Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 45

Good evening everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees, episode 45. We're up to now, nearly over in it. The season is nearly over and I've still got a couple more live streams to go. I'm gonna add my whiteboard to the screen there, a little sneak preview of what I'm going to talk about in a second. But just before we get on to my public service announcement whiteboard, I do live streams every other week without fail. I never miss them during the season. When we get out of the season, which is kind of like for me the beginning of September, we are going to go down to one stream per month, which I think is fair. Like, there's not a huge amount going on in the off-season, so you don't want to hear me like mumbling on when there is snow outside. But let's get into it today. We are going to answer as many questions as we possibly can, and I'm sure you have all got loads of questions because we're into honey extraction season, we're into varroa treatment season. We're into making split season, we're into queen's nucs, everything. It all kind of hits at once in August, so we have a very busy period, and no doubt we're going to have a busy live stream today. So these are the things I'm going to talk about. First one is WhatsApp. So I've got my WhatsApp set up here. If you've got a question for me, great, I'll answer them in the comments. But if you want to send me a picture of something and ask a question— maybe you've got some weird looking brood, maybe you've got the best brood frame ever, maybe your queen's had her wings nibbled off, anything— if you've got a picture or a video and you want to ask the question via WhatsApp, I want to ask Opinion, for what it's worth on anything, WhatsApp it over to me, and then in the comments write kind of like what you what you will show up as in WhatsApp so I know I can link it back together. The number is 01352 372247. Always got to put the gaps in. Quick, don't get bored on this bit. Queens and nukes. So queens are we've got two weeks left, two and a half weeks left of queens, and this isn't like my emails that say you know when they're all sold out and then they're mysteriously not sold out. Uh, some people get annoyed about that, but they genuinely are sold out for that week. But queens will finish on the first week of September, absolutely no doubt about that. So I've got my calendar there. You want queens in that last week of August because the following week I've only ordered like 100 queens and I can't get any more. And we normally have like 500, 600, 700 queens a week, and I've only got 100 for that last week, so they will sell very, very quickly. Uh, nucs— we've sold 50% of next year's nucs already, and it is not even September yet. So it'd be very unlikely that we get to Christmas and there's any nucs left. So if you want a national nuc or you want a poly nuc for next year, get involved. Um, right, so last orders, already spoken about that. Channel memberships— I think I'm up to like 27 or 28 videos on there now. Even some of the channel members won't have seen the videos that I've uploaded that I haven't, um, I haven't clicked go live with yet. Uh, but there are loads and loads of videos on there if you want to get the Up-to-date information as I see it throughout the season. That is the best place to get the very update information. Channel memberships. The Abello Open Day. Oh man, I'm so excited about the Abello Open Day, and I fear a little bit for Damien. I don't know. I don't know if he knows what he's letting himself in for. I think it's going to be an incredibly busy day, but I'm excited to go up there. I'm excited to make pizzas for everyone that comes. There will be a pizza for you, and I just think it's going to be a really cool, busy day. Uncapping and hacks. If you've got— if you want to, you want to win the Black Mountain Honey hat, you can send me a video. Do not forget this one here. I've been having loads of fun with that uncapping. So people sending me your videos in a portrait orientation uncapping a single frame of honey, that'd be cool. But then what other people have been sending me as well now, which I really like, it's like beekeeping hacks. So I'll run another competition for that one as well, which is most views wins a hat. But if you, you know, if you get loads of views, you'll get a hat anyway. But that is pretty much any beekeeping hat that you want. And just film it again, portrait orientation. Don't worry about any ums and ahs and anything. I'll stitch it all together. I'll put it on all of my platforms and I'll credit whoever wants crediting on it. So there we go. That's all of the public service announcements. I can't talk. I'm getting very, very tired at the moment. I have an English tea shop organic Calm Me tea, which is very apt. I need that. It's got like cinnamon stuff in it. Really nice. Oh, that is hot, bro. So let's get on with it. Let's answer some questions. I should no doubt be here for a good, good few hours. I do, I do enjoy answering these questions. So first question is from James Camplin, who is the channel member. He says, hi Lawrence, is it too late to raise some queens for splitting? So I, I, I'm not raising any more queens. I'm not grafting anymore. I've got queens that are going through the process. I've got queens that have mated already and I'm just waiting for them to lay. And I— so I, I'm basically done now. I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be rearing any more queens. I wouldn't be doing any more walkaway splits. I wouldn't be, um, I would say I wouldn't let any colonies supersede. I've got some, I've got some colonies superseding just kind of— that was a couple of weeks ago that I let that go. But I wouldn't do any more walkaway splits. I wouldn't do any more, uh, grafting. But you're fine to do splits. Like, if you're putting in mated queens now, perfect time to go away and, and to do splits. And you, you can turn a good colony, a national colony, maybe on 10 frames of brood, into 3 nucs easily. And I, and I think they prefer to overwinter in that format. If you've got a national colony at the moment, all it's doing is condensing. If you chop it up into 3, give it its Varroa treatments, give it a bit of a feed, put a new queen in, they kind of, they go out and then go back in again like that. You get like a little bit more expansion out of them because they realize that they're not gonna They're not going to do very well just on 3 frames over winter. So I've got a lot of colonies, a lot of nucs at the moment that are on 3 frames, probably like 2 or 3 frames of brood, uh, a frame of stores-ish, and then they've had like a first hatch of brood out of the brood already. So there's like a decent amount of bees in there, and they'll, they'll easily fill up the 6-frame nuc going into winter. So not too late for making splits. I would say a little bit too late for me for queen rearing. I know people are still queen rearing now. Murray goes quite late into the season with it, and I think there's still loads of drones around, so you probably, if you get the good weather, you'd get away with it. Like, this Sunday is 26 degrees, I think. Well, in York it's 26 degrees, um, and I suspect down south it's going to be way warmer than that as well. So if you've got queens going out and mating this Sunday, be perfect. But when you're grafting, you've got to look kind of 3 or 4 weeks ahead, and I don't think 3 or 4 weeks ahead we're gonna have that good weather. I've been sorting out my colonies, mite treatment, etc. I have a lot of colonies where there is a lot of pollen in the supers, about 30% in most. I'm not sure what to do with them all. Um, so what I'm going to do while I'm answering that is rub up my whiteboard because I need to get back into the whiteboard. Um, so pollen in the supers is really annoying and there's not a huge amount that you can do with it. Um, if you— if you— when you're storing supers, you can either store them wet or you can store them dry. And I always say if you've got pollen in your supers, you're best to store them dry. So that is extracting the honey out and then putting the supers back onto the same bees and letting the bees clean them up and then taking them off. And that's like dry storage. Or you can just extract them and then seal them, um, like in plastic or back in the boxes without letting the bees clean it up, and that's wet storage. And it makes a big difference if you've got pollen in the supers. So if you've got pollen in the supers, you have to do dry storage. If you do wet storage with pollen in the supers, you come back to loads of mold. Like, they're just covered in mold. The frame's really no good, and I wouldn't let the bees clean that up because it's a lot of work. Mold's not nice. But if you store them dry, what happens is pollen mites get in there, and the pollen mites, I guess, just like eat the pollen or do something to it. The pollen doesn't go, but it just disintegrates into like a dust, a really dry dust, and you can just shake it out at the beginning of the year. and then start again. And what I will do, I drew, I drew this last time, um, but I'll draw it again. So when you have your brood nest like that, if that's your perfectly square brood box, and then you've got like your first super up here, you'll have a brood nest is kind of like that, but is obviously restricted by the queen excluder that sits along there. And then what the bees like to do with the pollen— I don't know why I always draw it so small, because it's quite— I'm going to start drawing things bigger. they always put the pollen kind of like around the brood nest like that, so you can see why it ends up in that first super. And, and if you look, you'll see that arc there. You won't have it at the top frames up— top of the frames up here. You'll have it down in that bottom, bottom third of the frame. Uh, so the way to stop them doing that is to have a bigger brood nest, either bigger box or double brood. Hey up, Laurence! I guess it's in that voice. Um, if it's not, sorry if I've offended everyone. Uh, that's the G&Ts finished. It's time to get off to the garden chair and harvest the apiaries. Like to hear your thoughts on Formic Pro as I used it after I couldn't get hold of Max. So they're basically the exact same thing. So Max was short for Miterway, Miterway Quick Strips, and Formic Pro is the new, like, new version of it. Basically exactly the same, it's just Formic Pro. I spoke about this on my channel membership. I think a few people got annoyed about what I said on there as well. I wasn't quite expecting the response to that one, but I'm really not a massive fan of Formic Pro. So I used to, used to quite like Max that was available. I used to like it that Max was available as a treatment to use in the season with the supers on because it meant that you had the ability to treat your colonies with supers on. And Formic Pro is like— sorry, Max and Formic Pro, horrible stuff in terms of, you know, get it in your face, get it in your eyes, you're like, oh, it is really bad. It's the same acid that red ants use to kind of like spray and stuff, so really horrible. And I didn't like it because you get— you can, if you get the temperatures wrong, you can get real bad damage to the brood, and then it's like cannibalizing the brood because it's been damaged. And if you've got old queens, it's a good way of killing your queens by using Max or Formic Pro. But It was, it was a useful tool because it meant that if you had a colony that had 6 supers on that was covered in varroa mites, but you had 2 months of the season left, you had a tool that you could use, which was you just put the Max little nappies in above the queen excluder— plastic queen excluder, don't corrode your metal queen excluders with formic acid— and within a week, the col— like, the mite drop on it is substantial. It is very effective at killing the mites, also very effective at killing old queens and killing brood. But for some reason, the formulation of it has changed and the licensing of it has now changed, and now it's turned into Formic Pro. And Formic Pro is exactly the same, but you can't use it when the supers are on. So whether people will follow that advice or not, I don't know, but you should, because if you, if you get your honey tested by the VMD and you've got loads of formic acid in it, they're going to ask you did you take your supers off? And you can get quite significant fines, so you should follow their advice. So I'm not a fan of either of them, and I just think that there's no real benefit to using them over using Apivar, is my experience and my advice. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't and don't use either of them. I would welcome the reformulation back to MAQS, which meant that you could use it on supers, and then I would take the risk on colonies with young queens Uh, if they— if I needed it in the season. And I see Mick finishes saying he's not going to use it again this year. I've changed back to Apivar. Definitely the way forward. Apivar works, still works at the moment. Hi Lawrence, I hope you're well. I'm planning on extracting on the 13th of August and then adding my spices straight after. Is that okay? So I, I'm— I don't know what your spices are. It's like your secret blend of herbs and spices. Um, I'm guessing you mean like your treatments. And if, if it is your treatments, then yes, that is fine, no problem. If it is your spices, I would like to know what spices they are because I want to use some. Good evening to you and the fam, Lawrence. Looking forward to my next queen I purchased from you for the 22nd. Yeah, a lot of people have got them for the 22nd. There's some, some lovely queens going out at the moment, so I'm sure you'll be very happy with it, John. Hi Lawrence, regarding the hive I sent photo of on Facebook today, I put in a queen cell from a split with a frame of capped Brood, still short is a laying worker. Either will either will work or it won't. Fingers crossed. So I think that's that's all you can do if you've got laying workers is is add add a frame add a frame of brood in like adding frames of brood in does work, but it doesn't take it's quick doesn't it's not quick. It takes a long time. You've got to keep on adding frames of brood in. But I think putting in a queen cell on that frame of brood is a good shout. And and some people said that last week. That's the way that they deal with them by just putting queen cells in. And you could see. You can see why it would work and why they would potentially allow that. Because whenever I go into laying worker colonies, they're always creating— there's always like the starts of queen cells. So the starts of like emergency cells where they're trying to turn the infertile eggs that are being laid by the laying workers into queen cups. And then they get a couple of days in and they realize that it's just like drone egg in there. They stop, they give up on it. So good luck, I hope it works. And I was wondering, as I have 4 supers full of bees, how do they then all fit into the brood box as that is already very full? I'm guessing they just cram themselves in. So you need to make a judgment call on that one, Ben. So if you've got 4 supers and they're full of bees and you've just got a single national brood box, you— on the first couple of days they won't all fit in, you'll get bearding out the front. So what I always say is that, that kind of 15th of August date that I give people Take it with a pinch of salt, and if you've got like really nice weather the week before, take your honey supers off then and let them beard when it's still sunny. And similarly, if you've got nice weather the week after, delay it a week, because when you cram them in, you are going to get tons of bearding out the front. But I don't think that the bearding is a bad thing as long as it's not pouring down with rain. And then over the next 2 or 3 days, you'll notice that the bees do start to get in and they manage to kind of make room in there. And if you're treating them with Apivar at the same point, Then I find that you get really good efficacy of that Apivar treatment because they're so crammed in and because they're kind of like spreading, like moving around next to each other, and it just spreads that amitraz around. You get really good mite drop that way. If, if it's clear that there isn't enough space, don't be afraid just to add a second brood box on for the time being. Or what, what you could do is you could just give them like temporary space as well. So I've done that previously where you just flip the Ashworth