Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Stewart Spinks - Episode 16

So we are live, and this is without a doubt the, the most proudest moment of my YouTube career to date because we've got Stuart Spinks from the Norfolk Honey Company here today with us to have a chat. So Stuart, thank you so much for joining us. I've really enjoyed our little 15-minute preamble. I don't— I'm not going to say for anyone who doesn't know who you are because everyone will know who you are, but would you just like to introduce yourself to everyone on the stream here? And say hello.

Yeah, hi everyone, I'm Stuart from the Norfolk Honey Company. We run a commercial bee farming outfit here in Norfolk and we try to produce videos to help other beekeepers. So yeah, excellent.

So thanks for the intro. I started beekeeping about 10 years ago in Birmingham out of swarmland And I remember that the weekend that I had the swarm land, I was so excited, as you would be, the first ever swarm that you get and it's sitting in your garden. And I remember just watching, binge-watching the YouTube videos, your YouTube videos, and there wasn't much, there wasn't much choice at that point. It was a case of you, you type beekeeping into YouTube and it was all of your videos, and they were so good. So you truly inspired me to become a beekeeper and also inspired me to do my own YouTube channel. So thank you for that.

Yeah, nice to be here this evening with you, Laurence.

Thanks, Stuart. So we are, for the first time tonight, we are streaming across 3 different platforms, so you might see the alerts pop up on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. So we'll see how that goes. You can ask questions in the chat, and we've got 7 questions to start us off, so we'll jump straight into it. Uh, just, yeah, we'll go for it and I'll answer some So first question, I've not got the names down here, but is due to the late spring cold snap, will you be feeding pollen sub or patties?

Yeah, so we've already been feeding. We actually harvest pollen from our colonies and feed it back to the bees generally at this time of the year here in Norfolk, and I think The one thing to say is that wherever you are watching this from, your local conditions really do dictate what you need to do and when you need to do it. So what I'm doing here in Norfolk can be completely different to other parts of the UK, let alone around the world. So you have to take into account your local situation before you plough ahead with doing anything. But we, yeah, so we We mix our own pollen with fondant, so we just mix it into baker's fondant, and we feed that. We try to feed it as early as we can without being excessively early, so maybe late February we start to get a little bit of pollen into some of the colonies. And again, I think the the best thing about beekeeping is there are so many options, so you don't have to feed pollen. You don't. To do anything in beekeeping. Whatever you want to do with your beekeeping is perfectly fine. There are, of course, a few simple rules to follow to help beekeeping be successful for you, but generally, you know, whatever you want to do is perfectly fine. So we try to build up our colonies for the oilseed rape crop. So we have an awful lot of oilseed rape in Norfolk, and And we keep our bees on farms predominantly close to home over the winter, but they are on farms that have oilseed rape. So we're trying to maximize a crop of oilseed rape nectar that comes in, and we use that to build up colonies and also to take a honey crop. At the moment, we're into some crazy warm weather, and The locally, we've got something called goat willow that is in flower. It's, it's just starting to flower, big puffy flowers full of pollen, and bees absolutely love it. And as soon as it warms up, they're all over it, and they'll just ignore— certainly pollen substitute, they will completely ignore in favor of a natural pollen. And so as long as we've got access to goat willow, and then subsequently those other flowering spring plants, there's probably not any need for us to continue feeding with our pollen. Having said that, if we were to be hit badly by a cold snap into April, then we would look to switch back to feeding some pollen substitute, or as we're doing, pollen. And the reason for that is Once you get a large brood nest area and the bees are developing that brood nest into a really large patch of brood, the last thing you want is for them to run out of their reserves, so running out of either honey stores, be it fondant if you've fed them fondant, or pollen and pollen substitute. So once you start feeding them, you do need to keep an eye on them, but I have a feeling, touch wood, we might well be through the very worst of it, and we shouldn't need to be feeding them any pollen substitute or patties from this point on.

Fingers crossed. It's an interesting topic. I've recently just done a video saying why I'm so glad that I've not fed any pollen sub this year, because about a week ago we had like 13, 14 inches of snow, and it was like a real genuine like week-long cold snap. It's been so cold up here, the bees have just not been flying. So I think for me, I was happy that I didn't feed any pollen sub because we've got nothing to build them up to.

