape is that you get a massive cold spell at the end of November, and then you wait like a couple of weeks, ideally 3 weeks, but to get it perfect, it's never going to work. So say 1st of December is like -10 degrees Celsius, and then you get 3-week period of pretty cold weather, and then you get a day or two around like 21st, 22nd of December where it's like 6 or 7 degrees. maybe 8 degrees. So the bees are still clustered, but it's a loose cluster. That's perfect, that's absolutely perfect for going in and doing a vape. But that— you're never going to get it absolutely perfect. But what you don't want is you don't want it super, super cold so the bees are really tightly clustered down, and then the vape, the oxalic acid, can't get actually into the cluster. And you don't want them so active that they're just flying in, flying out. But now's fine. I would go in and do it now. I would do it at nighttime though. just get some lights and do it when all the bees are in the hive, close them up, and just give them the vaping. When do you start queen rearing? Any particular visual cues? So we just, we work backwards from when we think we're going to have good weather and when there's going to be a suitable amount of drones. So like, if you don't have good weather and you don't have natural drones that are flying, if you're doing like natural queen rearing, you're not going to get your queens mated. So you just need to work out when the bees start rearing sufficient amount of drones, and then work forward to when those drones are going to be released, and then work forward to when those drones are going to be sexually mature. You can kind of roughly work out all that information, it's quite easy, and the bees are pretty good at making sure that they do that when the weather's suitable. But you do, you need the two. So for us, it is like June, is kind of the point when we're likely to get mated queens out. But if you think of like the weather in May, weather in May is always really nice, so we work back from there. So it's kind of, we start the prep like middle of April, back end of April, and start getting things ready. And I'm definitely going to start it a little bit earlier this year, and just, I'll make the sacrifice that if the first round doesn't work, we'll just move straight on to the second round. But yeah, any particular visual cues? Yeah, the queen starts rearing, uh, the colony starts rearing really loads of drones. Any luck with getting a farm, as I know that you're looking to get one? So no, and we've given up, completely given up looking to get a farm now, uh, so we're just staying here in our house, which is, which is nice, but we're not, we're not moving. Too risky with everything that's going on with interest rates and available cash and stuff like that, so It's not happening. Uh, Rich says, get a queen rearing long hive coming this year. Do I still use mine? Do I still use mine? And any tips? So I know I said earlier on about long hives maybe not being for me in terms of like commercial, the commercial world. The 8-nuc long hive is just incredible. Such a good versatile piece of kit. Really, really do love it. Um, so in terms of tips, no, not not a huge amount of tips, but just have fun with it. Um, what was, what was I going to say? There was like a mod— I, I wrote this down before— there was a mod that I would do to it that I would ask them to do. Did you say you, you've got a Queenery? Okay, you've got it coming this year. So if you've not ordered it yet, if you've not confirmed it, I'd definitely get the cedar one because I've got a cedar one and a pine one from them, and the cedar one seems to be doing a little bit better. Um, but no, like, I had great success in terms of the amount of queens that I got raised in there. And then I've got 8 nucs in my, in my 8-queen long hive at the moment, um, and they all seem to be doing, doing pretty good. Uh, Reality 2 says, can I put a link in the description? So this is where I get my polyhives from, for anyone who wants to have a look. Right, can you or anyone recommend a pollen trap for a Timber National or Abello 12-frame hive? So I can recommend one because I've only used one and it's really good, but it's not for either of those hives. So Abello, I think they still do it, but it's weird, it's for some Polish hive that's like a slightly different size To a timber national, but timber national sits well on it, and it was great. So have a look on the Abello website. That's the only one that I've used. It was good. Julian Dixon still waiting to see you do a bee beard video. That would be good. That would help me go viral, wouldn't it? Maybe maybe I'll have a go at doing that next year. I tried to put up. I tried to put up a like a prize. people to send me in their best bee beards, and I got told off by a number of people that it was inciting dangerous activity, which to be fair it probably was, so I retracted it quite quickly. But I should, I should probably do one, shouldn't I? So if I get some of these super calm colonies through the winter, maybe I'll, maybe I'll do a bee beard if I find a good swarm. With the mild winter, they've got brood present, Should you do multiple treatments? So, so yeah, I think the general consensus is treatments every 5 days, and from people that I've spoken to who have done that and tested as well, like mite counts, you need, really do need quite a lot of treatments. So I would be looking at like 5, 6, 7 treatments every 5 days, especially if you've only got like a couple of hives in your garden. It's not going to hurt the bees doing excessive treatments, although You're not supposed to use apibioxal more than once, and we don't. All right, let's have a look. So Sean says mainly uses Payne's polynucs and the BS Honeybees 2-in-1s and trialing Abello polynucs this year. I've not tried mages before, what's your thoughts? I really like the BS ones. BS ones are my favorite polynucs just because they're so versatile. I've always liked them. I've had the, the steel dividers. So they used to come, and they still do, it's a bit annoying, they still ship with the basic Correx divider and then you have to upgrade it. But I wouldn't use the BS— if you're not going to upgrade the divider on a BS Honeybees 2-in-1 nuc, just get a Maysmore one because they're pretty much the same. Okay, the feeders— the feeder is better on the BS Honeybees one, but it's that metal divider that makes it like a really, really good design. So that's definitely my favorite. I love the Abello Polynucs. I think the Abello ones are the best built, but they don't have the 2-in-1 functionality. And for me, it makes, it makes a massive difference doing that because you can, you can take the 2 sets of 3-frame colonies through the year, which you couldn't do in the Abello ones. And the Abello ones are quite expensive as well, but they are made of a far superior material. And I— what I really, really like about the Abello ones is the plastic molded floor. It is a very good floor, but if I had to choose, I would go with BS Honeybees. Do you earn enough from the beekeeping to go full-time beekeeper? Yep, I could, I could do it full-time if I wanted to, but I don't, I don't like kind of just putting all my eggs in one basket like that. And, and also, like, it's, it's supposed, it's supposed to be a hobby. People say, really? But yeah, it's supposed to be like my, my fun hobby. Um, so I think if I went full-time and did it like 100% of the time, I'd soon get a bit like— I'd lose quite a fun hobby. So I want to keep that hobby and not make it my full-time job. Uh, David Townsend said, off the colony, it's been kept in the house and lately it started to go soft and the room smells amazing. Okay, so this is the ivy honey. I think if you warm the frames up, you could spin it out, right? Amazing. Spin it out, get it out as soon as possible. I'm really interested to see how you go with your ivy honey. Any ivy frame that I've taken out the following year has been like rock solid, but I do like the honey. Seen the bees on cleansing flights last week at 90°C. Noticed Blue tits after them could be a problem. Not in a the blue tits will take bees. I see the bees, the birds going for the bees. There's a joke in there somewhere. But no, they're never gonna, they're never gonna dent them that much. Just leave it. A.R.C. Mid-fifties here in Albuquerque. Okay, I'm, I'm think, I'm guessing that's like single figures Celsius. Okay, so pretty, pretty chilly still. Excuse the pun. Simon says, all I can think of regarding Albuquerque is the Prefab Sprout song King of Rock and Roll. Oh, Glomby Glumson says hi from Germany, Bayern. Hello! My dad was from Germany, he was from Detmold. I think that's not that far from around there. Bumper Mike, Port Talbot here, not too far. Hello, Bumper Mike. Jim's in sunny Morecambe. Right, Carl says hello from Neath. Can I place hives in a Small line of trees, approximately 4 meters deep within the trees. Yeah, so, so I've had tons of colonies and tons of apiaries within the trees, and I will say there is no problem whatsoever putting colonies, apiaries in trees. Fine. There's such— who comes up with these beekeeping myths? There's some crazy beekeeping myths, which is that the bees don't like being under trees because when it rains, the water pitter-patters on the roof and it annoys them. That is genuine beekeeping myth, absolute load of rubbish. They don't care. However, bees much, much prefer being in full sun. And when I say bees much prefer being in full sun, that's probably not right. I prefer the bees being in full sun because I find you get much less kind of like dampness issue. So if you've got a colony that's susceptible to chalkbrood, they tend to do a lot better in the full sun. out of like woodland. But the biggest one is that if you get a colony in full sun, they work so much harder. So as soon as that sun hits them in the morning, colony gets nice and warm and they go out working. And then the later in the day that the sun's hitting them, the later they're going to work. And it pretty much is as simple as that, that the longer they're in the sun, keeping the forage as a constant, the more honey you get. So I moved every single one of mine out from under the trees. The other issue was the trees kept on falling over and smashing