Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 60

Hello and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I can't believe it, we're on to episode 60 of Let's Talk Bees. And reminder, at the moment during the season from April through to September, I'm doing these streams every single week. However, do not get fooled, like I think a lot of people get fooled. I do them every other week on a Friday at 7:30, and then the other week, every other week apart from that one, I do them about 10:20, a much shorter one Saturday morning. So we kind of go Friday night, Saturday morning, Friday night, Saturday morning. So it's Saturday morning today. A slight change as well. So on the website, if you go onto the website, you can submit questions. So it says like, ask a question for the live streams. I'm changing that slightly. So I'm not going to answer those live questions today. I'm going to do a special dedicated additional not live stream, and I'm going to answer those questions, and I'll just post the answers out so everyone can see it. So it's kind of like a pre-recorded live stream as well to cover those ones. But what that means is that I can dedicate myself to anybody who wants to leave a comment. So the, the way this works is very, very simple. You can just leave a comment in the, in the comments section, ask any question you like, and I will answer it as best as I possibly can. So let's give a little bit of an update as to what is going on at Black Mountain Honey at the moment, if anybody's going to gather. The Saturday morning ones are never anywhere near as busy, but I appreciate for some people Friday night is not good. So It's gone a little bit wild at Black Mountain Honey at the moment. I've been trying to film this beekeeping course at the same point, so bringing videographers in, and I've also been trying to offload and outsource all of the editing. So bringing the two together has been, um, I wouldn't say a challenge, it's not, it's not been a mega challenge, but I think going forward we now have a plan which is gonna, gonna blow people away. So There's no more editing taking place by me, so you're going to see a big jump up in the quality of the videos. But also because I'm going to now have a single— a whole day booked in every single week with a professional videographer who costs a lot of money but is really, really good, means that I can start to film things that I never filmed before. So if you're a channel member and you've been enjoying the live apiary inspections, those live apiary inspections are about to get so much better because somebody else will be able to be there to video me now. So it'll be more dynamic. You'll be able to zoom in, punch in, punch out, see what's going on. If I'm showing you something, you'll be able to see it right close up in wonderful 4K quality. So I'm really, really excited about that. That is going to improve the member offering substantially because you're going to get a lot more kind of time to see what is going on with the bees. So we're going to do more live inspections on the member channel. We're going to do more kind of like close-ups and informational ones talking about different things that are going on. And of course, we're going to continue give people the heads up so that they can take the right actions before things are too late in the season. So let's jump in and answer some of the questions there. But if you haven't already, got the link there either on Facebook or on YouTube. The channel membership options are really taking off, lots of people joining, and I want to make them as good as I possibly can. So let's jump into some questions. Got Danny B's. Mark sent me a brilliant video earlier today, so thanks for that, Mark. He says, morning guys, are we all ready for the fantastic weather coming up. So I certainly am, and I'm generally not at this time of the year, but I've just gone ahead and like double supered a lot of things. And it was interesting because I went through yesterday and I got maybe 15 like full-size colonies, so colonies not in nuc boxes but in like a standard brood box. And I went through yesterday thinking, right, they're gonna— I think they're gonna have made it up to the supers now, so we're probably gonna see like 2 or 3 frames drawn out in the supers. And I went through 10 out of the 15, and not a single one of them had drawn out a single super frame yet. So when, when people are ringing me up and saying, my bees are not touching the super frames, what's going on? I think we all need to kind of pinch ourselves a little bit and sit on our hands and look outside and say, you know what, it is actually just the 26th of April. So I wouldn't worry if your bees aren't drawing out your supers yet if you're starting off with small colonies. Before you know it, you'll click your fingers and you'll come in and the whole super will be drawn out. That's how quick it is. So don't be caught out. I've got a couple of colonies that are doing really, really well, kind of like overwintered or maybe double brood, or they've come through the winter really, really strong on a single brood and then they've gone straight up. But the ones where I've been putting nucs in, um, are still getting to the point where they're just getting up into the supers. Channel member says, want to do some overwintered nucs this year. Do they need extra stores like a super, or is there enough stores in the broody areas to take them through the winter? So we overwinter every single one of our overwintered nucs and colonies, and you know, there's, there's well over 1,000 there in a single 6-frame nuc. More than enough space in those brood frames to do it, but you need to follow the processes. And as you're a channel member, I will definitely cover this in great detail for people who are preparing overwintered nucs later on in the season. But the most important thing with overwintered nucs is the varroa levels in the colony, and people completely overlook this, and I overlooked this for years. If you, if you don't get the varroa levels right in the colony, i.e., you don't treat your bees early enough to ensure that the viral load transmitted by the varroa is very, very low, They don't produce anywhere near as much winter bees, which means that they can't kind of come