Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 43

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. Now you might have noticed at the beginning there that I was focusing on doing something else, which I was, and I've still not managed to do it. So I don't know if you're anything like me trying to do 2 things at once. What I had planned to do there was very subtly hit the go live button on StreamYard, and then without anybody noticing, I was going over to Instagram to hit the go-live button on there because you have to do it separately for Instagram. And as soon as I hit the first one, my mind froze. I, I don't know if it's a man-woman thing, but I am, I am a man and I'm really, really bad at doing like 2 things simultaneously like that. So hopefully that's worked. Let me just double-check, make sure it has worked, because I want to make sure that we are live on all of the platforms. And I do believe we are. So we are live on YouTube, Twitch, yes Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Everyone still calls it Twitter, it's not X, is it? But we are live on all of those, so feel free to jump onto any of those different platforms to watch. It's just me talking about bees as normal. I do have the extra screen up, and prize to anyone who can guess what that is— there's no real prize— that's me. Not drawn by me, but my drawing's not that much better than this. That is me, that's my daughter youngest daughter, and these are apparently my legs. So I think— I'm not sure what's going on there, but that is a picture drawn by my daughter. So we'll probably rub that out now. Not strictly accurate or relevant for a beekeeping podcast. Someone made a very good point last week, which was, love the whiteboard, really like the whiteboard, but doesn't really work for a podcast because I'm just listening to it in the car and you're drawing stuff. So I'm going to try my best today to visualize speak the whiteboard as best as I possibly can as well, which I kind of guess means that I don't need the whiteboard. But I like the whiteboard, I really do like the whiteboard. Right, let's get on with it then. I think there's a few questions that have already come through. Stick your comments in there, I will make sure that every single comment does get answered. We might speed up a little bit towards the end. I have got a cup of— what have I got today? A Pukka Nighttime Blend, that is actually what it's called. And I've got some water as well. Proper old man. First up, I was going to do this on Sunday night and then realized that England are playing in the Euros, and that wouldn't be good, would it, doing a live stream when England are losing to Spain in the Euros? So predictions, get your predictions in. How about this for a fun game? I've got— I do have a couple of secret stash beekeeping hats, and if you want to have a little prediction— so what I'm going to need, this is going to be the prediction you're going to have to do first. Sorry for everyone who doesn't like football, but come on. is the Euros, so give me this one. First goal scorer, correct score, like a double. So put that in the comments, and if it comes true, I will give you a hat. Black Mountain Money— Black Mountain Honey hat. How about that? I'll have a guess as well, and I'll say Olmo to score first and 2-1 to Spain. But I'm a natural pessimist, so hopefully I'm proven wrong. But let's get on with it. Let's answer some questions then. I thought that would be quite fun. Uh, right, first comment is from Nils. He says, Hi Lawrence, I don't know if I can make it to your stream, but we'll rewatch later if I can't. I'm seriously thinking about starting beekeeping next year. Have you got any tips to get an apiary? So I love that. I think that's a really nice way to start because what I often say to people is don't keep bees in your back garden, and I reckon 80 or 90% of people watching this stream now are going to have bees in their back garden, but over the years of having bees in my back garden, talking to people who have bees in their back garden, when people move away and get themselves a nice secluded out apiary and keep all of their bees there, and reclaim your garden for non-beekeeping activities. I think it's quite nice. So my advice would be to you to start off not in your back garden, see if you can find somewhere else outside of that, and then just go out and speak to, speak to landowners, see if people are willing. You'll find that the majority of people are willing if they've got a bit of land, or you've got a farmer nearby, and you just say to them, can I have a little plot of land? Just, you know, it's only small. An apiary only needs to be like 5 meters by 4 meters or something tiny. It can be a little scrubby piece of land in the corner as long as it's got good access. That's my prerequisite now. Then it's pretty easy to get an apiary. I was at one of my apiaries today doing some videos in the rain. We'll talk about the weather, but the, the farmer came by and he's great. He's so good, the farmer. So I was going to build a little bridge through to it and I was, I was telling him it might be, might be a bit difficult me building a bridge because it's, it's probably about a 3-meter span And I'm struggling to get sleepers that are going to be long enough, and I think the sleepers might shift. And he said, oh no, that's fine, we can— he said, I need to, I need to clear out that gully, so I'm gonna have to get the digger in there. So what I'll do is I'll just clear it all out, I'll stick loads of soil into the gully for you, I'll stick a couple of pipes through, we'll make like a culvert, and then we'll just pack it down with, with gravel, and then you can just walk straight over. And I'll cut the, I'll cut the fence for you here, put a couple of posts in, cut the fence, and I've got a gate that you can put on. You just tie the gate on. I was like, yeah, sounds good, thanks very much. That sounds absolutely brilliant. So that is the plan for the winter. I'm very excited about that. But farmers are great, so just find a nice, a nice local farmer, preferably doing something— they've got a lot of wildflower schemes going on at the moment, and they're apparently in England, they're making some serious cash from it as well. So they like their green credentials, especially if they're getting paid for it, but they would like to have some bees taking advantage of all of the wildflower crops that are going on there. Okay, there we go. Caldespar says, good job I checked, I didn't see anything on your Facebook page. So yeah, I forgot to put out the notices, sorry about that, but I am here. You can, you can set your watch to me every other week at half past 8-ish, kind of. Sometimes it's 8, sometimes it's half past 8, so maybe don't set your clocks to it because it's not, it's not that guaranteed, but it is guaranteed to be every other week, and we've done that now for maybe like 4 months, I'd say. a notice as well, an intended notice of reduction of streaming frequency. So in, in the off-season, I'm not going to do this every other week because I don't think people are going to have as many questions. So in the off-season, I will do it once a month. Hopefully, hopefully that's okay. Hi Lawrence, I hope you're well. I have missed that bit, I've jumped to the bottom. Sorry, it wasn't— that wasn't just it, there was more. Let me go back up. He says, I have had your queen for about 3 weeks now, but the bees seem like they haven't calmed down noticeably. They still try and sting me often when inspecting, uh, stung my dad the other day after the inspection. Can you suggest any ways I can make them calmer? I've tried washing my bee suit and gloves, but that has not seemed to work. So when you, when you kill your queen, if you've got an angry colony and you kill the queen and you put a new queen in, if you assume that queen starts laying the second that she comes out of the cage, you are not going to have a single daughter of that queen emerge for at least 3 weeks. And, and, and in real life, you're probably talking a week, week and a half before she starts laying. So you're talking 4 weeks from her coming out of the cage to there being one of her daughters in the colony. So in the first 4 weeks, you're not going to see any difference whatsoever. It's going to be 0% difference. After that, you're going to start seeing incredibly gradual difference because you're gonna have the first bee emerge, and then the first 10 bees emerge, and then the first 100 bees out of 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 bees. So I say to people, you're not going to see any difference within the first month. You're going to see very, very little difference within the first 3 months. When you will notice a huge difference is the middle of April next year, because at the middle of April next year, every single bee that is in that colony is the daughter of the queen, and that's the only time that you can really start to judge it. So in the meantime, I would just say don't do that many inspections. That's probably how I would deal with a colony like that. It's getting on now, we're weeks past the solstice. If you're giving your bees sufficient space, unlikely that they're going to swarm. There is still a— I'm seeing swarm preps in some of my colonies at the moment. The swarming season definitely seems to be pushed out to the right this year. So normally at this time I'd say very, very unlikely to get a swarm, but personally you do need to still go in and do the inspections, and I am inspecting. but if it's causing you real issues, maybe you could just give them an extra brood box, make sure there's tons of space in there, give them an extra super, and just leave them, leave them be. Take your honey crop off when you need to take the crop off, and then see what they're like next year. And they will— you'll be amazed, the difference will be huge. But it's not that quick, unfortunately. Everyone please hit the like button. Excellent, thanks Steve, did my job for me there. Joshua, Says, evening, Lawrence, I hope you're well. I caught my first swarm on Thursday, appeared on my daughter's school grounds. They were in the poly nuc box, all I had, and they've started building in the feeder. Excellent. He says, I presume the queen managed to get into the feeder section before I got the lid on. I've removed the queen excluder. I presume all I can do now is wait for them to draw out the foundation and for the queen— is there more? Yeah— to move out before I replace the excluder and remove all the wild comb. Yeah, so that is annoying. That's a bit frustrating that she's gone straight in there and drawn comb in there. That is a little bit weird why they would do that. I know swarms do get a little bit— they're a bit weird and they go clustering up in places that they shouldn't. With the Payne's Polynuc though, there is, like you say, there is the queen excluder bit in there. So in future, put the queen excluder on. What you don't have though, there's kind of like a— it's not a crucial piece of that box, but it is a component that would have made this slightly easier for you. There's a polyboard that goes on. So when you put the polyboard on, the queen can't get through if the queen excluder is there. So it's to stop her going into the syrup. Um, but yeah, she— as long as the queen is still in there and they're drawing comb out, they will eventually get around to drawing out foundation and then do exactly what you said. Um, I'm just seeing people putting through all of their score predictions now. This is good. I'm excited to see what people's score predictions are and whether you're all as pessimistic as I am. Joshua also said hive inspections have been delayed due to lots of bad weather locally, so probably the time to talk about the shocking weather. I get genuinely— I don't want to say depressed because it's not, it's not depression, is it? But I get moody and a bit sad with the weather. Like, I went to go and film today, it's 15 degrees, and the bees are just like, yeah, miserable. And you get the niggly little viral diseases, you get a little bit of chalk brood, you get a little bit of sac brood, you get bees that are just not doing anything. You get bees that are— they're not even angry, they're just like, whatever, what's the point? Like, the bees are depressed. The bees are genuinely depressed. And you get used to a level of buildup, and you get used to the bees doing a certain thing in kind of like 2 weeks or 4 weeks or 6 weeks, and you think, well, they would have filled that box and they'll have another box on. And you're just going into colonies and just like, you've done nothing in 3 weeks. You have sat around and done nothing. And I can't exactly blame them. But it's it's just drizzle, constant constant drizzle. So I'll try I'll try not to moan too much about the weather. I know as a collective beekeepers will be very miserable about the weather. So let's keep let's keep it positive. Yeah. Denby Honey says, "Hi Lawrence, looking forward to this. I've gone from two hives to nine hives this year. My next project is to learn how to manage my hive numbers. How many supers would I need for ten hives?" So the number that I always go on is is get that right four. Where's the four? There we go four. It is like minimum really that I would say that you need, and 4 is a minimum if you're going to do a spring and a summer extraction. Totally unrealistic for the UK to expect to get a spring and a summer crop. Okay, I'll start— I'll stop with the negativeness now. Negativity. But 4— I can't get that right— 4 gives you the ability to take a decent spring crop. If you're getting more than 4 supers for a spring crop, you're doing really, really well. And then take them off, extract them, and put them back on, and hopefully get 4 supers of honey for your summer crop. That's— it's quite ambitious, but in the best colonies, that is, that is more than achievable in a good year. If you're just going to keep all of the honey on, I would say you're looking at 6 supers per colony. And I've had loads of— I've had so many people message me this year, it's really nice, saying either they bought a nuc or they bought a queen early on in the year and This is my colony now, and it's been a rubbish year, but many people have messaged saying they're on double brood, they're on 6 or 7 supers full. And I'm, I've got a situation here because I've not got enough, anywhere near enough supers. So I'm having to do like my main crop extraction at the end of June and then put them back on and like to get more honey. So it depends on what your strategy is, but I'd say for spring and, spring and summer extraction, go for 4. If you're just doing one extraction, go for 6. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't go for any less than that. Good evening to you and your family, Lawrence. I bought 2 of your F1 Buckfast queens from you a few minutes ago as I've just had to put down my old queens today. Oh, thanks for the order, John, um, and sorry to hear that you've had to put your queens down. It is a bit depressing killing queens, a bit. It's a bit sad, but it is a necessary evil. It really is, because if they're angry, then you potentially, you're potentially saving someone's life from, you know, being stung. I know that sounds A bit, maybe a bit far-fetched, but it, but it is. You're increasing the enjoyment. But if you're— if your colony is failing, if there's a drone-laying queen in there, or they're any, any other way that the queen is failing, it's for the good of the colony. Kill the queen, get a new queen in, and it fixes it pretty quickly. Hello, bees have no stores and nothing coming in due to rain. Feeding 1:1, but more than 2 liters goes off quick, so feeding every 2 to 3 days. Can I switch to invert to save me having to feed the hive so often? So yeah, you could go to invert, but you can feed— the rule that I use is that you can feed invert whenever you want. Early in the year, middle of the year, back end of the year, the bees will process invert really, really well whenever you want. Although all they'll do with it, it kind of at this point in the year, is like water it down and just eat it. But you're getting more bang for your buck in terms of like the calorific content that's going in there because there's more sugar. Because of the higher density. The only real rule is that towards the end of the season, when you're feeding up for winter, don't use thin, light 1:1 syrup because it gives the bees too much work to do too late on in the year, increases the moisture levels in the hive, and can cause issues with like dampness and condensation. So that's the only rule really with syrup. Don't feed 1:1 syrup late in the year. Everything else is fine. John Sylvester with his queen said they were, they were not so calm buckfast though, quite flighty. How long do I wait to bring introduction again? Um, so in terms of queen introduction, you kill the queen, wait 8 days, knock down the emergency cells, put the queen in after you've knocked the emergency cells down, wait 24 hours, pop the tabs, both tabs, um, and, and then give it a week and the queen should be out of the cage. Sorry about your queens, John. He says, hi Lawrence, really enjoying the member Members only live apri videos, by the way. The unedited content is actually just as helpful and enjoyable as all the others. Thank you very much, John. I enjoy. I enjoy doing that. I've got. I've got one that I am just slightly editing at the moment—an exclusive members one. It's. I enjoy doing them. I just. I don't want people to get bored of me doing the same thing. So it's inspections are very iterative, and it's just the same beehives, the same me talking. So I do run out of things to talk about. So I'm trying to keep them. a little bit more interesting. I spoke to a guy who comes and gets queens, I won't say his name, and he doesn't live that far away from me, and I said, should we do it in your apiary? I mean, I think that format would work loads better in somebody else's apiary where I'm not like doing the bee inspections but someone else is doing the inspection, then we can just like chat about their bees. Maybe they're angry, maybe they're brilliant, maybe they're local AMM and they're doing everything that they should be doing and they're really good, maybe they're producing the most honey or the most extraordinary honey ever. Maybe they've got disease, maybe they've got varroa issues, maybe there's something else going on there. I think that'd be really cool, and not in a, like, a forensic, oh, let's look at your bees way, but just in a, let's, let's kind of look around someone else's apiary and do an inspection there. And I think that would throw me a lot, like, there'd be a lot more curveballs and, and things that I wasn't, like, ready for. Put me on the spot a bit more, which would be cool. I'd be up for that. I just can't travel miles and miles, so this guy's perfect because he's only I don't know, 15 miles away, something like that. So if you're within, I don't know, 30 miles of me and you're up for that, I'm definitely up for that. So let's do it. Um, John says, oh, and what's the difference with the Queen's delivery and 48 hours choice? Thanks. So that's, that's the delivery service on the website. You do not understand the amount of difficulty that I have with the delivery service on the website and putting the options on. Basically, the difference is there is no difference. We— whatever option you send, we will send them. using the quickest, most expensive service that we can actually buy. But whenever I put that on there, people say, oh, that's so— that's a special guaranteed by 1 PM, so if it doesn't get there by 1 PM, I want my money back. And I say, uh-uh, I don't think so, because we've paid for that service and Royal Mail make it like impossible for us to claim the money back. So the wording now is called the Queen's Delivery Service or the 48-hour one. And the reason I had to change it to 48 hours, it used to be called free 48-hour delivery. And people say, well, it's not free, is it? Because it's £9.50. And it's like, yeah, but it's supposed to be free for honey. And I just, I basically tie myself up in knots whichever way I go with the naming of the delivery services. So short answer, John, it doesn't make a difference. It costs £9.50 and we'll send them as quick as we possibly can. How you doing, Aidan? Um, Daniel, hello. John Begri, Mr., Mr. John Begri. Adam Goodall. Loads of people. Soren Jensen, hello. James Camplin. Is everyone saying hi? This is great. Marcus at Walkerby Honey. David Pescott, hello. Danny Bees, channel member. And there we go, someone's actually answered a question as opposed to saying hello. I really enjoyed all of the hellos there, so hello everyone. If you've got a shout out, put your name on. Uh, Gary Wheeler says, evening Lawrence, love your new logo branding iron. Was it made locally to you? So it was actually, it was made by a guy in Liverpool. I reached out when I started the Black Mountain Honey channel. I used to pester companies big time, properly pester them and way too much. Like I was probably, you know, I had like 200 subscribers and I said, will you send me a free so-and-so? And they all came back and said, no, no chance. Who do you think you are? And looking back, I was like, okay, no, that's probably right. So I stopped doing that because it was quite embarrassing, like asking for stuff and just, you might, 98% of the time you wouldn't get a reply and then 2% of the time you'd get a reply saying no chance. So I stopped doing it because it was really embarrassing and looking back on it, you think, yeah, that was really cringe. What was I doing? But I like to collaborate with other companies and I think collaborations are like really good. So with this branding iron, I don't want a freebie. I'll pay for the branding iron. But I said to the company, I chose a relatively local company. This is based in Liverpool. And I sent them a message saying, "Do you want to do like a collaboration on my branding iron?" So here's here's the deal. Here's what I'm offering you. I'll pay for it fully fully pay for it, and just all you have to do is just as you're making it because you've got to make it anyway. As you're making it, just like film a couple of bits, film a couple of bits, send them to me, and I'll integrate it into my video, and then we'll do like collaboration on YouTube or something like that. And I, I thought that was a— I thought that was a pretty good and a pretty fair deal. So they're the kind of things that I'll go for now. And I just didn't get back, didn't get back at all. Wasn't interested apparently. But I just— I thought