Right.

It's just there's no, there's no oilseed rape or anything. And if I'd have built them up, I would have had real issues with them just being locked away. But I think now, at this point, if the weather turned now and it was continually like rainy and drizzly but warm, then I think I'd probably go and add some then just to keep them Take it away.

Yeah, it's really important that people look at their local conditions. It's all well and good for me to say we're not going to feed or we are going to feed, be it fondant, pollen sub, or whatever we're giving them, but for your own individual local area, it's so important just to see what's happening and to put that into context with your bees. So think about Especially for the kind of the beginner beekeepers that are out there, think about what your bees are doing at this time of the year, and if you've not got the experience, then grab a book or talk to a more experienced beekeeper and think about the size of the colony that you've got and the progress that they're going to make, and put that into context of your local weather conditions and whether you need to feed them or not.

That's really good advice. All right, next question then. So it says, what months do you typically harvest honey, and do you harvest multiple times throughout the year?

Yeah, so, you know, I actually had to look at our Google Photos to just check the time of year that we do actually harvest because my memory is just rubbish. So we have to write everything down that's important to us, and that mostly goes on the the hive roofs. However, last year, as an example, we harvested in the 3rd week of May, and that was the oilseed rape crop and the spring crop. And interestingly, last year, for the first time in a long time, we produced a fantastic hawthorn honey, and it was a really special honey. Not masses, you know, just— maybe 100 kilos or so, but it was absolutely gorgeous and well worth separating out from the oilseed rape honey. And you know that it's completely different, you can see that it's different, so it's worth separating. So we did that in May, and that tends to be our regular spring harvest. And then again, we— up until this year, We've always finished our honey production by the end of July, so by the first week of August normally we're taking off all of the honey and extracting. This year we do have an opportunity to go possibly to some heather, so we might well give that a try. Never happened before, so, you know, it'll be completely new to me. So after all these years of beekeeping, We're going to experience something completely new, which is, you know, one of the things I love about beekeeping. So yeah, middle of May and then first or second week of August is when we harvest our honey.

I cannot wait to see your adventure to the heather. It's probably my favourite thing in beekeeping is opening up a hive at the heather, and the smell is just the most Overpowering in the world. It really is the very best, so I will look forward to that with great interest.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I've just— that was the perfect segue into my next question as well, which is, what is your favourite part about keeping bees? I've told you mine.

Yeah, so favourite part about keeping bees, you know, it's possibly a bit of a cliché, but it is helping other beekeepers. I absolutely love being able to help somebody who's maybe new to beekeeping or has a particular problem with their beekeeping. Maybe it's pests and diseases, or they're looking to solve why they can't produce any honey. They want to put in a new queen and they don't know how to. I just get a big kick out of seeing people get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of their beekeeping. I guess if I were forced to park that and think about beekeeping generally, for me, I would take it back actually to my very first few years of beekeeping. We lived in a mid-terrace house here in Norwich, and we had a very small garden, and it had a kind of potting shed at the end of the garden. 2 or 3 windows facing out towards the house, and that was where I made up all of my frames and put the wax in and cleaned all the propolis off. And in the spring, I'd go into the shed, open up a new pack of foundation, and we'd scrape down some boxes. And just that smell of beekeeping in the spring is probably the best thing ever. It's just a wonderful thing to have if you've got your beekeeping equipment in a shed. And you've sat out all winter waiting for the new season to start, that kind of rush of the new season. I, having never done a parachute jump, I— people laugh at me because I liken it to a parachute jump. We spend all winter kind of drifting down gently to the ground, and then in the last few weeks you get that ground rush situation where the season's upon you and you've really got to get everything together. all of a sudden, and we seem to fail every year. So I think my favourite part about beekeeping is coming into the spring from the winter and just the joy of everything around spring.

There's definitely a meme in there somewhere in terms of you hitting the ground in that parachute and then just being a massive tangled mess because—

Yeah, in a bee suit, no doubt.