them, which is not good for polyhives. I've probably lost like 10 hives in 5, 6 years from trees smashing them open, which wasn't good. So all of my apiaries now are completely out in the open, in the sun, and I find they do a lot better like that. But no, no problem putting them under trees as long as they're not going to fall down on them. And you're happy to get a slightly smaller honey crop. Oh, Chris Humphreys! Chris is like some mega beekeeper. You have 5 colonies in logs, that's awesome! I wanted to do a log hive just like for fun, and I've not got around to it. I've got loads of bee things that I want to do and I've not got around to it, so I want you to send me some videos of your log hives please, Chris. That'd be amazing. Mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, is that how you say it? I'm thinking of adding a frame of drone brood foundation to the hives I want to breed from. Opinions please. So yeah, definitely, that's a really, really good way to do it. So, but I would go two-pronged with that. Yeah, in that, say you've got 10 colonies in an apiary and you want to— you've got one of them that's really good, so you think, well, I'm going to add some brood frames into that one, some drone brood frames into that one to boost the good drones. I would add into that as well, identify your worst colonies in that apiary and kill the queens, because you need to, you need to tackle it from both ends, because those bad colonies will still be pumping out those really evil drones. So you might as well just kill the bad queens and replace them with the F1 daughters from your newly reared queens, and then you'll still get the same drones from those F1 queens than you would have done if you've got a purebred queen there. And, and then that way you're hitting— you're taking the very best and trying to repopulate from them, and you're removing the very worst at the same time. That's definitely what I do. I was thinking of putting Apivar strips in perhaps in March. How long after they're removed can I add supers? I know a few people that do that. You know, it is actually recommended as a spring treatment, so according to their, like, the blurb on the back You definitely cannot add supers while the Apivar's in, but there's no like isolation period after it. So the second that you take that Apivar strip out, you can put the supers back on. So if you do it in— if you did it in like first week of like say 1st of March and then give them the 8-week period, on the 1st of May you could put the supers back on. Really, really effective, and I think that's— it's a good way of doing it. And then you go through the year with very, very low My accounts. Rich says yes, CDS. Sorry, sorry, Rich. I think a few people have had that. They've seen seen things on videos and bought them and thought bloody Lawrence like making us buy stuff. I've got the camera like right in front of the comments there. Let me just see if I can move that a bit. There we go. That's better. Right, We Purple Haze says I feed my bees mushroom compounds over the summer as Paul Stanis research with the University of Washington and had no varroa population, so didn't treat. Have you tried natural methods? No, not, not a mushroom compound over the summer. That sounds really interesting. I've not tried natural methods. I've tried not treating and they died because they had really high varroa loads. But I think, I think in America it is slightly different as well, and it The reason I say that is that you can have areas in America where there really isn't that many bees there. Like over here, the density of bees in any kind of given area is pretty high, which means that whatever you do, it doesn't matter because you're affected by what your neighbors are doing at the same time. So I know people in America who are completely treatment-free. So it could be that you— I'm not suggesting this, but it could be that you're feeding mushroom compounds to just a colony of bees that's like naturally quite resistant to varroa in an area where there's not many other beekeepers with colonies that have got lots of varroa. But I've not tried natural methods because for me as a bee farmer, like, I want to get as much honey as I possibly can from my colonies. I want to make sure that they can cope with the varroa levels. But I'm well up for people trying it. Like, I'm always interested, and I always say massive credit to people who do try different things on their bees. I think it's— we need people like that to move things forward. But I'd be interested to know more about that mushroom compounds. It sounds interesting. Arctic beekeeping. I got this really cool, like, I know it's not going to be like that, but Arctic beekeeping is like just like an igloo in the middle of like nowhere with a few beehives up there. I'm guessing it's not like that. Can you leave heather honey in the hive during the winter? Here in the Arctic, we have to take it out before winter, if not there's poop everywhere and a dead colony. So no, so I think that's another beekeeping— not to say that's a beekeeping myth that you're wrong, but definitely what I've heard is that heather honey will give bees dysentery over winter. So we've got a static apiary up in, like, in heather moorland, and we never feed them because they've got so much heather honey. And for people who've taken bees to the heather, you'll know Where do they put the heather honey first? They fill the brood box first, and it's not until they've filled the brood box that they'll put it up into the supers. So the main heather flows go into the brood box first, and then that's what the bees overwinter on. And by far and away, my best overwintering performance is from the bees in the heather apiary, and no dysentery whatsoever, like literally nothing. So I think that there's something else going on there. There is— the heather honey has a much higher water content, so it might be that the temperature conditions are not right and then it's maybe fermenting, and then the bees are eating fermented honey, and then that's giving them dysentery. But I think if the temperature conditions in the hive are kept correctly, I've never had any issues with dysentery from heather honey. So see if— maybe tweak some other variables and see if it's something else other than the heather Honey. Pink It's Honey says glad the live chat is back. Good to hear. I'm glad to be here as well. Although I do find it's crazy, like I'm not used to talking like so like energetically for so long. I can already feel it in my throat that it's a bit like oh. So we've got I've got max fifty minutes left and I've not even drank half my tea yet and it's cold. Right, so top of the league says. He's an Arsenal fan. Sorry, that's a bad joke for me. He says, I have some 60-plus-year-old honeycomb frames. Not a boast, just an interesting fact. That's pretty cool, I'd like to see them. What equipment do you use to collect swarms? So I use a Payne's Polynuc with the feeder chopped out, and you've seen the video, I chopped it out so professionally. And for anyone who didn't get the sarcasm there, that was genuine sarcasm. I'm so rubbish at stuff that. So I butchered a Payne's feeder out, and it's like an 8-frame void now with a ventilated screen on the top and a ventilated screen on the bottom. And then I keep 8 frames just of foundation in there, and then that's like my swarm catching box. And I, I keep it in the car. That's the big one. So I keep it in the car and keep all the little kit in there. But that is all I— that is all I do. I put a bee suit on, put some gloves on, just bang them into a box. And then they seem to like it. And then because you've got the mesh over the top, I put like a bit of Correx or something and lay that over the top and the bottom if the bees are trying to march into it, because they don't like it trying to march into it with the mesh. But I always keep the mesh on because you can bake a swarm pretty quickly. But that's my equipment to collect swarms. I don't collect swarms anymore, but you know, like, I get so many swarm calls, and if I'm there and I've got it in the car and I see like a massive swarm, I just, I just can't resist it. But I'm very, very careful about where they go now. I've got, I've got a friend who I give them to, in fact, and then I go home and I bleach my beekeeping suit. Do you equalize colonies, and if so, at what point, e.g., when at 8 frames of brood for the donor hive? So, so previous videos, like, I did this all the Yeah. Equalized them and got like, if one's got 6 frames of brood and one's got 3, I share the brood out. I don't do any of that anymore. Like, the EFB scare last year has made me completely change the way I do my beekeeping, and it will mean that some colonies will be a little bit weaker and some will be a little bit stronger, and maybe the weak ones will die and not get through the winter, and the big ones will get too big too quick and swarm and I lose them. but at least I'm not transferring frames around that have got any EFB, and for me it's the EFB that I'm always kind of concerned about transferring now. So no, I do not do any sort of equalization. Hi, customer of yours from north of Scotland. Hi, Simon. When my bees are on oilseed rape, they always start swarming. Could you have queens ready in May? So, so could I have queens ready in May, um, you, or could one— So you could, you could definitely have queens ready in May. Like, I'm not sure about this question here. So we, we start selling queens in like April, the imported ones, back end of May I would say for the UK ones. But if going to the all-seed rape though, that really does progress the colonies really quickly. So you could start rearing queens much earlier on the all-seed rape. I love going to the oilseed rape. I think it's really good fun. And like, the negative that people say about the oilseed rape is that it sets in the combs, but if you get it out quick enough, it doesn't set in the combs. And then the other thing they don't like is that they don't like the honey. They say it's quite bland and a bit too sweet. I really like the honey because it makes the easiest soft set in the world. And then you get monster colonies, huge colonies that you've already got honey crop from, and then you can just split them up. I get what you're