through the colony in a decent size. And no matter what you do, no matter when you make up the nucs, no matter how much space you give them, no matter how much syrup or feed or fondant or pollen you give them, they just can't expand to the same or kind of like the same way compared to a colony where they've been treated very, very early. So really, if you're thinking overwintered nucs, be thinking about healthy, healthy colonies now. And it's quite an easy one to do. So if you're thinking, right, I'm gonna— I've got 2 colonies there, I'm going to double brood them. Um, so I've got 2 double brood colonies, so probably got like 44 frames of bees and brood and stores I'm going to play with. Maybe you're thinking of making up 10 nucs or something like that. Having that plan now is brilliant because what you can do is you can say, well, that colony is not a honey production colony, not going to produce any honey with that colony whatsoever, so there's no risk of tainting the stores or tainting the honey or tainting the supers or any of that. So why wait for the varroa treatment? you can varroa treat now and have that little plan. So you could say, right, 2 double colonies, I'm going to treat for 8 weeks. So let's say it's the 1st of May today, so 1st of May, 1st of June, 1st of July. You take out that treatment on the 1st of July, you've got 2 mega double brood colonies that you can go and split from. And if they get too big, you can just treble brood them, so no supers need to go anywhere near them. And then you can make your splits, and you're making your splits from like the healthiest bees possible because the varroa load is going to be significantly lower. Similarly, you could trap the queens, force them broodless, do an oxalic acid vape, you can do any, any sort of Varroa treatment to get it down. It's not— I'm not just one-trick pony with Apivar. Like, oxalic acid with a cage is very, very suitable procedure for that, but it will dent the amount of bees there because obviously you're restricting the brood. That is what I would do though, so focus on that, but they definitely don't need any extra space or any supers or anything. And good luck because it is good fun. Says good morning, which must be at the market. Hello at the market. Says good morning, your queens are due imminently, I think, Adam, if not already arrived. Good morning, thank you for answering my question last week. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone. I love that. I've never heard it called a weekend before. That is a brilliant term. Um, uh, Melanie Keating, channel member, says, morning, Lawrence, loving the lives and the support. Last week you mentioned you've adapted a crown board to use the Instant Vap. How did you adapt the board, please, and could you do a video on it? Um, I certainly can do a video on it, but what I would say is I think I've already done it. So if you Google on the channel— John, where's John when you need him? He's good at finding these links. If you Google on my YouTube channel, go on my YouTube channel and search for multi-purpose crown board, definitely a video on there for a multi-purpose crown board. And it just shows you what I use. So you can either buy it or you can make it. I've not done the video of making it, but you'll see from the— when I show it, it's dead, dead simple. So it is literally just a board with a hole in it and then a hole at the side. So if you get what you need from the video, great. If you don't, stick a comment on the video and I'll add that to the members list. I've been furiously building more supers and frames. I've already burnt through the ones I made over winter. I think everyone is in that same situation. I'm looking over there and there's a mega mess where I've been making up frames. Oh, Morning, Lawrence, when do you send your first nuc boxes out? Well, so we have sent a lot of nuc boxes out already, so we are 600 nucs in so far. All of the overwintered have gone, minus anyone who's asked me to kind of delay it for a week or two. So we've got a couple more weeks to go, and then we're sending nucs out on the 7th of May, the 14th of May, the 21st of May, the 28th of May, and I think it's the 4th of June, 3rd or 4th of June. So 5 more weeks of full dispatches, and then I'm dispatching next week as well. So 6 more weeks of dispatching nucs, and then we are Done, and we are done done this year. There's going to be no additional nukes coming through unless Richard pulls a rabbit out of the hat. Andrew Rogers says, "I'm checking today or tomorrow in case I need to add more supers." I love that. It was quite timely addition there. I think this is where I am at the moment, looking outside and thinking, "Have I given everyone enough space?" Matt Page, channel member, says, "Haha, yes, I haven't missed this. No, we are on time. Adam is waiting for them to arrive. Fingers crossed all is good. Down to the bottom." So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go. Not really, I'll stay for this one because I could just talk about nonsense, can't I? But I am at the bottom, so your question will get answered as soon as possible. John says he's going to catch it later, so you will get a link for that video as well. Brilliant. Morning, Laurence. I got my, uh, my nuke I got from you are doing really well, and thanks for all your advice. Uh, no problem. Glad they're doing well, Simon. It's, um, it's quite— it is quite funny at the moment. Uh, I, I do laugh a bit to myself the situations that I bring myself into. But like this week, my phone has not stopped. Like all week, not stopped. And when I say not stopped, I counted up my WhatsApp chats yesterday. So just yesterday, I had 120 different WhatsApp chats. So not messages, there's like multiple messages in each of those chats. So there's 120 WhatsApp chats where people have messaged me for advice. And you know, it could be WhatsApp member subscriptions, it could be premium membership group, or it could be people who have bought nucs and they're saying, what's this, what's that, I need, I need help with what you've provided. So that, that happened. I think I had 100 phone calls yesterday. Never ever ever in my life again am I posting to say that there might be some queens available. Oh my goodness, that was not a good idea. The