The first thing that you said about teaching and helping other people like that comes across so much in your videos, in that—

thank you—

so much time to, to, to give to people. And it's not a, well, here's the answer. You go in and you layer it and give all of the detail and so generous with the information. So yeah, you really can see that. Okay, so next question, uh, what, what are your plans for the beekeeping season?

Yeah, so lots of plans. Um, we started planning Last autumn, and what we were planning to do was to increase our colony numbers. And unfortunately, we experienced possibly the worst wasp population attack that we've ever had in one of our apiaries. So we.

If—

And people have watched the videos, we have the fishing lakes apiaries that we've got, and they're old gravel pits, and it would appear that the ground being sandy and gravelly is perfect for wasp nests. And so we split a lot of colonies last autumn to make up overwintering nucs, and we lost a huge number of them. So we've had to replan our spring, and what we're actually going to do is to split colonies this spring, which will obviously reduce the amount of honey crop that we get in the spring, but we're committed to pollinating some borage in the summer, so we need to increase our numbers to be able to pollinate the borage, but also of course have strong enough colonies to take a crop off that. So we've got Spring splits, and the way that we're going to do those is, if anyone's seen our Patreon videos, we use the double brood split system. We've used the Demery split system, a vertical split, lots of different names for them, but that worked really well for us last spring, so we're going to do that again. So double up with brood boxes, and then once we've got brood all the way through those double brood, we can then split them. One box will have a queen, one will be queenless, and then we'll introduce a queen. In very simplistic terms, we'll introduce a queen into the queenless brood box. We're pollinating oilseed rape this spring, so we'll have the bees on oilseed rape. We're going to the borage, as I mentioned. Somewhere in between the oilseed rape and the borage there will be some field beans, so we, we're lucky enough to have some field beans. Doesn't always produce a great deal of nectar, the conditions have to be right, but when it does, it kind of floods in fairly quickly. And then of course there's the possibility of the heather crop that we may be able to take, still negotiating that, and I'm kind of excited, anxious about the whole situation because we don't really have a great deal of Heather here in Norfolk, so we're going to have to take the bees on a fairly lengthy journey, which we've, you know, we do when we take the bees to the borage, but, you know, it will be a different type of journey for us. And I guess, you know, our subscription Patreon page is a major part of what we do through the year and through the active season. We'll produce usually 3 videos a week. We've got the weekly podcast that I produce as well. Everything is done by myself and Steph, who helps me part-time, and it takes an awful lot of work. And I'm sure, Laurence, you know only too well, the video that goes out is a very shortened version of all the takes and retakes that we try to do in order to maybe get our language right so that we're explaining things properly. It's really difficult, particularly for us blokes, to kind of multitask and to try to think about what we're saying on the one hand, try not to swear when we've been stung on the other hand, and put across exactly what we're trying to do. So we do all of that, all of the admin behind that. And we'll be doing that this year as well. And it's been a couple of years since we've regularly posted on YouTube for various reasons, which I won't bore everyone with, but we're hoping this year to get back onto YouTube once a week to be able to share some of our journey as well. So that's, you know, that's going to be quite busy, 4 videos a week plus the podcast, which goes out. We've just, I've literally just posted and published to Patreon our, I think it's 250th podcast, so we've been doing it for 5 years and I think in that time I've probably only missed a dozen weeks, so you know I'm quite proud of that because you know there's a lot of work that goes into that. And then finally our local association, the Norwich and District Beekeepers Association, has a teaching apiary And we've just secured— I've just helped secure a fabulous paddock where we can move our teaching apiary to, and it's just going to be such a wonderful environment to be able to teach beginner beekeepers. And I'm involved with that teaching process as well. We're running some beginner sessions and we'll be inspecting on a weekly basis, so there's a lot involved in there. Fingers crossed. I did notice Matt posted a question about the Ranger. I just saw it fly through. The Ford Ranger has had a checkered past. We've had lots of issues with it, but at the moment, touch wood, it's doing just fine. Thanks, Matt. I'm hoping that it will continue for another year or two, and then we're going to have to think about maybe replacing it. But yeah, it's, it's going to be an interesting drive up to the heather with With the Ranger.