that was a fair deal. And I thought that— let me know if what I was asking for there was unreasonable. I didn't think it was because I thought, well, I'm paying for it and then like he's going to get some visibility and some people are going to probably want to buy branding irons. But I get, I get something out of it because I get like a, like a little slightly cooler bit of personalization in the video because I thought the way that he made it would be cool. And you can see by the way he made it, it was— it would have been really cool, but just didn't get back to me. Uh, but he made it. But forget that, it was a cool branding iron and it's made really, really well. I did a full video of it today branding up some wood, which went well, and branding up some poly with mixed results. It works on the poly, but if you, if you do it really lightly, that's the way that I'm going to do it on the poly. Just, you get like a faint, uh, branding in the poly. It looks nice but very subtle. If you go in too hard, it just mushes everything and you just wreck it. So I have to paint, I'll have to paint back over the ones that I mushed. But if you go, there's a, there's a, you can basically get it on the painted poly where you put the brand on for the perfect amount of time and then take it off. And then if you peel the brand away, so like on the logo bit there, it's just perfect. And you, you get this effect that is fully painted and then you get like the white poly underneath, like really crisp. But you'll see on the video, it wasn't very easy to do. But on wood, it's brilliant. And you can buy them for, uh, you can buy them just any size you want. You could do frames on them as well. They're really good for frames, good for theft prevention, I think, as well. I do have another branding iron, like a completely different style of branding iron, which isn't anywhere near as personalized. I guess, I guess I could actually get it personalized for that, but it's with a— it's basically like a big— oh, I should go and get it really, but I can't, I can't leave the stream unattended. It's cool. It's a big structure that you slot numbers in, so you slot the numbers in on it, and then instead of heating it up, it comes connected, you you can connect it to your gas tank and then you fire it at the same time. So it is like, it's mega. Uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't use that one on poly, but on wood it would be really, really good. On wood, I should have got the electric one, but I never thought about that, the fact that I can get like individual bits engraved to go in. I'm going to do that. So incoming another video, I think, for that one. Oh, Vera Giles says, evening, Lawrence, is it worth saving a colony with laying workers? So I've had a couple of colonies turn laying worker this year, and I was dealing with one today And they are annoying me so much. Like, laying workers is probably the most annoying part of beekeeping. I would say it beats chasing virgins. I'm gonna use my screen. There we go, get the screen out. The way that you know you definitely got laying workers is, say that's like the cell. Excuse the drawing. So normally you'd get like an egg laid there like that, single egg. Now if you're going into your colonies and you're seeing like egg, egg, egg, egg, egg, egg, like that. You're thinking, well, there's like 7 or 8 eggs in the bottom of the cell. That's not laying worker. So a lot of people confuse that with laying worker. That, that probably is just going to be either a misfiring queen, or it could be, it could be like a drone laying queen as well. When you get laying worker, they're up here. You get like clusters of them on the wall because— wait for it— this is, this is, that is that, believe it or not, that is the abdomen of A worker. They can't get their bums down long enough to the bottom to lay eggs down there, so they're laying them on the wall. So that's the dead giveaway for laying workers. Like I said, my daughter does do better drawings than me, so I'll rub this out as I'm talking. But laying workers are really, really difficult to get rid of. So what some people say, if you read the books, what they say is you can add add a frame of brood in, like one frame of brood every single week for 8 weeks, and you can kind of gently wean yourself off the laying workers. And I'm guessing what's happening is that the laying workers are dying, but then because you've got new fresh young larva in there, you're not getting any new laying workers that are being created. And there's no way that you can go in and say, well, you're the laying worker. You're never going to see them laying, so you can't go in and kill them. and there's likely quite a lot of them. I don't think this is just like one laying worker, there's going to be a few in there. So that's what, that's what some people say, and I say, well, that is that if you do one frame of brood a week for 8 weeks, it's 8 frames of brood. That is a huge amount of resources to try and save one colony that's not guaranteed. So all I ever do now with laying workers, I just shake them out. But you need to shake them, you can't shake them out directly where they are because the laying workers will come back. And here's the bit that there's slight conjecture on this, and I'm not 100% sure what happened. So what they say from then on is you're supposed to take the colony 20 or 30 meters away and shake them out 20 or 30 meters away, obviously remove the beehive from its original location, remove the stand, and by shaking out the bees that far away, the laying workers can't find their way back because they've never been outside the hive. And I think, well, That's not right. Sure, like, why have they not— why have they not ever been outside the hive? Surely they will have orientated, unless they're incredibly young bees that have never been out that are turning laying worker, and I don't think they are. I think they're older bees, so I think the laying workers will find their way back. So all you can really do is just— you could just kill them all, which is a bit harsh. I can never do that. I can just kill a colony of bees like that, but I will just shake them out, remove the hive stand completely, and just like cross my fingers that they don't all go back into one hive. Because I think as they go back into a queen-right hive, if any laying workers start saying, come on, I'm the queen, they just kill her. They'll just kill off all of the individual laying workers as they go into the hives. And I, I've— so I've done that. I did that last week or the week before, and I've gone back in and checked the colony and that So I shook them out and they've— most of them have gone back into one colony. And I went back in there today and there's laying workers in there. I'm just like, oh geez, that's really, really annoying. So what we're going to do now, I'm not 100% sure what I'm going to do now because it's taken over one colony and wrecked that colony. But that's never happened to me before, so I do, I do think that's an anomaly. I don't think that's going to happen to most people. I think if you've got like a big bank of 6 to 8 hives that they can all share the laying workers with, I think— I don't think you'll have much of an issue with that. But that was, yeah, frustrating one for me. But is it worth saving a colony with laying workers? It depends on the colony. If it's a relatively small colony and you've not had capped worker brood in there for ages and the bees are all pretty old, there's not much value in the bees that you've got there. They're all going to be dead within a few weeks anyway, so maybe the best thing is just to seal them up. It certainly saves any complications with all of your other colonies, but it's not, it's not nice to do that, is it? Hey Lawrence, I just noticed 2 of my hives have a lot of their brood frames converted to drone frames. Are those drone— are those frames doomed, or will they turn back to worker cells? Um, so they're not necessarily doomed. I have seen them rework drone back into worker, and, and they will do it if they're desperate. But if it's only, if it's only 2 frames, all I would say is just put them on either side of the brood box and then they'll probably just get used for stores. And then it doesn't really make a massive difference if they're using it for stores, probably get a slightly larger amount of honey in there than if it was worker-based. I don't think by a huge amount, but people do use drone comb in the supers, so it would probably work. But failing that, yeah, scrape them back down to the midrib. That will work. Scrape them back down and then they'll rework them, checkerboard them. It's probably the way forward. Oh, Cub Rider knows how to put a smile on my face. Sound and picture is great. Well, I have upgraded to 1080p. Someone who— it made me laugh, uh, just me going on about the resolution, people saying we don't care about the resolution. It's like, I care about the resolution. solution needs to look at least half decent. So I'm glad, I'm glad it's good, glad the mic's holding up. Hello from East Devon, looking forward to receiving our queen on Friday. Looking forward to sending it out as well. Oh, here we go, we've got the people coming through. That's, that's a very, um, general prediction there, Demby, honey. Spain, you've got, you've got to be more, more accurate than that. Um, Hi, Laurence. Right, How do I combine 3 colonies? Is it just as simple as putting the nuc The 3 nuc frames into 1 hive. So it can, it can be pretty simple. Are they— if they're all like failing colonies that you're looking to merge because maybe like the virgins haven't gone out and mated, just kill, kill all the virgins, make them all queenless. They don't even need to be hopelessly queenless to do this. Just make them queenless and then just put them all together. And the, you know, the rules, the rules say 2 colonies will fight, 3 colonies won't fight. I've merged 2 colonies loads and they don't fight. So it's not these rules— who writes all of these rules, these, these beekeeping rules that get passed down? But that, that is what it says. 2 colonies will fight, 3 colonies won't fight. But just make them all queenless and then put them all together and then stick in a new queen and it should be good. Oh, I like Marcus's, like, uh, prediction. First goal, Saka, England 2-0. I'd take that, that'd be great. Hi Lawrence, I have 3 nucs of Buckfast bees that I bought from a local beekeeper from my beekeeping association. I'm just wondering what is the best way to clean wooden hives? So if you're— if like without the bees in them, cleaning wooden hives is loads easier than cleaning poly. So cleaning wooden hives, super simple. Get yourself like a big trough. I'll tell you what's good, I'll tell you what I did this in the other day and it worked really, really well. wheelbarrow. So get a wheelbarrow and then get a couple of bits of wood and build yourself like a frame so you can put— and this can just be like— I've got my drawing and I can do my drawing, right? So imagine this is like the top of a wheelbarrow like that. Who, who on earth has a wheelbarrow like that? But anyway, just get 2 bits of wood and put it over like that. That's my— that's like my jig. And then you just get your brood box and put your brood box over like that. So the reason that you need something like that is that you want to get your hive tool, and it's better to do this in winter because the propolis doesn't smear anywhere near as much, but you can do it, you can do it in the summer as well. But do it on like cold days in the winter and the propolis goes incredibly brittle, and then you just get your hive tool out and you scrape the box from top to bottom, scrape off absolutely everything you can. If you've got a way of sharpening your hive tool first, or you can use a hive tool that's like Get it nice and sharp, sharp as you can get it. Not like for cutting knives, but get so it's got a nice edge. You don't really want to do it with a blunt hive tool, so a new hive tool would be good to do this. Scrape it all over from top to bottom and then get the blowtorch out. And I had loads of people saying to me, oh man, you blowtorch your boxes way too much. And you know what, I definitely don't, because if you're burning the wood So you're turning the wood from wood into ash. You're doing it too much. But if you're just getting them black, as black as they can be, then you're not really like burning any of the wood, and you are actually getting those additional benefits like the shou sugi ban of additional, um, like in terms of preservation of the wood. So just— and then once you've scraped it all down, you just get the blowtorch and just burn it. And, and my rule is always basically want to set it on fire without setting it on fire. fire. So setting it on fire, minus 1, and that's, that's about as much as I go. The MBU says you want to just add a mild shade of color. I just like to go a little bit more, but you could, as long as you're getting in and getting into all the crevices, you should keep it nice and clean. And then you just do that on every single piece of wooden equipment that you've got. I find burning boxes, like scorching boxes like that and scraping them down, really therapeutic. I think it's a nice activity to do, especially It— well, it's nice in the summer, but in the winter, on like a dry day in the winter, just sitting yourself down and scratching off all the stuff and burning, it's nice and it feels nice. Bleaching polyboxes is hell. I hate bleaching polyboxes. It is not a fun job at all. Um, I just— the other thing I didn't really mention about here is obviously you're putting it on the wheelbarrow, so you're not just scraping the rubbish onto the floor because then that creates its own issues as well. So just burn that or chuck it all on the fire at the end of the day, you should be good to go. Uh, Rob Firkin says, hi, any thoughts on queen excluder frame cages as a way to allow removal of queen excluder mats, giving free passes to supers and getting frames laid into? I have to read that one again, Rob. So any thoughts on queen excluder frame cages as a way to allow removal of Queen excluder mats. Oh, I guess you mean just like normal queen excluders giving free passage to supers and getting frames laid into. I, I guess so, but I don't, I don't have any issues with queen excluders at all. It's a lot— I get a lot of people say to me, oh, the bees won't, bees won't draw out the frames in the super, must be something wrong with the queen excluder. And it's, it's never— it's not the queen excluder, there's nothing wrong with the queen excluder, it's just not enough bees yet. And and they all come back after kind of four to six weeks, and they're like, yeah, I've got like three supers of honey now. It just it just takes time. It's like watching the kettle never boils when you watch it, and then you uh you leave it. Oh my god! Someone stole my prediction there, Demby Honey. You stole that was my prediction. You definitely don't win a hat from stealing my prediction. Almo to score first, then two one to Spain. Definitely a third go now. Good evening, Terry. Oh, I like James. Almo to first first goal England win on penalties. Right? I'm not reading out any more predictions, but if if you get it right, you've. you've got to come back and find your comment and I'll send you a hat. My F1 Buckfast queen I bought is doing amazing. Quick update on the Nucci hive, the colony is doing amazing, up to 16 frames of bees, and I've taken 4 donor frames. This is my favorite hive to work. It's, it's funny you say that. I've got so much stick about doing a video on a beehive. You, you can't make up some of the comments that I get on YouTube saying it's disgusting, like you're clearly getting paid to promote someone's product, I can't believe you stoop so low. And I think, well, whoa, hang on, Just doing a video about a beehive, telling it like it is. I'm not paid for it. Okay, he has sent me the hive for free, which I said at the beginning of the video. This guy sent me this hive for free. Let's have a look at it. It's pretty cool, and it was pretty cool. Do you not want me to do videos on like new products? Should just do no product videos. I like product videos. I think they're cool. The the so what the the best thing about the Nucci hive and and the guy. The Nucci Hive guy is going to hate me for saying this—is the flat roof, and it's the bit that everybody slated in the video, saying flat roofs, what are you doing? You need a pitch roof to run the water off. And the reason that I love the flat roof is because it gives me a table in the apiary. Brilliant, like a proper big flat table to put stuff on. It's like simple things keep me happy. But I do, I do like the Nucci Hive because it's a nice flat table. But it is cool; it does look good as well. Uh, right, I'm just running through people's predictions. Right, Andrew Rogers, channel member, says, I made a split into a nuc Thursday. Is it possible it could get big enough to fill a National Brood Box this year? So depending on the split, if it's a 6-frame split filling a nuc now, I'd be very, very surprised if it stayed that small. So it will fill a nuc box. Even you could do a 2-frame split now, 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, and a good shake of bees, and they'd easily fill the 6-frame nuc up before the end of the year. So a, a nuc at this point in the year would definitely fill a normal hive up. Hello. Oh, I like this one. David says, click the like button, it's free. Thank you, David. Says, noticed your Lysan Langstroth hives, you use the plastic vented plugs rather than the poly plugs. Just wonder what the 2 types of plug are for. A very astute observation, and the only reason I'm using them is because I got up there And I forgot to bring the poly plugs with me. That's it, simple as that. So don't read into that at all. The 2 plugs are for— one's the proper one that you should use 100% of the time, and one is the one you should just chuck in the bin and never use. And the vented one is the one that you should never use. I don't see any reason for the vented one. The only reason that I would ever put the vent— that was tongue-in-cheek, by the way. The only reason I would use the vented one is if I was moving the colon. But I wouldn't just rely on the vented plugs to keep the colonies cool. I'd have the open mesh floor open and preferably a mesh screen on the top as well. I'm not a fan of any of those vents. I'm a fan of the holes. I'm a fan of being able to take the plugs out and like let them fly in and fly out. I think that's really useful, but I'm not a fan of the vents. So just— I just use the solid ones. And it's a good reminder because I'm going back up there tomorrow. Terry had— talking of laying workers, I was speaking to Terry earlier and he had a colony of laying workers and my advice was to shake them out and he's just said that he couldn't do it, so it's on the list for tomorrow, but you've got to do it. And it makes no sense when you start looking at apiaries as a whole. When you shake them out tomorrow, you still have the same number of bees in the apiary, it'd just be like slightly different numbers per hive. one less hive, more bees per hive. And then a couple of weeks later, just make a split, stick it back in that hive, and then you still got the same number of bees and you're back to the same number of hives. But it is, it is difficult. I, I know how you feel when you've— they're your babies, aren't they? You don't want to, you don't want to kill them, but you're not killing them, you're just giving them a new home, sending them on their way to a new home. Hi Lawrence, I've added a mated queen to a nuc. 5 weeks later, I've got supersedure cells. So are they— you say cells as in plural. How many cells have you got? If you come back, I'll answer it. There's— is there— they're more than one cell? Is there quite a lot of cells? And where— whereabouts are they? That would be good to know. Uh, Marcus Walkerby Honey says, just had a splash out and bought an Instavap ready for end of November, early December. Where would you advise buying the oxalic acid from? Loaded question, that one. I would advise you buying the only licensed product that you can use once a year in your Instavap, which is ApiBioxyl. And keep your records for the VMD as well. Cannot use the 100% pure oxalic acid that you can buy on eBay or Amazon. That is not licensed for use to kill varroa mites. Some people do use it to clean the inside of their beehives whilst the bees are in there. It's a bit of a rubbish one. I don't think that would even stand up to the VMD. They'd be like, yeah, whatever, you're clearly using it to treat for varroa. But we, we have to be really careful what we, what we say and what we do. So we genuinely do use Apibioxal, and it is Really annoying because it gunks everything up. Right, next question. Denby Honey says, "I'm loving your lives, mate. They actually give me a lot of confidence going into my hive." Brilliant! A lot of people have said that to me, and it's just for me like tripping over stuff, isn't it? And dropping syrup on the floor, and basically being a bumbling buffoon of a beekeeper. I used to like it when I could hide behind my editing suite of videos and come across like. Quite professional, and then I started doing the live ones, and everyone saw like this guy not got a clue what he's doing. But you know, I've never claimed to be master beekeeper, just the guy with the camera. But I I enjoy the lives as well. They're quite cool. Leon Morgan says, "Hi Lawrence, have a drone brood problem. I don't know if it's a virgin queen or laying worker. Considering just buying a queen and taking a chance. Almost thinking of giving up. Only have one hive." Oh sorry to hear that's quite quite a depressing comment, Leon. Leon. So don't, don't give up. But I, I do, I do know the feeling. But don't, don't think of buying a mated queen as the silver bullet that is going to fix everything. And you just, you know, get my queen, just put it in, and then come back a week later and they've killed your queen. Because then you're just— that's going to depress you even more. You've got to fix the problem. So is it a drone-laying queen or is it a laying worker? You need to work out which one of those it is first. The, the comment that I said at the beginning, I'll draw it again for you if you weren't here, in terms of like the position of the eggs So if that's a cell— I know, I know— but if that's a cell and you've got like eggs sitting at the bottom, multiple eggs sitting at the bottom like that, that's likely going to be a drone laying queen. And