feed around the other way. and don't leave it like that because they will start to build comb in it. But you can, you can take the supers off, flip the Ashworth feeder around the other way, give them space so they're all in, and then a couple of days later, once they've kind of condensed down a little bit, just take the Ashworth feeder off, tap all the bees out, turn it back around the other way, and then you're kind of doing it in like 2 stages then. And I found that that works on the biggest, strongest colonies. Also says you should also do a honey extracting video, it'd be interesting. I need a volunteer to come and do a honey extracting video. But definitely, I'm definitely going to do some sort of honey extraction video this year. Um, but it's, it's one of those ones that when I'm extracting honey on my own, I've not got enough sets of hands to extract the honey, let alone trying to film it. Like, it's so sticky and everything gets sticky, and then bringing like filming equipment in there is difficult. And then because you've got like lights like these ones here, um, unless you've got the, the shutter speed at the right speed, you just get this flashing. I won't, I won't tweak the settings on the cameras to show you what the flashing's like, but it's, it's not good, and that's why I've always avoided it. Hi Lawrence, following harvest, is there some guide that you could give in preparation for overwintering hives with regards to ratio of resource frames to active brood frames? It's a good question. There's no, there's no real kind of like fixed guide that I would give, but what I would say is just you have to ensure that the whole time from now through to when they're creating the winter bees, that the bees have, or the queen has, sufficient space to lay. So if you've got a box of 10 frames and you've got 8 frames of stores, that is not going to work. And I would say if you've got 10 frames and 1 frame of stores, I'd be thinking, oh, that's, that's a bit close to the edge of them starving. But with, with the weather as it is at the moment, like You don't need huge amounts of stores in there, and as long as you're getting regular flying days and you're seeing the bees coming in and bringing stuff in and bringing back nectar and bringing back pollen, I wouldn't go crazy with feeding at this point in the year. You can do a lot of damage feeding too much too early. So when I've said previously about I take my honey off on the 15th of August and I put my Apivar strips in and I give a feed, what I'm doing is I'm setting them up for their feeding. So if they don't need a feed at that point, I won't feed them. And if I do feed them, I'm not giving them any more than like a liter, a couple of liters each, absolute maximum. Last thing I want them to do on a congested brood box like that is just backfill all of the frames with stores, because you just— the queen's not got anywhere to lay, and you just, you get this massive drop in numbers. So you definitely don't want to do that. So limit the feeding that you're going to do at the moment. But if you do have if you've got 6 or 7 frames of stores in there, just, you need to remove some of those frames of stores and do it before you put your Apivar in or any varroa treatments in that's going to tank it. And just extract it, and then it's a great time to be putting frames of foundation at the moment. They draw them out lovely, especially with the weather, and you don't get any drone brood at all at this point in the year. Really nicely drawn out frames. If you want— if you wanted like a rough configuration, I would go with like 2 or 3 frames of stores, and then the rest either empty frames of like basically an empty brood frame with nothing in it, or frames of brood. So either laid up frames of brood or space to be laid up, something like that. And if you want, like, I'd go like 80/20, good, good rough percentages for you there. Good evening, Adam, how you doing? Honey harvests are going well, getting there. A few people saying hi, John saying hi, hi John. Hi Harry, hi Mick. Uh, Harry says, I'm going to extract my honey this weekend, so I'm looking forward to that. Any tips? Um, so my, my favorite tips for honey extraction, kind of, you have to go back a few, have to go back a few weeks if not months. So I love castellated, castellated supers are my favorite, so I only use castellated supers now for honey. I like to go on 9s, so the spacing is 9 spacing, which means you get big fat chubby frames to extract when you're doing your uncapping videos that you're going to send over to me. I know you've already sent yours, Harry, it was very good. Uh, it does— that just makes it— makes honey extraction so much easier. Personally, for me as well, I know I dabbled a little bit with using deeps, all deeps. I've gone away from that now because I find— I think the bees prefer the shallower frames. It makes it easier for me to juggle around frames that aren't capped properly, so you get fewer frames that aren't fully capped. It's far easier to blow them out with a blower when you're blowing out. I tried it before blowing out 14 by 12 frames. That didn't work. But even blowing out deep frames is difficult, and blowing out supers that are on like 12 frames in there is very, very difficult as well. But blowing out castellated nines shallows with a blower is like it's it's five seconds of blowing, and there's not a single bee left in it. It's just done. And I love it, speeds it right up. Other extraction tips, 2 things, mistakes that I've made before: never let the honey sit overnight. You can get away with it if you've got a heated room, but if you time it wrong and you get cold evenings, it really slows down extraction. So I like to go out in the morning, go and hit an apiary like early, get all of the Get all of the supers back in the car, Apivar strips in, feeders on, and I'm back in the extraction room by like 10 AM. So, you know, that's not even going out super, super early. And then straight into extraction for that apiary, and the honey's still warm. The honey's still 36, 37 degrees as you're taking it off the hive, which means as you uncap it, you stick it into the extractor, it just goes whoom, get every last bit of it out. That's a really good tip. The other tip, if you are going to leave your honey extraction room, like any honey in it, just Have a roll of gaffer tape with you, and any wasp or anything that you see coming in, just look and look where they're getting in. A little bit of gaffer tape, because as soon as you get a few of them in, oh, it can be carnage with wasps. I know there's no— I know there's literally no wasps this year, but I, I have actually seen a few starting to come out now. So I think a few nests are getting big enough to start causing a little bit of a problem. But it is the— it's been the easiest year I've ever had in terms of wasps, and it means that you can do loads of splits really late, which is brilliant, and I've certainly taken advantage of that. Lynette says, hi everyone. Hi Lynette. Harry also says, all my hives are full of brood, they don't seem to be slowing down at all, have you seen the same? So yeah, it's quite a late year though, so I think they've— everything's like shifted a little bit to the right this year, and it's not— there's still plenty of forage around for the bees, so I think yeah, A lot, a lot of my colonies are full, full with brood, which is good. I like it. Good, healthy, big, strong colonies. Good evening, Laurence. Please, can you discuss filtering of honey post-extraction? What is the best setup for an extraction room? Thanks as always. So before I answer that, Adam, I'm going to drink a little bit of my tea. Oh, it's a really nice tea, that one. I like— and I know it's a bit hippie, isn't it? But I guess— oh, I'm not, I'm not a hippie at all. But it's English Tea Shop Organic Calm Me. I know I already said that, but it's a really nice tea. So I saw— so somebody messaged me the other day saying about filtering and like what, what would I recommend. And I said what I use is the Abello Premium Tank because it's got a conical bottom, which makes it like— conical bottoms are the best things in the world. And then they do a sieve top for it, and it's a 200-micron sieve, I think. No, so it's a— so it's a 700-micron sieve. which, which quite, which quite big. And someone said, oh, that's no, that's nowhere near fine enough for like for filtering honey before you sell it. And I thought, well, it definitely is, like it's fine, excuse the pun. And when you, you need to kind of like split these 2 things out, which is one, like extracting honey and filtering honey for like sale, and, and I'm not talking about just like, like for your friends, this is like for proper sale in shops and stuff. And then showing honey. And these 2 things are just completely different. Like, showing honey is all— do you know what, I'm not a massive fan of showing honey. The only honey competition I like, I like a black jar honey competition, which is like you have to put it in like a sealed black jar so you can't see anything. You literally could be black or blue or whatever in there, you don't know. And then they just taste it and the best honey wins. That is, that's my ideal honey competition. But I can see how people would enjoy it. It's a bit of fun, isn't it? But when you're filtering honey for these competitions and for showing like that, that's when you want to be worried about like the micron rating of the various different sieves and filters and cloths and stuff that you're going to be using to filter out all of these different things that are in your honey. What I use though is a really coarse sieve, 700 microns, which is, is very, very coarse, and it gets out the majority of the wax. It gets out any dead bees. It gets out any kind of— I guess that's it really, just like wax and, and dead bees and wings and legs and stuff like that. But then because it's a conical bottom, I use it as my honey jarring tank as well. So all I do is I just, I put my, put my honey frames in the extractor, spin them out. It comes out with loads of bits of wax and all stuff on it just into a big 60-pound bucket. I take that 60-pound bucket, I move over to my I need like my settling tank with a big sieve on top, pour it in, and then I just rinse and repeat. Just keep on going, keep on going, keep on going. And it's a two— my one's a 200-liter tank, so it's a 600-pound tank, which for me is like 1,200 jars because I use an 8-ounce jar. So all I do is I just extract in the morning and just fill it up until it gets to the top and then just leave it for the next day or 48 hours. And what happens is all of— I basically take the sieve off with all of the bits of wax and bits of legs and stuff, but then you can see you've got this like a little bit of sediment on the top. And then over the next 24 or 48 hours, that sediment grows and you'll get like froth and wax and like smaller particle stuff that's gone through the 700 micron. And all I do is I just get a big commercial big bit of cling film put that on the top and then pull it out. And then it's— and that's it, that's all I do. And then I, I— you can go into buckets on the bottom after that, or you can— what I do is jar directly from it. And maybe out of like 1,200 jars, maybe the last 2 jars are a little bit hazy or got like a little bit of froth on the top. So 2 jars out of 1,200, because you've just used gravity to let all of the stuff rise to the top. So I wouldn't get, I wouldn't get too hung up on like micron ratings of filters and stuff like that unless you're showing honey. A big coarse sieve and a big tank and letting it all settle up to the top will do 99% of the work for you and keep all of the good stuff in the honey. Good evening from Greater Manchester, how's it going? Buzzy Stings and Bee Juice says, what is the best way to keep extracted honey runny and slow it from setting? So the only real thing that I guess you could do is— there's a few things that will make honey set. So the, the blend of the different sugars that are in there will determine how quickly that sets, and there's not a huge amount that you can do to stop that unless you're going to go to certain places to get certain types of honey. Oilseed rape is notorious for setting quickly due to— I always forget which one— is it high in sucrose or glucose or whatever the -coses are? But that different blend of sugars will determine how quickly it sets. So I always find like borage very slow to set in comparison to oilseed rape, just probably like 3 or 4 times slower to set. The other thing that will make it set a lot quicker is coincidentally the one we were talking about previously. If you've got like detritus in there or bits of stuff in there, so the more pollen you've got in there, the more wax you've got in there, the more bits of things that you've got in there will trigger that kind of crystallization process. So if you see like this hyper-filtered honey, like the supermarket honey that you see— honey, I know it's all over the news, isn't it, that at the moment? Properly all over the news. And I don't think it's doing a good thing for honey overall because everyone just thinks or everyone's honey is fake now. But if you look at this so-called supermarket honey, they, they flash pasteurize it and then they put it through the finest of finest of finest of filters. And I think they filter a lot of it through like diatomaceous earth— that's definitely not how you say it, but you know what I meant— which is like super fine powder. And they're like pumping it through this powder, basically getting out every last bit of anything that is in the honey. And that will slow it right down because you never see supermarket honey on the shelf that's setting because everything's just taken out of it, and also it's not honey. Um, don't quote me on that though. So, so those 2 things you could, you could do something about. You could filter it a little bit more. So when I'm using like a 700-micron filter, it's probably gonna set and granulate quicker than using, um, like a 200-micron filter. But I reckon you're taking some of the good stuff away. I think they, I think they said though with a 200-micron filter will basically let all of the pollen through, so you're not taking any of the pollen out of it. But I still think you're taking— I don't know, you're taking a bit of something out of it maybe. But apart from that, there's not a huge amount that you can do. So what is the best way to keep extracted honey runny and slow from setting? Filter it. And then the final one is just heat it, keeping it somewhere warm. But keeping it somewhere warm will slowly raise the HMF of the honey, which is not what you want to do because it will still ultimately end up crystallizing, and then you've got to heat it again to raise— sorry, to get it back to runny. So I think you just, you need to accept basically it's gonna— it is gonna granulate at some point and have a plan as to how you're gonna heat it up gently to get it back to its liquid state, which is pretty easy if you've got a decent honey warmer. The Abello one is very, very good, and you can set the temperature on it and come back a couple of days later and it's, it's perfectly back to liquid and never gone above 40 degrees or 38 degrees, which is only a couple of degrees higher than what it is in the hive. You can do it at 37, you could set the thermostat to 37. It does take quite a lot longer though, I found, so I set mine to 40 now and it's done in a couple of days. Want to move to a Swenty hive but no entrance reducers on these. Also lots of bees Always outside every night. How best to get them in and block up the entrance? Yeah, it's a bit of a pain, the Swenty hive, in terms of moving them because it's not quite got the right. The one, the way that I did it, the Swenty hive. I will draw it. People like my drawings just just to laugh at, not not that they're useful. So the Swenty hive kind of looks the Swenty floor. Looks like this. So you have this— it's gonna be really difficult to draw, isn't it? You basically just, you basically just have a little entrance like that, don't you? But then it's got this ramp that's down here, so that's kind of like a ramp. So the way that I found with all of these hives, the best, best way to close them up is to get a— I don't know why I've drawn a picture because it's not really relevant— like a foam bung. Get yourself a foam bung. So if you've got like any old sofas or anything, like the sofas, you can see— oh, it's that way, isn't it? These ones down here. Oh, shh. No, there was a jar of water down there when I was doing that. It's