It sounds like—

and that'll be us through to Christmas again, Laurence. That'll be the year done.

What an amazing set of plans. Have you been to the Borage before?

I think this is our 4th year. It's really interesting, funny story. I've never been able to get my bees onto Borage. Years and years and years I've been trying, trying to find somebody that will allow me to take my bees to the Borage. And then a few seasons ago, our first trip down, I think it was— this will be probably our 4th year, 3rd year, somebody out there will know more than me, to be honest. But I had a phone call from a guy who'd been onto the website and gave me a call to ask if I'd got enough colonies to pollinate his borage, and literally the next week had another phone call from another farmer who wanted me to pollinate his borage. So it's just, you know, really crazy how things happen. And it's a bit like trying to find a new apiary. I'm sure lots and lots of people out there will go, how do I find a new apiary? How do I actually get my bees out of the back garden because they keep chasing me down the garden path and into an out apiary? And when you first start, it seems almost impossible. And it's, you know, some people like myself, don't want to go banging on farmers' doors and asking if we can put our bees on their land, but as soon as you get one, you'll find that more and more will pop up, so persevere with it and just ask around, get your name out there, and you'll soon find people will have land for you to put your bees on.

There's nothing better than getting your bees in and out, April, isn't there? Yeah, I had 36 colonies in my back garden And that was, that was 36 too many, I think. And then the relief from getting them out of there and just getting them into somewhere else that was nice and isolated, and it was just a lovely place to go and be— excuse the terrible pun— but just to, just to be there in, in the forest doing nothing other than just checking your bees. It was great, and, and my wife was really happy about it as well.

Oh, there's nothing better than— we have wonderful hobby business, you know, you're out in the sunshine, sometimes the pouring rain, but you're with your bees, you know, that's your office in the fields of this wonderful country that we have. I can't think of anything better, and although my wife is in the room next door, I have to say, since taking on beekeeping full-time as a career option, I don't really think I've worked a day in my life since that point, it just, it's just such a joy to be out with the bees. I love every minute of it.

Yeah, we're definitely very privileged. Just on the borage, the final thing, I love borage honey. So some, it's a bit like oilseed rape for some people. Some people really don't like it, but borage honey is, I think, my favourite honey. We never take our bees to the borage because we only grow sheep in Wales, so you don't get any of that good fun arable crop. But we buy in borage honey to sell and it is my favourite. I love the taste, I love the texture of it as well, it's great.

Yeah, and you know, it comes across in so many different shades. Some is almost as clear as water and then some is really quite dark and it's really interesting, the different shades, the different colours of the honey from the borage that we have. Interestingly, for those of you that haven't a microscope, you can always check to see where your bees have been by looking at the pollen that's in your honey, and it's a very, very simple process once you've got the basic tools, and they don't cost a huge amount. It's such good fun, and it's one of my favourite Pastimes when I have the time to be able to do it is to just get some honey, centrifuge out the pollen, and have a look at the different pollens that are in that honey. And of course, it allows you to say to people, this is hawthorn honey, you know, this is blackberry honey. It's just a— it's a great part of beekeeping that I thoroughly enjoy.

Oh, I can imagine. I think People think I'm obsessed with Black Bee Honey Company, but they sell borage honey, but they don't sell it under the name borage honey, they sell it under the name starflower honey. I love a good bit of marketing, and I just think when you see it on the label, starflower honey, oh, that's going to be a bestseller, that one.

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Right, next question for you then is, what is your favourite style of beehive?

My favourite style of beehive in terms of The type of hive that we use, I guess.

So I guess, yeah, you can interpret that whether it's poly or wood, or you've got a special nice-looking one, or a long hive.

Just, okay, so this year we've switched entirely to Langstroth hives, and it just makes sense with the number of colonies that we have now, having gone through so many different hive types and styles in order, really, in order to produce the videos. I think it's really important that you talk about something that you've experienced, and at one point I'd never used a Langstroth hive, so I couldn't really talk to people about the pros and cons of a Langstroth. So we've kind of had lots of different hives over the period. So we settled on the Langstroth hive.