saying though, like if you don't split them up after that, they can— it is quite easy to get them to swarm, or they do just end up swarming on you, which is a real pain. Doug Cotton says hello from Nova Scotia, Canada. Hi Doug! And I've jumped all the way to the bottom there. I'm doing quite well to not, not getting through all of these comments. Right, so says someone calling themselves top of the league wouldn't boast, would they? Any— anybody who's watched this before knows I'm like the most pessimistic Arsenal fan in the world. So like, if we finish 5th, I wouldn't be surprised, and I would expect us to finish like 8th because we're useless. Uh, says, hi Lawrence, I spent a couple of years '87-'89 in Deptmoor. Might have bumped into your dad. Uh, great vids, mate, keep them up. All the best in New Zealand. Um, cheers, Darren. That's crazy, you're in Deptmoor. Yeah, no, he, he moved out of there when he was very young. Um, but yeah, uh, says, I love the idea of Swiss bee houses. I have an old pigeon shed, I'd love to try to build one. Would you— what would you consider the idea? I've never heard of them. Um, see if you can send a link or something, that'd be interesting. This is why I'm not getting to the bottom, lots of comments. Right, David Townsend, I have a couple of hives at a recycling center. There is a lot of organic dust in the air. Both of the hives have a very low mite count. Natural mite drop over 7 days, one hive with 7 mites, the other 13. Cool. I just, I love how you've pinned that on the organic dust. I'd love to see studies about things like that because it could be something simple like that, couldn't it? It's organic dust in the air, I don't know. But there's— bees definitely find a way to kind of survive. What I always think with that is that it's the survive versus thrive argument. Are they just good at surviving and getting through, or are they actually really thriving? And I guess for wild colonies of bees, it doesn't really make a massive difference. As long as they're surviving, that's kind of good enough. Right, Arctic Beekeeping, the problem here is that the bees stay in the hive for 7 months between October and April, and then we— I'd see the problem with the honey, right? So that's— so I think that's what it is, it's the confinement, isn't it? And what's probably happening is that the bees can't get out, so they defecate within the hive, and then they're defecating on the frames, and then the other bees are like trying to eat the honey, And they're probably eating some of that faecal matter and then it's given them dysentery. So I would say it's more the significant 7 months of the year that they can't get out as opposed to the actual heather honey. But so it'd be interesting, so you're saying if you take the heather honey out then you don't see the problem? Because that is interesting. And for me in North Wales, like, we don't get very long winters, you know, they can get out on cleansing flights most months. It's rare to have a month go by where they can't get out on a cleansing flight. For drone production, add a super frame to the brood box. I do this and sometimes cut the bottom of the wax drone cells. It gives the Varroa control. The chickens love them. Yeah, I've seen people do that. Natural, um, good tip. Oh, I'm getting to the bottom of these now, right? Right, David Little, hello from North Carolina, USA. Hello. Uh, Bumper Mike says 106 watching, 16 likes, it helps with the algo. Yeah, I need all the help I can get. Uh, Feckless 7, hi Laura. Hello. Uh, any plans to do more of the lay-ins and other formats this year? Really love the content. So I went through a phase where I bought, I bought a lot of different hives and different formats and kind of thought, you know, I'm I'll put the money in to do the videos, and I'm just not at a point where I can do that anymore. But for the sake of like going and— and the lay-on hive and the long hives are different because I was given those. But the other formats, like going and buying different equipment just to do videos, I'm not— I can't do it anymore. Can't justify it in the old bank account. So, um, I'll do more. I'll do the ones that I already have and do different slants on those. So the lay-ons, um, the, the long hive, and the queen rearing nuc. And then any of the other formats that I've already got, but I probably won't be buying any new ones. Um, it's interesting, the Lion's Hive one, because, because what I've got is not a pure Lion's Hive. And someone said to me 6 months ago, someone said, I bought a Lion's Hive, a Hyde Highs Lion's Hive, on the back of your recommendation for it, but I don't like it and I'm a bit annoyed that you recommended it. And I looked back on the videos and I thought I don't remember recommending this hive. Like, I, I'm quite clear when I say people have— people have given me this hive for free, and I'm going to do some videos on it and see how I like it. So just for the record, I don't like the Hyde Hives Layon's Hive. Don't like it, don't like the format, find it very, very difficult to use. I don't find it gives me any benefits over the long hive, and it's— I've got a lot of, like, disadvantages from using it. So, so for anybody thinking, oh, should I get a long hive? Should I get a queen rearing long hive? Should I get a lay-on hive? If you're looking and you're, you're insistent on getting something from that, like, range from Hyde Hives, definitely the queen rearing nuc. Like, for me, that's, that's something I've considered going and buying a few of those for myself, uh, and, and moving all of my queen rearing operations over to those because they are so good, so versatile. And when you actually do the maths on them as well, you've got 8 nucs. So if I'm going to go and buy 8 nucs from BS Honeybees now with the dividers in, you're probably talking like £70 per nuc. So it's like £560 for 8 of them, if I've got my maths right. Well, I think it's £650 for the queen rearing nuc, like the, the 8 nuc queen rearing nuc from, from Hyde Hives. There's not that much in it. in terms of costs. But yeah, I'll be very clear and very honest when I'm doing videos because people are giving me something for free or where I genuinely recommend them. But I will do more, I will do more of the content. Right, Have a question, what is your thoughts on how to add a second 10-frame box to expand brood early in spring? You don't have built comb. So all I would say is just Like, the bees will expand at the rate that they want to expand. Adding on another box early is not going to make them expand any quicker. Adding another box on too early is going to make them expand slower because they're going to have more space to heat up. I've, I've been caught out on this thinking, right, and I didn't do it with adding another brood box, I did it with adding supers, saying, right, I'm gonna get my supers on right nice and early and make sure that the bees are going up and working them. And then it got so cold I had to go and kind of go back around, tail between my legs, and take all the supers back off again. So what I would suggest more on there is that if you want to get them going early and the weather is good, stimulative feeding is a good way to go. 1:1 sugar syrup. If it's warm enough for them to take 1:1 sugar syrup, then feeding them 1:1 sugar syrup will speed up their growth 100% because the queen will take that as a trigger that there's available nectar, and she will go and then lay at a quicker rate, assuming that there is sufficient protein either in the hive or coming in in the form of pollen. So you could combine it with pollen sub, and then once they've got to a point where they're kind of 80 or 90% full in the box, then you can take all the feeders off and go and put additional boxes on. Right, let's have a look, more of these. There's some, some great quality comments on, on this chat today. Uh, Richard K, being nosy, what got you into beekeeping? So I just, I just had a swarm, swarmland in the garden, and I quite like honey, and I thought it was pretty cool. Uh, Andrea Smith says, have you used plastic foundation? As I thought I might give it a go this year on one hive. What do you think? So yeah, so I have had a go on that that now, and I've had a go on— what's it— Frames and Feeders. They do the fully molded plastic frame, and I think if you're going to go down the route of plastic foundation, you might as well get the full benefit of having a fully molded plastic frame with foundation. And the bees have taken to it, but they've not taken to it anywhere near as quickly as like full wooden and wax foundation, which I was quite surprised at. I thought— I knew it wouldn't be as like quite as quick, but I was surprised at quite how slow it was. So I'll just have a think about why are you going for— why are you going for plastic foundation? What are you expecting to get out of it? It's not something that I would get across all of my colonies, especially— I don't know where you are, if you're in the UK, like EFB, AFB, if you get one of those, EFB or AFB, and you've got a few colonies and you've got like plastic foundation or plastic frames, you are in serious amount of trouble because they won't let you burn stuff in situ. So you have to pay to get it like incinerated, however you say it, and it's pretty expensive, uh, because it has to go down as like a hazardous waste. So have a think about it. If you want to see a bee beard, YouTube search Paul Stamets bee beard and save his— and save the bees campaign. He also did an Amazon Netflix on bees and mushrooms and a TED Talk. Okay, cool, that could be good. I do like a good bee beard. Yes, if they remove the heather honey, they don't see the problem. We give them 18 to 22 litres of 2:1 sugar syrup in September. Right, that's, that's really interesting. So it does seem to be like a combination of the two, doesn't it? What you need to do is, is take a colony with the heather honey and go and put it further south when they can get out and defecate outside of the hive and see, see if it's still giving it to them. It may well be like a certain type of heather honey that does have effects like that, but there's— I've heard that before a number of times, saying don't overwinter your bees on heather honey because you get issues with dysentery, and I've