second I posted it, I had about 4 phone calls come through and I thought, oh, that's— I hope that doesn't continue all day. And it continued. All day, so apologies if I didn't get back to your messages saying you'd like access to the queens because there was only about ten of them. I think there was twelve or twelve or thirteen queens available at the end of the day, and I probably could have sold like two or three hundred. So definitely won't be doing that again. But then the emails getting loads of emails, three or four hundred emails a day at the moment. I get back to every single one of them. So what I do as well, if you want to get in contact with me quickly and you're messaging me through WhatsApp, just a little bit of advice for people if it is okay. Just put your question down in text. If you put your question down in text, I'll. Flash through it and I'll voice note you back. If you if you voice note me, it's the bottom of the list because if it's like a three minute voice note, I can't I can't listen to a three minute voice note in the day, so I have to like schedule that in for the next day. So if you want your questions answered as quick as possible, just short question in text. I'll voice note you back straight away. There we go. James Cratch just says it's five twenty seven a.m. in Central Indiana, USA. Appreciate it is probably a little bit early for the USA, so apologies for that. But James is up. James Cratch is up, which is good. Matt Eek says, @BoozyPitBees, started beekeeping last year and now already up to 9 hives and loving it. Thank you for all the teaching videos and Buckfast queens purchased last year, all going strong. I'm guessing that was @BlackMountainHoneyBees. I quite like Boozy Pit Bees as well, that's an even better name, but thank you, Matt, much appreciated. Danny's Bees says, if we order a couple of queens now, when would I receive them? So we've got availability for the 8th of May, so to send on the 8th for delivery on the 9th. But looking at it, it's like it's going to be sold out by the end of the weekend. So if you're looking for that date and you're thinking that's far away, I'd get in now and order those queens because the following week, um, is the— he's like the 15th, and that's where we'll be shifting to probably come the end of the weekend. I put in a double bottom deep in prep for swarm season, but the bees are not doing anything with it. Should I remove it back to a single or just wait it out? A lot of people are in this similar situation. As I say to everyone who asks me this same question, is if you put a pan of water on the stove and you light it and you say, right, boil, and then you stand there and watch it, it never boils. Like, it literally does not boil ever. But the second you say, right, it's not going to boil, you go to the toilet and come back and it's all boiled over. And that is just the best way of describing what is going to happen with everyone's bees. So you look at the brood box and you say, oh, they're covering 80% of the frame, so the rule is put another brood box on or put a super on. So you put it on and then you say, come on, come up and do something, and then you come back the next week and you're just like, they're literally not even touched it. So the 80% rule is giving them 20% contingency. So you think, for them to increase, to take up that 20% contingency, is a 25% increase that they need just to fill the brood box. So to get them to do that in a week is not— you're not going to get it. And to get it in 2 weeks is probably a push. So after 2 weeks, they might have just like completely filled the brood box, and then it's on that 3rd week that you might start seeing bees coming up into the next box. And then like 3 and a half, 4 weeks later, they'll almost will have filled the box. So it's just kind of like do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, or do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, but everything happens there. And I know my finger got cut out of the graph, but you get what I mean. Do nothing, do nothing, do nothing, and then it just goes up. So no, I'd wait it out, and before you know it, they will be filling that box. Uh, Matt Page says, in your opinion, what's the best queens at the moment, as I'll be— or sorry, as I will be ordering one in around 3 weeks depending on how my double brood is expanding? So my favorite is the F1 Buckfast, whether it's the, the imported F1 Buckfast or the UK mated F1 Buckfast. We have just added a new type of F1 Buckfast queen, and I'm so, so excited about this. So you know that I'm constantly like hoarding breeder queens. I've always done it, and it's always cost me like a lot of money, but I do. I like to, I like to get myself a lot of breeder queens, whether they're artificially inseminated or island mated, tested, not tested, whatever, um, and then do my own testing. So I graft kind of from different ones all the way through the year. I test the daughters, and then I find out which of my breeder queens is the favorite. You can't— you can tell a about a breeder queen by the colony that the breeder queen is in, but really you need to test the daughters to see if those traits are being carried down. So I've got now lots and lots of different artificially inseminated and pure alamated queens and some breeder queens, but I've also tested some to get my own very best tested breeder queens. What I have done is I have sent the 3 very best breeder queens that I have here over to Melitta Bees, and they are going to start grafting an exclusive Black Mountain Honey F1 Buckfast line from those queens. The first ones are available, I think it's week 24 or week 25, so it's kind of like the middle of June. First ones are available, they are on the website now. I've not even actually started promoting them, so this is like exclusive to anyone watching this video. They are there now. There's going to be a limited amount each week because I need to— it's a forward order how many they're going to do. But I'm so excited because I know what the daughters of these colonies produce, and I would say that is going to top tier for Black Mountain honey and something that's going to really set us apart that nobody else has access to. Morning all, I keep forgetting these morning lives, just got