just gone all over everything. Nearly swore. Um, but basically those, those sofas down there, you just cut them, and I've got loads of bungs, and then you just bung it in and just like stuff it in this gap down here. And because it's, because it's foam, you put it in, it just goes, just like fills all the gaps. And it works quite well. The Suenti floor is not good for moving. The underfloor entrances are brilliant for moving because you have that— I'll draw you like the cross-section of the underfloor entrance. So the underfloor entrance is like this. Sorry for people listening on a podcast, I can't do 2 things at once. So that's the underfloor entrance, so the bees will fly in like that and they go Up there, and the foam bung is just the best thing in the world because you just stick a big foam bung in there, and it just blocks it up completely. And I've got tons of these foam bungs. You just wham them in, and you know you can put it in and fill that whole bit there, or you can just fill that front bit. But either way, they can't get out or in. But the Swensi one is is slightly more difficult. Chester says, "Hi Lawrence, introduced one of your queens last week. Going in tomorrow to see how she's getting on. I put a third super onto." 2 or 3 weeks back, but the bees will not draw it out. I think extract now. So yeah, when, when the bees— if you put, if you put a super on later on in the year and the bees are just like, come on, I've had enough, then, then take it back off. That's the way to do it. Keep them nice and compressed at this point in the year and it'll make honey extraction loads easier because you've not got loads of half-drawn-out frames. Um, but good luck on the queen introduction. Uh, Jay says good evening. Hi, Jay. Evening, Laurence. I pulled 30 pounds of honey from 6 flower frames. I Flow frames this week. Is that good or average? It's very light in color and not too thick, was all capped, and it's absolutely amazing to taste. Uh, £30, that's good, that's pretty good. Yeah, I— it goes, it goes like up and down. I don't think the Flow Hive is— you're not going to get like bumper crops from the Flow Hive. I know some people do get very good crops from the Flow Hive, but I, I tend to kind of just like leave mine and at the end of the season just take, take whatever's left. But £30 is good. That's like a good, a good national super. And I know the Flow Frames are like a little bit bigger than that, but I think that's good. Glad it's— glad it was good. And then you corrected yourself, Flow Frames, not flowers. Yeah, nice one. Saying huge reduction in drones near me now. Hi Aaron, looking forward to our extravaganza this weekend. Just for anyone who doesn't know what that is, Aaron has very kindly, very kindly offered to help me make pizzas at the Abello summer event. And I'm really glad that he invited himself because he is like absolute expert and has been managing the whole process and buying the ingredients and getting everything sorted. And I promise you, Aaron, I would have just rocked up with my pizza oven and some way overproved dough and probably forgot the cheese. So I'm glad that someone who is taking it seriously is, is on board. And I think the people who eat the pizzas will be glad of that as well. So thank you. Channel member says, what is the best poly nuc national on the market at the minute? I'm wanting to use a couple for everything next year, from splits, overwintering, and even collect honey on super frames. So it depends what you're using it for. I, I still think the best 2 are the BS Honeybees and the Abello. They're very different, the BS Honeybees and the Abello, though. And the reason, the reason I liked the BS Honeybees is it gave me the option of using the 2-way split, so putting them divided down the middle and using that. I know there is a new nuc on the market. I have to say it's not a patch on the BS Honeybees. Someone might get angry for me saying that. It's really not though. I just, I've already had in the first week a few issues with it. So the issues that I found is that it's not syrup tight. Had syrup dribbling down. It's not, um, it's, it's a bit too soft. So when I'm kind of going in and levering stuff up, I've already started making a little bit of damage on it. You, they say, you, you say you're not supposed to paint it, and, and I've, I've worked out why they say you're not supposed to paint it now. It's because you can't paint it. It doesn't hold the paint. And as I was painting it on, I was thinking, this is nice. No, it's not sticking. The paint's not sticking to it. Like, when you, when you paint something on, you can feel it stick, but you could see it kind of like almost just not going on. But then when I got the first coat on, I thought, oh no, that's actually worked quite well, it's stuck. And then the, the next coat went on really nicely, and the third and fourth coat, I thought, this is great. And already the paint's just peeling off, like it's a week old with the really good quality Valspar paint, it's coming off. So I wouldn't recommend, I wouldn't recommend painting it, and I think that's the reason they say to not paint it, is because the paint doesn't stick to it. But Also, the other things with that is it comes with the Correx divider as opposed to like the nice metal divider. What I do like about it, I think, I think the feeder is— I think it's a better feeder. I do think the feeder design split, like it's basically turned around 90 degrees. I think the feeder design is better and, and it is loads cheaper. So I do like the fact that it's loads cheaper, but I find like I use, I use a hive tool kind of like scraping poly quite a lot and I just I've already damaged it. It's only, it's only a week old and I already damaged it with my hive tool. So I do like the BS Honeybees one for that central divider and to make splits. If, if the Abello, if the Abello one had the polyashworth feeder, which you can get with it now, but it had the divider as well, there'd be no question in my mind that the Abello would be way, way better. But the Abello doesn't have that, so I think you have to pay extra for the polyashworth feeder, which makes it quite a lot more expensive. It doesn't have the central divider. So those 2 things probably put the BS Honeybees like slightly, slightly ahead. They're my 2 favorites though. I used to like the Maysmore. I've got loads of Maysmore ones because you used to be able to buy the Maysmore ones for about £20. They were like £20 each, it was crazy. You might hear background noise of babies in the door in the room next door, but the Maysmore ones are like ridiculous price now. What I'm hoping with the Old Castle Farm hives nucs though is that they're gonna, you know, pull the price down a little bit. And I think, I think Payne's had a reaction to that. So the Payne's nucs, they are the nucs that we use, is the Payne's nucs. Uh, I know I've not mentioned them on my list there, but, and, and they're very, very different, the Payne's nucs. They, they don't have top feeders, they have side feeders. But the reason that we use the Payne's nucs, which were on sale the other day for loads cheaper than they normally are, I think they're like 25% off. The reason that we use Payne's nucs is they are by far and away the best ones for travel through the postal system with it— with a feeder intact. All of the other nucs, you can't send them through the post and send a feeder to a customer, which early on in the season is really important. You need to be able to send them through the post so they can manage the heat, but also send them a feeder in like one package. And the Payne's nucs are brilliant for that. So I've got hundreds of Payne's nucs now, and they're the ones that I use the most, and they're the ones that I'm probably most, most kind of most used to. And I really like them. I've not got a bad word to say about the Langstroth versions. Um, the spacing on the Langstroth versions is slightly off. They are working on a tweak to the mold, so that, that is one down point that you get for the Panes. But also, they do need to make the national version feeder movable, because the, the movable feeder in the Payne's Langstroth nuc is brilliant. There's so many good uses for it. I love it. So I've gone way off track there. Sorry, sorry, Shell Shed. What is the best poly nuc? The BS Honeybees poly nuc is the best poly nuc. Really good. But you can't go wrong with the Abello, and you can't go wrong with the Payne's as well. So the top, top 3. Evening, Lawrence. I hope you're well. How much longer we have F1 Botfast queens for inspection tomorrow? And might need a queen. So I'll try not to hit the mic or spill any more water. So here is my calendar. So we are somewhere around here. I love trying to do this backwards. Now we're up here, aren't we? So we got we got that week. Can't do it. Right. We got that week, one week, two weeks, three weeks, three weeks, and we're done. So order them. They're on the website at the moment, but order them before the end of August because I cannot guarantee that the first week of September they will be there. I but I can guarantee. They will not be there on the second week of September. Heard it here first. I've taken on a new nuc. Should I feed syrup or fondant? Uh, so I only feed them if they need it is what I would say at this point in the year. Don't, don't feed if they don't need it. And then I, I would feed them 1:1 syrup at this point in the year. Do not spill any because you'll get them robbed out really, really quickly. And then once they've built up and they're getting towards the point that you want to get them ready for winter, then move over to 2:1 syrup One nice big final feed, and then think about fondant if they need an emergency feed in February or March. John says, "Hi Lawrence, I'm going to treat my colony with Apivar. Can I still do inspections every week? I was in the back garden." So yeah, you can you can go in and do inspections with Apivar. No problem whatsoever. Beegrease Bees. John says, "Lawrence, leave your WhatsApp number up on the whiteboard for latecomers that might have photos to send." Brilliant idea. Always forget my number. It is 01352 372247. Can someone check that? Because I'm just guessing that. Can you check that, John? 01352 372247. I don't think that's right. Something like that. If it doesn't get through to me, it'll get through to someone else and they might answer your question, and it'd probably be just as good an answer as my question. So there we go. We're removing supers on the 22nd. Is there a process for taking 4 supers off a colony, or do you just take them all off? How many supers is too many to take off in one go? Can you condense too much? So just take them all off, take them all off in one go, that's fine. You can condense too much though. So as I said at the beginning, if, if the bees are not condensing all down, they're never just going to accept it on day one and say, yeah, we'll just go in the brood box, that you'll get bearding. So if they do that, upturn the Ashforth feeder, or you can just put Put an empty super on. That's a way of doing it as well. Just take the frames out and put an empty super on, give them some space. Don't leave it like that though, because they will start building copious amounts of, uh, like wild comb in there. But then like 24 hours later, take the super off and you'll be able to get them in. If it's clear that you can't get them in, you can double brood them. But I've done it previously. You, you say, you look at the colony and say there's not enough space for all of those bees to get in there. So I'll give them double brood, and then you go about 3 weeks later and they've just not touched any of the frames, and then you just take, take the double brood back off again. So they didn't need the space, they just needed kind of somewhere to hang out a bit. They didn't want to do anything with the frame. So I hate, I hate putting frames, I hate putting boxes on like that and then having to take them back off again because it's, it's like hygiene risk. Some more tea. But 4 supers should be fine. You should just about get 4 supers worth of bees condensed into a national brood box with the help of either one empty super or one upturned polyasphalte feeder. Oh, get my breath back. Hi Lawrence, uh, all looked into requeening from Black Mountain Honey, laying well, looking well, thanks, great service. Thank you very much, Julian. Um, Sam Cotter just hit the nail on the head, have a drink of tea. I think I'm not having enough drinks of tea, so thanks for that, Sam. I think I lost the ability to read Julian's comment there, so sorry, Julian. For varroa treatment, I've just purchased an Instant Vap. When would you recommend doing a treatment and how many times a year? So Instant Vap is for sublimation of oxalic acid. So if you're going to do that at this point in the year, you need to do multiple cycles at 5 days apart. So the Instant Vap, or any sublimation of oxalic acid, will only get the phoretic mites, so it won't penetrate into the brood. kill varroa where that's like where the majority of the varroa are. So if you just do one single treatment, then you'll get all the phoretic mites, and then all the mites will just come back out of the brood and reinfest the colony. So in order to work against the varroa's life cycle, you do it 5 days apart, and you don't need to cage any queens or do anything if you're doing it 5 days apart. And the bees really— the bees tolerate varroa, the Instamat, really well. You might get the odd bee that gets too close to the nozzle and dies, but apart from that, it doesn't kill bees at all. So repeated cycles and treatments isn't an issue for the bees. So if you've got it in like your garden, you just want to fire it up every 5 days, go for it. What I would say though is PPE. Like oxalic acid is horrible stuff. I know I said formic acid was bad. Oxalic acid is like really, really bad, especially in a in its sublimated form, so when it becomes gaseous, if you, if you ever get a whiff of it, it's bad. It's one of those things that I reckon in 30 years from now they're gonna— you're gonna get all these beekeepers that are dying from horrible lung diseases. So sorry, I do have an Instant Vap, so it'd be me as well, don't worry. But just make sure you have proper, uh, proper face masks, either full face or whatever, just a normal one. But make sure the filters are rated for organic vapors. It says on it organic vapors, they're the ones that you want. So, so if you're doing it at this point of the year, do multiple treatments, at least 4, I would say, split 5 days apart. What I like to do though is I treat with Apivar at this point in the year and then go back kind of mid to end of November and go one time with the Instant Vap to try and find a broodless period or as close to a broodless period as possible. And then that works, that works really, really well. There we go. Hi, I've just found my nuc swarming, but the queen is— but the queen should be in the nuc as the entrance has the queen excluder on. All the bees have gone back in now. I'm gonna read that again. Hi, I've just found my nuc swarming, but the queen is— so it's okay, I see what it is. But the queen should be in the nuc as the entrance has the queen excluder on. All the bees have gone back in now, so it's probably a virgin. Probably swarmed with the virgin if the queen is in there. So if, if you have the queen excluder setting on, the mated queen that's in there can't get out. So what happens is the colony doesn't swarm with the mated queen, it will swarm with the first virgin that's emerged. And virgins, when they emerge, like after a few days, they can still get through the queen excluders. So likely what's happened, I reckon. Uh, what would you do please? I would go into the colony and I would take down all of the swarm cells and I would make sure that the queen is still there. as long as the queen is still there and you've taken down all of the swarm cells, you should be fine. If you left the swarm cells there, then you'd get further casts going out. What would you say is a good honey harvest this year in terms of weight of honey and how many supers? Oh, how long's a piece of string? So I would say, let's break it down into spring. If you got any honey in spring, you did really well. if you got 3 jars of honey before the beginning of June, wow, your bees are superstars. I would say you'd have to do something pretty— you'd have to be a— no, I don't want to say that, I don't want to offend people. If you're anywhere south of Manchester— there we go, I won't offend the whole of Scotland because I don't— I