never seen it, not once in a single hive, and they've overwintered better than any of the others. Ian Anderson says heather honey £8 a pound, sugar syrup 50p a pound, no-brainer. Fully agree, but not out of the brood box because it's a pain going in and trying to extract stuff out of a brood box, brood frames, when it's heather honey. It's just really, really difficult to extract. Uh, Joe Creasy says sorry I'm late, was actually making some brood frames. Nice to see Jasper in the back. Jasper, Jasper. There he is. Uh, Rich says they had a sale in December. I got mine for £530 for Caesar queen rearing long hive. Wow, that is, that is a really, really good price. And as I said, if you were trying to get 6— uh, sorry, if you're trying to get 8 VS honeybees with the steel dividers, you'd be paying more than that. So that's a good price. I'll speak to them about that. Uh, Tim says, how are you getting on with the queen from John Getty? Interesting to compare the different types. So yeah, touched on that at the beginning, lots of chalkbrood, so there's a real significant amount of chalkbrood in there. Lifted the lid off it about 3 weeks ago, just to— I crack them occasionally just to see if they're there. I know I shouldn't, but you know, like, they're nicely insulated boxes and just cracking it for 2 secs and then strapping it back up again makes no difference. Yeah. And you could not see a single bee. And I knocked on the box as I do sometimes because you can like hear them buzz. Didn't hear a thing. I even tilted up the bottom of the box like that and I couldn't see them. So they are either dead or they're doing what AMM do naturally, which is very, very small clusters over winter. But I'm really interested. I hope they do get through, and if they don't, I'll probably get another queen. Um, but I am interested to do some comparisons with them. Right, Jim Butler says, I'm a new beekeeper, got my colony last year and thinking of doing some cup comb honey this year. What is your opinion? Is the advantage of wired over unwired foundation? Great videos. Cheers, Jim. Yeah, cheers, Jim. I would, if you can get through the first couple of years without doing a huge amount of extraction, I would just run it all as non-wired because you can extract non-wired foundation, it's no problem at all. The first year is a bit difficult because it does— you'll get a few blowouts. But if you can get through that first year, unwired is fine, and they kind of make up, like, they strengthen it after a few cycles. It seems to work well. At what daytime temp would you start feeding 1:1 sugar syrup? So it's more like the temperature and the time of the year because, like, We've had a really weird warm spell at the moment where it's like 12, 13 degrees outside, and the bees would take syrup when it's 12 to 13 degrees, but I definitely wouldn't feed them 1:1 now because you're increasing, like, putting too much moisture into the winter cluster. And then if you get a cold snap after that and the bees are trying to cluster in with all that sugar syrup, wet sugar syrup around, it can cause issues. Definitely don't want that. So it would be more, yeah, like minimum 12, 13 degrees C. but also probably no earlier than, for me, no earlier than 1st of March. Um, and that's dependent if you're going down further south, it'll be earlier, and if you're building them up for oilseed rape, it'll be earlier again. And as I said, Chris Manton has started doing a little bit of stimulative feeding now, so you're not, not a million miles away from when you would start. Uh, and the thing with the feeder, like on a polyashworth feeder as well, what's so good about it and the other top feeders is that if you put the syrup in there and the bees don't take it, it's not the end of the world. Like, okay, you might need to clear it out if it goes a bit mouldy, but they won't take it if it's too cold, and then if it's warm enough, they'll come up and take it. So the bees will take it, but 12 to 13 degrees, rough, rough guide. Says, looking to start my first hive in a large-ish urban garden. I don't want a large colony in case they swarm. swarm. Would a non-prolific queen be easier to control regarding swarming? What would you recommend? So possibly the guy that I spoke to earlier in the year, maybe, who had exactly the same query with this one, which is like, I wouldn't be put off by a large colony. I find like by far and away that the most gentle colonies I've got are big, strong, large colonies, because I, I don't know why it is. I guess it's like a Buckfast trait that The bigger they are, the more they seem to work together. I don't know, it's, it's an odd one, but don't be put off by thinking, oh, there's going to be so many bees flying around in the air, because you can really channel them in the way that you want them to fly by screening them. And what you could end up with is like getting a non-prolific, maybe like British mongrel colony that's really small that's like angry Vikings, as someone referred to some of my bees the other day, which I thought was rather apt. Because then, okay, you've got a small colony, they're not prolific, but they're aggressive and they're going to sting people in the garden. So you need to like balance the two. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't just look at saying, well, I definitely want a non-prolific colony. What I'd say, if for someone in a garden, and I always say to people, if you can get away by not having your bees in your garden, it's a lot better. But if you do want them in your garden, I would just go more, just get like a nice calm colony of bees. And if you're going to buy them from someone, maybe go and see what they're like before, and, and go and see what they're like kind of not in April, because all colonies are nice and calm in April for some reason because they're not very big yet and all they're interested in doing is surviving. But maybe go and see them in June Something like that. Go and see them in the June gap, first, second week of June, when there's nothing around, there's no nectar. See what they're like. If they're nice and calm in June, then they're going to be calm throughout the whole year. Eduardo Perez says hi, Lawrence. Hello, Eduardo. I missed someone else. Peter Sabba, he said hi as well, didn't I? Hi, Peter, you're always on here. Hope you're well. Right, Wee Purple Haze, oh sorry, you're just, you're chatting to someone else, right? Howdy from New Hampshire. Hello. Um, is it Trihuma says, aren't you afraid that contaminate honey with sugar when feeding in the spring? So no, not really, because you feed such a minute amount of sugar syrup compared to what they're actually going to take in, and especially if you're putting like frames of foundation either in your supers or in your brood box or doing any sort of recycling, then the second that you take away the feeder and you're putting on the first box, as I would just say, if you're going to be feeding them, put the first box on for frames that have got foundation in, and then by the time the bees have turned that wax foundation into combs, they're going to be way past any sugar that's stored down in the brood box, like I mean, like a long, long way past it, so I wouldn't be worried. Do I feed fondant? So yep, I got some big blocks of fondant ready to go if I need them. Perfect feed for this time of year. Bjorn says, your videos are really inspiring. Great video you made about the Demerara splitting. Gonna try that with some of my hives this spring. Thank you, Bjorn. Glad you find them useful. I hope I'm saying that right. Always wondered, how big is your operation approximately? How many honey-producing colonies and how many nucs do you run? How do you manage all the work on your own? So I struggle, I struggle to manage it all on my own. Around 100 full-size colonies and then like hundreds of nucs, and I really do struggle. Long, long nights in the summer. And in the winter it's not too bad. Is it, is it okay that my bees are out flying today even with fondant in the hive? Yep, they'll just be going out like kind of cleansing flights and defecating and collecting water to break down the fondant, because they can't just eat the fondant, they do need to, they do need water to break it down. Mokhtar says, I'm a new beekeeper since July next year— last year, I'm guessing you're saying. When is the best time to do a split? So that is like the impossible question to answer because I'm not sure where you are, so I'll answer it for the UK. I always think best time to do a split in the UK is like first, second week of May, and it seems a bit early, but if all you're interested in doing is making a split, do it at that point in May, and it's like you you almost get around the really difficult swarming part of the season. And then by the time the bees have built up from that split and you're into— and you're past the June gap and you fed them through the June gap, you probably get a nice amount of honey from the summer crop. I did that like 3 or 4 years in a row and didn't get much honey at all, but like you could get some serious colonies on the go. Arctic Beekeeping says, need to add that because of the need to winterize on sugar syrup, we get back around 40 to 50% of the money we used on the sugar here in Norway. Oh, that's interesting. So it's like state subsidized, is that what you're saying? That's very interesting if so. So it's half 6. I will do— I'll keep on going until my wife and daughter get back. They've gone out for a girls' evening. But when they come back, I do have to go because they are gonna— yeah, I think they want dinner on the table, to be perfectly honest. Regarding heather honey, we have a honey press from thorns, but it's hard work doing about 30-40 supers. Would you recommend a hydropress for the job or anything else? So I have the loosener and like a swing cage extractor from Abello, and they are really good, But they're nowhere near as, like, easy as the hydropress. It's like a huge, huge amount of work because I only get 6 frames in my extractor, and then the loosening— you have to loosen each individual frame. Jazz, stop it. But the hydropress, if you're geared up for doing, like, quite a lot of heather and you're quite happy just to cut out the frames completely, cut out the frames each