on now. I guess I have a bit of catching up to do. Only a little bit, not too much. Found an open queen cell with an egg in it, gonna do an artificial swarm tomorrow, and that is from a nuc you sent me and OSR fields nearby. So oilseed rape will progress swarming very, very quickly. Um, what I would say is I never— I don't do an artificial swarm with an egg in a play cup. I only ever move on to a kind of a split or an artificial swarm if the egg opens and then they charge the larva. Now you might say, well, that's like, it's inevitable, it could happen. It doesn't always work like that. So a queen can lay an egg into a play cup and then nothing happens, and the bees will just come in and clear that out and say, no, no, we're not ready to swarm yet. So I don't do it in that case, and I've found it previously where you'll go in, you'll find the egg, and you just say, right, take it down. And you come back next week and you find it again, there's another egg, and you take it down, and you come back the next week and they're just not doing anything. So it's not— it is not a surefire signal they are going to swarm. I only ever take action if they're charging that cell. So if I'm seeing like pools of royal jelly at the bottom, and even if it's a pool of royal jelly with an egg in it, I'm confident then that that egg is going to hatch, there's going to be a larva, they're going to continue feeding it, so they are going to swarm. So if you've not done it already, you could probably— you could— you can— it depends how much risk you want to take. Like, if you're going to do a split anyway, do a split anyway because it makes sense. Um, but I wouldn't hedge your bets on that egg in the queen cell producing a queen. So just have a think about that. I have 2 brood boxes, I can't find the queen, went in yesterday and came under attack. I want a vertical split, just can't find the queen. Want to shake them to find the queen, but the bees are a bit peed off. Also removed a queen wasp. Could this be why the bees were so wonky? Possibly defending against the queen wasp, but queen wasp doesn't really, you know, she's not in there to cause a huge amount of trouble, she's just in there to find somewhere to start building her nest, which obviously the bees are not going to like. In terms of doing a vertical split without finding the queen, it is very, very difficult. You really do need to do the split because it's the detachment of the queen and the queen's pheromone from the brood that is the kind of critical driver of the demerace split. And you can't really gamble, you can't just say, right, I'll split the boxes, because you might just end up with a queen at the top and then you're just splitting the brood but the queen's in the wrong place. So it doesn't really make— oh, it doesn't make much sense doing it that way. So I'm just trying to think how how you could do it. If you're in double brood, you could, you could just leave them to it, um, and hope that they won't swarm. But yeah, you do, you do need to find that queen if you're thinking of doing a demerare. Seeing a few queen cells but just a few drones. Oh, that's really interesting. I've got tons of drones up here, like never seen so many drones this early on in the year. I think, I think this week, I think if you've got queens going out and mating this week with the weather that's coming, you should, you should get them mated. Uh, No matter how much kit I have, it's never enough. What proportion of spares kit for split swarms do you typically have? It's a bit, yeah, it's an awkward question that one for me because I'm set up for so much bigger than what we currently are. So I bought like enough hives for 300 or 400 hives and have them all stacked up and stored, so I've got access to a lot of kits. I don't really see much of an issue there, but for most other people, I appreciate you do see the issue. So for me, I find I can manage with this kit. So for each colony, single floor, 2 brood boxes, 4 supers, like a polyashworth feeder and a roof. And with that, on average, you can just about cope with all of your colonies throughout the season, so long as you're not like actively splitting. So if you're, if you're like on 20 hives and you want to get to 50 hives, then you obviously need all of the, all of the boxes to make that expansion. But once you're trying to like keep yourself nice and steady, that is, that is about right. You should be able to manage it without doing demeroe splits. Harry says, hi Lawrence, located in Australia, can I make a nuc out of a hive and place it in the same location and let them raise their own queen? Will the bees in the nuc return to the mother hive? So yes, you can, you can definitely do that. Let me, let me draw this because somebody asked that yesterday and I didn't give them the best question or the answer even, right? So say that is your beehive there and take the snap off, and let's say you just kind of got the entrance there and the bees are flying out all nice and happy. So If you're going to do this kind of manipulation here, this is how I recommend it. Remember, the, um, the entrance is about there. It's important, but I'll put it back there in a sec. But the entrance is there. So what I would do is I would move everything to the left a little bit. So your, your original beehive that you're going to have— did not look anything like that— is now going to go there. Yeah, so with the entrance about there, and then your nuc split that you're going to make Put snap back on. Your new split you're going to make is going to go there, something like that, and the entrance of that one's going to be there. Now you can do it either way, you can put the queen in the new split or you can leave the queen in the original one. I think when you're doing something like this, you're better off moving the queen to the new split. So the bees coming back in now, they're going to come back in and they're going to think, well, I need to make, I need to make a decision here, where am I going to go? They're thinking, well, this is where my entrance used to be, so I can either go in here or I can go in here. They're going to recognize the shape of this one, so more bees are going to end up here. But this one here has got the queen, so it's going to tempt quite a lot of bees back into it. You will find the majority of the bees will go back into that one because of the shape, even if the, the shape of the new beehive is the same. But that is what I do. And then this distance here is like 4 inches, something like ridiculously close. You can do it at no inches as well. You can connect them together and then not even give them the option of going down the middle. That is how I would do any sort of split like that in the same apiary. So let me just rewind all of that so I've got a nice clean board for next time. I won't do those dotty trails either because they took a lot of time. Right, there we go. Hopefully that was useful. Ricky Sharp says, uh, channel member says, thanks for my 5 queens I received on the 11th. Love the QR code on the back, really helpful. 