Excuse me.

My reason for that is because we seem, I guess, generally to favour more and more large brood nest areas, larger colonies in the brood box, and the Langstroth just seems to hold the number of bees really well, and it's very rare that I find a single Langstroth brood box is not big enough to take the entire brood nest area of the bees that we have. So it's nice to run colonies on a single brood when they're on honey production. Obviously, we stack them in double brood in order to do the splits, but we push them back down into single brood ready for honey production. So that's really important because if they run out of space in their brood box, then it's likely that you could be pushing them down that nasty swarming route. So you don't, you know, you don't want to be doing that. The way that I've always inspected— so we have our frames traditionally, whether it's been National, Commercial, Smith, WBC, whatever it is, I've always had the frames in a cold way. And so for those of Those of you out there that are unfamiliar with the warm and the cold way, if you imagine you're standing directly in front of the hive, the warm way is with the frames across going front to back, and the cold way, if you stood to one side of the hive, going front to back, side to side, if that makes sense. Not a very good explanation. So What I discovered was that having the frames in the cold way allowed me to get more people around the back of the hive in order to do an inspection and demonstrate what I was doing. If you have it in the warm way, they tend to kind of come in at the sides, so you've got people stood on either side, whereas if you're demonstrating with the cold way, you've got most of the people trying to show, you've got most of the people in front of you or to one side, so you can kind of make eye contact with people and make sure that they're understanding what you're doing. And the Langstroth is naturally set up in that way, the cold way, so it suits my beekeeping perfectly well. And then of course you've got the boxes that go on top, the Langstroth supers or the medium boxes that we use are fantastic for storing honey, The bees love them. We go with 9 frames and, you know, they pull them out really well. Interestingly, and again, you'll, you know, this is beekeeping, so we all have a choice to do things differently. We've always gone with 9 frames in the brood box, sorry, in the supers, and only on maybe 1 or 2 occasions have the bees decided that they're not going to draw out the foundation nice and square. They're going to go off at some odd angle. Yet you have people that start with 11, then go to 10, and then go to 9, and maybe even less than that. But we've always gone with 9, and that just works really, really well. And of course, extracting then becomes a bit easier than if you've got 11 in the box. So we're on honey pour Langstroths. They're polyhives, and I think they're absolutely fantastic. Our bees come through the winter really well on them, and I would certainly recommend them. And just last year, we switched to something called a TechnoSet, which I think is similar to the one that you demonstrated recently, Laurence, which had a bit of an odd name.

I know. I didn't—

I can't quite get my head around the name that you were using. However, Technoset sounds a lot safer to me, but it looked almost identical, to be honest, and they're really good as well. So they're a double-walled plastic hive— nasty word, plastic— but, you know, they last really well, and they have polystyrene insulation in between that twin wall, and it's a really— well, you've obviously got that set up now. The system works really well and fits together Very nicely, so it's it's been a a really interesting new format for us to handle certainly over the the last year. Just while we're talking hives, the most fun I've ever had with a beehive is a top bar hive. If you've never tried a top bar hive, go out and build yourself a top bar hive. I have. Pete to thank, who helps us occasionally. He basically built it for me because my woodworking skills are rubbish and it just wouldn't have gone together properly. And a top bar hive is just such fun. You're never going to get a great deal of honey from it. We didn't take any over the last couple of years, but just to see the bees drawing out their comb from a top bar in that kind of triangular Toblerone shape. It's just lovely, it really is lovely. So yeah, it's top bar hive, give it a try, any kind of top bar setup. Yeah, was really good fun.

It's on my list, so I'm going to try and do that this year. Oh, do, yeah, yeah, especially for YouTube as well, because it'll probably go horribly wrong, and I'm in exactly the same boat as you, which is I do not do woodwork well. Oh, my woodworking escapades are absolutely shocking. But what is funny, what you said about Langstroth though, because I'm in the same boat as you in that I've tried pretty much every single hive that's out there, and I love working the Langstroth.