time you're doing it, the hydropress gets, like, Every last drop of heather honey out. You just get left with this cake of wax where all the heather honey's come out. So a hydropress is really good. What I was always really, really scared about with the hydropress is that it's run off just like a hose, like a water hose, and if the hose went, you just like, you know, ruined the whole batch of heather honey. So I was always really worried about that. Never happened. Let's go. But I was always really worried about it. It's not a live stream without Jasper going wild in the background, is it? Um, oh, I've forgotten this. So someone's just said, have I done my checkerboard yet? No, I've not. I completely forgot I was supposed to do a checkerboard, wasn't I? So I'm gonna I think last year I did it like last week of Jan, and it felt so wrong doing it last week of Jan, but it worked. So no, I've not done it yet, and I need to do it, so thanks for the reminder, Eduardo Pires, that was a great shout. For grafting, use a drawn frame in the brood box and spun and put in an isolation cage with queen. I use black wax foundation for this, much easier to see larva and the right age. So I'll agree with you there, black foundation for grafting is very, very good. It makes it so much easier to see in. I do agree with that. What queens give you the calmer bees? Like, in my experience, some hybrid Buckfasts give you calm bees. There's loads of Buckfasts that aren't Buckfast, and there's loads of Buckfasts that aren't calm, so it's not, it's not as straightforward as, as that. And I've seen local British mongrels that are perfectly calm as well, that people have kind of bred naturally over years and years and just keep on killing out the aggressive ones. It's dependent on where you are, and your local stock in the area is going to be relatively calm as well. But I guess from all species of bee or hybrid of bee, you will, you can get calm Bees there. DC Blessed Bee says, first year keeper from Washington State, USA. I enjoy your videos and thank you for sharing your time and experience. Thanks for watching my live stream. Arctic Beekeeping says, last question: planning on making a YouTube channel from the Arctic, but what's the CPM for the beekeeping niche? That's a great question. I'd watch that. I reckon loads of people will watch that. What do you mean the CPM in terms of like the cost per milli? It's, it's a weird one, you know, because for beekeeping as a whole is pretty high. I think it's, it's quite a good one to do, but in terms of like the total views, it's not very high unless you're Texas Bee Works, um, but then it's very high. But I, I always get really interested by the CPM. So, so for people who don't know, like the CPM, they like advertisers pay on YouTube videos like to, to put adverts on certain videos, and they'll pay depending on the demographic that are watching it, and they'll pay depending on like the demographic where they are in the world, and then the type of videos. So what's really interesting is like for me, American people, American people watching my channel, I earn a lot more on their adverts than I do for like English people, so people from the United Kingdom. Um, it's probably about like 100% more from the USA, and I don't earn much from ads at all, but it's just interesting to see the differences. And then Ireland, pennies. Don't know, people from Ireland, you don't earn anything from their adverts. Number 1 at the moment is Croatia. Random fact for you there, right? We'll get back to beekeeping. Uh, Andrea says, how do you recycle your wax if they get damaged when spitting out the honey? So I have a wax capping Press, so anything that gets damaged just gets cut out. It goes through the wax cappings press. I recycle all the honey out of it, and then we melt down all the wax cappings at the end of the year. James Crouch says he'd love to see bear-proof hives. That would be cool. And you can see why these channels get better views, can't you? Andrea says she's from Portsmouth, but have been to your house to collect a queen with my friend Linda that lives near you. Thanks for some great videos and help is much appreciated. No problem, Andrea. I think your friend lives in Bulguin. Excuse my pronunciation, but that that would make sense to me. And wow, I'm down. I'm down to the bottom. This is great. So the first one, James Jokris says no offense, but in my opinion, not as good as looking as the Texas lady. It's true. It's definitely true. If anyone's not seen what's happened to her channel recently, it's pretty crazy. She's got like four. 450,000 subscribers now and is getting like 30 or 40 million views a month, which is— I'm not gonna lie, I'm very jealous, but fair play to her. So we've come to the end in that there's no more questions, but like, my wife will be back relatively soon, so I will stay around for another 5 minutes, 10 minutes. Richard's asking, who is this Texas lady beekeeper? So Google it, Texas Bee Works. It's cool. Like, I'm not gonna anything against her at all. Like, I think it's like fair play to her. She's built a really strong following of people. A lot of people say that her videos are staged, and where am I on that? Her videos are definitely staged, 100%, because it's amazing. She goes in with like no bee suit into like a cupboard, like a closet, where, oh, there's a nuc of bees in a closet, so she's just going to save them. Okay, who's put a nuke of bees in a closet somewhere? And then sometimes in some of the videos you see people like passing her stuff. It's quite clearly staged, but come on, it's YouTube. Like, loads of stuff staged on YouTube, isn't it? Um, but as I said, I'm just, I'm just horrifically jealous of her. Um, but I, I, I, I quite like it. I think she's good. Yeah, she has. She's been on Joe Rogan, which shows how how successful she's been. Dan says, when's the next session? There will definitely be, there will definitely be a next session a little bit sooner. I won't do them every couple of weeks, but I'll try and do like one every 6 weeks or something. Do we have a problem with fake artificial honey there in the UK? Well, ask the supermarkets. No, they said absolutely no problem with it whatsoever, I would suggest that there is quite a significant problem with a pound of honey costing 69p in Aldi, because I struggle to buy the jars for much less than that, and this is stuff that's flown in from China. Uh, one more question about the heather honey: what size hydropress would you recommend for honey? So just get the biggest one you possibly can. Because if it's small, it's a bit tedious. What you want to do is just keep on scraping it in and then do as few cycles as possible with like inflating the bladder, and it starts to naturally come out anyway. So I think we had a 50-liter one. I don't— I wouldn't— you don't need much bigger than 50-liter, and I think they do a 30-liter one as well. 30-liter one should be fine. I, I'm glad people are saying about the content thing. Thank you very much. I, I'm only— I'm just jealous in terms of The numbers and the views she gets. But yeah, she's but she's good. I I like her. Some people really don't like her and really like slag her off and say I can't believe it. It's so fake. And I'm just like it's you can't argue with the success. DC Bless B says I would be upset if I was a female YouTube beekeeper. Try finding other female keepers channels to watch. There is, there is a bit of that. There's not, there's not many. They do tend to do well. So The Honeystead as well is another female beekeeping channel that's done, that's done very well this year. Compilation of stings to the face video needed. I've done a— I did a couple of them and they didn't do as well as I thought, but you know, I will continue to get stung in the face regularly. All I need is my swimsuit. Yeah, Definitely don't want to see that. Arctic Beekeeping says, do you have any YouTube starting tips when doing beekeeping? Just keep on posting loads of videos, that's always good. I'm gonna really try something very different with my videos this year, and it's difficult because some people really like the long videos. So like there's some videos like queen rearing ones, it's like half an hour long. Some of the demerare ones are like half an hour long, and some people are just saying that's, that's far, far too long. And then some people like a really condensed down quick 5-minute video, like really fast-paced with loads of stuff in. YouTube likes that style of video as well, so you, you, they tend to do better. So, so I think I'll be doing more this year of like the condensed ones. Unfortunately, what people will definitely realize this year is I'm not going to be posting anywhere near as much content as I previously did. So, so last year I posted from like April through to October, maybe like September, October, I posted a video every single day, brand new video every single day, plus Shorts. So this year I just can't, I can't keep up to that kind of schedule because I'm just, I've got way too much other stuff going on. Um, so it's probably going to do like 1 or 2 videos a week. And I'll still do the same thing, which is I'll film maybe like 10 videos a day and they'll go on the membership section and then they'll be drip-fed through. But I've decided, I've decided I'm going to go and play a bit of golf and I'm going to do some other stuff as well because it becomes a bit too difficult just doing bees, bees, bees all the time. And it's supposed to be fun, so I'm trying to break it up a little bit. You'll still get lots of videos. And they'll be shorter, so I'm hoping that there'll be more. I'm going to do some more series. I'm kind of running dry really on ideas for series. They need to be something that's like quite easy to film and that is progressive, so it's not just a case of like something— oh yeah, doing another inspection. So if you have any ideas of cool series to do that don't cost me loads of money, then stick them in the chat. That'd be good. Amateur Radio on the Air says, how much actual honey does non-EU require to be called honey in the UK supermarkets? I don't know, but there is, there is a rule about that, about like how much you have to put into for it to be blended. But I think, I think what you can just put in, even if it's