understand it's been pretty grim up in Scotland this year, but if you're anywhere south of Manchester, I would say You've probably got minimum of 2 supers, maybe 3, occasionally 4, and then if you've got Black Mountain Honey Queen, you'll probably have like 6 or 7. It's a shameless plug, sorry, I take it back. It's not as simple as that, but it is, as with all of these things, it's not straightforward because it's all about the genetics of the bees that you've got, it's all about the forage and the location that you're in, but then the skill. of the beekeeping comes in. And that's, that's the difference between 2 supers of honey and 6 supers of honey. It's making sure that you've always got 100% of the bees that are in that colony in that colony, and they're not in your neighbor's chimney, and they're not dwindling away. And you've, you've built them up to maximum strength at the right time when you know the flow is going to be there. And you've made sure that you've not got old queens kind of petering out, like 2 and a half years old, when they, when they should be like doubling down on the best point in the year. So I think the majority of people will have had a decent summer crop. We certainly had a really good summer crop, and long may it continue because there's still, still a week of it left. Uh, but yeah, anywhere, anywhere between 2 to 6 supers is my, my answer for you there, Ben. But I'll say 4 supers. There you go, average. Matt Burrow says, hi Lawrence, not sure if you have access to your WhatsApp while streaming. Thought I would send you a picture as I'm listening Listening while strapping the bees after inspection must be with a hat. Right, let's have a look, Matt, see if I've got— also some people have, right? So, so what I'll do is I'll just jump over to WhatsApp now and we'll work through WhatsApp. So if I go present, to work out how to do this now. There we go. Okay, so we'll go, we'll go on to WhatsApp. So I think that is Mick Hoyle. Uh, so this looks like Mick has bought himself a branding iron. How cool is that? Should we, should we click on it? Oh, music. Like it. Nice. I love it. I wonder how many people went out and bought branding eyes. They are really good fun. I think it's a great idea. Should we watch that again, Mick? It's so much more fun watching other people's videos. Nice music. Oh yeah. Do you know what? Someone messaged me on the first day that I got my branding eye and they said, brand your leg. Just do it on your leg, and I keep on thinking I could maybe just like do it, but I'm I've not built up the courage yet, and I think I'd probably regret it afterwards. Um, I've not got the name, but you can see your see your phone number there. Sorry about that. Greetings from Germany. I'm curious to hear your opinion about caging queens and follow with oxalic acid as a varroa treatment. So I think that's a brilliant treatment. A lot of people do that. Richard Noel does that. Caging them. and following it with oxalic acid as a varroa treatment. Highly effective. It's just a lot more work than using Apivar. And if I just had a few colonies in my garden, that is 100% the way that I would deal with my varroa treatment regime, because it's, it's super simple. You just put the, put the queen in a cage 15 days or whatever it is for the rest of— it's not even that, like 10, 12 days. I always— Harry will be laughing because I don't know, I have to look at the little diagram to work out what it is. But a number of days after you cage her, there's no more brood. Every single bee in the colony is, is a bee. It's not a— it's not an egg, it's not a larva, it's not a pupa. And every single varroa mite in the colony is on a bee. So then using oxalic acid sublimated means that you get a really high, uh, effectiveness killing phoretic bees— which, sorry, killing phoretic mites on bees, which every single mite now is a phoretic mite because it's on the back of a bee. So it works really, really well. And if you're in America, if you're in Canada, if you're basically anywhere apart from England or the UK, you can do that with the supers on. Brilliant. Do it in the middle of the year and it just wouldn't have any impact on the colony whatsoever other than probably boost honey production a little bit because the bees don't have to tend to all of the brood. So I think it's a brilliant idea. I've got more. Here we go. This is your one, Matt. So here, this is what Matt says. Thought I would send you this picture while you're doing your live stream as I'm strapping them all down. Look at That nice, isn't it? That's a lovely picture, Matt. I love—is that—is that barley? Field of barley. Bees at the end. Nice stands. I like—I like your branding or your like painting or whatever it is on your hives. It's pretty cool. You've got some nice supers on there. We need to do more of this. Q and A's are like taxing. I just kind of could sit here and watch people's photos and videos and stuff. So so if you're—if you're enjoying this, just send me whatever you got. Send me the full reel. Uh, let's see what else we got. Oh, one from Harry. Is this the worst queen painting attempt you've ever seen? Right, let's have a look. No, that's not too bad. You've seen, you've seen Splodge and Splidge. That's what I've renamed the other one now. I went in to see Splidge today and she— well, Splodge is still there being superseded and Splidge is just happy, but that's, that's not that bad. You've, you've— the circle are trying to do control to go in. How do I do that on this? Here we go. It's like the perfect circle, and then you've just decided to like jazz up the wings a little bit as well. It's fine though. I don't, I don't think that there'll be any issue. It's only when you get it in their eyes I find that they start getting angry. So on the wings is fine. Makes me feel a bit better as well. Oh, here we go. Odd-looking cells. It's brilliant. I love people sending in stuff like this. So this is, this is really good fun, right? Like, says, hi Lawrence, I found a couple of odd-looking cells in one of my colonies. Is that chalk brood? What is your thoughts? Right, let's have a look. So that there, just, I, I get some like that. It's basically just neglected brood. There's not— there's— it's not as a result of virus. It's definitely not chalk brood. It's just like a bit of a defective larva that they've not capped over. Well, you occasionally get those in there. I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry at all. I don't think that's any sort of disease or virus at all. It's just you occasionally get like a defective abnormality of brood like that. It's not sac brood, not chalk brood, not bald brood. Um, it's definitely no— it's definitely no disease. Like, it's not— it's definitely not AFB because you wouldn't be able to see it because it'd be under the cappings, but it's definitely not EFB. Um, I'm just looking. I always like to look, you know, I'm looking at this one here, but I'm looking at the other ones as well to see what I can see. Lovely brood pattern as well. That one there just looks like they're waiting to, to finish capping that off. Wouldn't be worried about that. I don't think you've got anything to be worried about there. And you've got the same one there. I'll, I'll look into it again because there probably is a name for it. But what I know, when the bee inspectors showed me this, because I, I was worried when I saw this in my hives It's see what I would say is it might have something to do with how like empty a lot of these cells are. There's no there's no um kind of like stores in any of those cells there, and you can see around here as well. See like these dark marks here that can be as a result of varroa. It's often white, but sometimes it goes a little bit darker. So it's like varroa poo. Um, but it's not it's not always that. It's hard when you're like zooming quite. It could just be propolis. as well. But if you're seeing like that kind of shape with white coming out, that's generally varroa poo. Um, and, and it— we, we are in the— we are at the time of the year where you'll start to see the impacts of varroa, and this here is probably linked to varroa. So you do tend to see more and more of it as you go throughout the year. So it could just be like they've nibbled on a larva and then the larva's become a bit deformed or something like that. But definitely nothing to be worried about. I'm sure everyone's seen something like That in their colonies. Oh, it's great that everyone's sending me their pictures now. So brilliant artwork. I love that. Love the stenciling. Look at that nice brand new tin roof on it as well. And you got the underfloor entrance there. Very, very nice. Oh, I like that. I like I like the color scheme, and I like the fact that you've like put the numbering on it as well. Brilliant. Very, very good. Right. So that is we're done on WhatsApp for the time being. Let me jump back here. Stop screen. If give me an— I'll just jump back over to WhatsApp every now and again because that's so much fun. It's like a nice break. I should have had a cup of tea when I did that as well, but that is always good. Evening, Laurence. On the topic of super storage, do you prefer wet or dry storage? Massive fan of wet. Much prefer wet. It's so much easier, and it means that you don't— you just take the honey supers off the bees and then they never go back onto the bees until next year. And then when they go back on, the bees are like, yeah, we love this. But you do just need to watch out that you don't leave loads of pollen in them. I think the barometer for winning a Black Mountain Honey Hat is a little bit higher than that, Matt, I'm afraid. And they're in limited supply as well. I've only got about 7 left and they're all destined for competition prizes and I will not be buying any more, so they'll become like limited edition. I'll be removing all of my supers next weekend, therefore all of the bees will be condensed down into the brood box. Is this mass overcrowded state likely to lead to a swarm impulse? If not, no issue. If so, I won't be able to make splits due to lack of nucs. Is there a way around this possible issue? So I'm not going to say that the bees will not swarm by condensing them down like that at the back end of August, but if 100 people did it, I think 2 colonies would swarm. So you're talking 2%. Bees do not want to swarm late on, back on back end of the year. They just don't. It doesn't mean that not all colonies will swarm. So for me, it's quite easy because I just do it to all of them, and you might get the odd one that swarms, or the odd 2 that swarms. If you're doing it in your back garden, if you've got one colony in your back garden, just add a brood box on, or add another super on, or give them additional space to, to make sure that you're not going to trigger any any swarming impulses. I find the way that you'll trigger the swarming impulse more than condensing them down is by not having enough space for the queen to lay. So if you've got 6 or 7 frames of stores in there and then you condense them down, they'll be long gone because there's just not enough space for the queen to go. And it's more— I find that's the bigger trigger, is the lack of space in that national brood box, as opposed to condensing all the bees into the brood box. So just make sure that they've got plenty of space. But if you are worried, just add Add another frame on. Uh, John is on the case. Thank you, John. Uh, Tony and Liz say greetings all. Hello. Ben meant Apivar. I don't know why it said spices. Brilliant, I got it though. Uh, Julian says the new Old Castle Farm hives pollen, it looks fantastic value compared to the BS Honeybees. It does indeed look good value, but I'm not 100% sure it is direct comparison, but I, I will reserve judgment. I'm not Um, I just— I've been stung too many times, again excuse the pun, for talking about stuff before I've tested it out. So like I said, I'll reserve judgment. All I've found so far is it is a little bit soft and it doesn't hold the paint as well, and this— the feed is a bit leaky. So I can safely say all of those things because I have experience of them, but I want to— I want to test it out a little bit more for myself. I do welcome the price reduction, very good price reduction. But then the interesting thing about the price reduction thing is when you buy like a pallet of nukes, you kind of get like a— you're not paying RRP. You're ringing them up and saying, can I have 700 nukes? What's the best price you can do me? And you're getting, you know, you're getting a good price. So I, I pay way cheaper than £54.99 for the Payne's nukes. You know, you could, you could buy the Payne's nukes. We could buy one Payne's nuke last week for £46, £45. So that's a lot cheaper than the RRP of the old Castle Farm hives at £54.99. So it's, it's, if you're buying a few, you'll generally get a decent discount. Hello. Hi, Nia, how you doing? He says, hi Lawrence, I'm new to beekeeping and I just got my first colony. Do you, do you have any tips on seeing the eggs, as I found it difficult to see any on my first inspection? Everything else looked okay. So seeing, the best way to see eggs is to get someone like to point them out to you, because I think once someone points them out to you, it's like really easy to see eggs. But it depends like if you've got good vision as well. The biggest tip that I can give someone for eggs is black plastic foundation. Seeing eggs on black plastic foundation is so, so easy. So if you're one of these people that struggles, you might be interested in doing that. I've done videos saying about like frames and feeders frames and like what I don't like about them and the issues that I've had with them, But the colonies that I've got on frames and feeders frames now, oh, the frames look so good. Like, they're the, the best frames that I've got at the moment are the ones that were on frames and feeders frames. Brilliant. Just took 2 years to get them drawn out, but now that they're drawn out, wow, they're just like brood all the way around, all the way to the corners. And then you look in the middle and you can just see the eggs every time because it's on a nice black background. But that's— they're my 2 tips. Get someone to show you it. and then you should be able to see it. And if not, get some black, even if it's just one frame of black plastic foundation coated with wax, and then you can keep that in the middle of the hive. And then if you're just kind of— because sometimes all I want to do is I want to just go in and just see if I can see eggs. If I can see eggs, I'm like, right, the queen's there, I don't think they're going to have swarmed. And then if you did that on black plastic foundation, you'd see it every time. Hi Lawrence, I bought 5 Buckfast queens from yourself and will be delivered around the 22nd. Any advice when to make up the nucs for the new queens to be introduced? I was thinking this weekend. Well, let's get the calendar out. So I always say eight days. So I'm going to try and do this backwards again. So we are here Friday the ninth. So if you did this weekend, say let's say you did the eleventh. You want to wait eight days. So we go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I get that right? Do it there. What? So it's always the next day. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So your eighth day would be. You can't see it because I'm not holding it up. The nineteenth of August. Which is perfect. You'd go in, take down all the queen cells, and then basically any day after the 19th and you've taken down the queen cells, you can, you can add your queen in. So your queen will arrive on the 23rd. So that, that period in between there and there, the 19th and the 23rd, is fine. I find the bees, if anything, they like a little bit of a delay. So this weekend will be fine. Take down the queen cells on the 19th, and then the queens will arrive on the 23rd, and you can put them straight in. Wait 24 hours, pop the tabs, feed, give them a little feed at that point, helps introduction, and you should be well on your way. You can do little wavy flags like that. Thanks, Richard. Thomas Carter, I like your shoe logo, like a shoe with wings, that's cool. He says, hi Lawrence, move the top box down to the bottom after doing a Demerara split, how long will it take the bees to move the honey back up to the top? So they'll do it relatively quickly. 