if you've got them kind of like on the wall there and there's more, you find with a laying worker you'll just get like loads of eggs. You'll get like 15, 20 eggs like sitting on a wall, not like there, but sitting on a wall like that. If it's like that, then it is a laying worker. The laying worker is way more difficult to fix. Drone laying queen's easy to fix. You just find the queen, kill the queen, add a new queen in, and it's fixed. Really, really simple. Laying worker, much more difficult. And laying worker, to fix it as it's your only colony, I'm going to go ahead and say it's impossible. I don't see there's any way that you can fix a laying worker if you've only got one colony and it's turned laying worker. It's a sad position to be in, I'm afraid, because you can't, you can't add, continually add frames of brood because you've not got any frames of brood, and you can't shake them out to go into other hives because you've only got the one hive. So I, I don't have a solution for you, I'm afraid, other than let them dwindle and start again, which I know is a bit, a bit of a sad, sorry state to be in. So hopefully, fingers crossed, the drone laying queen. Paula Rainbird says, hi Lawrence, I received my Buckfast queen from you on the 5th of July, went in the next day to release her, and I had Brood, guessing I had a virgin queen, so I have made a split with the with the Vicfast, with the Buckfast. I get a lot. I get a lot of people doing that, and people ringing up saying, "Yeah, can we cancel that order because we've gone back in?" And there's eggs, and there's a queen. So it is it's easy to do it this time of the year. People think they have. People think they're queenless or hopelessly queenless. They go back and they've got eggs, and you think that definitely weren't hopelessly queenless. But it is it's a good news story. I guess you've got your colony back to being. Queen right, and then you can make a split as well. John Hayes says, best way to clean the inside of my smoker rim? So I just get the torch, just burn it until it completely vaporizes all of the, the gunk that's in there. And then you kind of want it a bit gunky, the rim. The gunky rim seals, seals it so it works properly. But if you can't close it, then get the blowtorch on it. Right, a few more predictions there. Right, Ben Hay— uh, sorry, Ben Hayes— Ben Davis says the bees have filled the top super but not fully yet. I've quickly ordered a super from Abello, so hopefully it comes in time before they run out of space and try to swarm. Definitely get it in there as soon as possible. That, that is the only way the bees will swarm. The only way that is the beekeeper's fault, I guess, at this point in the year is if they hit the roof. Never let the bees hit the roof at any point in the year. Surefire way to get them to swarm. Uh, evening, evening, Chrissy. How's it going? Uh, Lynette says, evening, Lawrence. I don't have a clue about football, especially names, but I think Spain will win 3-1. Okay, I started reading that not realizing it was about football. Sorry, I said I wouldn't do anymore. I think you're probably not far, far wrong though. Um, sorry, John, I'm guessing you're answering someone else there. Jump back, right? RJ says, hey Lawrence, why don't you comment on the aerosol spraying being done by the government? You must see it daily. It's ruining the weather and the season. Cheers, pal. So I'm not sure, aerosol spraying, what are they doing? We're talking the, the ones that come out the back of planes or the cloud seeding? I'm not, I'm not one for conspiracy theories. I don't know, do you, do you think that the government are doing something to make it so rainy and miserable? I'm interested to hear. Let's, let's see what it is, right? Member Snuffer says, hope all is well, Lawrence. Got a couple of hives where the queen stopped laying. No eggs, no larva. and didn't see the queen. Is it down to the weather that she stopped laying? I guess so, or either that or it's a missed swarm, and it is easy to miss a swarm, but I don't think you've missed a swarm. So I've got a few colonies where they stopped again, they're just thinking, what's the point? You can almost hear it when you open up the colony, there's like, no, just supposed to be sunny, supposed to be the middle of summer, it's like the best part of the year. And I drive on the, on the way to school dropping off my daughter, there's this hedgerow and you have never seen anything like it. It is white with buds on the bramble, like you've just— I cannot get over how much bramble is out. And like you walk past it and there's just nothing on it, nothing, not a single insect on it because it is just too cold. And that is annoying. Because it would be— I, I think if when it started getting sunny again— we had the really cold start and then it started getting sunny— I think if it, if it had carried on being sunny, we'd have been on for some of the best yields ever because of the, like, the condition of the plants and the fact that the plants were primed to go into it. I think it would have like turbocharged them a bit, and then it's just cold again. It's not been, it's not been too bad today. I know I posted, didn't I, saying it was going to be sunny today and it wasn't. Too bad, but it was just cold. It was cold. It was it was a bit windy. It was not good. Steve's Honeybee says had some queens from you a few weeks ago. One colony was very weak and the queen started laying. Expected two days ago the colony was very weak. Queen had disappeared. Would she abscond if they are too weak? So yes, definitely. Or she might die if they're too weak as well. So the queen's very much dependent on the nurse bees in the colony to feed her, to keep her in good condition. Unless it's an emergency, she won't go off and feed herself. And, you know, she doesn't really eat honey, she eats royal jelly, exclusively royal jelly. So if the colony's weak, especially if you've got like an aging colony, so if you make a small split with the wrong demographic of bees, so you've just got, you know, you want emerging brood and nurse bees ideally making up a split, which is the youngest bees that you can possibly get and bees that are like -1, -2, -3 days old. So then after one or two, three days, they emerge and they're zero days, and they're they're the ones that create the best and the most royal jelly to keep the queen in perfect condition. If you're making up like a split with eight-week-old bees that are just about to die, they're not going to feed the queen at all—not a single scrap. So she she just probably died. They just cleared her out and said, "Okay, see you later." I do see I do see a lot of that when people send me videos and pictures of things that have. gone wrong. And I always say, send me a picture, like a wide-angle shot of the makeup of the nuc, and sometimes you just see like half a frame of bees. And I said about the one I had a while ago that someone complained that the bees couldn't get through the fondant, and they sent me a picture and it was like a fist size of bees. And he said, your queen wasn't strong enough to eat out of the fondant. And I said, well, it's not— the bees eat in. it's not, it's not the queen that will eat out. And he said, okay, yeah, fair point. But it is probably that. So yeah, she would have gone. Sorry about that. Still swarming in South Wales. Just seen today 2 wild swarms next to each other in a tree not far from a wild bee colony. Yeah, I, I think, I think it's moved to the right. When you see 2 swarms next to each other, I always think they're swarms from the same hive, either one swarm that's split into 2, or like a, a swarm, like 2, a prime swarm and then a cast, or 2 casts. But I am seeing the same. I've still got colonies that are having a go. Can't wait to check my hive tomorrow to see if the queen was accepted. It's been a long week. Yeah, it's a long week, and it's always nice to go in and see when they've been accepted though. Agree completely with not having hives in the garden. My previous gentle colonies have turned real bad, stinging anyone within 50 guards. That's not good at all, but it is the time of the year where you're going to get the worst behavior. You've probably got like peak number of bees at the moment because you've got the solstice. They're building up all the way until the solstice, and then the solstice is supposed to be the trigger for the colony or the queen to stop. Like, you know, she might plateau for a little bit to kind of bring the numbers back, but then you've got all of that brood to emerge. So 3 or 4 weeks after the solstice you're gonna have like peak bee numbers, and you might have a plateau at peak bee numbers for a few weeks as well. So we're in that plateau at the moment, which is absolute most amount of bees that you're going to get. And when you get the most amount of bees, you get the most amount of bees that are angry as well. I just see Caldaspar say that was never a penalty. I agree, never ever a penalty. But it's not nice having angry bees in your garden. It's really not, with your neighbors trying to like strim the lawn and the bees just pinging them. Not good. Keep them in an out apiary, definitely. It's really interesting, the differences of success. My bees are chock-a-block and a double brood, yet they're not interested in the supers. Then my queen buggered off a couple of weeks ago. Oh no, that's not good. But it could, it could just be depending on what the bees are like that a double brood is, is too big, too big for them. A lot of people with local bees and local mongrel bees They're lucky if their bees fill— I'm not saying this in a derogatory way, but they are naturally a smaller brood nest, so they're lucky to fill the single brood box, or their normal operating conditions, they'll just about fill the single brood nest. And then a double brood is like a super and a half, maybe a little bit more than that. And if you've got that full of honey, then that could be not that far off average. So it could just be a case of tweaking the configuration a little bit to get that right. Uh, Keith Jenkins, good evening Keith, how you doing? Uh, Louis Baldwin says, hi, I've got a vicious hive with dirt, dirty comb, was going to kill the queen and replace the foundation. Can I add a virgin straight away or leave in the cage? Um, if, if you're going to do that, you know, I, I think you should do a shook swarm. Shook swarm's the easiest way of doing that if you've got all of those problems. We've got like an angry colony dirty comb, you're going to replace with foundation, I would just do a shook swarm. Shook swarm is really, really easy. You just, you get like a brand new or freshly scorched beehive, new frames, new foundation, get that all ready with a floor, brand new floor, brand new roof, brand new crown board, and then you just shake all of the bees from your old hives into that new hive and then find the queen and make sure the queen's in there. And then if you can, put a queen excluder on the front of the hive to make sure that she can't leave, and then just leave them in there for a few days, 2 or 3 days without feeding, and then get the feeder on. That is what I would do. And you can, you can merge that into like a requeening process at the same time. So you could kill the queen, shake them in, add a new queen at the same time, and then the, the new queen's pheromones will keep them, keep them there. I would give that a go. Michael Menino, good afternoon from New Hampshire, USA. Hi Michael, still working my way through your honey. I've got lots of honey, I do like yours, it's nice. I learned from yours, from your honey, I learned that basswood is lime, lime honey. I never knew that before. Um, might be able to hear some background noise there, that is my daughter, daughters crying in the background. Here we go. Lee Leatherbarrow, thank you for the very nice review. I like that, I appreciate someone waiting for a few weeks and then doing a really good review like that. So thumbs up, let's get the thumbs up on there. Thumbs up, thank you, much appreciated. He says, hi Lawrence, I think the members' weekly inspections are great. Good to see someone's weekly inspections and see how they, uh, the colonies progress throughout the year. That, that is the one good thing. They can be a little bit slow because you're seeing the same thing every single week, but then the flip side of that is that you see the same thing every single week, so you're seeing how the colonies actually grow, like a real-life version of that, although it is spread out over a few weeks, so maybe I will persevere in my same apiaries then. Hi Lawrence. Hello. When doing a Bailey comb change, would you put fresh box above or below the existing brood box? I've been given conflicting advice by different beekeepers. I don't think it makes a massive difference which way that you do it. The Bailey comb, it doesn't confuse me because I understand the principle behind it, but I'm just, I'm just not a massive fan of it. It's a bit slow for me in, in kind of like the moving and like constantly moving the frames. And I guess if you've got a couple of colonies in your back garden, it's, it's something that you, that you can do. But having done shook swarms and having done shook swarms for the reason of, of EFB, I just think the, the Bailey comb exchange leaves behind the one really important part or benefit that you get from a shook swarm, which is it reduces the transmission of asymptomatic EFB. So that means if your colony has got EFB but it's got no signs of EFB, then it is still transferring that, potentially transferring that around the apiary, and you're transferring it around the apiary as well. Where a shook swarm on a colony that's got asymptomatic EFB is the recommendation of the National Bee Unit and is proven to Not guarantee that you'll reduce or eliminate the EFB that's there, but you've got a good chance of eliminating the EFB that is there. So if you've got dirt, if you've got a box dirty comb, you know, there's no thought that you've got EFB, but you're thinking, oh, my comb's dirty, it's probably got a high viral load in the comb, I'm going to do a Bailey comb exchange because I want to get onto nice fresh combs. It's more work than a shook swarm, and it doesn't give you that benefit of, um, the potential to remove asymptomatic EFB. And then the other benefit that you get from a shook swarm as well is you get the forced brood break. So if you've got— if some people are doing a Bailey comb because they're thinking, well, my combs are really dark, I've got like holes in the cappings, I've got deformed wing virus, it's got an issue with varroa. So the beauty of doing a shook swarm is that you get onto a nice new comb, brand new comb, you're reducing or potentially eliminating asymptomatic EFB without— that's like an added bonus. You're putting a forced brood break in there, which on its own is going to help reduce the varroa load. But then like the, the perfect cherry on the icing on the cake is that because you've got that forced brood break, you can zap them with some oxalic acid and get the best drop that you're going to get because there's no varroa in any of the capped brood. Really, really good. I was thinking of doing a shook swarm on some of the colonies that I've got. If you've been watching the live inspections, some of the older frames that I've got, I was thinking I'm gonna shook swarm these. I've not shook swarmed those colonies ever, so I was thinking of doing that, and I was looking at the frames of brood and I was thinking, I've got 12 frames of bees here and like maybe 10 frames of brood, and 6 or 7 of those frames beautiful, completely packed out frames of brood. If I shook swarm those, I'm giving away all of that broodness going on to the fire, and it's going to set the colonies right back. So I was thinking, what can I— what can I do here? There must be a better way of doing this. I don't— I don't want to transfer the brood. I don't want to move the brood anywhere because that defeats the point of the shook swarm, but I don't want to give up all the brood. So I thought, well, this is— and I thought, this is, this is quite a good solution actually. So what I'm going to do, and I'm going to do this, I'll do it on a video, is I'm just going to go and get my queen cages, put some fondant in them and keep them sealed. I'll get the queens, I'll put them in the cages, and then I'll just leave it 8 days, and then I'll go back in and hopefully I'll, I'll work out the timings for all of the brood to emerge. Basically, I'll put them in the cages and wait until all the brood's emerged, and then it's done, isn't it? There's the queen that's in the cage, there's no eggs, there's no larva, and all the brood has emerged. So I've got all of the benefit out of the frames of brood, and then I shook swarm and then put the queens in the cages. And shook swarms with queens in cages works really, really well because it means that the bees won't abscond because the queen's there, and there's no way for the queen to get killed during the shook swarm. There's no way for her to kind of get squished or run over or anything like that. So it's— a lot of people, when they do shook swarms, they cage the— pardon me— they cage the queens anyway. So that's what I'm going to do. And that is what I would recommend you to do, David. So I've gone way off track there, is I wouldn't worry too much about the top or the bottom. I'd reevaluate what you're doing and saying and think about doing a shook swarm instead. And if you're worried about all of that good brood, stick the queen in the cage, wait for however many days it takes for all of that brood to emerge, and then do a shook swarm, and you get a much better way of doing it. So sorry, I've not answered your question because I've not done it that way. But I think that's a better solution for you there. Right, I'm nearly an hour in and I've not drunk any of my tea, so I'm gonna drink some tea. There we go. Get my breath back as well. Just looking at— I did that wrong— this in the background there, I've been thinking of a cool sign. So I think it's called like Corvin steel, something like that. Basically going to get a piece of thick, five millimeter thick. It's like carbon steel, but it's a special type of carbon steel that's going to rust but keeps a really tight rust. I'm going to get that, that there— where is it— cut out of it, and I'm going to get it in the back of the apiary all nice and rusty. I thought that would look really cool. Hi, I'm thinking of transferring my nucs over to my hives next weekend. Do you think that's enough time for colonies to expand in the hives and me take another split from them later this year? So I wouldn't do both. I would say nucs going over to hives is fine, and they'll build up nice and strong. Taking splits out of colonies late on in the year is not idea. I had someone message me saying that they wanted to make a 1-frame split at the end of August, and will I still have queens then? And I was like, oh, definitely don't do that. That's— you've got no chance of getting that colony through the winter. You need to be taking big, big splits at that point in the year— 3, 4, 5 frames of brood if you're going to do it that late. So don't make 1-frame splits in the end of August. And, and Ed, I wouldn't take another split out of it. I would just leave it at that. hive them up and then take your splits next year. I'm glad that people didn't think that was unreasonable, my, my little proposal there. Just bought Ashforth feeders for Abello 12-frame hives. How do you use them for feeding fondant? So it's a, it's a bit balancy the way that you have to use them for feeding fondant. You basically just turn them upside down and balance them on. It's the only thing with the rebate system is it doesn't work in reverse quite as well. as a non-rebated system, but they're not designed for that. You can use them, just take the metal out and let the bees go up there, but it's not really going to work in winter because the bees won't go around corners like that to find the fondant. I rarely feed my bees fondant. I find if you feed them enough syrup, get them really nice and heavy, you don't really have to feed them fondant. And then you can feed syrup a lot earlier in the year than people tell you. You can start feeding the bees syrup, invert syrup, mid to end of Feb. So there's not that many months in between the late season feeding to the early season feeding. But the Ashforth feeders, the 12-frame rebated ones, they don't sit perfectly. You can do it though, just doesn't look, doesn't look very tidy. But just flip them upside down is the only way to really do it. Any advice on cup comb once it's out the hive? Can it be kept in the freezer until needed? Can it be refrigerated? Monster Frosted. Any advice welcome. So the only way to really keep it is in the freezer. That's how we keep ours. Keep it in the freezer and it will keep for like a good couple of years. You can still granulate in the freezer and will granulate in the freezer, but it's way, way slower than leaving it just out. And obviously if you just leave it just out, it will granulate pretty quick. Evening all. Hello. Hi Lawrence, I've tried hard to prevent swarms this year but had one a few days ago from a nuc I only made up in May. Wasn't expecting that. I'm sorry to hear that. I don't think it's been a particularly swarmy year this year though, definitely below average, but they're, they're making up for it now. Hi Lawrence, I'm seeing a lot of nectar in one hive's brood box, Langstroth, restricting laying space with plenty of room in the 2 supers above. Do you see this as the workers holding up the queen, or way, way down, the queen slowing down? Laying causing the issue? I, I don't, I don't think it's the, the workers. I think it's going to be more of a queen issue, that one. You generally find that when the bees swarm— so the bees swarm, queen goes, leave behind queen cells, you've got virgins, and then the brood box is just chock-a-full of nectar. And then when you get a new queen mated, they, they start moving it all back upstairs in anticipation of the queen laying or laying more. But I, I've not Often had that, you know, in, in a colony that is like properly queen right with a decent queen. So, so maybe it is just you— the nest will be contracting now though. You'll start to see them going in now and, and happening at like quite a rapid rate. There's not as much brood in there and it'll just get less and less. The only exception to that is if you've got like little splits, then you're feeding. So if you've got like a 2 or 3 frame split and you're feeding it up, you, you'll