like a 10% EU and then 90% non-EU, I think all you need to say is, all they say on it is that it's made from a blend of EU and non-EU countries. Regardless of the split is my understanding, but we don't import honey from the EU or the non-EU. Oh, Rich! Yeah, I've been I've been stung this year. Yeah, I'd never put my bee suit on this time of year, and I'm always like chiseling boxes open, have a little quick look, and then bang, they get you in the eye. Always. Ash says my content is more informative. Her content is mass appeal clickbait. Yeah. I'm sorry if some of my stuff is a bit clickbaity. It's difficult to keep it going over winter. And I'll put the advert in there again, like, I want to use the channel for cool videos. And I do think, like, I know not everyone wants to hear this, but the future of YouTube is partly the Shorts platform. But I want to make that Shorts platform kind of like quite fun and exciting. And I can't do that all by myself, so I want people's videos. So if you want to send me videos, you can drop me a DM. I'll give you my WhatsApp number. You can WhatsApp me, call me videos, and I will post them. And you, you do stand a chance of winning like a nuke or some queens or some money. Uh, Pure Yorkshire Honey says write a script, it will make it easier to start. Yeah, that's— it's good. I don't know what I find, I can really notice the video videos where I've written a script, and it'd be interesting to see if other people can notice the videos where I've written a script. I find it much easier just to like maybe a couple of bullet points or no bullet points, just like waffle, but then it kind of comes across a little bit more natural. But definitely like, yeah, when you're first starting out, write a script and try and grab a bit of attention at the beginning. Am I on TikTok? Yeah, I am. I did a few videos on TikTok But it's it's difficult TikTok, you know. Like it's they they consume the video so quickly on TikTok. Like you'll get like about an hour where they'll watch the videos and then bang the videos are dead and you just need to keep on posting them. So I decided to stick onto on YouTube and it's I think it's a good call because they they are starting to monetize Shorts videos. Pure Yorkshire Honey says I try and keep my videos to seven minutes max. Yeah, it's it's good. Do you know what? Yeah, if you go to nine minutes, a bit better though, because if you go past eight minutes, they they there's a secondary advert bit that goes on there. YouTube likes them just over. DC blesses me, says surprises me you aren't at the Hive Life Conference in Tennessee. People from all over the world are there this year. Yeah, I know. I would absolutely love to be there. I really would. Andrea Smith says come and have a go at fly fishing with me and Linda. Oh, definitely up for a bit of fly fishing. I love a bit of that. Where do you go? I know, I know someone else that does a bit of fly fishing. Brown trout, he says. Good fun. Uh, Tina says, I went down the fake honey rabbit hole when a hive was installed at my work. Interesting. Uh, Rich says, you'll need to do road trips to other beekeepers. So if I ever— if I retire early from my job, which I don't think I will, but that is what I would love to do. I've said that before, like, that, that's the future of the channel, which is just like moving around and doing videos and going and meeting other beekeepers, other farmers, like in the UK, in the US. I'd love to go to the US and do like a proper tour of the US in like a camper van and go and see all the sights and go and see like some beekeepers as well. I would absolutely love to do that. That'd be great fun. Uh, Darren says golf, a good walk spoiled. Winston Churchill. Yeah, he's wrong. Love golf. Uh, Richard says hi, first time listening to your live chat, it's really good. Thanks, Richard. Lost a hive recently and now I'm left with many frames of capped honey. What should I do? If it's not like covered in poo, like dysentery, you can probably just like recover it and eat it. That is like the safest thing because any AFB risk, any EFB risk is not a risk to humans. If it's like covered in poo, then I would just burn them, but it's fine for human consumption. Don't go start feeding it to bees because it's just not worth the risk. I'm in the US and enjoy your videos even if it does seem— if it doesn't really apply to us. We have a lot of colder winters, hit -6 Fahrenheit last week. It's always crazy when I'm like, minus 6, that's not really that cold. Like sometimes here we get to minus 12, and then I look because we don't work in Fahrenheit at all. I look at minus 6, what it actually means in Celsius, and I'm like, okay, yeah, you win. It's definitely colder out there. Is and a fun fact I learned the other day is that minus 40 C and minus 40 Fahrenheit is the same thing. So you've learned something. That's probably the one. Factual thing you've learned today. Dominican beekeeper, greetings from the Caribbean. How warm is it in the Caribbean? I just—it must be thirty degrees now. Maybe maybe twenty nine. Robert Hope says, "Great live chat, Lawrence. Next time, can you give us advance notice as I nearly missed it? Thanks." I I thought this as I was doing it. Oh, I need to like. Promote it a little bit more in advance. But it's difficult to do it because I just— I was out today doing something else, and then I came home, and my wife and daughter have gone out, and I had a choice. I was gonna— I'm clearing out my garage and building like a gym in the garage. I've got loads to do in there. I broke my chop saw, so I could have— my choices for this evening were I was going to go to the driving range I was going to do some weights because I got a bit chubby. I was going to start clearing out the gym. I was going to lie down. That was, that was top of the list. Oh, and I thought, well, you know, I could, I could squeeze in a little YouTube Live video. So that's my general thought process. I don't have time to like— it's not that I don't have time, but it's like the priority seems to go away when I forward think when I'm going to do it. So I will try, I will try to plan it in a little bit next time. Richard says, is Richard with you this season? So no, that was the best miscommunication ever. So I spoke to Richard at the end of the year and said, what happened? Like, you didn't— you never got in contact. And he said, oh, I thought you were going to get in contact with me. And I said, yeah, oh, we didn't really— he didn't really discuss who was going to get in contact with who, did we? And that was it, like 6 months later, and I just didn't have any help. So, um, he might do. Do you know what, I think— I don't know if he's watching this. Richard, you're very welcome to come back. I know my bees were horrible that day. I think he might have got put off by the first time he came and helped, which was a bit like, hold this camera and mind those angry bees. Uh, Joe says, are you doing a propolis tincture video and how to make it? Now, a couple of people have asked me that. Have I said I'm going to do that. So it's really easy to make it. I should, I should probably do a video on it. I bought some propolis tincture, like a big massive bucket of propolis tincture off someone, and I think I exchanged it for some queens. So I've got like this bucket, you know, you get like a 3-pound honey bucket, and it's full. And it's not like propolis, it's not like full propolis tincture, but it's propolis that's been cleaned using that 80% alcohol. and then you need to just like water it down with more 80% alcohol, which, which is— you can't really get, um, here. I do have a bottle of it, I just found it somewhere. But, um, and that's it. So it's like really strong 80% plus proof or percentage, whatever it is, alcohol mixed with propolis, and they're just filtered. That's all it is. I might do a video on it. Um, Wee Purple Host says, do a series on natural remedy colonies— mushrooms, rhubarb leaves, logs, and all the old wives' knowledge. Those are the only 3 I know, but must be more. I, I don't know if I would do a video on that. Like, you know, like the rhubarb leaves, like, you, you kind of trace it back in terms of where's that, where's that myth come from? And the myth, and the myth has come from, well, They use oxalic acid to treat varroa, and it's effective at killing mites. And in the rhubarb leaves, there's naturally occurring oxalic acid. But I don't know, how would you— how would you want, like, feed them leaves to— I just, I just can't see it working. Um, but, but I am, I am open to doing that. I just feel a bit bad, you know, if I do something like that. Yeah, you can't win on YouTube. So I'd say I did something like that said, right, we're gonna do some experiments on this colony here, and we're gonna not treat them, and we're gonna just give them rhubarb leaves, and then they die. Oh, people would get a bit— oh, you killed your colony by not treating them. JR Hartley. Interesting. Uh, Tina says, answer video questions, get them on live. Yeah, so what's his name? Fred, is it Fred? I can't remember his name. Really famous American guy does that. Does it like weekly, doesn't he? Answers questions. And I started looking at something like that, but I think I'll just, I'll just do it ad hoc. I can't, I can't do it every week. Um, I spend too much time in front of the screen at work. So, uh, right. Pure Yorkshire Honey says Kay said she will sell you her camper. I'm jumping into conversations here. Oh, there's loads, loads of— I'm really enjoying that people are having a good chat on here, this is good. So says, what's your thoughts on insulation? Have you tried well-insulated hives and do you see the difference from non-insulated? So only in terms of like wooden versus poly, and you definitely see a massive— like they come through the winter, I find, better. They come through the winter bigger in insulated. I think there'll be more brood There's definitely more brood in insulated ones, which I think is a negative because it's quite nice to have like a longer broodless period to vape them with. And then come May, I find the non-insulated ones have caught up. So it's only— there's not a huge amount in it, and it's more that I think if you're going to insulate it, just get the insulation on top of the