2 conditions. You need to have bruised all of the frames. So this is like how to fix a demerare. Once you've got all of your honey up the top in the national deeps, take it down to the bottom. You need to bruise all of the frames, like every single one, and like quite heavily bruise them as well, so like the honey is almost dripping out. Bees don't like it. So you need to bruise all of the frames and you need to make sure they've got sufficient space above. They won't move it up if they've not got space to move it up, and they won't move it if you've not uncapped it. So if you've done both of those things and then there's a flow on, I would say they'll do it within a week. It's not like a quick— it's not like an overnight process. You've got a massive colony, they can do it within 48 hours, I would say. But give them a good week to do it and you should be good. And if they've not done it first time, just go back and bruise it again. And then if they've still not done it, what you can do is you can start— you start lifting the frames up into the brood box above. Definitely worthy of a little draw in this one. So your configuration will be something like this. So you're gonna have, let's say, you've got 3 supers on. So this is brood, this is honey, and then you've got super, super, super. And let's hope you've got like an empty super on the top like that, some something like that. And you're hoping that they take the honey from here And move it up into one of the supers. Now, if they're not doing that, what you can do is take the frame that is here and just start putting it up in between 2 brood frames there, basically checkerboarding a bit like that. Don't, don't move any brood downwards, but you can move honey upwards like that and stick it in between those frames of brood. And if you, if you have like brood honey brood and you've uncapped it, 24 hours later that will be, that will be completely gone and it'll just be up there somewhere. They hate, they hate you doing that, splitting their brood with honey frames, capped honey, uncapped honey frames, and they'll just, they'll clear it out straight away. So if you are struggling, you can do something like the nonsense that I've just written down here. 01352 372247 if you want to WhatsApp me a picture or something Funny or whatever, really. Just I'll have a break. Just read some WhatsApps. I think that'd be quite cool. Let's go over to there now. See if there's anything on there. I bet you there's not, is there? Let's have a look. Oh, there is. There is one. Mick says, "If you send me a Black Mountain honey hat over winter, I'll make you a Horsley board video if you if you use one next year, as you'll be amazed how easy the boards offer swarm control. Yay or nay?" Um, so it's very kind, very kind offer, Mick. Um, uh, let me, let me come back to you at a later date on that. Like I say, they are in, uh, very high demand, the hats, uh, and I'm— I could, I could just get a horsey board. Um, I'm pretty sure the bee equipment bit of Thorns has sent me one. Um, but very, very kind offer, but thank you. I will come back to you on that. I clipped my queen about 4 weeks ago very badly, complete novice. Having seen this vid, looks like Her back is damaged. Is it? However, she continues to lay like a demon. Oh yeah, she looks a bit dented. Yeah, definitely damaged. I don't, I don't think— yeah, no, that might have been you when you clipped it, if you kind of use like the pin technique, or if you cut her. Do you know what? I've got a couple of queens like that where they've got dents in them. Not, not in that location. Tends to be like lower down the abdomen. and they, they're kind of okay. And like you say, she's laying like a demon. I wouldn't be surprised if you go into that colony in spring next year and there's 2 queens in there though. It is the kind of thing that they'll supersede for, uh, so, so keep an eye on it. I wouldn't— I certainly wouldn't do— I wouldn't preemptively kill the queen or do anything like that, um, but keep an eye on it. I took your advice and I've got a polyashwath feeder on the metal part there is a sliding opening. Why is this there, and does it matter whether this is open or closed when feeding the syrup or fondant? So always keep it closed. There you go, simple. Always keep it closed. The reason it's there is that for the last dregs of syrup— definitely not honey— last dregs of syrup at the end of the year, the idea is that you can open it and just let the bees access the feeder to clean the feeder for you, which is good. I use that on my Abella ones. It is good. So always keep it closed. apart from a couple of days at the end of the year. But you know what, I don't even bother doing it because you, you'll get the bees to go out and a few bees will go out and they'll clean up everything, but then you just end up with a few bees that never want to go back in, and then you've got to like try and take all the bees out, and then there's— so I just, you know what, there's a little bit of stickiness at the end of the year. It soon dries off, but that is what it is there for. Channel member, says, hi Lawrence, had a complete nightmare with queens this year. Anyone else? How quick will they lay swarm cells after they have swarmed and natural local mated queen starts laying? I'm going to read that again. Hi Lawrence, had a complete nightmare with queens this year. Anyone else? How quick will they lay swarm cells after they have swarmed and natural local mated queens start laying? I'm— I don't know whether it's like me just not reading that properly. How quick would they lay swarm cells after they have swarmed and natural local mated queen starts laying? So All I can think that to be is natural. Like, I'm well lost and I feel really bad. I'll tell you what, if you, if you rewrite the question, Lee, I'll just jump down to the bottom and answer it again. I don't understand the question. How quick would they lay swarm cells after they have swarmed? And that is the, it's the bottom bit. I'll answer the first bit. How quick would they swarm cells after they have swarmed? And stop saying it. Pretty quick. So if they're cramped for space, they'll go again. If they're AMM queens, they'll go again. You get really, really swarmy stock. But I don't— I'm pretty sure you don't keep AMM queens, so that's what's confusing me. And then the next bit says, and natural local mated queens start laying. That's— yeah, you have to write it again. You've said— I'm at a loss. I'm at a loss. Sorry, Lee. Um, Sephiadem is watching on Twitch. Excellent, my one Twitch viewer. Hi Lawrence, what do you do with frames that not That have not enough capped honey to extract the frame. So I did this on a channel membership video, I think. Sorry, just having a sip of tea. So I kind of use the law of averages with that. So if you've got a frame that is 100% capped, you can extract it. If you've got a frame that is 80% capped, you can extract it. If you've got a few frames that are kind of like 20% capped, I just chuck them in the mix. It's really, as long as you shake them and the honey doesn't come out, for every one of those that you put in, as long as you've got one fully capped frame to cancel it out, the overall moisture level, it's not gonna, it's not gonna like massively boost the overall moisture level of the honey that much. You're not going to want to extract like 80% of your frames that are not capped because then you will end up with moisture Content issues and your honey will start fermenting. But like you say, what do you do with the frames that are not— that don't have enough capped honey to extract the frame? I just chuck them in, chuck them in, and I've never had a single bucket of honey ferment because the vast majority of the frames that I have are fully capped and then they balance each other out. I'm just going to jump down and see if Lee has gone and messaged, written that again. No, he's not done it yet. Okay, we're good. And I just have to find where I was up to. Right, Graham Thomas says, hi Lawrence, I have a colony that is creating supersedure cells, 2024 queen, removed another one today and placed in a nuc, will be day 7. What is the viability of the supersedure queen cells in a nuc? So very good, super, supercedure queen cells are very, very well-fed queen cells because there's only 1 cell or 2 cells max, sometimes 3, but mostly 1 or 2. They really put a lot of effort into them. So I'm a massive fan of supercedure cells. Some of the best queens I've got come from supercedure cells, so this should be fine. Loads of drones about still, but it's just the weather. I wouldn't deliberately carry on grafting at this point in the year, but if I had a supercedure cell, I would risk it. Just keeping an eye on it though and making sure that it did lay really nice brood before it went into winter. And if it didn't, I'd be, I'd be swapping it out for a mated queen. But you should be okay. Mike Moore, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, Apivar question. Instructions say 2 strips per hive, but does that mean that— does that— but does the number of brood boxes affect this, i.e., double brood or a frame nuc? Yeah, it's misleading, the 2 strips per hive, because I'm pretty sure they've changed the instructions because it used to say 1 strip per— I just, just looked at my WhatsApp there, loads of WhatsApps come through. I'm going to go back to the WhatsApps. It used to say 1 strip per 5 frames of brood. And I'm pretty sure that was for Langstroth brood as well, but you said 1 strip per 5 frames of brood. And then for me, that's, that's the advice that I always follow, which is 1 strip per 5 frames of brood. So if you've got a nuc, it's 1 strip. If you've got a single brood box that's full of brood, it's 2 strips. If you've got a double brood box that is full, 10 frames of brood, another 10 frames over 10 frames of brood, it's 4 strips. But no one's got that at this time of the year. You've probably got double brood, which is 10 frames of brood and then like 10 frames of honey, which in which case it's 2 frames, 2 strips for your 2 sets of 5 broods, and you just put the strips where the brood is. And that's, that's the way that I always do it. So if you've got 2 strips per hive, just ignore that because that's really misleading. It's 1 strip per 5 frames of brood and you'll be, you'll be good with that. Right, let's go back to WhatsApp. Someone definitely sent something on WhatsApp then. Oh no, I've deleted WhatsApp. I closed it. Let's get WhatsApp back up. Oh yeah, someone sent me 10 messages. That's, that's what was going off there, right? Let's have a look at that, uh, WhatsApp. This is good fun. Uh, so the person who did the very colorful hive said, this is the colony I requeened with one of your F1 Buckfast queens around 6 weeks ago. This is only the top brood box. Oh yeah. This is this is the way to win a hat. Very nice frame of brood. Wow, love it. Everyone but fast queens, black ants and honey. We do we do like that. These are some exceptional frames of brood. Wow. That that's pretty pretty good. Wow. I'm just I'm just going. I was just going to go rounding round in circles. Let's have a look at a few more that for people who are listening to this on a podcast. Basically, ten of the best frames of brood I've ever seen. I think most of them would have stood a chance of winning the cap in last week's competition. That one's great. Just a lot of brood. So that's that's brilliant. Anyone else who wants to show off Black Mountain Honey Queens, you're more than welcome. Send them through. Another one. I always go to say people's names, but I don't have names on WhatsApp. So this is someone saying, "Hi Lawrence, this is a perfectly good cell." A few days ago, I checked today and it looked like. This. Very nice. Looks like a supersedure cell to me. I love the dimpling of it. Just— I'm just double-checking to see it's not an emergency cell. It doesn't look like an emergency cell. It's not got like the kink in it. It's— that's throwing me a little bit there. It's quite— it's a bit dented, isn't it, there? I don't know whether it's like the dimples going around. Um, but interesting to see. Oh, sorry, so you're saying this was a perfectly good cell a few days ago, I checked it out and it looked like this? So, right, it does. It looks like it's been dented, doesn't it? Is it Did you did you knock it or something as you kind of like put it in or took it out? It does look like it's taken a bit of a bash. I'll be interested to see whether whether she emerges. Glyn says my new laser engraving signs are selling well. That's someone plugging stuff. I love it. Those guys nice, very nice. If anyone wants a honey for sale sign, get in contact with Glyn. I do like a oh here we go. Love stuff like this—a pallet beehive. That is cool, and you've sent a video on it as well. No way! Oh, it's buffering because I've not got the— I've not got the bandwidth. Oh no, no, it is just like a time-lapse one. There we go. So, so that would definitely be worthy of a hat. Yeah, if you, if you did a video of you making a pallet beehive from the beginning to the end and like just filmed it in, in portrait Orientation. So that one there, that that's kind of portrait orientation. Filmed it like that. And when people have when if anyone's thinking of doing this and sending it to me, like I'll speed it up. I'll cut it all out and everything. So if you're like nailing all stuff together, just let the camera roll and I'll just you're just like Superman speeding it all up. It'd be so cool. So turning a pallet, turning it from a pallet to a beehive. Oh, someone's got to do that one. I might even have a go myself this winter when I've got more time on my hands. Or someone else has messaged me on WhatsApp, so brilliant. How do you merge 2 colonies in a long hive? Here's one I've made. Oh, I like that, that's cool. Um, I would probably go with some form of like newspaper board, something like that. Get yourself a follower board. I'll draw this for you. Let me, let me close down WhatsApp. Um, How do I do that? Here we go. So in in your hive, you in your long hive, you'll have like boards, divider boards like that. You might you might not have that. That took ages to focus. But if if you do have any boards like that in there to stop the colonies going through, I would just cut a big hole in the middle and then pin. a bit of paper, like newspaper, either side like that. Kill one of the queens and then do— kill one of the queens and then like 24 hours later just like score like tiny little holes in the paper and then just let them, let them chew their way through. Um, and do it one piece of paper on one side, one piece of paper on the other side, so like a proper slow introduction, and that would work really well. Right, back to the questions. Hi Lawrence, I've had a chance to have my honey tested to see what my bees are foraging on. Have you had it done? Looking to see what the difference between my two apes are about four miles apart. So yeah, so we get we get ours done. We get two apes done actually every year because they're quite far apart. It's good fun, isn't it? One of the things you've got to look out for on the the honey testing though is that there's this thing called a pollen coefficient, which means that you get like these spurious readings for certain pollens, and it shows. I'm not I'm not a pollen coefficient expert, but I do know it exists, and it. You get things showing up that are really like, it's like saying you've got like 20% rose pollen or something like that on it, and you know that your honey is not going to be 20% rose pollen, but it's because there's something to do with the pollen coefficient means that rose pollen triggers reads much higher, something like that. But, and then also you get some plants that don't have any nectar on it at all, but they've still gone out and foraged the pollen. doesn't mean that you've got nectar from a plant just because you've got pollen from that plant. But it is really interesting, I love it, brilliant, it's amazing. We had 72 or 73, I think, in one of our samples, 73 different types of pollen. So we're so lucky in North Wales because you don't get big monocrops, you don't— there's nothing, you don't get any crops, it's just everything is wild, uh, and everything has a bit of a fighting chance, so it's all good fun. Hi Lawrence, I had a queen in a 6-frame poly but felt they needed a bit more space 2 weeks ago. I added a brood extension over the last 2 weeks. They've both drawn it out and the queen has now filled 10 of the 12 frames with capped brood and eggs. I really want to keep them in a doubled nuc over winter. Suggestions please. Don't need any suggestions, that is a perfect format. Really, really like that format. Overwinter a lot of nucs like that. They seem to like this kind of thin, narrow format a bit more than a wider format, and they'll start