start to see more and more brood and an expanding brood nest. But on full-size colonies, you will see them going back down. But if we're talking like 8 out of 10 frames that are fully nectar, then there's definitely something going wrong there. If you've got plenty of room in the supers above, I don't see it as the workers holding up the queen. I see it probably as an issue with the queen, and the queen's not able to lay that much, so the bees aren't moving stuff. So I'd have a look at the queen, see if she's okay. I get free stuff sent to me to review on my YouTube channel all the time. Companies are always messaging me. At the end of the day, Free advertising for them. Exactly. I think I think they get a pretty good deal. Some of the free stuff being sent through, they get a nice little video, don't they? Made. Um, Hollow Works Stores says, "Oh, and there is a massive gap in the market for non-plastic cup cone containers. We are going to try food-safe metal tins with windows." Yeah, there is a big. I've seen those food-safe metal tins. They're good. They're like aluminium tins, and then they're sprayed with a food-grade, like non. Rust. I know aluminium doesn't rust, but it does— what's the word? What does aluminium do that isn't rust? Does something corrode? There you go, it does corrode. So it's sprayed with like a food-grade lubricant or non-corrosive something or other. But they're good. I like, I like the metal tins. I think they're loads better, the metal tins, and you can use them for something afterwards. But there is— I don't know if there's a gap in the market because I think the metal tins fill the gap in the market, but they're quite expensive. So then people just go with the cheaper plastic ones, but they don't look nice, the plastic ones. Hello from Sweden. Hello. How can I give my bees more space in the hive when I don't have more supers or brood boxes? That is going to be a bit of a challenge, I think. I don't, I don't think you can, because you can't— no, you, you just need to get more supers or more brood boxes. I'm trying to think, think outside the box, excuse the pun. But like, you could remove the roof, but then it's just going to rain into it. And you can try and give them space outside of the boxes, you know, think— thinking outside the box, but they're just going to get wet. So I don't, I don't think it will— I think, I think you're just going to have to get some more supers or brood boxes. Sorry, that is a real cop-out answer, but I don't, I don't think there is a fix for that. And I think the fix of getting more supers or brood boxes is a pretty, pretty easy one. So just have to get some more. Uh, John Sylvester says, thanks so much for the great info as always. I did end up choosing the Queen's Delivery as it sounded nice. Yeah, everyone goes for that. It's the same price though and they get there at the same time. Uh, Stealth says, evening Lawrence, had 2 queens from you a couple of weeks ago. One hive introduced fine, queen spotted. Second hive, massive roar upon opening. This was requeened because aggressive. Is there more? Yeah, uh, been over the 4 frames now and couldn't spot any eggs or the queen. When do I assume a failed introduction and when should I check again? consider a second queen. So I've, I've had colonies where you, you go in and, you know, they're not happy and you've introduced a queen and you can't find the queen, you don't see eggs. And if you can't find the queen and you don't see eggs, I always think it's a failed introduction and always treat it as a failed introduction, like the first time. But I'll have it. So, so I've gone up to that, I've basically got a colony that's had that today. So I'm going back up there tomorrow with another queen, but I've had it loads of times in the past where I go back up the second day and I find the queen. So just because you've not found her first time doesn't mean she's not there, and just because there's no eggs in there doesn't mean she's not there either. So I'd give, I'd give it a week, give it like 2 or 3 inspections. If you can't find her after 2 or 3 inspections with a big green dot on her back, then I don't reckon she's in there. But I wouldn't do that after the first one, especially if it's— you've got like a big aggressive roar, so there's probably a lot of bees in there. She, she could be anywhere. And I did a video the other day, a live stream one with the splodge queen that I've affectionately named Splodge. Now I've got two two queens named Splodge, and I opened up no queen emergency cells that I'd I'd missed or got the timings wrong, and I thought it's annoying failed introduction. Then and then looked on the floor and they were bawling her. I managed to get them off. Whenever they're balling a queen, I always manage to get them off. She's never dead. And there you go, splodge at the bottom of the floor, just being trampled on by everyone. And I put her back in the cage. You, you would have seen the video, but you've not, you've not seen the outcome of the video yet. I'll give it away. So I got her, put her in a cage, put some honey from, from that colony in the cage with a bit of wax, and put her back in for a reintroduction. And then I've gone back in a couple of days later and she's out now walking around on the frame. Shocking queen, like absolutely covered in paint. One of the ones that we got sent that we couldn't send out, but it worked. But I would, I'd give it a week, give it a week, and if there's no eggs and there's no queen after a week and a few inspections, I would requeen again. Uh, well, who's next? Demby Honey. Demby Honey says, hi Lawrence, I bought an overwintered nuc from a Welsh YouTuber that does a lot of YouTube content. They turned out to the worst nastiest bees that we've ever had, should have went with Black Mountain Honey. Oh no, I don't— yeah, okay, that's not ideal. What we pride ourselves on at Black Mountain Honey is the calmest bees that you can possibly get, but I've had a couple of people message me saying, we bought nucs off you and they're horrible, and all I would say is we'll fix the problem. If that happens to us, like, we'll fix the problem. I'm sure the person that you're talking about would fix the problem as well. He's a very reasonable person and he is excellent with his customer service, so I know, I know he would, he would back that up. But what I would also say is open mating, F1 Buckfast or, or whatever, there's always going to be some sort of variation in there. You're going to have, you're going to have your normal distribution curve and you're going to have your percentage, whatever it is that you're aiming for. and you're going to have 5% that are the calmest bees that you've ever seen, you're going to have 5% that are just horrible even though you've tried to breed them to be calm, and then you're going to have your 90% in the middle that is what you're aiming for. So we've had a couple, I've had 2 people message me saying, we bought nucs from you last year, and we sold 800 nucs last year, so we sold a lot of nucs, so I think 2 out of 800 is not that bad, and they said they're really, really angry, they're really, really aggressive. And they sent me a video and I was like, yeah, that's completely unacceptable. So we backed that up and we'll fix that. So they killed the queen, waited 8 days, emergency queen cells, and then we sent them a new queen. And both of them have come back and said, yeah, they're kind of— they're getting there. They're not like perfect, but they're not anywhere near as aggressive as they were. And I know next year they'll be good to go. But yeah. Calmest bees going, Black Mountain Honey. Lamond, I think, or Laymond. Hi Lawrence, I love your videos and you inspired me to become a commercial beekeeper. How many beehives and in how many apiaries would you recommend to be able to live off selling honey? Oh, that's a good question. Are you— I'm guessing you— I'm going to assume you're UK-based, but I think with your name you might, you might not be. I don't know. You would have to— oh, it's a difficult one. The, the UK bulk honey market is about as dead as it could possibly be. It's really, really not in a good place. But I think you get these little pockets of people who are able to make a really, really good living off not that many colonies of bees. And the way that they do that is that they have excellent marketing. They show what they're doing. They've got good social media, but they've got a good, like, strategy to say— to tell people why their honey is better than everybody else's. And some people, some bee farmers take huge, huge offense to that. They say, who do they think they are, this person here telling people that their honey's better than mine? Their honey's not better than mine. And I say to them, well, it's probably not better than yours, but that's the game, isn't it? You need to— what's your USP? We're in an open market and we're competing for the same customers. So This is this is fair competition. They're not saying and they're not implying that yours is worse than theirs, and they say no they are. They're implying that mine is worse than theirs, and I say no you're taking it way too personally. It's that you can do that you can do what they do, and this kind of goes back to like the raw argument, and I'm I'm so happy with the outcome of the raw argument because everybody calls their honey raw now, and rightly so because it is raw honey, and it's not misleading, and it's not inferring that other people's honey is. cooked. It's a perfectly usable term to describe to the customer the minimal processing that has taken place with your honey. So I'm still a little bit scared to put it up on all my things because I don't want to ruffle too many feathers, but I think the majority of people are now calling their honey raw. So how many colonies of bees do you need to be able to live off selling honey? It very much depends on Whether you're going to sell it as single jars direct to customers or go down the wholesale route of selling loads of jars, maybe white label or with your own labels to shops, or you're going to go down the route of putting honey in buckets and selling it as bulk, or go down the route of putting honey in barrels and selling it as bulk. And the scale there is one end that you get the most money but it's more work, and the other one is the least amount of work. And the least amount— no, yeah, the least amount of work and the least amount of money. But I think realistically, if you were in the bulk honey market, I don't think you could survive on less than 250 hives in an average year. And I think we're in a below-average year at the moment. I think if you're in the honey business— if you— sorry, that's the wrong term. If you're in the beekeeping business, you need to over-diversify. And you look at the companies that have over-diversified, and they're the ones that are doing slightly better than the ones who are focused on bulk honey. And it didn't always used to be like that. It used to be like bulk honey was kind of the place to be in the bee farming industry. And it's changing all the time. It's a difficult one to know. It's a difficult one to know what to do with your business and Sometimes things feel like a risk, but I don't see it changing anytime soon. I did see one thing actually. I got sent an email from—I'm not sure who it was from—it's basically like a government changes in legislation thing, and what they were saying was: So at the moment, you know, like a jar of honey, it says a blend of non-EU and EU honey. So basically means Chinese honey, and someone's put in like one percent Ukrainian honey so they can use this. Blend of non-EU and EU sources. So there is a change coming. I don't know when it's coming through, but they sent through the proposed changes to the honey regulations, and, and it looks like the only change, but it's quite a significant change. It says that you cannot say that anymore. I should have got— I should have got the PDF up actually, but what it did say was that you need to identify in order the countries where it comes from And it gave you like a little bit of leeway for certain certain like proportion blends that you can have. But there's no way that any of these companies are using those proportion blends. So what it will have to say going forward is a mix of honeys, China eighty-nine percent, Spain ten percent, da da da whatever. And I thought, oh, that's good. I really really like that because it's it's cheap Chinese and cheap Indian honey. The ones that are the, the focus of the spotlight, or the spotlight of the focus, or whatever it is, of honey fraud. That's, that's where it's coming from, the honey fraud. And I don't think many people would buy as much honey if they knew it was Chinese honey, because people know that a lot of Chinese honey is, is adulterated. So I think that's a really positive move, and I think that's a good, uh, positive move that will support British beekeeping and British bee farmers. I think that'd be really good because it puts it kind of front and center, doesn't it? Which is UK honey, Scottish honey, Welsh honey, English honey, Northern Irish honey, Irish honey if you want to take it outside the United Kingdom. But that's a unique selling point that we can all jump on. But couple that with the cost of living crisis, it's going to be It's going to be quite difficult. I still think, is there space for a jar of expensive honey in, um, in, in your supermarket bag? I don't know. I just don't know. I'm thinking about saying something, and I'm— this is why I'm stuttering at the moment, but I, I'm not going to say it. I keep on biting my lip, and I keep on cutting it out of all the videos for fear of all hell breaking loose, so I'm not going to say it. Sorry to do that to you. I bet you're thinking, what is it now? Baby says, hey Lawrence, I hope you and your family are well. If you start again from scratch, would you still go all out Langstroth or keep some other frame types as well? If so, why? So I'm kicking myself 10 times over with this question here because I've always given the advice, just stick with the frame type, stick with one frame type. And then because of doing YouTube and doing all of these other videos, I've not, I've not stuck with one frame type. So I've used all of these different ones. And now this transition over to Langstroth The only reason I'm transitioning over to Langstroth is to— basically it's the nucs business that's pushing me over to Langstroth because Richard is so good at doing the national nucs. I kind of want to do the nucs as well, so I'm doing more of the Langstroth nucs. Richard is doing Langstroth nucs as well now, but I thought, well, if I move over to Langstroth and I can, I can focus on that as like the format for me to make nucs, and I'm not encroaching on Richard's numbers, like it's easier for us to manage as a team. Having a different format each. But having done that now, and I've kind of like been going through all my kit and like cleaning stuff and selling stuff and, and just clearing stuff out and for the big move over to Langstroth, and now I'm finding myself like low on kit. And, and in the long run, I think it's the wise move, and I think I'll definitely be happier on Langstroth. I prefer working Langstroth. But then the ones— the one Big massive drawback of Langstroth that I just hadn't thought about before I started the transition over, and it is quite a big one for me, is that I really like to work the bees the warm way. I'll draw you a picture. I've not, I've not used the board anywhere near enough, have I? But for anyone wondering, if the bees are flying out in that direction, that's the warm way. Frames going across like that, and then you've got the beekeeper kind of standing that way. I much prefer working that way around because it just didn't hurt my back, and I can kind of just take, you know, take my hand— there they are, hands— and work the bees that way. When you— with Langstroth, you don't have that option. It is— the cold way is the only way, so you have to have the frames going that way. And I guess you could probably mod— I could probably mod the floors so that you could have them around the other way, but it would take up loads more space. But that is a big Negative for me. They're the only two negatives, I think, for Langstroth: cold way and the the the small lugs, which for some people are a big benefit. I like the small lugs because you don't damage them, but there's no denying that they are more fiddly to pick up than the national lugs. So would I still go all out Langstroth or keep some other frame types as well? So I would definitely stick to one type without a shadow of a doubt. It makes it so difficult having numerous types of frames. All sitting in the same apiary. Really, really difficult. So keep it simple, keep it all the same. Richard Atkins says, any tips on melting down wax or melters you would recommend? So tips on melting down wax is do it in grades. Definitely do it in grades. Oh man, cappings wax is so easy to melt down. Just, you can do it, you could do it like a bain-marie, but it is super, super easy to melt down, super easy to process, super easy to filter, and you end up with a far superior product at the end. Brood frames, they're like the complete opposite. Really difficult to melt down, really low yield. Is it worth it? Definitely not for me. I just burn brood frames now. Just, just not, not even the log burners, have a big fire to burn them all, eliminate the disease that could be in them immediately, and have a really nice big warm fire. And then kind of everywhere in between. I just— not really getting a huge amount of wax from anywhere else. A good one is when you're in the apiary, this is a good one, just keep a bucket there and just throughout the whole year just like scraping all your burcombs, all your little scrapings go in a bucket. And if you do that, you'll be amazed how much wax that you get in a bucket at the end of the year. I've done it and you get like a big— I've got like these 60-liter buckets, uh, there's no Yeah, 60. They can't be 60-liter buckets. What are they? I know, maybe they are. Yeah, 60-liter buckets, and it was full. I had one from one apiary like full of just like little bits, and that's good grade wax. That's like pretty clean wax, and that will render down nice and quickly. So what I got, I got Melaflow. So the Melaflow is pretty good. Um, what's the other one? The— I can't remember the other one. What's the Obello one called? It might be the Might be the Mellow Flow Zia Bello one. Got the Suyenti. No, no, the Mellow Flow Zia Bello one. The Suyenti is the Happy Melter, and they're both pretty similar. Both, both good. Uh, the tip that I got with that one, which— drawing out again. Here we go. I love this. So on the Mellow Flow, if you're thinking of getting it, this is like a cross-sectional view like that. Um, and I've drawn it wrong. You have— it has like a bottom like that. So all of the wax can go down there, but then the tray sits there. And in my mind, the tray is too low. Richard gave me this tip, really good tip. So what he does is he gets like a couple of bits of hardwood— don't use treated wood here— and just runs the— put 2 bits of hardwood along like that to lift the tray up. And then you just get a lot more space down here for all of the wax to flow through. That's a really, really good tip and helps if you're like melting out honey from the frames as well. So if you want to put your frames in there, if you've got like, I don't know, frames of honey that are completely crystallized and you can't get the honey out, you can put all your frames across there and then run it like that, and you can, you can get a decent amount of honey doing that. But both, both of those would work. They're quite expensive for what they are. What a lot of people use those for as well is just to uncap So you uncap into them and the honey can just stay there, and you, you put those bits of wood on again, all of the honey drains through, you kind of warm it up, but it's not, not getting that warm. And then at the end of the year, you just ramp the temperature right up, melt everything down. The tip that I use though, this is the crudest way of doing it, is just using something like that, an Appimelter or a Meliflow. And then once you get your wax up to temperature and you, you put it to the maximum temperature, but you don't keep it there for that long until it's all liquid. And then you just open the honey gate, wax gate, and have a big bucket there lined with a pillowcase, like a pure cotton pillowcase. And it comes out like perfectly, perfectly pure, and you wouldn't even want to do that much more clarification on it. It's like really good quality wax. You might get the top, top kind of 10 millimeters that's a bit grainy, but then apart from that, it's really, really good. So I should do that. I've got, I've got quite a bit of wax that I need to melt down, so we'll do some of that. Lee Leatherbarrow is on a virgin hunt tomorrow. I think I know the answer, but is there a top tip for spotting virgins? It, it is difficult spotting virgins, it really is, and it, it's time-consuming, very time-consuming as well. But my tips I've had before is don't, don't hold the frames like that, you know, go full, full arm out. Another good tip as well for finding virgins is they fly off the frames really quite quickly. So when you pull the frame out, immediately be looking for virgins before they fly off. And I've had that loads of times where you pull the frame out, you see them, and they fly off. So you need to be ready, like, as soon— like a ninja. As soon as you see them, kill them. So it's like virgin dead, that quick. And there's nothing more annoying than seeing a virgin and missing her before she flies off and then not being able to find her again. If that does happen, I've said this on here before, if that does happen, the best tip that I've got is look under the open mesh floor. That is often where you'll find them in that scenario, and they're looking at you thinking, oh, you know all these tips. But it is good when you find them and you kill them. It's quite satisfying. It shouldn't be satisfying about killing bees, but it's— you are fixing that colony and making sure that colony is gonna be fixed. Uh, right, Ian Staples says, hi Lawrence, I've been splitting this year with your queens. At what time do you think it is too late to open mates? So we will carry on grafting through to like early August, so even towards the end of August you'll still get matings. You might not get them at quite the high frequency that you'd get early on in the year, but every year is different. So this year, early on in the year, matings were terrible because it was just too cold, there wasn't anywhere near enough drones, and then we had like a really nice period, and then like 3 or 4 weeks after that, that's like the prime spot for getting the good drones that are in the air. So I don't think there's as many drones in the air this year that there was at this point last year, but who knows, we might get a really nice warm spell the next 4 weeks. Let's all cross our fingers, and then the back end of August could be prime for getting queens mated this year. So we're just gonna— we're gonna carry on this year. just keep on going all the way through and see what we get. Uh, but normally I would say kind of mid, mid to end of August is when you want to start ramping it down. I wouldn't, I wouldn't bank on any queens being mated in September in any decent number. You'll get a few, but not, not that many. Right, let's have another tea. Sorry, John. Uh, John Hayes says, this year has been expensive for us with queens. Steep learning, all our fault. We want to try and raise some of our own next year, but how do we time it right for when we will need them? So that, that is, that is difficult for timing them right when you need them. It's, it's an interesting point you said it's been expensive year for us for queens. So I've seen a number of people put this on forums and stuff, and I know a guy who is very keen about saying that, in that a good queen doesn't cost you money, pays you back. And it is so, so true. Like, a good young F1 Buckfast queen from a reputable breeder will give you way more honey on average per colony than the £40 it costs for that queen. So if you think how much you're selling like a jar of honey for, if you're selling like we sell an 8-ounce jar for £6, so it's— is it 7 jars of honey? 