4 of the queens successfully introduced as I missed a couple of queen cells in one hive. Top quality queens. Sorry about the one you missed. I'm glad that the rest of them successfully introduced, and I'm glad you like the QR code as well. Uh, MGGH says, is this live? Hey there from Lebanon in the Middle East. It certainly live, and my dog in the background is loving it. Uh, the Herefordshire Honey Guy says, I've got 100 acres of oilseed rape and a nice amount of rain in the last few days, and just a bit concerned as to how bonkers the next week is going to be. It's, it's going to be the swarmiest week of the, of the year, this, like, to date. Um, but I think it's really going to catch out a lot of people. It's one of those ones. Yeah, so see when people said about, um, you've got like a brood box, let's draw this. This is what happened this week, and this is why people will get caught out, me included. It's not— I don't exclude myself from this. All right, so say you've got a brood box at the moment like that, and let's take the snap off and say the bees are filling it up nicely, but you've already gone ahead and you've put 2 supers on. So your supers are sitting there like that, and the bees are not touching them at all. So you're just full of bees, you've got bees here, That's it, that's bees, isn't it? But nothing up there in the super. What's going to happen this week is the colony, you'll come back after a week and they'll just be up there like that, and if they hit the ceiling up there, they swarm. Happens every time. So they have to sit, they have to hit the ceiling, and they have to hit the walls over there as well, but they'll run out of space. But that kind of transformation can happen in a single week where you've got 2 supers on, they're not doing anything, and then you get a week like this They're going to be saturated with nectar. There's going to be no room at the inn down there for them to put any nectar. They'll bring it up there, they'll realize they can bring it up there, they'll get 4 or 5 days of crazy flow, and then the supers will be full. So midweek inspection, I would say, is due. That's what I'm going to do on mine this week. I'm just going to go, go through kind of like Wednesday or Thursday. So if I'm inspecting like Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, I'll go and do a quick Wednesday peek just in the box. So just lift up the roof, have a look down. If my top super is empty, great. If it's 50% full, great. If they're looking like it's congested in there, I'm going to go and put another super on midweek, and that should fill up your supers, I think. Uh, Alexandra says, hi Lawrence from Adelaide, South Australia. Looks like I have 2 supercedure cells, but my marked queen is there, looks good, and plenty of brood and eggs. Could they be swarming this late in autumn? Um, so they definitely could be swarming this late in autumn. I hate it when I get a colony that has 2 cells because for me 2 cells is like it's borderline. When it's one cell, it's straightforward supersedure. When it's 2 cells, it's like, could be swarming. I treat 2 cells as supersedure though. So if it was me, if I saw 2 cells in autumn, kind of in the UK, I would take them both down and see what happens the following week. And if they bring new supersedure cells back up that late in the season, really straightforward, that queen is a duff queen. So take down the supersedure cells, kill the queen, and add a new queen in. If you go back next week and there's like 6 supersedure cells or like 6 cells, um, it's definitely not supersedure and it'll be swarming instead. That's what I would do. Uh, Yes, yes, put me down for one please. I've forgotten, I've forgotten what we're putting things down for now. Sorry, Matt, do remind me. There are queens next week though, or the week after even. Channel member says, hi, nuc arrived as planned on Thursday and fantastic, thank you. I just wondered, where are they in their mite treatment rotation? Are they done or will I need to treat soon? So for us with the, with the nucs, we treat twice per season. season. We treat once in middle of August, so we give them Apivar in the middle of August, and then during a broodless, natural broodless period in the winter, we like to go end of November, early December, depending on how I'm feeling that season, and we try and identify a broodless period and give them one blast of Apibioxal, which is just like pure oxalic acid with additives, but yeah, additives that have no impact on the bees, and that's it. So for the— if I was taking that nuc, my next cycle would Middle of August, so you've not got to do anything with them now unless you're, like I said before, unless you're thinking, well, I'm going to take that one nuc and I'm going to split it into 8 nucs, then you could do a treatment now and the bees would respond well to that. But if you're looking to get honey out of them as well, you have to wait and delay that treatment. But doing it early in August is much, much earlier than people generally do their mite treatments, which means that even though the mite load will increase over the summer, you're treating it way before the bees start producing their winter bees, which means means that you get the good overwintering performance. As in one of those special queens? Okay, yeah, makes sense. There will be, there will be a few available, so they're on the website now. If I take a 3-frame split and let the original hive make a new queen, do you