off, they'll cluster at the bottom, and they'll just move up to the top. So I wouldn't do anything, just leave them like that, get them well fed, and they should be good. Hi Lawrence, what is the impact on a colony of moving them less than a mile at this time of the year? I have a new apiary, but it's close to where they are. So you'll just get drift back to the old site depending on how close you are, but if you're a mile, you'll get pretty, pretty significant drift back to the old site. But If you, if you have one colony— pardon me— one colony in one site— if anyone's wondering what this rather fancy pen is, I think that's my daughter's pen— if you have one colony in one site and you're going to move it to another site, you'll lose maybe 20% of the bees going back to the original site. But if you have 3 colonies on one site and then you're just moving one colony to a new site, it's kind of irrelevant because your one colony will go to the new site some of the foragers will just go back and just blend in with the other colonies, so you don't really lose any bees that way, you're just distributing the bees across different, different hives. Hi, how you doing? Hi Lawrence, when do you recommend doing the last proper hive inspection in the way of pulling out frames? So kind of like, I've not pulled out frames really for weeks, but I, I would do it before, before or after honey extraction, around then. Make sure you've got a good queen in there, make sure that the brood pattern's looking good. There's no point going through the whole winter process, getting them ready for winter, if there's just a drone-laying queen or laying workers, and just be shaking them out at that point. But that would be my last, my last inspection, and then supers off, Apivar strips in, feed, and then go back 8 weeks later just to take the Apivar strips out. Definitely wouldn't be pulling out any frames at that point. That is surefire way to kill your queen before winter when nobody's got any queens. So about now, kind of like I say, season's coming to an end. This time next month there will be not much, not much left to do. Chrissy says, good evening, thought I had another swarm on my hands today. Thankfully they just went for a bit of a fly about and then came back again. I had a mini heart attack. attack. I managed to get 2 full brood frames of honey off my 2 brood boxes. They aren't interested in the honey super. I'll film it once my filter arrives. I'll get the honey extracted for my soap, lip balms, and shampoo bars. I've got about 3 kilograms. So nice, good, good that you still got a little bit of honey. Uh, you'll find next year, if you manage to not lose the swarms, that's when you'll get a decent amount of honey. Could you, could you add a super with just no frames so that then they have enough room after you extract? As I don't have a polyashworth feeder, so You can definitely do that. Ben Davis also says, where would you recommend I get my Honey Jar labels from? Struggling to find anywhere. So, so Abello, you can, you can label, uh, like design your own on Abello. You can do it on Thorns. There's a few places that will let you just kind of like put in your details and then you can have stock labels. Some of them are a bit old though, a bit drab. Some of the Abello ones are nice, like a bit, a bit newer, but I do think you just get like You could probably go on Canva now, just print your own and then get a company to print them out for you. It'd be good. Uh, yep, yep. Ding Ding says, I'm in Devon, think summer flow is over. I'm gonna— I'm going on holiday on the 17th for a week. Would you pull the honey supers before going and store before extracting when I get back, or leave on the hive until I return? Definitely leave on the hive until you return. It will be a nightmare to extract them if you just took them off They'd just be like cold and really, really difficult to extract. You'd have to warm everything back up again. Cub Rider says, hi Lawrence, could you elaborate on today's sugar syrup on introducing a queen? Uh, yeah, so I'm just running, running out of time. Um, uh, maybe if I WhatsApp myself the video, I could, I could show you that. Let's see if I can do that. I'm not good at talking at the same time. I can't, I can't do it at the same time. Basically, I had a video of introducing a queen with sugar syrup. So I had a colony that had a failed virgin. So it was, uh, an emergency cell that had emerged and a virgin had gone out. And I thought last couple of weeks there'd been— it'd be nice weather, um, so give it a chance to mate, see, see what happens, see if it mates. Came back 2 weeks later and it hadn't mated, but I found the virgin, killed the virgin, and then I just— I always take like a batch of queens with me just for Exact scenario. So I'm going to, I'm going to York tomorrow to the Abello show. So I'm away kind of Saturday, Sunday, not back till Monday. So I didn't want to have to wait until Monday to go and put the queen in and then go back and let the queen out. So killing the virgin colony was instantly hopelessly queenless. So all I did was just I took a caged queen, dipped her in sugar syrup, and then just opened the cage and just let her walk. into the colony. And it's a pretty good way of doing it. If you— you have to drench them in syrup, and if— but don't, don't drown them, but they have to be like fully coated in syrup. But the idea is that when you put the queen in— if you just put the queen in normally like that, like, she'd fly off. So the syrup stops her flying off. But then if she didn't fly off and you put her into a colony, you would instantly trigger defensiveness. They try and kill the queen because they'd just be like, who is this queen? that is not the virgin that was here a minute ago, will kill her. And even like as they're killing her, they're probably thinking, she looks like a pretty decent queen. And you can see the behavior sometimes change, but they kill her first. Like they kill first and then make a judgment afterwards. If you coat them in sugar syrup, they clean them first, and by the time they've cleaned them, they're like, yeah, she's actually pretty decent, we'll leave her in there. So it does work. I've done it a good few times now, and it's quite a good technique. So yeah, there we go, elaboration. Uh, Michael Critwell says, how can you tell if a larva is a drone larva before it's capped? Uh, so you, you can kind of tell by the size and, and, and the way, the way they're starting to build stuff out. It looks like a bit bigger, they kind of like expand it out a little bit. You could— you can't tell from the egg, and you can't tell when it's like a tiny little larva. But as it gets bigger, so maybe like day 7, day 8, day 9, you can start to tell that it just looks bigger than a normal worker bee larva. But early days, you wouldn't be able to tell. That's your new name. PK says, hi Lawrence, I found a couple of odd-looking cells in one of my colonies. Is that chalkbrood? Oh, we answered that one. I've got down to my WhatsApp, right? So let me jump back to WhatsApp again and see if we can get any more. Oh, we do. Here we go. Marcus at Walkerby Honey. Here we go, labeling up jars by watching. That's weird, isn't it? That's— I like your honey. Look at that. That's— I bet you you've got a good amount of lime in that. Wow, that's very limey honey. Lime honey is one of my favorites. It's really weird, like, seeing the picture on there, um, of me doing a very silly face, um, and then, and then me being here as well. Hello. But nice, nice honey. I love that. That's good stuff. Uh, next one says, hi, can you do a video or members video when you start to remove supers and condense them down with Apivar? Cheers. Yes, I will do that, no problem. Uh, next— oh, I like these, they're nice hives. Are they like Langstroth? I think they do look like Langstroth. They're cool. And I love that. Oh yeah, that's totally what I would do. That's very neat, very neat notes. But I do like that— I've not even read your question, I'm just looking at your pictures. Uh, what was, what was the question? Oh, here we go. Right. Hello from France. Hello. Quick question, how far can a virgin queen fly? And an unknown virgin queen killed my mated queen the other day. Had to kill the virgin and buy an original known queen cell. Hmm, I'm not sure how far they fly. Cop-out answer, I don't know. I, I would imagine a good few miles, and I I think they've evolved to fly further and further and further to kind of get the genetic diversity, but I've never looked at how far they fly. I'm gonna guess, I'll just guess a few miles, I would say. Um, that's annoying. You say an unknown virgin queen killed my mated queen the other day. Do you think, do you think of just a random virgin just flown into your hive? I guess it could happen if you've got like other hives, but other hives like close next to each other. But I'd say there's probably— sure, it's not super seizure cell. There are no cells or anything in the colony. That would be, that would be my guess. Or you're typing at the same time. Gonna come, gonna come back straight away. I'm gonna jump off WhatsApp before you get on. I'll come back to that one though. Uh, right, here we go. Buzz Stings and Bee Juice says, if I have a load of half-filled super frames that I don't want to extract, can I freeze them and give them back to the bees next year to to continue filling? Um, I don't see why not. I don't see why not. Giving frozen frames, probably not going to be the best thing in the spring, but defrosted frames, I just wonder whether they'll— I don't know, I've never tried that. You can definitely do it with capped stores, works well with capped stores, like fully, um, like the correct moisture content. I've never tried it with, with nectar, but I guess half-filled super frames. So you're not saying like nectar, you're saying frames that are just not uncapped? I reckon work. Yeah, um, we, we did that one, PK. Uh, so Nick Will says, how do you deal with drone laying colonies? So if I've got a drone laying queen, and it's simple, I just kill the queen, put a new queen in, and that fixes it. If I've got laying workers, I really hate laying workers. There's loads of different ways to do laying workers. I think I'll still stick with the one that I would generally do, which is I'll just shake them out. I just shake the laying workers out And the majority of the time they don't impact the colonies around. Sometimes they do. That's the reason I'm not a massive fan of shaking them out. I do think it's, it's, for me, it's just the easiest way of doing it. Shake them out, clean the box up, melt down the frames, start again, take a split from something else. They're the 2 most common instances where you're going to have drone laying colonies. So the first one's loads easier to fix if you've just got drone laying queen. kill her, start again. But yeah, shake out the laying workers. Now you say mine looks 5 years old, lid seems loose too. I've missed that bit. I think, I think that's back to someone else. Hi, my bees seem to be backfilling the brood box but not honeybound yet. I've taken the queen excluder off for now to try and encourage them to store in the supers. Will this work? Um, no, they're just going to naturally want to backfill at this time of the year, so taking the queen excluder off is not gonna is not going to encourage them to store it in the supers. It's just going to encourage them to— it's going to encourage the queen to go and lay eggs upstairs, so then you get like this topsy-turvy hive. I'd definitely put the queen excluder back on. If you're really struggling, all I would do at this point in the year is just take the frames of stores out and either extract the honey out of them if you can, or put them in the freezer, or just put them for storage somewhere out of the way that they're not going to leak, and just add in a frame of foundation would be the best way. Chrissy says she's also super excited for the collab. I am super excited for the collab as well, but that's all we can say. PK has asked the same thing again, right? So I, I like, I like PK's style, but I'm going to— I'm not going to click on the things now though. Um, Pain B— John says Pains do sell a top feeder as I use it on the one I removed the side feeder from to make it to 8 frames. So yeah, I've got the Pains top feeder as well, but I really like the side feeder. I like the frame feeder in the Pains now. It's, um, weird how you can go kind of full circle on something like that. Hi Lawrence, you previously stated leaving just the brood over winter with fondant. Do you still advise this due to less space to keep warm over winter? Um, so, so I always— I take my honey off, put my Apivar strips in, I put my Ashworth feeder on, I feed with syrup, and I leave them like that. That's like my configuration. Um, I will, if they're light, I'll feed them with fondant over winter, but it's like an emergency feed. I'll only do that if I've just not fed them enough in the spring. But I think as I've, as I've grown older and wiser, I just feed them enough in— sorry, feed them enough in the winter. I just make sure that I feed them enough, and then I generally don't need to feed any fondant. And that's, that's the way that I, uh, I get them through the winter and it does, it does very, very well. Flower Street Farm Bee says hello from Colorado. Hello as well. Uh, I'm just jumping through the PK chat there. Deborah Brady says, I'm treating my bees with Apiguard, can I use this on my nucs? So this was the one that I think I caused a bit of anger on the channel member video the other day talking about my dislike of Apiguard. I'm really not a fan of Apiguard, just, just not a fan of it whatsoever. Don't like the, the application method. And I don't think it's that very— I don't think it's very good as a treatment. I don't think it's that effective. So I appreciate, Deborah, that's, that's a bit awkward for you. So I wouldn't chuck it out. Give it— persevere with it for this year and see how you go. But next year I would go with Apivar. It's a lot better. Apiguard though, if you're using— I think it's one tray per hive, Apiguard. So if you're using it on a nuc, they say just like half a tray. That's what I would go with. It's funny with Apiguard because in most other countries, Apiguard, you can buy it by like the big tub, big massive tub, and then you just dose it yourself and it's loads cheaper. And then the UK, they're like, yeah, they don't understand dosing and they'll probably pay loads more if we give them these little individual foil wrap trays. So yeah, I'm not really— I'm not a fan of Apiguard. Um, Paul Lewis says, hi Lawrence and family and social media family, 2 queens arrived today, very happy of course. course. Thank you. Like and join, it's worth it. Oh, thank you very much, Paul, just for that. Not a shameless plug, my Black Mountain Honey Queen and her daughter were my 2 best queens this year, 8 supers each, and also drew out a brood box full of foundation last month for me. Excellent. That is shameless plug. But I know it wasn't a shameless plug. It would have been a shameless plug if I'd asked you to say that then, but I'm really glad that they are doing the business for you. Hello, Laurence, thank you for answering our questions. I have one: what is the best way to deal with ants? So I'm not best placed to answer that, I'm afraid, Jean, because in the UK we don't really have issues with ants. We get the ants that we get in the UK— people, people who get them is under— if you've got the roof and then you've got a crown board, like a plastic crown board underneath it, so like the Payne's nucs, Payne's poly nucs, you'll get these tiny little ants, like literally tiny little things, and you might get like a few thousand underneath there, but they don't They don't ever go into the colony. They're just living in this void. I get loads of them, but they don't do any issues into colonies. But I don't, I don't have any problems with ants going in and trying to steal honey, like none. And I've never ever had that issue, and I don't think many people in the UK have that issue. So we're not really, like I say, we're not really very, very well versed in coming up with solutions for that. I suspect it would be some sort of like oil trap around the legs to stop them climbing up, or I don't know, I haven't really thought about it. Sorry, sorry, Jean. Um, Donna Morrison says solid, solider, sorry, soldier is being superseded. Poor Splodge. Yes, Splodge is being superseded. It is, it is pretty sad. Tony Baker says hi from Australia, mate. I can't not read that in without an Australian