Yeah.

It's a bit weird at the beginning, isn't it, with the little lugs, and you think, oh, I don't like these lugs. But then I remember on a 14 by 12 box once, I just, I didn't put it down on the floor, but I definitely didn't chuck it down on the floor, maybe put it down a bit rough, and I broke like 80% of the lugs just because they were heavy boxes and it was full of honey, right? And then when you start breaking, snapping lugs on the National, then you realize on the Langstroth it's just impossible to snap the lugs.

Yeah, yeah.

Box construction's so easy, and I like the top bee space. There's nothing I don't really like about Langstroth. And then people say, well, why don't you move to Langstroth then? And I say, well, because everyone's on national nucs. And then if you want, I, I use the nuc production as part of my swarm management.

Yeah.

Then if, if everyone in the UK just said, right, we'll all go to Langstroth tomorrow, then I'd be well up for that. But whilst everyone else is still on nationals, we were a little bit stuck, I think, with selling the nucs. So there's a couple of questions just coming on the chat that I will go to. First thing I would say though, I always forget to say this, If you are enjoying the stream, please do give it a thumbs up. Helps out on the algorithm, so please give it a thumbs up. So there were 2 questions that were very similar, uh, and one of them answers the other one. So it says, for Stuart, when did you become a full-time beekeeper and what did you do before?

Yeah, um, I'd have to look at my, um, my photographs again to try and work out, um, around 2013, or thereabouts. And the only reason I say that is because prior to that, 2008 on— yeah, around 2008. So I went back to school, I completed a full-time science degree at our local university. The toughest 4 years of studying of my life, which is why I'm not doing any BBKA modules because I've had enough of studying. So yeah, that was a science degree in biology and ecology.

Oh wow.

So immediately after that, I joined the National Bee Unit as a bee inspector. So I had a short stint with the Bee Inspectorate, and if anybody's out there who has some experience in beekeeping and would like to just experience a lot more variety. Honestly, seasonal bee inspectors' jobs are just such good fun, certainly when I was doing it. You get to meet so many different people, see again so many different types of hive, so many different types of bees, and eat lots of cake. Now, you know, the cake is always, you know, an important part of the job, but yeah, that was a really enjoyable experience and taught me an awful lot. And I think it was the seasonal bee inspector's job that really pushed me through into the full-time bee farming. I spent an awful lot of time looking for disease, finding disease, and then helping beekeepers clear it up, so cleaning their equipment and scorching boxes and all of that kind of stuff. And I just got to thinking, well, actually You know, I'm not doing my own beekeeping here. I'm helping everybody else clean their boxes, and I've got a pile of boxes back home that I need to sort out. So as a seasonal bee inspector, you would go out in lovely weather conditions, help other people inspect their bees, and the only time you could inspect your bees was in the evening or when it was pouring with rain, and nobody, no sensible beekeeper wanted their hives open. So that was yeah, it was a really enjoyable part of. the learning process really, but I've been keeping bees since around 1989 on and off. I did actually find, I don't know if I did have a photograph kicking around. I've got the camera kind of homed in on me because the rest of the office is an absolute tip, to be honest. I had a photograph, excuse me while I just lean across. I don't know if I can find it just very quickly. No, it's gone. It's in amongst all the rubbish. One of my first swarms that popped up on a hive outside the shed that I was talking about earlier, my first experience with swarms, we were in a terrace house and the bees swarmed into a flowering cherry just a couple of doors down from us, and I convinced the neighbour that it was okay and I could climb up some ladders and get these bees off. I'd got an old boiler suit with, I guess it was, I think it used to be called a bee farmer veil, which was literally just the wires and a bit of mesh that you tucked into your bee suit, Wellington boots, and climbed this ladder with a cardboard box to shake the bees into. Of course, when you first start beekeeping, you don't realize how heavy bees actually are when they're in a swarm. It's quite a weight that's clustered on this tree. So I shook the bees, the weight of the box toppled forward, I spilled the bees down my front, all over my boiler suit, into my Wellingtons, climbed down basically telling everybody that that was how you did it, it's fine, this is This is how we keep bees and how we collect swarms. Turned the box upside down on a sheet, wedged the corner open, and prayed that the queen was in there. And all of these bees just fell off my boiler suit onto the floor and ran into the box. It was, it was an absolute miracle that it happened.