7 8-ounce jars, which is 3.5 pounds of honey, which is like one brood frame of honey. That's it. So, so the colony's got to produce one brood frame more of honey from that queen. And, and I would bet in the vast majority of circumstances, by adding in one of our queens— unless you've already got one of those queens there— but adding in one of those queens is going to definitely give you one more brood frame of honey. It's probably going to give you a couple more supers of honey. So if you think a couple of supers, if you're getting £20 per super, that's £40, that's 80 jars at £6 a jar, it's £480 of honey for a £40 queen. And I think that they're the numbers that people do get caught up in. I understand your point in terms of like spending money on queens, but I don't— I think in the overall scheme of things, the cost of the queens is negligible in comparison to what they can do. And this year has been just the worst possible year in terms of weather. It's just so bad. We're not going to get another year like this for 30 years, I don't think. And if we do get another year like this next year, then you can blame me for cursing it or jinxing it there. But the question there, we want to try and raise some of our own for next year, but how do we do— how do we time it right for when we would need them? It's— I don't think that's too difficult to kind of answer, really. Work out when you need them. I know that sounds really bludgeon. That's not meant to be patronizing, but What do you need them for? You're going to make up nucs? Because if you're going to make up nucs, then it's pretty easy to do. You just say, well, I'm going to make up 20 nucs, and I'll make the nucs up, and I'll just do a single round of grafts. And if I need 20 nucs, I'll do— I'll graft 40 cells and hopefully get a 50% strike rate, and then I've got 20 cells, and I just make my splits. And you just put the, put the queen cells in after 8 days, good to go once they're capped over, the queen cells. So, so for making up nucs, it's relatively simple. For requeening, again, it's, it's pretty simple for requeening because you just say, right, what colonies do I want to requeen? I've got 10 colonies I want to requeen. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill all the queens you want to requeen. At the same time, graft. I do it like on the same day. And then by the time you get to day 8 and you've taken down all of the emergency cells, your, your queen cells are going to be close to the point of getting capped over. And then just wait however many days it takes. I like to take them out a couple of days before. Don't want to take them out too early when they get capped because you can still dislodge the, the pupa at that point. You want to wait till the pupa's like a couple of days before emerging and then just go and put the cells in and then you're good to go. So I think both of those scenarios of what you would be doing with queens or buying queens in for, you just do it like en masse and you just have to have a little bit more, a little bit more planning, a little bit more foresight. But also Just be aware that unless you're doing it with a pure Buckfast queen, you're going to be working at F2, so your, your volatility scale is going to be much higher. So you're going to get some good, some bad, but you'll get more variation than you would using a pure Buckfast queen. But also, some aren't going to mate, so you're going to be in a position where you've made up a nuc, maybe 2 frames of brood, frame of stores, shake a bead, you put a cell in You've waited a few days for that cell to emerge. She's emerged. You've waited a week for her to become sexually mature, and then you're thinking, right, come on, do something. And then you've waited three weeks, four weeks, and she's not mated. And then you think, what am I doing now? What do I do now? You need to have a backup plan. So you almost need to do another round of cells at that point, in just in case. So that's what I would suggest: do another round of cells at that point, just in case for the ones that haven't mated. And then it's simple: just find the find the failed virgin, kill her. Pop another cell in, and they'll take to that really, really easily. But then if that one doesn't mate, you've got to start thinking about shaking the bees out because that colony there is getting really, really old. You've got bees there that are six to eight weeks old that are not gonna—they're not gonna survive another cell going in. So maybe the backup plan is—is you buy queens as a backup plan. But with a bit of planning, that is doable. Uh, quite, quite a lot of people watching tonight, 223, which is, which is good. So I hope you're enjoying it. Um, if you, if you are enjoying it, I much appreciate a share. Share it on social media and that'd be brilliant. Vera Giles says, thanks. Regarding egg-laying workers, I might leave them a week and check for a mated queen. Eggs seem to be low down in the cells. So if they're low down in the cells, you've got a high chance that it is a drone-laying queen, which means that much easier to fix. Donna Morrison says, hi Lawrence, I've had a terrible experience today with a hive I inherited on the 10th of June. First few weeks absolutely fine, last 2 weeks have been horrendous, and today 20 stings to the hands, 100 to the suit. Um, just checking to see if there's any more on that note. Okay, it's— that's pretty bad. And colonies will do that at this time of the year, that they, they can pretend to be all nice when there's a good flow going on, and then when the flow stops, they become Horribly vicious. So hopefully they're not in a in a place where they're going to be harassing too many people. But it sounds like they need they need a requeen. But it's a good time of year to requeen. Kill the queen, put in a new one, and then at least you know next year you're not going to be in the same situation. And you only need one frame of one brood frame of honey to pay for that queen. On on the note of queens, we do have. Available queens this week. So I, I— a brilliant, brilliant piece of marketing or strategic planning from Black Mountain Honey here. So I really went high with the order this week because the orders have been flying in and we've just not been able to keep up with the pace. So I ordered loads more queens from Melita Bees, and then the sales have died a little bit. So hence the marketing emails coming through. Sorry about that, but we will, we will sell them all. We definitely will sell them all, but we won't have sold out in advance. So we always get like a little bit twitchy But what it means this week is that if you need queens, we will be able to sell them. Um, so we'll have them on Thursday, can send them on Thursday, can send them on Friday, but then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday next week we'll be able to send queens at short notice, which would be good. And it'll be the first time this year that we've actually kept queens over a weekend, um, which is, which is good. That's, that's part of the thing that I think people like about our website and our company is being able to go on and get queens and order before 4 PM for the next day. So at least for those 3 days of the year, we'll have some queens in stock, which would be good. I've just had a queen playing opossum when I picked her up to clip and mark. Never had that before. Oh, I almost squished her in anger at myself as I'd never damaged one before. Luckily, I'd left her in her cage and noticed she was alive when I got home, so took her back to a hive. Never had that before. What? No tea? So I'll take the opportunity there to have some tea. It's scary when they do that, isn't it? I do it. They go like stiff as a board. So for people that don't know what happens there, queens, they play dead. It's obviously like a survival mechanism that they have evolved and adapted to. But when you pick them up, you're picking up a queen, marking them, clipping their wing, and then you go put them— pop them back down and they're just dead. And you just think, I've just killed that queen. A really good queen, that one as well. I've killed her. She's dead. And they do it for like a couple of minutes, like completely dead. And it's so funny because when they come out of it, they're kind of like this. They're like dead. And then, is he, is he still there? Right, dead. And they're looking up at you, and then they just waddle off, and they're like, yeah, no, it's fine, just playing dead. But it's always, it's like a big relief when they, when they waddle off because you think, I've not killed the queen. I've never killed a queen picking up a queen, but it happens quite a lot that they, they faint like that or pretend to be dead is annoying. Chris Matthews Fly Fishing says, hi Lawrence, thanks for all your free info. We had a customer in this week with the Langstroth frames, uh, that the bees burrow through the sides and was able to give an explanation because of Black Mountain Honey. Excellent. Oh, thanks for that, Chris. It is annoying that they do that, but yeah, good that you got the info. Hope all is going well. John Hayes, I know you don't like the visual format, but is there a TechnoSet supplier in the UK? Uh, visual format. I'm confused there, John. I don't, I don't think there is. And if there is one, I'm not, I'm not naming his name because I'm, I'm not a fan of the person that was, uh, supplying them at one point. But no names, so we don't know who that is. I got a hive with the drone laying queen. How far away should I take them and shake them out? And got a hive, they were really nice and calm, and now they have turned really horrible. Is it down to the weather? She is the daughter of a queen I bought from you last year. I wish I hadn't read that second bit. So in terms of the next generation, F2, it's one of my personal hates. It's like the F2 generation saying shouldn't buy Buckfast queens because the F2 generation can be aggressive. And I think, well, it's not— is it the Buckfast's fault that the F2 generation is aggressive? Because it's kind of 50% of the drones in the air. And if you get Buckfast— I'm not, I'm not even— sorry, bang the mic. I'm not having to go at you, man. This is just talking out loud about the, like, what an F2 is and why they're not responsible for aggression. But if you take, say you've got 10 F1 Buckfast colonies and you take them to like the middle of nowhere on island, you'll go down to F2 and they will just be the same as the F1s, like identical. And you'll take them down to F3 and they'll just be the same because all they can mate with is the same nice friendly drones. So whatever's there just kind of stays there. Where if you're in the UK, you've got all these wild colonies and people keeping like local mongrels, and then there's like angry drones in the air, people with angry bees. And then the— you go down to F2 and they've mated with 50%, so you've got 50% of like unknown genetics from the local drones, but it's the Buckfast that make the bees aggressive. I know you've not said that, I'm not taking it out on you, man, but you do have like volatility being built into that there, so you just don't know what you're getting. So in the UK, you could get perfectly friendly F2 Buckfast, and you can get very, very aggressive F2 Buckfast. And some people will say it's because of the fact that the Buckfast is a hybrid So when a hybrid crosses back with like a near pure or like a local mongrel AMM, that's what's triggering the aggression. And I just, I just don't buy that. I just think you just— it's uncontrolled drone mating with drones of unknown origin. And it tends to be in local colon— in, in wild colonies, feral colonies, that it's like the angry colonies do best. And of course the angry colonies do best because no one goes out and robs them. So they live more, they live longer. You've got like a badger going in and he's— a badger is going to select between 2 colonies. Is he going to go into the one where they're just like, yeah, yeah, come in, it's fine? Or is he going to go into the one where they're like, get him, kill him? It's the one that's like chilled out that's going to be more open to dying out. So you're naturally selecting this angry trait that's in there, and, and then the Buckfast gets the bad rap for it. So I They can, they can go a bit angry like that when they mate with local drones, and it is not nice. But I would just say you kill them and then add in a new queen again, and they should be good. Um, in terms of the hive with the drone-laying queen, how far away do you need to take them? So with the drone-laying queen, you don't need to take them any distance whatsoever. Just, just kill the queen and put a new queen in. It should be fine. If you do want to shake them out again, you'd not really take them any distance. Just shake them out, take away the hive, take away the hive stand. and let them beg their way back in. The taking it away is to try and not let as many laying workers, if you've got laying workers, come back to the hives, but not even sure that that is 100% accurate anyway. Right, I've still got people— wow, I've just got people doing all the scores. That was ages ago, so I am very, very far behind on questions. Right, so let's speak up a little bit. Uh, speed up even. Uh, Peter B's collected 8 swarms in 2 weeks, running out of equipment. Very nice. Uh, Cub Rider says, I'm surprised just how many people don't realize that to subscribe is totally free on YouTube. I know, I, I get that as well. What was the one? I can't even think, I've had so many. It's banning people on YouTube is really, is really good, good fun and very easy. It's got the best silent ban feature that's going, so I'll show you it one day. You go on to a comment, if there's a comment of someone just like slagging something off, all you do is you just go on to it and go hide user from channel. And what it means for the user is that there's no difference whatsoever. He can still see all your videos, he can still comment on all your videos, but basically to everybody else on your videos, he becomes invisible. It is brilliant. So then no, people don't know they're getting banned, but they are getting banned. And they're thinking, why is no one responding to my really controversial comments I'm putting on there? It's like, because it's because you've been banned. You've been totally silently banned. It's brilliant. I do quite enjoy it. Aiden says, a product review I'd like to see is a pollen trap for a wooden national hive. I have a product. I have a pollen trap for a wooden national hive. It is of course from Abello, and it's not actually for a national hive, it's for some, some Polish hive, but the wooden national does fit on it, and I, I used it before. I did. I think I did a review on it. If you search the channel pollen trap review, it is on there. I was amazed how much pollen it collected in like a couple of days. You don't keep pollen traps on for very long, but it collected loads. It was really, really cool. I would like to do more trapping of pollen. I don't know what I would do with it though. It's quite hard to process. You need to, you need to clean it, and then you need to dry it to stop it going moldy, and the equipment to process it is Of course, very expensive, but it would be good. Daniel says, how long does the virgin queen take to start laying eggs? Thanks for knowledge advice. No problem. So a virgin queen, she emerges, takes about 5 to 7 days to become sexually mature, then she'll go out and mate. And she needs to mate within the first 3 weeks, so from becoming sexually mature, and then she'll take like 3 or 4 days after mating to come back and lay eggs. So it can vary from the day that she emerges, you're talking between like 15, if I've done the maths right, 15 to, I don't know, add 3 weeks onto that, 36 days. Is that right? Shocking maths. Something like that, 15 to 36 days from emerging to start laying eggs. If you're 36 days in, call it a month, a month since they've emerged and she's not laying eggs, then she is done for. Jay said, trying to find a virgin queen today, been demorated twice, nightmare. 2 hours later, shook swarm with the queen excluder at the entrance, see, uh, see what's what tomorrow. That is, that is the last resort, but it is a good last resort. Just take everything off the stand and then just set up a new hive or the same hive with the queen excluder over the front and shake everything out. And you do, you do find them. The problem is that they can occasionally get through queen excluders, virgin queens, because they're just bit smaller than a mated queen, but you should be okay because it is— it's like the size of the thorax that restricts them as opposed to their abdomen. So hopefully, hopefully you manage to fix it, but it is a nightmare. Like, finding them in nucs or normal-sized colonies is difficult, but finding them in like colonies that have been demoraid twice that are on 8 boxes or 9 boxes is a real challenge. So good luck with that. Oh, this is brilliant. Niels, who was the first person that I answered the comment on here today, he said he couldn't make it, but he has made it. You will see at the beginning I, I gave you a shout out and answered your comment. We are planning on getting the InstaVap soon. What's the difference in models and what accessories would you recommend? That is an interesting one. So I have got the older model and there is a newer model as well. And like, the, the bit inside of me that says I always want the latest and greatest model, uh, makes me want the newer model. And it is a little bit lighter, the newer model. But having held both of them and having seen how both of them work and how the displays differ, I think the older one's better. Don't tell Duncan I said that, it'll probably get back to him. I do think the older one's better, and I, I think the newer one is— sorry if you're watching, it doesn't make any difference if you're watching this, to be honest, Duncan. I could have my opinion, can't I? And I don't think, I don't think it will impact your sales regardless. But I think the newer one is cost-cutting in this disguise of making things easier or better. So the— there's less metal in the newer one, it's lighter. So you could say, well, that is, that is a positive, it being lighter, but there's less metal, so it's cheaper for them to make. But the big difference, and the thing that I much prefer about the one that I've got, it's got like a visual display. On it. It's got like an actual display so you can see the different 2 temperatures, like press buttons and stuff like that, whereas the other one's just got 3 red lights. And again, I think— I don't think that's an upgrade. I think that's cost cutting made to look like an upgrade. So I like the one that I've got. I like the older one, and I don't even know if they're going to continue selling the older one or just move fully over to the new one. I suspect they're just going to move over to the newer model because it's Cheaper to make, and I'm not—that's not me digging them out. Like it's it's a shrewd move. I'd do the same if I owned Instant Back, which is as long as you're getting the same end good product, and it is a really really good product. As long as the usability isn't diminished that much, you know, make it more profitable for the company. Of course, why why wouldn't you do that? But I do I do like the old one. I prefer the old one. I have to say. Marie says, I have 2 hives that I can't see if there is a queen or not. I can't see eggs or brood, but I did see the queens a few inspections ago. I took 3 frames from a strong hive, but no change. I'm just looking back to see if there's any more. No, um, I'm not sure what the question is, Marie. So you've got 2 hives, can't see if there's a queen or not, um, you can't see the eggs or brood, but did see the queen a few inspections ago. I took 3 frames from a strong hive, but no change. I'm not sure what the question is, sorry. If you— if you— I will answer it if you write it again underneath what the actual question is. I'll answer that for you. Um, Chrissy is, is slagging off my drawing, so you tell me stuff to draw, I'll draw it. I'm, I'm pretty shocking. I, I draw— this is like my drawing of people. I'm gonna do that and then like a little t-shirt and not forget the arms. And my arms always come out like that, and then they've always got— I've got like a dress with big feet. That's kind of, kind of how I rock a person. It's funny, isn't it? Like, some people are really good at art, and then some people are not good at art, and I, I fall into the latter camp, unfortunately. I'm glad you find it amusing though. Duncan Newton says, hi Lawrence, we've had 4 hives at our association apiary full of swarm cells with all the bees still in the hive, but the queen has already left. That's, that's interesting. I I get a lot of people