accent. I, I read that as hi from Australia, mate. Sent you a beekeeping hack on Facebook Messenger. Love your channel. Oh, amazing. Sorry if I butchered the Australian language. I have family, a lot of family living in Australia and New Zealand. I am, believe it or not, quarter Kiwi. It's true, my granddad was from New Zealand. I'm also half German, hence the very serious face. Sorry if I've offended any German people out there. I can kind of say these things if I am from that country myself, aren't I? So I'm half German, quarter Kiwi, and then like a bit English and a bit Irish, and then like a tiny bit English and zero Welsh. But I live in Wales, so my children are Welsh, so they're going to be even more mongrel than me. It doesn't really work. I always find that a bit weird in terms of where you live— or sorry, where you were born is like your nationality. So it's not, it's not really a nationality, is it? But because I kind of see my nationality as like what your parents are. But then if they were— if they're just the nationality of where they were born, I don't know. I find, I find it all a little bit confusing. But it is true, my daughters were born in Wales, so they are Welsh. There we go. Gotta go, got my basic assessment first thing. See some of you on Sunday. Good luck with your basic assessment, Aaron. Just remember that most of us would fail it. And it doesn't matter if you, if you don't pass it, but what does matter is making some awesome pizzas on Sunday. That's the main thing. Hi again, Lawrence. How harmful would you say Roundup is as farmers use it in the field? But I was at the hives at 6 o'clock blocking them while they sprayed the field. So apparently Roundup, no issues for bees, but oh, I don't like Roundup. I don't like it. I think, I think I'd be more worried about the impact of like me being there when they're spraying Roundup than the impact that it's going to have on the bees. Glyphosate is horrible, horrible stuff. It really is, and just lives there for years and years and years. I don't like seeing farmers spraying glyphosate, um, but I don't think it's going to have any short or long-term damage to the bees, I don't think. But yeah, make sure you're not there next time. Hi Lawrence, which polyfeeders do you recommend? I previously used large plastic rapid feeders and noticed lots of dead bees floating. Is this normal? Uh, you shouldn't really get any dead bees in, in the rapid feeders because they've got lids on them. Um, so yeah, I'm surprised that there's any, any dead bees in there. I highly recommend the Abello Ashworth feeders, very, very good. Don't, don't get the Suyenti ones. Like, I've got loads of Suyenti ones and they are rubbish, absolutely rubbish. They are designed for a top top bee space hive, but everyone knows that the National is a bottom bee space hive, so you have to build the rims yourself and it takes ages and it's— you can't do a very good job doing it. So just spend the extra money and get the Abello ones. Um, Mick is trying to convince me again on here to send over a hat. Um, so, so it wasn't— so just, just for clarity, Mick, it was The idea was that if people sent me videos to do a hack, I'd post them on the channel, and then the person who got the most views would win a hat. That was it. I can't, I can't send out hats for everyone who sends me videos because I get sent quite a lot of videos and there's only a few hats. But feel free to send me the video and I will post it, and if it's a good video, you might win a hat. Hi sir, as the honey season is now more or less over, how would you sum up your season? Oh, I like, I like a reflective question like this. So spring honey, worst season ever. Summer honey, good, good to very good. Like, really happy with that. Queen rearing started off slow, but then there's actually been a really, really good queen rearing year. So very happy with the queen rearing. Uh, queen sales, excellent, best yet, probably up like 30%. On last year, and nuke sales again up up very very high. So overall, like great great success. Sorry again, I've offended I've offended other people, but no, it's been it's been a really really good year. What what I I I have definitely get seasonal affective disorder. Remember what it's called this time? And I do like as I love the long days. And I love being out. I'm not one for getting up early, but I'm not one for finishing early. Like, I'll be out in the garden or out in the apiary doing stuff until it's too dark to do it. And in the summer, that's like 11 o'clock at night. I love it. And in the winter, like, I, I do struggle with it getting dark at half 3 and just like, oh, just get really like a bit depressed with it. Not depressed because depression's a real thing, and sad is just me being a little bit mopey. But since the bee business has become quite big, I really look forward to the winter now. And I look for— I love going and getting the colonies ready for winter and getting the Apivar strips in and getting the honey out and getting the honey in buckets and just being like— and then not having the queens to send out and the phone won't ring as much and the emails won't come in. And, you know, I love all of that. I love speaking to people, but it is hard work. And I just— I like to get to the point and be like, Ah, right, we're done for another year. And then by October I'm ready for it again, and then I have to wait for like October, November, December, January, February, March, and it's like April, yes. So, but, but for that period in between, well, basically for September, I do enjoy, uh, the fact that it quietens down a little bit. But how would you sum up your season? It's been a very good season, very happy with it. I like questions like that. Hi Lawrence, planning to follow your advice and get my hives ready for winter next weekend, 17th, 18th August. Are you still doing the same this year as everything seems to be a few weeks behind? So yes, definitely still doing the same. And it's, it's really important to not be guided by the seasons like that and, and the change in the weather. And I know 99% of the time I would say it's really important to be guided by the weather and guided by the seasons and don't look at the calendar but look at what's going on outside the window. But not when it comes to varroa. Varroa seem to just do what they want to do, irregardless of temperature, irregardless of the weather, irregardless of the length of the day. You get to that point in the year and there's just something that if you don't do it now, a few weeks later and it just becomes too late, and you have this massive knock-on effect next year. So I could say quite confidently now if you extract your honey on the 17th of August, your bees will do well going through. But if you delayed that until, let's say, the 15th of September, so if you went on for another month, there's no way you'd get more than a super, an additional one super worth of honey. No way. And more likely, maybe half a super, and probably nothing, because you've got so many bees in the colony. Like, you always think they've got to create a surplus, It needs to be more than they need to kind of sustain themselves and the bees and the brood in the colony, and there's loads of brood still at this point in the year. So unless they're getting a surplus, the honey's going down. So you might, you might delay it and you've got less honey than you've got now. And with the weather at the moment, like the hives, you've got good crops on at the moment. So I just think it's wise to get in there, cut the season ever so slightly short, take your crop, get your treatments in, get your bees ready for next year. And I'd love to see the impact that it's going to have because it's, it's, you know, it's not only me saying to do this, everyone's saying this now. Cut the season short, don't, don't put varroa treatments in in October, go, go middle of August. And I think I'd love to see like some stats on the healthiness of bees as a result of people doing that because I do, I do think people, you will notice it next year how good and strong and healthy your bees are having cut the season short and treated them early. Cub Rider says, if a hive dies out leaving drone brood in some brood frames, how can I reuse the drawn frames in nucs, etc., or should I destroy the lot? Drone layer with no disease. So I, I just melt them down, melt them down and start again. There's no, there's no point faffing around with it, especially if there's old like dying brood in there as well, because you're just giving the bees a lot of work. And if it's dark, if it's dark comb, just stick it on the dark comb pile and And start again. Uh, is it— Zora says, hi Lawrence, how do you prevent wax moth in your stored frames please? So we have it quite easy in North Wales because we get a regular chill, so it doesn't go like crazy cold, but we'll always have a good couple of weeks below freezing. So the way that I do it is I store all of my supers wet. I'll take an upturned roof and stack up all of my supers and then a proper roof on the top Ratchet strap everything together, plastic all the way around the edge. So I'm kind of saying wax moth can't get in, very, very difficult for wax moth to get in there. What you might have in there is some, some, some larvae or some eggs already in there and they start to develop, but because I leave them stacked outside under, under shelter but outside, they're kind of able to be chilled. So as soon as you get that Good week of freezing weather kills everything, and everything's dead. Now I appreciate not everyone—you probably wouldn't even get that in southern England—the almost guarantee of even like 24 hours or 48 hours of good sub-minus or minus temperatures. And in Europe, you're definitely not going to get that. So in Europe, they need other treatments, and it is a shame. They used to have like Certan B O B four oh one. I think it was. Was a good treatment. It was a bacterium that you sprayed on your frames, and then when the wax moth larva turned into eggs, I think the bacteria ate the eggs, or they did something like— I don't know the science behind it, but it was really, really effective. And then there wasn't— it didn't get recertified. And then I think very briefly they brought out B402, which was like the reformulated formulation of it, but then it, it didn't go any further than that. Or maybe B402 never got licensed, but it was supposed to be brought out. But there was, there was an unlicensed treatment that people used for it, and I think a lot of people got caught out with that by the BMD, so they stopped, stopped using it. Whether anyone still uses that, I don't know, but there is, there is treatments that are available for other stuff that you can use for that. that, but I won't— I'm not going to say their names on here because I get in trouble saying them. But we don't use it, definitely don't use it, because if you've got caught using it, you are in lots and lots of trouble. Hi Lawrence, any tips on producing cut comb? Would you try and extract any uncapped cut comb frames? Um, so tips on cut comb, I'm not the best, I'm not the best with cut comb, I have to say. I've tried it a few times and it's worked well. It's It's not the, the production of the cup comb that I find particularly difficult. Like, the tips for, for cup comb, I'll say at the end. What I find difficult is the fact that the shelf life of cup comb is quite a bit more challenging than just honey in the jar. And then it's not— it doesn't sell anywhere near as quick. So if you're, if you're doing like chunk honey, it crystallizes straight away. If you're producing cup comb, I didn't like the, the plastic containers that it went in. So it's like, it was more the sales side of it that I didn't get on with, and the education to the general public as to why it's good and all that kind of stuff. But I did find, like, when I did it, Manley combs I found were the best to get the right size chunks. So the good big chunky Manley frames, thin foundation in the middle, and then you just— you're almost like replicating forced swarm conditions to get them going onto a just massively condensing colonies down. That's why I find on— for a lot of people do it on the heather, and I think it works well on the heather because if you've got colonies where, say you've got a colony with 4 supers on, and then you take the 4 supers of honey off, and then you put like a super or 2 supers of cut comb frames on there, and the bees are just like, oh, we've got nowhere to move. And then you take them to the heather and you get a flow. Like, that's just like the perfect conditions for cut comb, which is massively overfill the boxes full of bees, and they do really well on it if you get a nice flow, but you do need a strong flow to get them to do it well. But the nice thing with cut comb is that it doesn't need to be perfect, you don't need perfect frames, it's not like section comb, you just cut the good bits out and then press all the rest of it out, which you would do for heather anyway. So you're following it. Would you try and extract any uncapped cut comb frames So no, I would just kind of stick them, stick them in the press at the end. I wouldn't, I definitely wouldn't try and extract it. It'd be nearly impossible, I think, to balance the extractor once you've— Okay, so you're saying extract the uncapped cut combs? Yeah, you could do that if you just had whole frames and you had other, other frames that you could extract alongside it. You could just extract them out, that should be fine. You might get a few blowouts if it's fresh wax, but it would work. I think Tyrell's Honey says, "Hi Lawrence. Last time you mentioned that you never cross-contaminate as you only go to one apri one day, therefore no need to change a suit, etc. How do you do this if you have multiple sites, i.e., seven?" So for me, I do have multiple sites, but I don't go to each one each day. So if you're going to multiple sites, then I would just do do the very best that you can. If you've got multiple suits, probably a good idea. But then really, like, you're not gonna— I don't know, do bee inspectors change suits at everyone they go? I think the bee inspectors do change suits, don't they? But then I would just think about what's— where are you going to spread that disease? And having dedicated smokers and dedicated hive tools for each site is a no-brainer because they're not expensive, and you could just have like one smoker for each site And a number of hive tools in a bucket of soda for each site, and then obviously like replenishing that soda as and when you need things like wellies. That's probably where you're gonna you'll get caught out dropping a bit of honey on a wellie or something. So you could just I keep a spray that you know the antibacterial spray that they use in the MBU. I spray my wellies. I spray my wellies basically before I go to the apron spray my wellies as I come home as well, and it's just like just spray them. All over and just let them dry. Don't wipe them or anything like that, just give them like a spray all over. And I guess the only other one is your suit then. Is your suit going to kind of carry contamination from one site to the other? And are you going to have 7 suits? You're probably not going to have 7 suits, I wouldn't have thought. So I would say that's a risk-based approach, and you think, I'm not going to change my suit unless it's soiled unless I've got honey or something on it, then I don't think that's going to spread or contaminate the other sites. And then obviously like gloves, you're keeping like gloves and stuff. So I think if you're doing hive tools, smokers, gloves, cleaning your wellies, and then limiting all of those to each of the different apiary sites, and then changing your bee suit if it's soiled, that should be pretty good to not spread disease. I would say that is more than Adequate. Hopefully that's okay. Marcus Walker by Honeybee says, do you have Glyn's details for the honey signs? Glyn, if you want to put your details on in the WhatsApp message, I will flash back to it for anyone who wants to buy one of Glyn's honey signs. Talking of WhatsApp, let's go, let's go back to WhatsApp and see if anyone has sent anything over. Oh, we do. Right, we've got more, more queens. Here we go. So that's a picture of an emerged cell. Very nice, I like it. And that is Black Mountain Honey Queen. Wow, she is a beauty with a retinue of attendants. I love that. I love it when you get like the perfect circle. This one here is wrecking it a little bit, but that is a very nice circle of attendants there. Beautiful queen. Um, I've got a few