think that the hive will swarm in that year, or as the new queen will probably see the year out with that hive? So completely depends on the genetics. So I know I get, I get a lot of stick about talking about wild feral stock, but I do have like a good few years of experience with wild feral And my experience with it around here was that they would swarm multiple times in a year regardless of the age of the queen. So even brand new young queens will swarm in that season, and I had some colonies that would swarm like 3 or 4 times in a single season, not even reaching the extent of the brood nest, and they just go off and swarm. So completely down for genetics. If you're talking about Buckfast queens or you're talking about like well-managed and well-bred queens that are bred to not swarm, the rule is pretty much this: every single queen can swarm whenever they want. It's much less likely that a young mated queen in her first season will swarm, but if you don't give them enough space, they will swarm still. So year 1, not that likely, but you need to manage them, you need to give them space. Year 2, much, much more likely. Even given sufficient space, they're going to look to swarm, so you need to kind of like do some sort of management. They won't always swarm, but there is a possibility that they're swarming the second year. If you're 2 years on and the colony is not swarmed, I always like, I kind of think this is potentially like a good queen here because if some queens— this is what I like, the queens that do this— they go 3 years, they don't swarm, and in their 3rd year they supersede. They just supersede themselves kind of like middle of the year and you think, oh, that was good, that's like really, really good genetics, that one. So we do something with that one, can potentially kind of do something with it by sending away some of the virgins or tapping some of the drones or doing something to promote those genetics within your apiary. Um, but yeah, so going back to your question there, do I think it will swarm? As long as they're managed well, the likelihood that the young queen will swarm in the first year is reduced. Can't sit on the fence any more than that. Nick Cotillard says thank you. Uh, thank you, Nick. Uh, Chris Turner says thanks. Nick Collard says might just double brood them. Definitely the easiest way. Uh, best viewers on stream, boo, remove the space. There we go, bit of advertising for Prime Superficiality. Get a lot of spam coming through on Twitch. I tried to not click on it, but I got fooled there. Good morning, do you know what's happening with the farmers' SFI this year? I have heard Labour have stopped the scheme, so there won't be as much forage as last year. It is devastating that they did that. Apparently though— so the SFI is like a paid scheme in England where the government pay them to put special crops like pollinator crops, or it can be any type of stewardship crop, or basically paying farmers to regenerate the land. And it was incredibly generous, and loads of farmers in in England just said, yeah, we're on that, definitely, like that is an absolute steal. So they've just rotated all the fields and stuck in all of these amazing crops, and the bee farmers are looking at them thinking, wow, we're going to be able to produce so much honey. And then the Labour government has canned it and said, no, it's not happening going forward. So they said everyone signed up to it to date will still get paid for the life of the scheme whenever it expires, but they're not accepting any new applicants. So you will see— so basically it will stop going upwards, it will stop getting any better, but I think it will still— but the stuff that's been done already will still have like a real significant impact. Shame that one though. Hi, the fake Flow Hive has a sieve above the flow section. Even in a moderate climate, is there any good reason why so much ventilation is provided for? The bees will block it up anyway. Absolutely not. I do not like any ventilation at the top, and I do not use that screen. When rearing your own queens, at what age of the queen cell do you transfer them to the mating So the way that I do it is I graft the cells, let them build up depending on whether you're using a starter finisher or just a starter and then putting into a finisher, same kind of thing applies. Um, but I'll leave them on the bars, um, like cap cells until like day 15, 14, 15, something like that. And then I take them out, put them in the incubator, and then leave them in the incubator just to kind of until I need them. And then I put the cell protectors on And then I put them into the mating nuc like 24 hours before they're due to emerge, something like that. You can, you can skip the incubator bit if you want, and you can, you can take them out a lot earlier than that if you're doing the incubator as well. So I think it's day 11, you can take them out. I generally use a starter finisher now, so I just leave them in the colony for as long as possible and then take them out. And then it's handier to have them in the incubator for the last kind of like a few days, just for the way that I do it. do them. But the way that I do it is you want the emerged— so you want the queen cell to emerge in the nuc, and you want the queen cell to be in the nuc for the shortest amount of time before that queen emerges. And as long as you stick to those rules, it should be good. I do not recommend introducing virgin queens to mating nucs. It is incredibly difficult to do, really hard to get good success. And I also don't recommend just putting unprotected queen cells into mating nucs either. They take them down a lot, so either wrap them with foil, either tip exposed, or use like one of the plastic cell protectors, because it does make a very big difference. Morning all, we had— we split a big healthy hive a couple of weeks ago, all seemed well last week, inspected yesterday and the queen right side of the split seems to be starving. We had given a feeder, a 1:1, but they haven't touched it. Is there any chance of saving them? We have dribbled the frames with syrup in an attempt to perk them up. So if they are still alive, they're dribbling them with syrup, is a really good thing to have done, and it will, it will kind of instantly