cluster with that polyashforth feeder, or just some Celotex or Kingspan, or any insulation board, and that gives you like the majority of the benefits. Ash says he's in his second year of full-time beekeeping and balance the downtime with teaching to iron out my income. What do you do when you're not beekeeping? So I'm a project manager in the nuclear industry. With temps so mild in South Wales, I'm tempted to feed 2:1. Would you advise this? Only, only if they need it. Like, I found— and this is something that I really found— people say in the winter all you should be doing is hefting your hives, see if they've got enough weight in them, and you'll be amazed how light a colony can feel and still have like quite a good amount of stores left. So I always think the best thing to feed at this time of the year is fondant, because the bees won't take fondant down at this time of year. Take fondant down in like late summer, autumn, no problem, and store it. But at this time of the year, they won't take the fondant down. So if you take like a 12-kilogram block of fondant, cut it in half, I would say 6 kilograms, probably going to cost you about a tenner max. I'd be very surprised if you put one of those on top of the colony now in an upturned polyashworth feeder, I'd be very surprised if they got all the way through that. Even if the colony was pretty much starving, I think they struggled to get through that. And then if they don't get through it, you just take it off, clean up the frames, and just chuck it away. Or you can melt it down, turn it into sugar syrup. Whereas if you start feeding them 2:1 now, and you're hefting them, and they don't need to be fed, and they start taking it down, you can cause issues with them like clustering up. But the bigger one is that you can block out the queen so that when she wants to start ramping up laying, there's not enough space for her to do it. That's me talking too much, right? Andrea says she's a fly fishing instructor and always goes when she's up at Bwlch Yn. Sounds good, let's do it. I'm gonna need an instructor. I've never, I've never been fly fishing. I like, I like a bit of sea fishing off the shore. How is you and everyone doing? I'm very good, thank you. In your opinion, what's the main cause of colony collapse during the winter. So I don't know if that's like a main cause of colony collapse. I would say it's mites and like the viruses that are brought on by not treating. Obviously a lot of people will lose that, and depending on if you've— if you're feeding your colonies well. The one that I think will catch a lot of people out, and you'll get to spring and there'll be loads of these. You'll get to spring, you look inside, and like, there's nothing. Colony's gone. And people think, oh, it's colony collapse disorder, my colony's collapsed. And you look into it, and you can— you get a bit of beekeeping experience, you can see this every year. It's so easy to see what's gone on, and it's just a failed queen. The queen's failed, the colony's dwindled. You get like a few little spots of drone brood left over, And there's no bees because they've just dwindled down to nothing, and it's just the drones. The colony won't produce the drones, so the queen lays unfertilized eggs, they turn into drone larvae, and then the bees don't feed them properly, or they pull them out and kill them because they're like, no, no, I don't want you, you're a drone, wrong time of the year. So the colony dwindles literally to nothing, and then you just get a few bees scattered on the floor. I would say that's probably number one reason why your bees won't make it through the year. And it's interesting, this colony collapse, because it is, it's a collapsing colony, but it's nothing like sinister. It's just poorly mated queen. Likes pike fishing. That's pretty cool. I've never been pike fishing. Goes for striped bass. That's more my thing, something you can eat. Guessing you can eat striped bass. Saying he's at Hive Life. Yeah, I think he's talking about the other Richard. Richard Noel is at Hive Life. I'm not jealous, I'm not jealous at all. Do folks use lay-on hives where you are? How big? So, so not many, and then the one that I've got, it's not like a proper lay-on hive, it's just like they call it a lay-on hive because it's got like a similar size frame. Louise says, have you lost any bees so far, Richard? It might be for someone else, I've not checked, I probably lost some though. Oh right, I've scrolled down too far now. I can buy 99% isopropyl alcohol from Hexyl in the UK, I found them very good. All right, Is that is that the same alcohol? Is that like rubbing alcohol? Because I'm not sure if it is rubbing alcohol. I think I don't know, and I always get confused about stuff like this. But that's interesting. Yeah, that sounds sounds like it do the job. So Rich says, "Do a video on someone getting started with a nuke with no experience at all close to your location." So I. that would be a good video, but it's pretty similar to the My First Nuc series. But also it's like the logistics of trying, you know, it needs to be something that I can just go and do, a video that I can just go and record, because I'm like, my time's so, not so busy doing other stuff, working, that to do it week on week I need to get the commitment from someone else to film them. Uh, says Fred Dunn. That's it, it was, it was Fred, Fred Dunn. Yeah. Um, this is, this is something interesting about Fred Dunn, and, and it's not interesting at all. I, I just found it quite interesting. Do you know when you see someone on a screen, you kind of get like, you think, oh, I don't know, that's what they look like on screen? I saw a picture of him like last year at Hive Life conference against, standing next to someone else, and oh man, he's well small, like barely over 5 foot, I reckon. I'm gonna say, I'm gonna guess like 5 foot 3. I couldn't get over how small he was. Uh, Taro says, what would happen if you poke the leaves, then mix your sugar mix feed with them? You're like, I get what you're saying, but I just, I've got like, you can get Happy Bioxal, which is like pure oxalic acid that's proven to be really effective. And it's, it's the same active ingredient that's in the rhubarb leaves that I think that you'd need like millions of leaves to make it work. Uh, Joe Creaser says, yeah, isopropyl is not the best, you need food-grade ethanol. Yeah, so that— this is, this is what my thought was, it needs to be food-grade. The people who make gin buy this, that's where you get it from. They buy it in like big LBCs, um, what do they call them in the US? like a tote. They buy it in the tote and then they water it down to make like gin and vodka and stuff. That's the one you need, but you need a license for it. Did you ever get the Instant Vap? If so, how did you get on with it and what temperature settings did you use? So yes, I did get the Instant Vap, and no, I've not taken it out of the box yet, but I will do some videos on it. How many times do you harvest honey per year? So I did do— I used to do twice a year. I did a spring harvest and then a feed and then a summer harvest, and I don't do that anymore. I just do one at the end of the year now, and it makes it a lot easier. Um, but you, you potentially can lose all of your spring crop if you don't get the right weather, and it means come the end of the year it's quite tiring doing your inspections because you're lifting lots of heavy boxes every time. Arctic Beekeeping says goodbye. Thanks, Arctic Beekeeping, good questions. What is the benefit of using the bottom entrance on your bottom boards? I'm not sure, I'm not sure, I'm not sure about that one. Do I use the bottom entrance on my bottom boards? I'm not sure. Right, Steve says, when do you plan to have queens for sale? So first queens will be here pretty much first week of April. I've put it on the website a week after that, but if they come early, we'll send them out early. Oh, that's very nice. It's like, it's like I've made you say that, Steve Bees. He says he purchased queens off me last year and he's very impressed. I have to say, I've been very impressed with the queens that we've been getting. Like, I've used loads of them myself, very impressed, and the feedback that we've we've been getting. If you go on our website, look at the feedback— huge amount of very, very happy customers. So I'm really glad that we've, we've secured a good agreement with our, our breeder out in Malta. Uh, yeah, so, so Bumper might say in June earlier. So, so we, we have imported queens and then we do our own queens as well. So the imported ones, first week of April, and then they'll be on tap throughout the whole year. And then our own ones, yeah, June, maybe last week of May. If you were to start over, what type of hive would you use? National, Langstroth, etc.? So it's a really difficult one to answer that because if some bee farmers are just interested in honey, that's it, that's all they want to do is honey, and they're not fussed about selling nucs. I've always said, for me and anyone who's not in that situation where it's just just going for honey, always go with the most standardized setup that you can get, which, which in the UK is a National. So I don't like the National setup, I much prefer the Langstroth setup, but to have the ability to do your swarm control and also sell your nucs at the same time, it doesn't get much better than that. So I would, I would stick with Nationals. And I said previously as well, if I was starting again completely from scratch now, the setup I would use is I'd make my underfloor entrances out of mesh and wood. I would buy seconds full cedar wooden brood boxes. I would run them all on national deeps. I wouldn't have any shallows in there. I'd run the oak-framed queen excluders I got from Abello because they are really, really good and they're just rock solid and last forever. Polyash force feeder, and then I'd make my own roof, or I'd use like a cheap upturned tray as the roof just to keep the water out. And it's a relatively cheap setup, but it's really effective and really makes your beekeeping quite easy. Uh, Peter Savage says gin is started from a neutral grain spirit, max strength is 95.5%. Okay, and that I know that's not rubbing alcohol, isn't it? But that is like— is, is that a