message me saying, I've got, I've got a queenless hive, um, the bees definitely haven't swarmed and there's no queen in there. And then I talk to them and say, but are you sure they've not swarmed? They said, no, no, they've definitely not swarmed, the hive is full of bees. And I say, yeah, that's not— that doesn't mean they've not swarmed. Like, you get a colony that swarms and then the same day the hive is full of bees. Because there's just way too many bees in the hive to start off with. And you've got to think about like the density of the bees that are in the hive. You could have a hive that's got 50,000 bees in there— sorry, I hit the mic again— and they're filling 4 boxes. And then you can have a hive that's got 30,000 bees in there and they're filling 4 boxes. So either way, they're still full, but the density of bees is far greater before they swarmed. So I find it Difficult to believe that you've got 4 colonies. Exactly. You said, yeah, 4 hives full of swarm cells with all the bees still in the hive, but the queen has already left. So I think more likely what's happened there is that the queen's left, taken a swarm with her. The swarm cells are in there, and it's just— there's just still loads of bees in the colony, but the swarm— the queen has left, and she has swarmed with a swarm, prime swarm of bees if it's the first swarm of the year. But But if that's not the case, then I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I think that's what I would suspect in that instance. I found Frame of Feeders frames, 14x12 frames, drawn out really poorly, but plastic Langstroth frames are drawn out perfectly. Any thoughts? So I've really struggled with the 14x12. Well, yeah, all of, all of the frames and Feeders frames that I've had, but I have— I've got a couple of colonies now where they are They're good. Like, they're—I might as well draw it just so Chrissy can have a laugh. I've got colonies now where if that's if that's the frame like that, it's like well wonky in it. They they may be like that, kind of like something like that, and that bit there is drawn out, but they're still not doing that bottom bit, which is which is really really annoying. And I don't know, like I don't understand why it is. I'm just going to remove that again because I've seen people get them drawn out, and the ones that I've got like fully drawn out now, they're great, but they've just taken like 4 times the amount of time to get fully drawn out. And I just— maybe the UK's not set up correctly for plastic frames and wax, I don't know. Maybe the wax wasn't put on correctly or the correct thickness, something didn't go right with them. But I found the way to get them drawn out is just cram the bees in, like an unhealthy cramming. so they're going to swarm and they just eventually have to draw them out because they don't have any other option. But it is, yeah, it's a bit frustrating. Sounds like doing a Mr. Bean when doing the lives. Maybe get a blooper reel ready for Christmas. Yeah, let's definitely do that. What would be the outcome if you introduce a new mated queen into a hive of laying workers? The laying workers would just kill the introduced queen every single time. Got no chance. Says, got 13 hives, mostly Black Mountain Honey Queens, F1 or F2, and I can't remember the last time I needed my smoker. Very nice to work, definite for beginners. Excellent, good to hear that. And you've, you've ramped up your numbers since the beginning of the year. Chemtrails have now been officially named Homogeneous Cirrus. I, I just gone over my head in that joke. Is it— it is a joke, isn't it? I'm not sure. Sorry, it's getting late. An hour and 50 minutes in. What's the time? It's like 20 past 10. I'm shattered. Sorry, sorry, Keith. Regarding Leon's comment about drone layout or laying workers in one hive, maybe contact a local association to see if other beekeepers can help with a couple of frames of brood or a split. That's a really good shout. Yeah, go, go, go to your local beekeeping association and let them know the situation and say, look, I'm kind of— I need desperate help here. I've got this colony, I've got no way of fixing it, and I'm thinking about quitting. Can someone help? And maybe they suggest just shaking it out and someone will give you a split. That'd be brilliant. Great comment. My colony has a horrendous mite load at the moment. I just ordered some Apivay Oxal to use as soon as possible, and I know that it can't be used with supers on. If I remove the supers first, when can I put them back on? So you can put them back on immediately. So you can only not use apibioxal while the supers are on, but there's no, there's no like exclusion period, so there's no restriction on when you can put them back on. So you can just take them off or like get all the— shake, check them all out, get all— make sure all the bees— there'd be no point just like treating the brood box and leaving all the bees in the supers, but shake them all out or get them all out into the brood box, and you might need to add another brood box on to do that just for space. Zap them with the apibioxal. Put them straight back on. That works perfectly well. Puppy Chewed HD, love that. I'm definitely going to look at that as soon as I finish this stream. Is there any beekeeping apps for record keeping, or do you use a notepad? So I've looked at the vast majority of beekeeping apps, and I'm, I'm well one for technology, love a bit of technology. So I've looked at all of them thinking, oh, this is going to help me, and I've not found a single one that I like. And it's not because that the apps aren't good, but the apps are always set up for like a generic user, and the main problem with the apps is that you just get a sticky phone. It's as simple as that. And then at the end of the day, do you want like a really sticky phone? And it's not good for disease transmission as well, using an app where you're kind of sticky fingers and then you go on the phone and then go to the next hive and get your sticky fingers back on the phone. Perfect way to transmit disease around. So I'd I generally don't, don't even use a notepad at all, and this is why I've got such a bad memory when it comes to what I've done to my hives. But I'll just like write with pen on the back of the hive, oil-based pen, or underneath the roof, just anything like important that I need to know. And if there's no writing on there, I'll just assume that the inspection last time was good. Some people use bricks. I think, I think the colored bricks are a nice way of doing it as well, where you have like a brick that's got like colored different faces, and depending on the way that you put the brick down tells you about the status of the colony. I did, I did do it on someone. Someone, someone has used the idea now and made a product of it. But I used to have like a, you know, the queen disc. I love having— I do like having an extra thing. So you know the queen discs that you have? So you've got like a queen disc with like a circle like that, and then you have that on the hive, but then underneath the hive you have like these 4 different colors. So you basically just draw— liking, liking my drawing, Chrissy— you basically just draw like this little grid. So you've got blue, red, yellow, and green, whatever color you want. And then you put that over the top of it so you can kind of like turn it round. So then it means that you can either like— it could be green, green could just mean like everything's fine, or it could be like yellow, and you're just like turning this round to get the different colors. It's quite cool, and I did like— it's really simple to make. It costs like 50p to buy one of them, and then you just need some paint to paint the little colors underneath. But that works really well, and I think, I think that is like a far more usable way of indicating the status of a colony. And green could just be everything's fine, queen's there, eggs are there, like there's no, no issues. Red could be they swarmed, or red could be they're queenless. Red's probably something a bit more serious, isn't it? So like you found disease or something like that, but you just, you can create your own status. And there's not really like, you've got 4 statuses there, you could, you could probably do like a 6-color quadrant if you wanted as well with that disc. You're not really going to get more than 6 statuses on a beehive, and, and then that's pretty much all you need to know. You just come back each time, and once you do your inspections, you just turn the little disc around like that. So someone I did that video about 3 years ago showing that, and someone I know who I really like is a guy, Castle Hives, who sometimes comes on the live streams. They've done that and they have developed it, to be fair to them. They've made it way better than my one into like a proper product, and they've done like timings on the queen wheel as well. They've made it into something a lot better than what I did, but I did have that idea a good few years ago, and I think it is useful. Maybe I'll bring it back. Maybe I'll that on some of my hives. I'll put on my list to do the video again, and he's going to think, what's he doing stealing our idea? I'm only joking. Right, what's next? I've got a lot, a lot still to get through. Carl Bridges, he says, hi Lawrence, loving your videos, looking at getting my first hive, and I'm interested to see how you are getting on with your Paradise Smart Hive. So Paradise Smart Hive is pretty good, you know, I've been quite happy with it so far. The problem that I've had is that I— it was big and strong, double brood box working well. And then I did— I've not done the video yet, I've been really behind on editing videos— I did a walkaway split but with the intention of requeening. So I did that, and then the queen-right side of it tried to swarm, so I had to make a split. So I've gone from one double brood Smart Hive to 2 Smart Hive single brood and a split that tried to swarm. And so they're all like knocked back a little bit, but in terms of, in terms of usability, they're absolutely fine. Got no problems. Not a massive fan of the entrance. The entrance is the same on all the Paradise Smart Hives. It's not, it's not the best bit of it, but it works. And, and as for the supers, I've not used them yet. So what I might— I think what I'm probably going to do is merge them back together, both of the colonies on a single brood, or we just let them, we just let them build up for winter and then we do, we do the proper test next year. We're not getting loads of honey this year anyway, whatever we do, but they're good. Ben Davis says the bees have filled about seven frames of honey on the top box. Do you think they will try and swarm before the super comes? If you get the super in, just get the super in there as quick as you possibly can. It's but it's going to be close. Seven frames of honey there. They're not far away from hitting that roof, or they've probably hit the roof already. Ben says I've sent you a picture of the top super to show. I can't I can't get that while I'm doing it, Ben. I'll probably like turn. And off, break the stream or something like that. It's a shame that you can't post like pictures on here. That would be so good if we could do that. Uh, we can definitely do that on a Discord as well. If we were in a Discord doing this, my Discord, then we could post comments as well, or you could, you could send me stuff and I could put them up. We need, we need to do that. I'm going to speak to my Discord guru and see how we can merge the Discord into the live streams to make them more interactive, because I would love it if people could send the stuff in. at the same time, and I could show you stuff. We definitely need to do that. Now that you've had it for a while, what's your thought on the Apisolis? So I like the Apisolis. I love the idea. It works chilling out bees, calming them down, but on like a really big, strong, aggressive colony, I don't think it's the most effective use. I think a smoker is better for really big, strong, aggressive colonies, but I don't even use like a smoker anymore, so I've not given it like a full a full workout. I think on the global scale it's brilliant. Like, it, it solves a big, big problem that a lot of beekeepers will face, which is you can't— I think it's, I think it's illegal in some countries even to have a lit smoker. Like, you're not allowed to have a normal smoker, so you need something like the Apisolis. Um, but I, but I like it. I think it's a good product, and that's not just because they sent me one for free. Like, I do, I do think it's cool, and I like the smell of it as well. Uh, Aaron Paris says you're really good to make videos, nice picture. You'll get a big smile on my face if it says it's a good picture. It does, it does mean a lot to me, you know, because look at the setting and the wall and the, the logo and stuff. But maybe you can see like a few too many wrinkles with this resolution. Uh, Aaron also says I like the whiteboard. If they want to see the whiteboard, they have to go on the live. Don't stop using that whiteboard. No, I won't. The whiteboard is here to stay. That's not what you think if you're looking at that upside down. But I do like the whiteboard. The whiteboard is cool. We need to use the whiteboard more, but we need to add pictures and videos in some. I can add pictures and videos in. Let me see if I can just like tweak, because we can do videos and stuff. I can go like present and then Oh, I don't know. I could break it. I could break doing it. I won't do it now. I won't do it 2 hours into a stream, but I'll prepare something for next time. Like, I can, I can show you videos. I can present videos. I can present pictures and stuff like that. Um, no, we're not doing it. Do you see what I mean about trying to do 2 things at once? Like, I can't talk and do that at the same time. I just, I break, and I, I'm such a man. Uh, Thomas says, hi, can you tell me what sort of manual uncapper you use for heather honey? So for heather honey, we just use normal uncapper, just a knife, just cut the cappings off. But then you need some sort of, like, a pricker or a loosener, the needles that go in to, to loosen the honey because it's thixotropic, which means it doesn't flow unless you agitate it. So you have to agitate it to get it to flow, and it needs to flow to be able to flow the frames. But I had a really expensive loosener. I paid £5,000 for a loosener and a very expensive tangential kind of like a cage basket extractor. So you need both of those things combined. That's probably like £8,000, probably €10,000 if you're not in— if you're in the EU. But what I found, a way, way better way of doing it, is just pressing it out, pressing it out using a hydro press. And I'm really excited because this year I'm definitely going to get to use the hydro depressed. So I, I've moved away from the Heather Apiary. I'd like some, some issues at the Heather Apiary, but we can go back there now. So I've not got the bees to go back there, so Richard is bringing up a trailer full of bees to go to the Heather Apiary this year. Fingers crossed we're going to get a heather crop. What's the date? It's like the 13th of July, so we've got like 2 weeks until we're going to go up there. And I've got loads of uncapped— not uncapped, unwired foundation. I said to Richard, well, I'll give you this unwired foundation and stick it in your colonies, and then we'll we'll, we'll, uh, just cut it out and stick it in the press, press out all the honey. And he said, yeah, let's do that, that's fine. So that's what we do now with the, with the heather honey, is we just use unwired foundation and then get the honey, cut it out, stick it in the, the press, and then— Oh, I love it. Let's draw it, let's draw it. This is— so for anyone who's not seen a hydro press, this is how they work. They're brilliant. So you have a big kind of like container like that, and then in the middle you have like this bladder like that, and then you have a hose that comes up through there. You basically just connect that off to— there's supposed to be a tap, but not very good at drawing. So it comes off to a tap like that. So what you do is you put the honey in there, and all of this is like perforated. So like little holes, and then you have like a lining basket as well. So you put this liner in like that, which is like a thin woven liner, and then you put all your honey in there. You build up all the honey. Da da da da da. That's a honey all the way up to there, and then you turn the tap on. So just no electricity at all. It's just standard water pressure. So three bar it all works too. And then this bladder just gets bigger, so it inflates and inflates and it gets like massive like this. And then the pressure from that inflating bladder pushes the honey out through there, and then there's like a collection trough around the edge. Basically got a hole in it, and then you have a bucket underneath and it just falls down through the hole like that. So I think that's probably the best picture I've ever drawn. That if you didn't make sense of that, then I've got no hope for explaining anything using the whiteboard because I thought that was pretty good. But the beauty of that system there for Heather honey, and it is a real beautiful system, and this is the reason that I knew that I had to switch away from using the loosener and the cage basket, was that I'd put all the effort in, I'd uncap the frames, I'd loosen the honey, I'd put it in the swing cage basket, I'd extract it 2 or 3 times, get 60 or 70 90% of the honey out. I'd be really annoyed that the yield that I was getting out of it. And then I put it into buckets and it would all have like bits of comb and stuff like that in it. And then I'd keep it in the buckets because that's what I always did, like keep it raw processed in the buckets until I needed it. And then normally when you come to like filter it with runny honey, it's great. You just, you open up the buckets, you put it through a sieve, you let it set for a couple of days, all the wax settles up the top, and then you just go straight into jars. But with the heather honey, that secondary filtering process took like days. It took days to get it to go through the filters. Whereas with the, with the, the hydropress, it's done. It's all in one. Like, the filter is so fine on that woven mesh that goes in that it's already filtered. So you don't even need to do the secondary filtering, which saved me so much time. So That is what I would recommend, and it's not—they're not even that expensive. They are a fraction of the price of the looseners. The loosener is five grand. You'll easily get—I got an eighty liter stainless steel hydro press for a grand, and it will last forever. And you might need to change the bladder every now and again, but it's—it works really well. Right, where are we up to next? Alex Ward says, "Have you ever tried using a crown board under the top?" Brood box for Demerara with a couple of bee space holes to deter bees from coming up and storing honey in it, then remove after the brood hatches? Um, no, I've not tried that. You, you could— I guess you could do that. You need to make sure that the bees can— the bees can get out, because what you want is the brood to hatch nurse bees, and then the nurse bees go down, because otherwise you're not gonna have enough nurse bees downstairs for the queen laying all of the eggs. So it could hinder the colony a bit. I don't think them laying up the top brood box with honey is the end of the world, as long as you— once they've laid it all up with honey and it's not capped, as long as you switch it back down again underneath the brood box, then all is good. And they move it back up for you pretty quick. But I know what you mean. If you don't know that and you get caught out by it and you have treated with Apivar or any Amitraz-based product, then it is a bit annoying. David Davis says, hello from Texas, love your vids, nice to hear what's going on in the UK bee-wise. 39.4 degrees C predicted here next week, bees are toasty using vented supers below lids. Wow, we need to— what we need to do is merge the weather from North Wales with the weather from Texas. So we've got 16 degrees Celsius, you've got 39, merge them, take an average. If we both had 26, that would be pretty nice to be higher than that, wouldn't it? It'd be like 28. we would be very, very happy. I think I— you never hear me moaning that it's too hot ever. Like, I just don't— you don't get that in the UK. It doesn't get too hot for me in the UK. Even when it was— it was 40 degrees here once. We had once, didn't we, where it hit 40 degrees and I loved it. It was brilliant. Uh, it's not nice if you're doing something, but just don't do it. Just don't do something. We're not set up well in the UK for hot weather. Like, there's no air conditioning or anything like that, and luckily we very rarely get it. And we don't get, we don't get much snow either, do we? We just get constant drizzle. Sorry, I said I'd be a bit more, a bit more positive. Would you recommend double brood with your queens running on nationals? So yes, definitely yes, but with a caveat that if you're, if you're thinking now, well, I've got them on single brood, I wouldn't recommend putting them on double brood yet. Definitely not this year. So for me, double brood is like an early season thing. gives you much less risk of the bees swarming due to them being condensed, um, or due to them being running out of space. So I like to do— I might as well draw it. Tell me if it is annoying me drawing the same thing again because I did draw this before, but I find double brood really, really effective in the spring. So I'll draw these a bit bigger. So if you've got— that's your floor, and then that's your first brood box. And then I like to have the Ashworth feeder, so feeder, and then you've got your roof like that. So in the spring, people say you should put your brood box above the other brood box, but I always say no, put your brood box underneath. And we had loads of conversations about this earlier on this year, and people saying it's definitely, definitely not right, you're doing it wrong. But a number of people followed this method and it worked really, really well. So in the winter you're going to have like a cluster of bees kind of like clustering up in there, something like that. What's really important, 2 things in the winter, one for me is good insulation above the cluster, so a polyashworth feeder above the cluster here gives the bees really good insulation, but more important than that, the cluster is close to the feeder. So we're talking kind of like