videos here. Oh, here we go. Look, let's, let's watch some videos. Oh nice, someone's got calm bees. We like that. Look, I like doing this, doing the taps. Beautiful. And, and you've almost got the French flag in there as well, I think. Is that the French flag? You've got the blue, the red, the white. Very patriotic. Let's have a look. Oh, nice. I love looking at boxes like that when they're just like bracing it up and you think, oh yeah, there's going to be some serious honey in there. Very nice. Uh, let's have a look at this one. Oh, I like it. I do. I do enjoy taking a break and watching watching the video, so feel free to send stuff through. My two nukes accepted rattle can paint. Ignore the color scheme. Oh, I like that. It's cool, isn't it? I like the lines. I think you sent me this in a WhatsApp, didn't you? In terms of orientation, it would be good. I think they would like stuff like that, like big. Bold stripes in, in 2 different directions. It's a good idea. I like how your apiary is ever expanding. It's cool. Nice WBC hive as well. Very nice. Right, let's go back to a question. I think we're getting close to the bottom there. Robert Thomas says, do you wash your jars when bottling, or do you trust that they are clean from the supplier? So we buy pre-sterilized. That's what the health inspector said to do. We had our re-inspection, um, about 2 weeks ago, and we got, we got 5 stars, which is very good. Uh, Robert also says, have got about 68 jars of 340 grams, which is 3 supers so far. Very nice. Oh, so he also said, my queen signed up today, done my last splits for the year. It looks like I will end up with 20 hives this season. Excellent, that's good expansion. Uh, Zora says, is it worth having top and side insulations when having open mesh base? So only the top is the important one. So top insulation, don't insulate the sides, because if you insulate the sides, then the water will potentially condense above the cluster. But if you just insulate the top, don't insulate the sides, then the warmest part is the top, which means that it will condense on the side walls and then track out of the hive without touching the cluster, which is very important. Super on top Of below super on top or below existing supers when adding new foundation super? I don't think, I don't think it matters. Honestly, don't think it matters. I generally stick them on top. Steve's Honeybee says, have you found it difficult doing your live in the apiary videos, filming and inspections at the same time? I hope to try to do one at the weekend. Uh, yeah, really difficult. The biggest one is reception. And I think people expect seamless, so we pre-record them now. I've not done one for a while actually. I should probably get one done. I've just been too busy doing stuff. Uh, but yeah, it's good fun. Some, some people not able to do and talk at the same time, and I probably include myself in that category. So you see me there just like doing stuff and not talking, but it's, it's good fun. I will look forward to seeing yours. Penjo says, I have 2 hives that I got last year. They both swarmed in the spring when the weather was so bad. Neither are doing well with only 3 frames of brood. Do I need to requeen or varroa? It's difficult to, to judge really without seeing it in the flesh, but 3 frames of brood doesn't sound good. I think it's likely, likely requeen is probably what you need to do. Sounds like poorly mated queens not expanding, or the queens might be fine but they could have just swarmed themselves down to nothing, so you just got kind of hardly any bees left but with a decent queen. So in that instance, you might want to add some brood in from another colony, but if you've only got a couple, then it's going to be difficult to do that. Can you tell us all how your name is spelled? Yes, it's L-A-U-R-E-N-C-E. Greetings from the Caribbean. Greetings to you too. Laurence, thank you for doing the live streams for us, very informative. Keep doing a great job. Thank you, Jean. I'm going to take a sip of tea, not coffee. Oh, there we go. JK Photography says, hi Lawrence. Hi JK. Dominican Beekeeper says, do you take part in the National Honey Show? So no, I've not been to the National Honey Show. It's quite far away from me, so we— I've not been down to that one. Paul M says, any recommendations for a robbing screen? Um, this year I've not seen any robbing yet, not, not a single jot. Uh, but in terms of recommendation, I'm quite happy with the underfloor entrances, and I think if you keep big strong colonies, they can protect themselves from robbing. So that's always the, the first line of defense, is make sure the colonies are nice and big and strong. But in terms of recommendations, like, I've never used robbing screens because I've never really needed them, so I wouldn't want to recommend something that I've I've I've not used, but yeah, sorry about that. The cop out. Bee Disaster says hello everyone. Robert Thomas is correcting me on Appyguard is two trays per hive, one after the other, one tray per nuc. Thank you for that. Glyn Burnett says what about Appy Life Var as a treatment? So I I can't comment on its effectiveness because I've never used it, but I've read the list of ingredients, which is just like some. a blend of essential oils, and I'm not a fan of essential oils for varroa treatment because I just don't think they work very well. So it's not, it's not something that I've used, so I can't give you a definitive answer on that one, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't fancy it. For ants, use car grease at the base of your hive. Excellent, thanks for that. Oh Mick, I've been trying for ages to get out from Laurence. Sorry. It was, it was serious aggro when I was selling them. Uh, Steve's Honeybee says, do you undersuper for brood boxes? Do you undersuper your brood boxes for winter? So in terms of like a nadir, taking the super underneath? No, I don't. I, I don't think a super has any place being anywhere near a beehive over winter. Get the honey out, store the boxes. Uh, Sunny Bill says, do you sell queens to Ireland? I'm afraid it's UK only. Simon G says, Bacillus thuringiensis. I can't even say the Latin words for things. You can, you can all read it there. I had a go, but it is, it is half 10 and I've been talking for 2 hours, which reminds me, if you, if you haven't already, like, hit the like button. I would appreciate a like. UK Honey Marketing Board says good evening all. Good evening, UK Honey Marketing Board. What happens when you know how? Says, hi Lawrence, I purchased some bees that were hard up for nutrition. Would the intro to pollen patties make the overfeed— oh, mouthful that one, sorry. How do you know they were hard up for nutrition? I wouldn't be feeding any pollen sub or pollen patties at this point in the year because there's so much available pollen for the bees. I would just get them some sugar syrup if they need if they need carbohydrate, you should be good. Says, regards wax moth, as a kid I remember mothballs. Would they do anything if still available? They would, but they would massively taint your wax as well. Horrible things. So I wouldn't— yeah, I wouldn't use them. Next one down, don't use— don't use mothballs, toxic. Yeah, don't want to use mothballs. And Cub Rider says, thanks. There we go, close that one out. Um, says, do you think the— oh, Close that one. Do you think the Abello jars will be pre-sterilized? So no, you'll know they'll be pre-sterilized because they'll have lids on and then you can use them. Hi Lawrence, what do you do about pollen in super frames? Extract and let the bees clean it out or something else? So covered that one at the beginning, so extract it if you can because it unbalances the extractor, and then let the bees clean the supers out and then store them dry, and then you'll get pollen mites in there and then it will just tap out later on in the year— uh, sorry, in the spring. Honey Oak Farm Firewood says, any problem with wasps in hives? It has been by far and away the easiest year for wasps in the world. There's no wasps, like there is very few wasps. It's been brilliant. They would be causing havoc at this point and like gnawing in the side of the feeders, and there's just like hardly any of them. It's great. Hi Lawrence, I'd appreciate your thoughts on leaving a super of honey for the bees over winter, no queen excluder, and an Oxalic acid dribble, please. I'm not a fan of leaving supers of honey for the bees over winter. I'll tell you why. I'm gonna have a sip of tea first. For bees, the difference between honey and like feed is negligible, it really is. I know some people say, oh, it's loads better for them, honey. In some instances, honey can be actually a lot worse for bees than than like a really simple refined sugar. So you're kind of enforcing dysentery on them in some instances. In most instances, you should be fine, but generally there's no difference to them between the honey and the sugar. So don't believe what people say that it's better for the bees. It's not, it's just the same. But the problem that you have is that it wrecks your supers, it wrecks all of your super frames, because you end up— all that you end up with every year is loads of brood in your supers, which means that the wax moth are going to go for them, means that you need to bring them into like a 3-year exchange, it's going to cost you loads of money. Whereas if you just keep your supers just for honey and they never lay any eggs in them, you never end up with the cocoons, which means that they just last kind of forever. You don't really ever need to change out your super frames, you can just keep on extracting them again and again and again and again. There's no weird manipulations that you need to do like changing things over, super super above it or below. I just— there's no place that the super should be on the hive over winter for me. Plenty of space for the bees in the national brood. I would remove it, extract the honey, feed the bees, and they will do very well. Hit the like button before you leave, please. Thanks, John. Anyone who's not a channel member, I can highly recommend it and extremely worth it, and many more videos Watch and numerous extra benefits. Sign up, guys. I love that. That wasn't—it wasn't a plug, but thank you. I appreciate that, Marcus. There is—I think there's twenty at the moment. There's forty-odd videos on there. So if you signed up today, you'll be able to watch forty videos that aren't on in the public domain, and I think about thirty of them will never will never be in the public domain. They are channel member exclusive videos. Jean is off to bed. Good night, Lawrence. See you live next stream. Thanks for coming in, Jean. John says have a great Sunday. Ben Davis says what's the best way to sterilize jars effectively? So probably the easiest way is in the dishwasher. Um, that was— the food and hygiene people were quite happy when we used to do that, but it soon became quite tedious to, to kind of pre-clean the dishwasher and then to sterilize the jars effectively. But you could, you could pour boiling water into them as well and then upturn them and dry them out in the oven. That was the other way of doing it. So there's a few, there's a few different ways of doing it. If you, if you Google how to sterilize jars, you'll come up with a few solutions, I suggest. I would expect— saying the wrong words tonight. Michael Gill enjoyed the stream. Thank you, Michael. Uh, G, is it the 4th time? Gene, I am drinking the English Tea Shop Organic Calm Me. I'll put it up there, you better see it if it focuses. It's not going to focus, is it? No, there we go, didn't focus, but it's a very nice tea, got a bit cinnamon in it. And I think— am I out of focus now? I think I am. There we go, back in focus. Oh, right. When do you start 2:1 syrup? So not until back end, mid to back end of September for me, because everything that you feed up until then, they're just gonna— it's gonna— for my bees anyway, they just turn it into brood. Uh, they don't start properly storing it until the, the days start really drawing in. So yeah, mid to end of September, I'd say. I left 1 hive out of 10 with a super on last winter, and that was the only one that died. They hadn't touched the honey. I— yeah, I maybe wouldn't connect the two, but it's— yeah, I still, I'm still not a massive fan of it. Would it be wrong to use the jars I got from Abella without sterilizing them? I would say if you're not going to sell the honey and it's like for personal use, I think, I think it'll be fine because some people just do like a visual inspection to check there's nothing in them. Like honey is so— it's like a super saturated sugar solution apparently, which means that for something to grow in it is highly, highly unlikely. So you can— if they're not sterile— honey's not sterile anyway. So I always wonder that, like why does the jar need to be sterile? Because the thing that I'm putting in it isn't sterile. It's definitely not sterile, but apparently that's what you need to do. But would it be wrong to use the jars? Yes, if you were selling it. If you're just having it yourself or friends and family, be fine. Wellesbourne Honey Company says only just seeing a few wasps here in Warwickshire. It's crazy, isn't it? There's just the odd one now. Happens when you know how. Says thanks for the queen. She's doing well. Follow Kiwi here in Scotland. Sorry for the mouth. Full. Sorry, I think it was me reading it wrong as well. Ahmed says, great stream. I read that as Ahmed Abbas, but I realized it was it was split there. Ahmed says, great stream, Lawrence. Very educational. Good night. Thanks, Ahmed. And John Mark Sylvester says, smash the likes and subscribe, people. So before I finish, let's go over to WhatsApp and embarrass myself because there's no one on it. Oh, I've actually switched it off. Excellent outro, brilliant outro. I'll keep it going. Oh, there are, there are a few on there. Here we go, let's finish on WhatsApp because WhatsApp's good fun. Um, before we finish up for the evening, Artisan Laser Studio, that's for, for Glyn. So if you want a nice laser engraved honey for sale sign, you can go to artisanlaserstudio@gmail.com. There we go. Feel free to advertise stuff on my live streams. I, I don't mind. It's fine. Uh, next one is— oh, nice brood frame there with some pollen interspersed. I like— what, what are these? What frames are they? They're homemade frames. Very interesting. I love to see something new like that. It's like a full-size homemade frame with no spacer. Is this from the pallet hive? Oh, you just sent it to see if you got it correct. That was me. Yeah. Um, Oh, that's a nice one. That was, that was the previous one you sent, wasn't it, John? And let's have a look at this one. John's swarm collection. Nice, very dark bees. I love John's selection of music on all of his videos. Are they doing well, John? You have to let me know. Very good. What a lovely way to finish. So there we go, another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I think we've finished. No more comments. It's half ten. We've been going for two hours and five minutes. Next week, obviously not doing a live stream next week. The following one will be the last live stream of the season, and that will be on kind of like twenty-fourth of August, something like that. I will confirm it closer to the time, and then we will move over to one, um, one per seat, uh, one per month. That's all we're going to do for next time. Uh, there's, there's a couple more. You can tell I'm tired. A couple more questions. The World's One Honey Company says, I need to get my new colonies up to snuff for winter. Would you feed now with 2:1 or 1:1? So I'd feed them with 1:1 until middle of September, then move over to 2:1. WhatsApp number For next time is 01352 372247. Save it. That is my business WhatsApp number. Happy to answer questions there, but I'll definitely bring them up on here as well. Keith Jenkins says good night. Good to hear from you, Keith. Ben Wong says thanks, Lawrence, as always. Shame you can't make it on Sunday. If anyone is going there on Sunday, come over and say hi, have a chat. I'll cook you a pizza, or Aaron will cook you a pizza while I kind of just stand around talking to people. That's— I think that's the plan, Aaron. But I hope you all enjoyed enjoyed the live stream. I am going to go and have some dinner, and then I'm going to go to bed, and then I'm going to make my way up to York tomorrow, and I'm going to talk to everyone about lots and lots of things to do with beekeeping. So I hope you enjoyed the stream. I'll see you all in 2 weeks' time.