bring them back like that. You can pour syrup into the frames as well. So not, not many people know this, and I guess that you wouldn't unless you really knew, but a frame, if you look at like a cross-section of a frame, try and draw it. So I should have done that. Oh yeah, so there you go. So that's the middle bar like that. There's a, there's a little bit of an angle On the frames. I think it's about a 15-degree angle, so this is like the cells like that, and I'm massively over-exaggerating it, but it's like it on both sides. And all that is is just to kind of keep the honey in the frames. But what you can do is you can just like pour syrup in from above like that and trickle it on, and it will stick in the frames, and then you can just put frames back in. That's quite good for an emergency situation like that. Whenever I do splits though, and as soon as you said it, I thought they're robbing each other. Because when you split in the same apiary like that, the bees know where the new location is and they know where the existing location is. And if you get some feed in the new location, the bees come back to the original location and they say, we've just found the easiest source of food. So I'm surprised they've not robbed it out in the feeder, but I think they're probably being robbed. So I would potentially look at merging them back together again. It's going to be the safest way of doing it, I would say, especially for starving bees like that. Then the starving bees aren't going to kill your queen. So I'd look at potentially merging and then splitting and taking them to a separate apiary. Taking bees to a separate apiary just makes, makes your life so much easier when it comes to making splits. It really, really does. Right, let's go. Thanks very much. No problem. Do the queens come from Italy on an airplane or by road? They come via numerous planes. Is it okay to swap a full super of capped honey for an empty super and extract it this early in the year? 100%, yeah, go for it. Get those jars filled. How is Sploge? Looking forward to seeing her in a video soon, assuming she's still there. So I checked on her about 3 or 4 weeks ago and she was still there and they weren't trying to supersede her, so I think they'll— I think they've given up on that now. I'm very excited to see how Sploge is getting on. Sorry, I know I keep asking the same thing, but what was the name of the new special queens you have coming. So they're on the, on the website at the moment, blackmountainhoney.co.uk, and they're called Premium F1 Buckfast Queens. And if you read the description, it will kind of echo what I said earlier about the, the selection process. I'm going to do a demerite on a double brood this week but don't have a spare brood box to use the new nest area. After putting the brood on top, would you remove the food frames from the bottom and add empty comb or foundation, or just keep the food in the bottom box? So It's always a challenge. I don't like mixing a double brew configuration with a demaret, but for the reason that you said there is that you generally don't have the third box available. If you're in a configuration where you've got like a box full of stores, you could almost just remove the box full of stores. That's probably what I'd be inclined to do— remove the box full of stores, and if you've got somewhere to keep it, stick it in the freezer or keep it somewhere where it's completely sealed. Probably, probably won't go off if it's kept somewhere cool and it's like completely fully sealed, and then you can feed that back to the bees for winter. But if just by taking that box away, you kind of give yourself the way of doing a demaree properly, but you will need the additional brood box as well. If you— I guess you could do it, you just take the food frames out, so take the top box up with all the brood, put that up to the top, and then the bottom box that's just full of food, yeah, just take those food frames out and put foundation in. find your queen on a frame of brood and put her downstairs, and that is like— that's almost like a perfect demerare. So you can do that, you just need to find a way of storing the food, because if you leave that food in the bottom box, the queen's got nowhere to lay, so you lose— you kind of lose all of the benefit of the demerare in terms of that rapid expansion. And it'd be interesting to see what the queen would do there. The other way of doing it, if that honey is like honey as opposed to like stores or tainted in any way, is bruising all of those frames and getting them to bring it up. But I suspect it is probably like winter So maybe not the best idea. Paul Morgan, channel member, says, morning, Lawrence, I finally got to see a live chat. Hope you're well. Question, why do my bees make such a mess of building comb? Sometimes I can't get one frame out without lifting two or three. Sounds very much like a spacing issue, that one. So if you've got DN4 frames, which most people do, so Deep National Four, it means that the the bars, the the separator bars that you have, spacing bars need to be touching each other. I see so much on. Social media of people not having these bars touching. So if the bars are touching, the bees just respect the space perfectly and you won't get any crazy wild comb. They won't expand the depth of the frames either. If you don't have them touching, and maybe you can't have them touching because the bees have expanded the frames out, then they just build loads of wild— loads and loads and loads of wild comb. So if you watch any of my videos, you'll see all of those bars, like those divider bars, the spacer bars, are touching each other. You have to have them touching or they will You'll build welcome. Norfolk Honeybees says hello. Hello to you too. Lagnus Farms Honey says SFI was put in place with BPS subsidy. We got help to keep production costs low so food would be affordable. Without SFI now, we have no subsidies, so food costs will go up for British produce. It's almost like the government don't know what they're doing. I'm gonna chuck that out there. Absolute farce. I'm so, so annoyed with what is going on. And it's not— I'm not red or blue or this or that. I just think they're all as bad as each other, um, but very, very frustrating. Another