April now, cluster is close to the feeder which means that if the bees need feeding, I can feed them syrup in the feeder, But also, if you're feeding them fondant, like you just pretend that's you've got big slab of fondant sitting there as well. The cluster is in close contact to the fondant, so the bees aren't going to starve that way. So if you take that out, and I'll leave everything in kind of already there. Ah, you can tell I can't draw. So now this is the original brood box down here. And that's the cluster again with the floor. That's what a lot of people say that you should do in terms of double brood in the spring, is that you should put the brood box— and that's the second, that's the first— you should put the brood box above because the bees want to move upwards. And they're right, the bees do want to move upwards, but the 2 things that are causing you real issues here is that all of this warmth here is just going up into all of this big void up here. So you're losing all of your heat upwards, and like, that's your insulation up there. That's not where you want to be living, at the bottom of the house. You want to be at the top of the house. But the bigger risk is that the bees, the cluster of the bees, they can't go up here because to get the food, because this is all just new foundation. So I'm really not a massive fan of that at all. So the way that I suggest doing it now, and this is the perfect time to go from single brood to double brood is that if that is your first brood box, is that you put your second brood box underneath. And you can do this really, really early on in the year. I see some people get caught out with swarming like back end of March, and if you did this, you wouldn't get caught out with swarming at the back end of March. And what will happen here, the benefit that you've got, the bees are nice and cozy upstairs in the top. They've got their nice insulated polyashworth feeder, If they need to go up into the feeder to get syrup, they can. If you're feeding fondant, the fondant's still in contact with the cluster. What will happen to the cluster is it will go like this, and okay, they want to go upwards, but they will still keep on building that cluster up as much as they possibly can. And then once you get to the point that they've built up to that size and they're filling both of those brood boxes, it's the middle of May, it's early May, and you can just switch them around if you want to switch them around. Or more likely you're just going to take all of that off the top and then you just start putting your supers on over that like that. So double brooding, really, really good, but don't do it late on in the year just because you think you need to do it. Definitely wouldn't do it at this point in the year, and when you do come to do it, do it late— sorry, do it underneath like that as opposed to putting it on top, and your bees will thank you for it. Keeps them nice and cozy, gives them lots of space to expand, and means that they can still get make contact with their food. I like my whiteboard. Cheers, Lee. I shaked out a laying worker colony, but they came back and massive fighting going on with hundreds of dead bees. Will destroy them in future. So I think a lot of people do, do take that now. And when I go back up to this one tomorrow, I think, I think that's maybe what I'm gonna have to do with mine as well, is just destroy them. Because if they start killing the other colonies and dragging the other ones down with them they're just not worth the old bees that you're going to gain by keeping them. Moved 4 hives from wooded area to new apiary on a farm in the open. Farmer is more than happy to help. The difference to the bees not being under the tree canopy and cooler is remarkable. Big improvement. It really is. I remember this because I had all of my colonies— if you look at my early videos, they were all kind of under trees and in woodland— and bringing them out, they're loads friendlier, I found, but just work a lot harder, and you don't get anywhere near as much chalk brood, anywhere near as much sac brood, anywhere near as much kind of condensation or moldiness building on the frames over winter. Get your frames out— okay, so get your colonies out in the sunshine is good. Hi Lawrence, why can't you put a queen excluder on the entrance to the hive? Is there more to that, Wes? Um, you can. So like a lot of nucs have queen excluder functions on the entrance to the hive. In terms of stopping swarming though, it doesn't work because if you put a queen excluder on the front of the hive, all that happens is that when the queen tries to leave, she can't leave, so the swarm doesn't leave. And then as soon as a virgin can get out of that queen excluder, the swarm just leaves with the virgin. So it will work to stop your mated queen leaving, but it won't stop to leave the swarm— it won't work to stop the swarm leaving. So I'm cutting my words out now. Todd saying basswood and goldenrod open in Vermont now. Very nice. Need good weather for basswood if it's the same as the one over here. Need nice high, high temperature. High humidity is good as well, but then high temperature overnight really helps the, the lime. Uh, Doug Gunn says loving the slabs of broom from the gorgeous Queen supplied by you. I will leave a review soon. Thank you very much, Doug. John Hayes says thank you for switching off the adverts for your live stream. No one— not had one at all this evening. Damn, forgot to put the adverts on. No, I, I— what I'm going to do with the live streams now is, is not put the adverts on for the live stream, and then I'll switch them on for people watching it after the live stream. I won't put the adverts on. There we go. Damn, somebody's joking. It was deliberate. Uh, Johanna says, hi Lawrence, thanks for the session. I bought a lovely BMH Black Mountain honey buckfast queen in early May. So prolific, they don't like the single Langstroth brood box on my Flow Hive. Seem to want to swarm any of advice. So I just think the— I think in a Flow Hive in particular, you can't have a single brood box. It just doesn't work because it's— you're saying what, you have a single brood box and a single super? And I know that you can uncap the supers and take the honey out, but it's still a really small space for a full colony of bees at their absolute strength, especially a Buckfast colony of bees. It needs more space. So I would double brood them. It doesn't really help help you if they're starting to swarm at the moment. So maybe take a split to stop that, but next year double brood in a similar fashion to I showed you there, under double brood, and it will make them a lot easier to manage later on in the year. I'm genuinely running out of breath. I can feel my throat going. I'll have a drink. Thanks, Terry. It's good when people give me permission to have a drink. I appreciate it. About— I'm about a fifth of the way through that cup now. Uh, Flower Street Farm Bee says hello from Colorado, just finished with the farmer's market. Hello to you. Had no dark honey yet, must be behind. Could, could still come. It's kind of like the bramble, isn't it, that gives you the nice dark honey? I think definitely for us around here. Uh, David Stevens says I was planning on doing the Bailey comb exchange to change some colonies I've been given from National Deep to 14x12 to match the rest of my hives. Would you still recommend the shook swarm to do this? Yeah, it'd be absolutely fine. I think you'll, you'll be amazed at how strong your colonies are next year if you do a shook swarm this year. It does alleviate a huge amount of problems. You'll like it. Uh, Dat Boy Jacob says, good evening, when is the latest I can do a demerite? I've done one earlier in the season which is doing fantastic thanks to your video guidance. Excellent, glad to hear that. I wouldn't do another demerite now. Maybe just squeeze one more in, but if you're not going to do it this week, I would just— I'd run the risk of them swarming. I know it's easy for me to say that, isn't it, for other people's colonies? You've got to do what's right for you, but demerars late on in the season can cause issues if you've not got enough bees there and you're kind of trying to make the colony do something that they literally will not do, which is expand the brood nest even further. So I find it does It does become less effective the later that you go out, uh, go on throughout the season. Um, but yeah, if not in the next 2 weeks, I wouldn't do it. Had a Carnie queen from last year, would build up lots of chalk brood. Got rid of her, new queen laid well, built up, then dropped off with massive amounts of chalk brood. Removed all frames and replaced with new wax and new box. Should that sort the issue? Really, really interesting interesting point. I think I said this on my live stream as well, uh, on the live inspection, that the textbook answer for chalkbrood is that it's queen-related and that the queen can't— the queen's offspring can't cope with the fungal spores of chalkbrood that remain. They're kind of within most, most hives within the world. So you kill the queen, you put a new queen in, and it gets rid of all of the offspring of that old queen, replaces it with new offspring. a new brood that are capable of resisting those fungal spores. It's not, it's not correct. Again, the textbook is wrong because I've had that, and I've had that with really, really good breeder queens, hundreds of pounds worth of breeder queens, where there's been a bit of chalkbrood in the colony and you put a breeder queen in there and then the breeder queen takes over, and then the next year you get a little bit of chalkbrood through. And people would look at that and say, well, that, that that queen's no good, she's, she's giving chalk brood, right? That's her scratched off the breeding list. But if you put that colony into like an infested, a fully infested hive with frames that are millions or billions of these fungal spores, then you're asking a lot of that queen to just completely eliminate it. She might reduce it down. Holding the pen, I like pointing with the pen like this. But the answer is a shook swarm, and the shook swarm is not an answer to everything, but a severe chalkbrood infection, the answer is both of those things combined. Requeen with good stock that should be resistant to chalkbrood and to do a shook swarm at the same time, and then you should not have anywhere near as bad chalkbrood issues. But the other thing to say about chalkbrood as well is that it is very seasonal and, and a little bit temperamental as well, in that You'll get it one week and it'll be gone the next week. And it's very much dependent on like humidity in the hive and like the wind and the weather. And it just seems to come up out of nowhere and go again out of nowhere. And generally people find it early on in the spring when it's a little bit wetter, you'll see a little bit more chalkbrood. And then as you progress throughout a normal season, not 2024, but a normal season, it becomes like significantly better. and you don't see anywhere near as much chalkbrood. This year has been pretty bad. I've got chalkbrood in a few colonies this year that I wouldn't have expected to see it in, and I just put that down to the weather. So I don't even think there's much, much of an issue in there. I think they'll sort it out themselves. But I would do what you said there, replace with new wax in a new box, should that sort the issue. I believe it will. Wes Granger said, what's your thoughts on the killing of the bee in New Zealand? Perfectly healthy hives being put on the fire. Is it, is it, is it in New Zealand as well? I've not, I've not followed that. Is this for varroa mites that they're doing that as well, or is it the AFB for New Zealand? I forget which one it is. Uh, for AFB, if it is AFB, it's the only thing that you can do. There is no other way to stop the spread of AFB. If it's for varroa, definitely don't agree with burning hives for varroa because it just takes grasp so quickly that and multiplies so rapidly and readily as well that there's no way that you can ever ring-fence it and stop it. Once it's there, it's there. And no matter how many hives you burn, even if you burn every single hive in the country, there'll be a swarm or something, or something that's carried it somewhere else, and then it'll just start off again. So I don't agree with burning hives to stop varroa in countries where they've not got varroa. For AFB, I do agree with burning hives for AFB because It's the only thing that you can do to stop the spread. Oh, new queen is Caucasian, very nice, should be good. Uh, Stevie B Beehives says, good evening, caught a swarm but had to put it in a 5-frame 14 by 12 nuc donated to me. Really nice, healthy, calm. How can I get these onto my national hives? Oh, so yes, it's slightly more difficult doing it that way around. The only possible way for you to do it really, just thinking, you could do it with, you know, You could get like an angle grinder. This is, this is going to sound horrific, that's probably going to be the easiest way of doing it, is just shaking all of the bees off the frame and just cutting the bottom off. Draw it in it. Although it was probably explained reasonably well. If you've got a 14 by 12 frame like that and you just want a national frame, just cut it. Just get an angle grinder and just cut the bottom off. Make sure you measure it first, and then once you've cut that bit off, you need to get like a decent angle grinder to do that to get a nice clean cut. But then just get a piece of wood and then just staple up through like that way. That that would work, and it's it's like it's gonna be a bit messy, a bit sticky, and you'll lose a little bit of brood as well. But that would work. The other the other way of doing it. Get back to the whiteboard. Um, is building yourself some sort of national box to go on that 14 by 12 nuc. So if you've got like a 14 by 12 nuc, that's cross-section, and you've got your frames— these are 14 by 12 frames like that— you just need to build yourself another box that will sit on the top with national frames and just build it up like that. And then once the bees are built up there and the queen is up in that top box Put a queen excluder in the middle like that, and then if you've got more boxes, you can put more boxes on top. But I suspect that you won't. But that's that's kind of the only way to do it. And then the final final version is to shook swarm it. Could shook swarm it as well. That would work. Shook swarms on little colonies are not as I don't like shook swarming little colonies or nucs because it sets them back so much, and and they sometimes don't come back from it. So I wouldn't recommend that. Shooksworn for that, but it is, you know, option C for you there. There are loads of bees in there, always a struggle to put the last frame back in. So we've probably missed, um, I've forgotten the first bit of the what you've— what you wrote there now. Sorry about that, I'm not gonna be— I'm not gonna be able to go back through and find it. You can see that the tiredness is kicking in. Have you noticed that it has been harder to get queens mated this month? I've had to add a frame of eggs to one of my splits to see if the queen is a origin, or if they are queenless. I think the whole year has been a bit of a challenge to get a decent amount of queens mated. Some years it is the easiest thing in the world getting queens mated, and you'll get like upwards of 90% mated because the weather conditions are perfect. And in some countries it'll be upwards of 90% like all the, all the time. And that's why the imported queens are so good, because we get them from Malta, and Malta's just like, it's basically like African temperatures. But I always, I always look at the weather there because I'm always— I always want to make sure that the queens are not being mated well, because I know they're being mated well, but like the transit through. So I'm checking the temperatures and it's just like always 30 degrees, just like 30 degrees, 31. So it's not like scorching hot, but it's just perfect sweet spot. I'm well jealous. What's the best pen for marking queens? So I like the Toma pen. I don't like the Posca pen. I like any oil-based pen really. Richard, Richard swears by a little tub of nail varnish, like a pink spangly one. He likes a pink spangly nail varnish. Make sure if you're using nail varnish though that you let— you have to like pin the queen in a cage with no bees, nail varnish, and like pin her down so she can't move while it dries. Because if she starts getting it over herself, it's really— it takes quite a while to dry the nail varnish, but it is good. Lasts for ages, nail varnish. Um, Mike Moore says, any chance of a video showing how to use the Abello Queen Tower? My attempts keep failing. The Queen Tower? I've not seen— I've not seen the Abello Queen Tower. You have to send me— send me like a link and I can— if it's an— if there is an Abello Queen Tower, I can certainly do a review. Have I got one? I don't know. It— I know, I don't know, I'm losing it. Sorry, Mike, send me a link. Um, Marcus says, after watching your live apiary streams, you recall what different hives, nucs are doing by memory or by what queen cage is on top. Do you just have an amazing memory or do you keep records of the visits? So I think if you watched most of the live streams, you'll realize that I have a shocking memory and forget what's going on in all of the hives, in every single one. But in terms of the requeening, I have been deliberately requeening with specific genetics, so I do keep the queen cage on top for that very purpose. And then if they're like Like the German Buckfast I use, I can tell by the numbers on the back of the queens and the kind of discs that are on them. But apart from that, I don't have a very good memory, and I probably don't have the best method at all of doing it. Like, I will write important stuff under the roof, but I think I'll go back to using those discs. Those discs were really good, and you can buy them with the queen discs. You can buy like big ones, like the Payne's ones. You can buy like little mini ones as well, like that big. And the mini ones would be perfect for that. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna revamp that, bring that back, I think, because it was pretty cool. Hi Lawrence, I've returned from holiday after 2 weeks, did an inspection yesterday to find 6 hatched swarm cells. However, I also found eggs. Is this possible? And young larva too, not sure why. So, so yeah, that's perfectly possible. So it only takes 5 days from hatching to the queen, the virgin, being sexually mature, and she could just go out on day 1 after that and come back and be mated, and it seems like a few days after that. So kind of from the cells emerging to the eggs being laid, like 10 days. So good. And then you still see the cells there, you'd still see like the emerged cells unless they started ripping them all down. So that's good, sounds like you've got a good mating, which is positive. We went to a honey conference a few weekends ago. We were surprised that the second most adult Adulterated food produces honey. Yeah, it's seriously easy to adulterate honey though, isn't it? Just kind of whack a load of corn syrup or rice syrup into it and no one knows. The Morris Homestead says hello from New York. I'm in my colonies right now trying to get a queen out of the soup. It's very nice. It is very dark and very much nighttime here. It's 5 to 11 in the evening here and I'm feeling, I'm feeling it. We'll get to the bottom. We'll answer all these questions. Bunny's Bees, what's the yellow thing on your hand? PS, mop top is here for good now, I reckon. What, what? Yeah, you've lost me there. I've got a yellow thing on my hand. I don't know, I don't know. Hi mate, I'm looking at creamers. If you were to buy again, would you go for the premium Abello or stick with the standard? So I would say for every single piece of Abello kit that I've had where I've had the Classic versus the Premium, I've much preferred the Premium with the exception of the creamer. The creamer is like, it's definitely a better product, but it's the only one that doesn't really have any different features. It's just everything's a little bit better. So like the Perspex is a little bit thicker, the metal's a little bit thicker, um, and, and, and that's about it. There's no Additional functionality, apart from one thing. Actually, there is one thing that makes quite a big difference. Now, there is two things, come to think of it. So one is that you can it's got a much higher, it's got a much bigger engine. It's not an engine, is it? This wall there. It's got a much bigger motor, and the motor has got much higher torque. So it will work the honey when it's a lot thicker. Don't call Motors engines. And then the next one, and this one is quite important, is that the, the turn rate— you can go down to a really slow turn rate, much slower than on the Classic line. Like, get it so it's like literally turning like that, which is good because it doesn't froth it up too much. But I think, as I didn't have any issues with the torque in the motor on my other one, it still always got through it. And even with it going a little bit quicker, I didn't find that it whipped the honey too much at all. So I think you'll get away with the classic one. 100%, get one with a heating element though. Don't make that mistake. That is a really expensive mistake to buy a creamer without a heating element. So if that's— if you're thinking like, I'm not going to get a heating element, I'm going to go for a premium, that's a shocking decision. Don't do that one. I'm not sure even if they do a premium one without the heating element. Make sure you get a heating element for a creamer. Because if it sets in there, you're not getting it out. You've got no chance of getting it out. So make sure you get on with the heating element. I'm surprised they sell them without heating elements, I've got to say, because what's the point? David Bailey, I think it is a disgrace that you can purchase honey that has a product of China on the label in your local supermarket. I would agree with you there. Not that I'm against like Chinese products or anything like that, but I just I know that Chinese honey is regularly adulterated because you see videos on YouTube of them promoting products to sell as adulterated honey, so you know it happens. Arturo Ward says, hello, Lawrence. Hello to you too. Ben Davis, I've managed to make my own honey extractor, must have saved myself £250. Well, that's— I'd be interested to see how you get on with