food-grade ethanol? I think, I think that is the same thing, but I'm no gin expert. I've tried to buy the BS Honey mesh top for the nuc but can't seem to get one. Where do we get ours? So the Maysmore one fits. I don't think BS Honeybees do one, but the Maysmore one fits exactly on the top. Good man, Langs are the best. I do like my Langstroth ones. Can I ask what your favorite bee breed is? You seem to like grumpy bees. So I definitely don't like grumpy bees, and I feel like I've not been entirely truthful with some of the aggressive bees that you've seen on some of my videos, and I feel like I can't be completely honest about them. All I will say is that they are definitely not my Buckfast, let's put it that way, and you will see that I'm going to be ruthless with them and I'm going to start stripping out the angry ones, the queens that aren't mine, and a lot of them are dead now. I did a lot of that at the end of the season last season. But yeah, some of those videos, you look at them, you just think, oh my God, they're so aggressive. Like that river apiary, I bought queens from someone 2 years back now, 2 and a half years ago, and I filled that apiary up with them. And the first year they were all right, and then the second year, oh my God, they were aggressive. And then every single one of them was the same queen. They hadn't like swarmed and then gone down from F1 to F2. They were the same queens. I just think they'd gone in quite late, not built up strong, and it was that first year of them being like full-size colonies. They were vicious, vicious, angry Vikings. Jim says, have you tried Dawn dish soap for your mite washes? So no, I've not tried that. We did like an alcohol wash, but we generally— I generally don't do the mite washes because for me, I don't need to know whether there's like a 6-mite drop or a 26-mite drop because we just treat them all, and we treat them all religiously, both with Apivar, and then we do our vaping as well. So I don't need to see kind of like on a mite-by-mite basis because I'm not doing like testing for different genetics. Your entrance is not on the front of beehives where you have to use an entrance reducer like a regular beehive. You use it, just called it an under— oh, sorry, so the under— the underfloor entrances. Yeah, they're very good, the underfloor entrances. They're not like— I've never sold these as they completely eliminate wasps, just make it a little bit more difficult for wasps to get in, but if you've got a weak colony, wasps will definitely still get in. It's all about keeping nice big strong colonies. Jiwi says, I'm in Wiltshire, UK. Is it still too early to look in the hive, or is it best to keep them locked up? So, you know, like the textbook answer there is don't look inside, it's too early, it's If you open them, you lose all of the heat. But I'm like everyone else, it's a kind of case like if I'm up at the apiary, I'll crack a couple open, but just be quick. Don't like take the box off and stand there looking at them taking photographs. But see, with me, what people say a lot of the times are, you're breaking the seal though, and then it makes it less efficient. And my argument is, well, I've got mine ratchet strapped down and they propolise the seal. So as soon as you crack them open, you have a look, 2 seconds, oh, yep, loads of bees, crack them back down again, ratchet strap, and you almost give them that seal back. So yeah, don't go looking at your bees, but I do, I do look at mine. Didn't realize there was so much to beekeeping. I think that's what makes beekeeping so great, is that there is so much to it, and there's— everyone has their views. And I've, I said this all the time, like, I'll never say to anyone, oh, you're doing that wrong, that's not how you do things, because there's no right or wrong way to do it. You just got to work out what works for you. And anybody who tells you, oh, you're doing that wrong, that's not how you do things, I just think they're just like a bit of a, I don't know, issue with their ego, because how do they know? And a lot of the time they've not tried it. And the Flow Hive is the perfect example of that. Oh, don't buy Flow Hives, Flow Hives rubbish, they don't work, blah blah blah. And you say to them, have you used a Flow Hive? And they're like, no, they're rubbish, you don't use them. And it's like, well, how do you know they're rubbish if you've not used them? I've used a Flow Hive. I used 2 Flow Hives last year and they were really good fun. And I'd never use them commercially, and I probably wouldn't recommend them to most people, but if I was just going to have— if I was going to have 1 or 2 colonies in my garden I would without a shadow of a doubt use Flow Hives because I wouldn't have to have any honey extraction rooms. So I just like to keep an open mind on my beekeeping stuff. I'm just looking, just wondering, is there any way to manipulate turbocharge a first-year queen? So like, they'll only really go as quick as what's available in terms of the forage, but stimulative feeding with 1:1 sugar syrup at the right time of the year will make them go quicker. Making sure they've got sufficient pollen, whether that's genuine pollen that you know is disease-free or pollen sub, will make them go quicker, but they often find if there's natural pollen, they won't touch the pollen sub. My dog has got one of my shoes. Jasper! JK Photography says, what's the earliest I can order queens from you? So you can order queens now. We did this last year, just did pre-orders, just because there's a massive demand in April for queens. So people can order them now and then you get your name on the list. We held the price as well, £38 for a Buckfast queen, so we've not put the price up this year. The postage has gone up about £1.50 though, because Royal Mail have just put loads of the prices up. Langstroth nucs sold out already of Langstroth nucs. We made 30 Langstroth nucs and we sold out like before Christmas, but I've set up a waiting list for them because I will do some more, but I'm not gonna— I'm not taking any more orders for them now. And there's not that many national nucs left either, so if you are interested in ordering those, you can, you can have a look on there, but they will sell out relatively soon. We want to do heather honey this year for the first time. Any tips on how many supers is it possible to oversuper? So yeah, so that's, do you know what, that's a great question. So I know a couple of beekeepers in Yorkshire last year who said the year before that was like the best year they'd ever had, and then lots of them didn't go up to the heather this year, so like, sorry, in 2022, because you're only really supposed to get like one good year out of every 10. So sod's law, they didn't go. And 2022 was like 300% what 2021 was for these farmers. They said it was insane the amount of heather honey that they got. So do you go to Yorkshire Moors next year to try and get heather? I'd say probably no, but you could do. And I think the effects of climate change on the UK means that the heather honey might start doing well more regularly. But going back to your question, any tips on how many supers? Is it possible to over-super? Yes, it is definitely possible to over-super, and it is the worst, worst possible thing that you want on heather honey because getting it out is a nightmare. Loosing it is so slow anyway, so if you've got it just spread all over the place— and they do this, spread it all over the place— And the risk in undersupering at that time of the year in terms of swarming, it's kind of like negligible. I've never ever lost a swarm on the heather because it's so late in the year. Not to say you, you people won't lose swarms that late in the year, but I definitely err on less supers on the heather. So I would say, if you've got your colonies condensed down to a big brood box and don't double brood them on the heathery, but you'll lose tons of honey in the double brood. On a single brood box and you've got 2 supers full, you'd have done very well. If you get 3 supers full, really, really good, and if you get 4 supers full, it's just like incredible. Yeah, I don't— I definitely don't plan for 4 supers. I would say 3, 3 at the best, and really you want 2 completely crammed-packed supers as opposed to 3 like partially filled ones. I'm in West Coast USA, I picked up 2 things of note from watching your videos, polyhives and bottom entrances, both great from the Oregon rainforest, smiles. Cheers, Dan. Thanks for all your hard work sharing information. Thanks, Jim, thanks for everyone for watching. Heather honey is the best from managed grouse moors, and that is very true. it makes a massive difference when they're managed and they're actually like cutting it back and burning it and you're getting like the new growth coming through. You can see when they leave them and they're not managed, they really don't yield anywhere near as much. Luckily around here there's a huge, huge, huge shooting site and a number of shooting sites around here and they do manage it really well. Out of interest, how many queens do you aim to raise each year for your own use and for sale. So about £300 is the most I've ever raised, and I've not got the equipment to do any more than that this year, and that's for my own use and for sale. Uh, Steve says cheers for all the information, off to watch a good team in the FA Cup. I'm assuming you're talking about Wolves. Go on the Wolves. Um, probably going to trigger you a bit, that one, as well. I'm guessing it is Wolves. But I think I think I'm going to wrap it up there because my wife is going to be home soon. Two hours and seventeen minutes. We had like a hundred people on at some points. I've enjoyed doing this. I can only do this if people come on the chat, which you've done today, and ask me loads of questions. I'm always happy to come on here, answer the questions. Doesn't matter if they're about beekeeping or Arsenal or anything like that. Thank you for all your support on here, but also on the YouTube channel as a whole, and buying the queens, buying the nucs, buying the honey, and Jim buying my hot sauces as well. It's really appreciated. So I wish you all a very happy New Year and a very successful beekeeping season in 2023, and I'll see you all soon. Take care.