question, sorry. You did a video about a demerit on a Flow Hive a couple of years ago. Do you still do demerits on the Flow Hive, and has your process changed at all? So it kind of worked, the demerit on the Flow Hive, but it did mean that they stopped going into the super quite as much. So I've not— I've not— I want to say I've developed a perfect solution for anything. I don't think I have. But with my Flow Hives now, all I do is I double brood and I let them have access to the super and I'll try and tap off the honey once or twice a year and generally that is enough. It massively reduces the amount of honey that you're going to get from them but it does also reduce the chance that they're going to swarm, doesn't eliminate it. I find managing bees in Flow Hives very, very challenging but it's good, it's good fun and gives you a new way of thinking about bees. SMS says hello from the Seychelles, that's probably the most glamorous place anyone's ever come onto this stream for. Hello from soggy whales. How do you make queens? So we graft from pure Buckfast breeder queens, and then we put them into specially set up colonies that feed those young larvae and turn them into queens. And then we put them into little mini mating nucs and they go out and mate. Hello everyone! Hi to you too, Chris. Um, I've reached the bottom, so it was only going to be a short stream today anyway. I do— I need to go in like 10 minutes, go and collect my daughter. Uh, but I'm— I reached the bottom. You know the rule, if I reach the bottom of the stream, the stream is now officially over. So if there's any more comments, I'll quickly get around to them, but we are reaching the end of this one. Like I said though, lots and lots of changes going on at the moment. If you're interested in kind of like learning more about how you can get the very best out of your bees, definitely head over to our website or head over to the Black Mountain Honey YouTube channel. Where it says subscribe, next to it it says join, and there's various different options in there. You are going to get a lot more value for being a channel member over the next few months, but definitely kind of going into the future as well. I think I'm giving up with videoing my own films, and I would just pay for someone else to come and do it now, which means that we can do so, so much more than we used to do and give you a real inside look into the workings of Black Mountain Honey. So hopefully you are excited about that. You can join on Facebook, you can join on YouTube. Matt Page— so this is a question that comes up a lot— Matt Page is still in the process of trying to figure out how to upgrade my membership. I just haven't got onto my laptop yet. Is it busy times, which I think is a good thing. If you are doing— if you're trying to upgrade your membership, do it on the PC. Works on the PC. All you do is you hit the join button again and it lets you reselect. If you're trying to do it on an Apple device, so an iPhone or an iPad, it just doesn't work. You need to get it on a PC for some reason, but the membership still will work. Um, where are we going next? Also, for queens, just heads up, if you want queens, go for next week— sorry, the week after that. Uh, another one as well is that we've had to pre-order special genetics for for April. Um, so you'll be kind of thinking, oh, if I want a Lagustica queen, I've got to wait 6 weeks to order one. That changes now. So you can order them for week 19, which is delivery or dispatch on the 8th of May. So we cut off the week before. So basically all of the special genetics now should be about a week away from being ready to be sent. So if you're thinking about getting an Obsidian queen and want to see how they're getting on, or a Lagustica, or one of our Elgon queens, all of those have good availability now. Final shout out, there are 20 nucs left, national nucs going out on the 28th of March for delivery on the 29th, Thursday 29th. When they are gone, that is it, they are gone. Um, it's— they're probably going to be gone by the weekend, so if you want to get a nuc from Black Mountain Honey, this really is your last chance this year. Hello from Ireland, and in my first year of beekeeping, would you recommend double brood cell instead of the Demaray? Um, depends how kind of into it you want to get. I much prefer the demeray. I find the demeray much more effective at stopping swarming and provides much bigger honey crops as well. The double brood is a lot easier but doesn't kind of give you the same impact. SMS says, I have so many questions, but I do not have winter. We have summer all round. Nice, but yeah, it gives you an issue with varroa, doesn't it? Have you got varroa? Do you get varroa in the Seychelles? Maybe, maybe you don't. That would be nice. Just imagine having to live without Varroa. Gareth the Beekeeper says hello from Derby. Matt Page says, tell me about it, tell me about it. Keith Johnson saying, when is the latest time in the year you can split a hive? I would say so long as there are mated queens available and the colony can take it, you are fine. So well into September. Simon Coates says, I released one of your VSH queens yesterday after a week of being in a cage. I checked she wasn't getting bald after a few minutes and I found her laying. Excellent news. good luck with getting that colony back on its feet. Thank you. Uh, and SMS says we don't have the viruses that attack the bees for now. So I've reached the bottom. We will be back this Friday. What date is it? Friday the 2nd of May at 7:30 PM BST, not GMT, which I keep on saying. And I'll see you then. I'll quickly answer Scout About's question because he is a channel member. He says, thanks for the tip on the queen cell protectors. Do you reuse the Grafting cells or the protectors, and if so, how do you clean them? So we reuse the cells, and we just scrape out the plastic, scrape out anything that's in there. We don't use any chemicals or anything, and we reuse the protectors without any sort of cleaning. So very, very efficient. JZBZ cups are the ones I use. I do not like the Nico kit. That's it. We reached the end. Eleven o'clock. I hope you found that useful. I will be back next week, seven thirty BST, the second of May, and that will be a long one. I hope to see you there.