that, that sounds cool. Bee Tender, recently found bees on the outside of a hive frantically fanning, inside of the hive looks Inside of the hive looked wet on some of the frames, not feeding. Weather has been generally dry here. Have you seen this? It sounds like they're just fanning down honey. That's pretty normal. So you've got inside of the hive looked wet on some of the frames, so that would be like lots of nectar. Not feeding, yeah, so that's about right. Weather's been generally dry here, yeah. I think they've just gone and collected loads of nectar and they're just fanning it down, fanning off the moisture to get it to the right level to be stored, I think. Hey Matt, I think you're talking to someone else. Hi Adam, he says, what would you say is the better, 2 9-frame extractors or 1 20-frame extractor? Hmm, I would say 2 20-frame extractors. Sorry, I, I know I shouldn't have said that, and I apologize to your wallet in advance. You, you'll really annoy yourself with 9-frame extractors. You— if you've got 10 frames in a box, it's just gonna just annoy me so much that every single time you can't complete a whole box. That would, that would drive me insane. So if you can just work out how many frames you're going to have in each box depending on if you're having castellations or what spacing you've got, and then just make sure that each extractor can take at least one box. And I know, you know, if you've got like a 12-frame extractor and there's 10 in a box, you're still going to end up with them, but I just want to see like a little bit more progress. And also, the bigger the extractor in terms of the number of frames, obviously proportionally, the wider it is. But the wider that you get, the more stable it becomes. But also, the less stress that you get on the motor because you get like the natural centrifugal force. So I find that bigger, wider extractors work far more effortlessly, or less effortlessly, than smaller ones. The smaller ones wobble a little bit as well. The smaller ones wobble a little bit as well. So I would go with 2 20-frame extractors, or at least 2 12-frame extractors. But, but believe me, the difference between a 12-frame extractor and a 20-frame extractor is significant. It really is. And the same jump up again a 30-frame extractor is way better than a 20-frame extractor. And then you do— you start to get like diminishing returns after that. So you've got like a 50-frame extractor, it's, it's not as good. It's not as proportionally as good as like the jump up from 20 to 30. But if you're looking at just that one extractor, like, go for a 130-frame would be good. So my answer is gonna— my answer is gonna be 2 20-framers. or 130 frame. There we go. Sorry, Adam. Um, Arturo says, hello Lawrence, of all the queens you sell, which one, which would you advise as a good all-round bee which is calm and— is there more? I think, I think that was it. F1 Buckfast. It's by far and away our most popular queen for a reason, and it is just a good all-round bee. Does pretty much everything you want of it. Nice and calm, really prolific, lots of honey, low propensity to swarming, low propolis, low disease, good, good resistance to disease as well. It is a very good all-round hybrid bee. Hi Lawrence, have you seen the frames Richard Noel has started using? Plastic Langstroth frames that don't need waxing or waxless. Also, do you intend on stocking these frames? So we, so we don't stock anything. Um, so we're not, we're not geared up for stocking stuff, so we won't be stocking them. But no, I've not, I've not, I've not watched Richard for a while, so I'll have a look. He says they don't need waxing, so they're just waxless. I'm gonna have a look at that. No, I've not seen that, but I will, I will take a look. Lawrence, what do you think of the Thorn Quintrex queen cage and the Bee Gone spray? So the, the Quintrex cage, I just don't see there's a need for a Quintrex cage. And if you're— if you can bend metal, you can make it for like a few pennies, but not everyone's got like a metal bending machine for making it. I'm, I'm just not a fan of pushing cages, full stop. So for anyone who's not seen it, let's get the pen out. A quintet cage is just— it's basically a pushing cage. If you've got a frame of bees like that, that's kind of like top-down look on a frame of bees, it's just like a cage that you push in, so it kind of comes down like that, and then you've got your little queen wanders around on there and she can't get out. But you've got brood underneath that's emerging and turning into little baby bees. And then the idea is, is that she's accepted in there and you can take off the cage and everything's good. I, I just find that hopelessly queenless— get them hopelessly queenless and use the travel cages and you get incredibly good success rates. So it doesn't— you don't need to complicate it with a queen traps cage. So I wouldn't use it. Honey Bee Gone, again, I'm not a massive fan of using— it's like natural oils to clear supers. Again, for me, because I found like a really good way of clearing supers using a petrol blower, and a petrol blower on castellated supers is like instant. It really is instant. You just lift the box up, you've got a full box of bees, and just go, and then you've got an empty box of bees instantly. And there's no chemicals, there's no residues, there's no oils, there's no taste, there's just lots of bees in the air, and it's perfectly safe for the bees and really quick, and it's just a really good solution. So not a fan of either of those. Sorry if you've gone out and bought them, but I don't think there's anything wrong with either of them either. I think Quintrex cages are probably the best of all of the push-in cages because they're metal and because of the way that they kind of like sink right in. It means that the bees won't burrow through. So if you do want to use an introduction cage like that, it is a good queen introduction cage, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't use them personally. Hey Brian, hey Brian, I have brood in my supers, no queen excluder. I'm gonna shake 4 supers of bees into a double brood chamber to put my queen excluder in. Wish me luck. I'll wish you luck as well. Good luck. Hi Laurence, is there a practical way of moving bees about 50 meters? Oh, 50 meters. So 2 options. One, do it in the winter when you can just move them however far. We're not that far away from winter now, so I would just wait until winter. The other one is do it a foot a day. So just like 1 foot and then 1 foot and then 1 foot. And 1 foot a day does work, but it's tedious and not always practical. And then the only other way is moving them away for 6 weeks, moving them outside over 3 miles away for 6 weeks, and then putting them back again. So there's 3 options there, each slightly tedious. There's conversations going on in there, so obviously great people having conversations. I'll try to skip through them. How late in the season can I start varroa treatment? I've not seen any varroa on my colonies yet, including using inspection floors. So we don't use— we don't go any later than the 15th of August. Some people say that is very, very early. but I found that it is about the sweet spot. Don't delay it, don't go as late as you can trying to salvage a honey crop for the year, just get your bees nice and healthy for 2025, that is the way to do it. If you're selling an 8-ounce jar, what's the best price to sell? The best price to sell it at is the maximum price that you can achieve for that, so don't start off cheap, start off high, see if it sells. And then incrementally lower it down to get it to the point where you sell out in April. Don't sell out in November. Selling out in November is you've sold it too cheap, and it is very different depending on where you are. And, and it could, it could— there's no logic to it. It's just a case of how affluent the area is and how many beekeepers are in the area, or how many bee farmers are there. So you just need to, uh, do it as best you possibly can. Oh, as people are in the chat, uh, Robert says, hi Lawrence, also interested in your views on queens. I've got a lovely Black Mountain Honey Buckfast F1 queen, a lovely Caucasian queen, and a few AMMs. All of the AMMs are more pingy, ranging from tolerable to nasty. I'm guessing there's a follow-up to this. Oh no, there wasn't, it was just that. So that, that's kind of my experience with them as well, which is some, some are okay some of them not okay, and, and generally didn't do what I wanted them to do. And the, the queens that are selected and bred from really good stock generally perform a lot better and way calmer. Uh, you could also call them drama queens. I like that, it's good. I've not used that before. Uh, says, Lawrence, would you sell clipped queens for people who want them clipped? So I'm Unfortunately not. No, we don't. We don't sell clipped queens, and the reason that we don't sell clipped queens is that we find that we don't. We don't. They don't introduce quite as well, and you'll get more forced super seizures on clipped queens. I know a lot of people sell clipped queens, but we we don't like it. Don't like doing it, and it it just it just kind of like complicates the issue a little bit. And we have we've sold clipped queens in the past, and we found that you get more failed introductions from clipped queens. So we find it's better just to get them laying and then clip them afterwards. And it is practice, practice on your drones. That's the best way to do it, just clip the drones. I know it's a bit harsh, they'll never get out to go and mate, but there's, there's a lot of drones. Today I noticed for the first time my colonies have loads of big Buckfast drones and they are beautifully orange. My hives are all F1 Buckfast 11 hives. I like big orange drones, they're cool, aren't they? Hi Lawrence, first time watching your live stream. Love the format, real-time Q&A and audience interaction. Thank you, Matt. Thanks for watching. Tyrell's Honey, uh, Lawrence, why did you go back to the standard veil on the Ultra? I bought a new Ultra with a Clear View glass after your video. It was weird in the beginning, but now I get used to it and like it better. So there's only one simple reason that I don't use it in my videos, and I just— I don't know how I didn't see it, excuse the pun, before, and it's the glare. So if I wasn't filming, I would use the— I would use the clear Perspex one I really like it. It's just like the field of view is like— it's just like you're not wearing a veil, isn't it? It's brilliant. And you can just see stuff so much better. And if I had like eye issues as well, I can see how it would be— it would be a game changer for people. But when I have it on, I just get like this glare like on the camera. So I can see perfectly through it, but the camera can't see me. So the whole point was that I was supposed to be able to see my face on the camera. And ironically, you can see it better on the one that's not the clear view. That's, that's the only reason why I don't wear it. Is there a reason why bees chew through the wax leaving holes in the frames? I always found it very odd. So it's just for access around the hive. It's sometimes to do with spacing of the frames. If the frame spacing is wrong and there's not a bee space on the outside of the frame, so they'll chew one on the inside like that. But it's just so they can get around a little bit easier. Lynette says, I work my Langstroth hives from the side. So you can, if you've got a hive stand with say like 2 hives on, you can come in and work from the side and you're effectively working them the warm way. But if you have them stacked on like 4 or 6s, then the ones on the side you can do that, but all the ones in the middle you have no option but to work it from behind. Broughton Bees says, had to do a swarm split today on a Black Mountain Honey colony. I got from your last shipment. Queen on order for the now queenless hive, but I'll get her on day 6. What to do with her until day 8? So as soon as she arrives, put her in and then just wait until day 8. Take down all of the queen cells and pop the tab on the same day. Safest place for her is in the colony. There's no queen, so they will feed her. All of the nurse bees will feed her and keep her ripe and ready for you releasing her. Lawrence, I did the split last year and they have been so calm, like The mother just turned nasty the past couple of weeks. Got other hives that I'm— that I've split from my F1, they are great like their mum. So you will get that, that versus, uh, the variability in the F2s, but it is, it is the time of year as well. You're at peak colony numbers and the flow is probably dying down in some areas now, so they just get defensive of their honey crop. So I'd say it's perfectly normal. Have been looking at varroa treatments. Have you any experience with Varomed? So I've used, I've used Varomed. So it's a mixture of oxalic acid and formic acid, I think, from recollection. And it's, it's fine. It was fine when I used it, but I don't really do it in like a scientific way. Best person to look if you want like the data is The Apiarist. He does his blog and he'd give you all the numbers and all the curves and stuff. And he, if you message him and say, can you do, you do Varomed? And he'll give it like, he'll give you the down low on it. But it works, and I think it works like oxalic acid drizzling works. And Varomed is basically oxalic acid drizzling with a bit of formic acid thrown in for good measure. And formic acid is good because it does penetrate below the, below the cappings as well. But I've not, I've not seen like the numbers, and I've not like done enough tests on it myself, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that. But from, from what I hear, it is good. It is a good treatment that works. Uh, Mem says, I've taken 5 splits from your queen, all exactly like mum. I did the split last year and she was calm, just turned nice in the last 2 weeks. Um, your F1 I got from you is the best queen, and tell everyone. Thank you very much, Mem. Are you still using the Apisolis? Not noticed it in any videos for a while. So I've not really used any smokers in any videos for a while. Like, I keep my smokers and my fuel and stuff in the car in case that I need them, but they're pretty chilled. I don't, I don't see the reason for like complicating it by bringing smokers and vaporizers and stuff out if I don't need them. I might, I might crack them out just for, just for some fun. Marie says, I put the hive— the hive I put the 3 frames of eggs and brood in not made any queen cells, and I can't still not see the original queen. Any tip on that? So if they— if you put frame of eggs in and they've not made any queen cells, it is 100% likely that the bees think they've got a queen. Doesn't always mean they do have a queen, but it means they think they've got a queen, be it a virgin queen, drone-laying queen, mated queen. They think they've got a queen, so you need to go in there, you need to find the queen, and you need to kill the queen before introducing anything in. That happened to me when 2 hives were rammed with bees, but one did swarm and had 2 swarm cells that definitely emerged. Any— and I thought they didn't swarm. I've missed, I've missed the first bit of that, John. Sorry about that. Cool name. Says, I've got a double brood on a very busy hive, but end of the season, would it be best to split and requeen and have a second new colony come autumn/winter? So if, if you've got a double brood that is kind of like completely full with like 10, 12, 14 frames of brood, yep, just, just split it nice and early and you might as well just take 2 colonies into winter. Don't do it at the end of September, do it kind of like now or early August at the very latest. Stephen Meacham says, I now have 22 hives and have loads of queen cells and queens not leaving. Would you put that down to the weather being so bad? It's, it's the worst possible weather. It's absolutely shocking and nothing else. Uh, Illuminati says, what we need is a stick on the voice recorder. Oh, I think a stick on the hive recorder. There we go. That makes more sense. Yeah, that would be good. Uh, John says, I have used a pair of earbuds linked to my phone for the microphone and used a voice recorder app on my phone. So it's good, but then you've got to go back and listen to the voice app and then probably transcribe it into some sort of text. So I, I can see how for some people that, that might be useful, but I wouldn't use that one. Hit the thumbs up before you leave. That's very good. We're nearly 3 hours in, 2 hours and 45 minutes in and I can properly feel it now. And you might sense that I'm getting through the questions now a bit quicker. UK Honey Marketing Board is here to answer all of your UK honey-based questions. Very good at that. Bob Ross via Lawrence— that one's gone over my head as well. Michael Critwell, late to the party. Uh, Lawrence is a tropical heat guy for real. I do, I love it. You never, never hear me complain about— complain about the heat. Uh, William Sharples says, could I use a fruit press for heather honey? So I started off using a fruit press for heather honey, and you kind of— you're turning the— you're turning the, the spindle and you're thinking, oh, this is working good. And it's just you don't get as good a yield as using the hydropress. I think I was getting like a 50-ish percent yield versus you get like 100% yield, maybe like high 90s using the hydropress. But the manual press, you just, you just like, you just can't get enough leverage on it to to make it work, and you feel like things are grinding together. Like, it's not, not what you want to be putting your honey through— grinding metal. Uh, right. I have over 20 hives at the moment. My 2023 overwinter Black Mountain Honey Queen is in my top 2 performers this season. Genuinely devastated we're not number 1, Ben. But he says we would highly, highly recommend, so thank you for that. Thanks very much, Lawrence. We'll catch up with the rest of this tomorrow, guys. Let the man Go to bed. Nighty night. Not long to go. I can sense it. I can sense we're getting towards the end. I'm going on holiday on the 27th for 2 weeks. Should I still be worried about swarming? So 27th July, you should be okay. Should be okay. Make sure you give them an extra couple of supers would be my top tip. What is the cutoff day for the next week delivery day? So next week, the queens arrive with us on a Thursday morning. So you will send them out on a Thursday. So for next week, if you want them delivered on Friday, on Saturday, you need to order by 4 PM on Thursday, and you'll be able to order by 4 PM on Friday for the Saturday delivery as well. Uh, UK Honey Marketing Board: New Zealand have placed an exemption on oxalic acid. Keepers can use it as they see fit. Everyone, anyone with sense— the US has done the same, and it's just, they've done tests, they said yeah, it's absolutely fine to use it. And the UK, they say no, you use apibioxal. Pat the 14th says, trying to have— trying to nice hive move, maybe trying to move a few hives with the wheelbarrow but unbalanced. Have you got a good tip on modified wheelbarrow to move hives around to keep them level on moving? No, not— I just— I'm a ratchet strap man, so I just kind of like ratchet strap them up and move. I'm guessing that is what you said there, trying to nice a few hives with a wheelbarrow. I'm guessing it is move, isn't it? Right, okay. No, so I just lift them up, ratchet strap, lift them up, and complain about my bad back later. Uh, Mike Moore says, I'm calling it a Queen Tower, but it's the one you reviewed some time back. It has 2 sides of mini frames and a feeder on top. Okay, is it— is their queen rearing nuc? Um, so I, I sold them. I sold them. Yeah, just because— and the only reason I— they're really good mini mating nucs. The only reason I sold them is I just wanted to keep everything everything standardized on a single frame size, and that was all it was. So we use BS Honeybees mating nucs now, 3 framers. Hi Lawrence, what do you do to a Demerara once you've harvested? Condense down to a single brood or split into 2? So we always condense it down to a single brood. Um, it's a little bit packed, so if they are just way too packed, I'll condense it down into a double brood, give them another box. At the time of writing this, you're 2 and a half hours in with of comments to go. If we could send pictures and video on here, you'd be at it all night, but that's fine. I don't mind doing it. You— like, my customers give me a great sense of kind of pleasure and give me the ability to run my business and my— me and my wife's business in the way that we want to run it and do, do quite well off the back of it. So it is the, the least that I can do, come on here and answer people's questions. Do you think you can overwinter on a single National Deep with Buckfast? Definitely yes, many, many people do it. You can do that, no problem. Julian Lawley, glad that the question came up about you selling Clip Queens. Thanks for the great info, looking forward to receiving Buckfast F1 from you on Friday. Sure, you'll be very happy with it. Wilbur McDougall says, what's the best method to turn set honey back to runny without affecting the flavor? So the only, the only real method of doing it is heating it up, and you just try and heat it up not too much in order to reset the crystalline structure so that it doesn't reset again really quickly without affecting the flavor. And I think if you do it quickly, it doesn't affect the flavor. Excellent live cast. Thank you very much. We'll post on the Facebook group. Cheers, John. My top 2 hives are neck and neck. The other one is the daughter of the 2023 Black Mountain Honey Queen, so keeping it in the family. Oh, that's okay. So we're top 2. Take that. David McDowell's had enough. He says good night. See you, David. And the last one's good day from South Africa, great content. David jumped in as well, says thanks, Lawrence, great live as always. I'm definitely done. That is a long live stream, 2 hours and 48 minutes. We seem to get like to the same point every, every week that is like nearly 3 hours, but we never get to 3 hours. Hopefully it was useful. Hopefully I answered some questions. Hopefully you found the whiteboard useful. I'll be back in 2 weeks' time. We'll do some more live apiary inspections in between there, and I have got a ton of videos I need to edit, so you will see plenty going on on YouTube over the next few weeks. But I hope you all have a good night, a good weekend. I hope England win, and best of luck for the rest of the beekeeping season.