But isn't it— This was before YouTube, wasn't it? Because that sounds like a viral video in the making.

Absolutely. When those bees run into the box, isn't it a wonderful thing to see? Or when you run them up into a hive, it's just such a fabulous thing to see. Yeah, sorry, one of the things that I am notorious for is going off down rabbit holes and off-piste when we talk, so I'm sorry for that.

It's very welcome, I enjoy it. And you mentioned part of the next question as well, which is I love a random question like this, so do you wear your bee suit inside or outside of your Wellington boots, and then also what boots do you like to wear?

Yeah, so bees have a tendency to climb upwards, so you will soon realise that if you wear your bee suit over your wellies, eventually there's a tiny little gap and a bee will get in there and you'll feel something crawling up your leg, and that's never a good sign. So bee suit inside my wellies. Normally it's Wellington boots, just standard Wellington boots with a steel toe cap, because if you drop a box on your foot, it's going to do quite a lot of damage, and that's a throwback to the bee inspector days. Health and safety, of course, is everything. And sometimes I'll switch to just a pair of hiking boots with a fairly high ankle, But being tall, and you're quite tall as well, aren't you, Laurence, if you wear a bee suit with ankle boots, eventually when you're bending down carrying things around, the suit tends to ride up and expose your ankles and lower leg, and the bees always seem to find that particular point to sting. So yeah, I generally tend to default to Wellington boots.

Yeah, I tried it a couple of times with a variety of other footwear that isn't wellies, and I get stung every time. A lot of people wear rigger boots. I've seen them wearing rigger boots. Yeah, I just tried them and just got battered. It's probably just my bees. Um, next question on here, I'm just going to go start going through the chat ones now because I've answered, uh, all of the ones on my list. So I'm going to work—

Okay.

I'll just go randomly. So question from Staunton Part B says Where do you sell most of your honey? So do you sell it bulk or in shops, or where does it go?

Yeah, a bit of both really. We don't have many local stockists, but the stockists we have sell lots, and we tend to put some honey in barrels. Last year was our first journey into barrelled honey, and it went really well. So we'll continue doing that, and we do sell some bulk in buckets to other beekeepers sometimes when it's— when we've had a fairly slow season and there's not quite so much. I don't know about you, Laurence, last year seemed to be a very good year for most people in terms of honey production, so it is a case of sometimes they want it, sometimes they don't, but I always try to hold back Around 6 months or so, so that the stockists we have— one of the important things with stockists is you never want to let them down. So if you've found someone locally, the local shop that will sell your honey, always hold some honey back for them because you don't want to have a phone call from them asking for more honey and find that you've run out and you're waiting for your spring crop to come in. So if you can hold on to some honey through to the next crop that's coming in and beyond, then you're, you're always going to have some honey for those, um, people that are supporting you and committed to selling your honey. So yeah, at the moment I guess we're kind of 60% wholesale, 40%, uh, retail stockist type situation.

And have you found like there's been a dip in honey sales recently? Because I think the general trend that we're seeing is it's getting more difficult to sell honey both on— we don't sell wholesale, but we buy wholesale, but okay, getting a bit more difficult to sell honey I think in the market at the moment.

Have we seen a dip? I guess maybe a little. We've had some fairly Hefty price increases, haven't we? So, you know, the cost of fuel. Funnily enough, I was looking at our fuel costs just this week. Our financial year runs from the first of September. We've spent nearly two and a half thousand pounds on diesel since the first of September, and it's just bonkers how the costs have gone through the roof. So, people seem to think. Non-beekeepers seem to think that the bees do all the work, but, you know, the beekeeper puts an awful lot of effort in, and it is quite expensive to get around everywhere. So it's, yeah, it is a tricky situation. Our sales are fairly buoyant at the moment, I'd have to say. We've just put a couple of fairly big orders out. So yeah, it's not bad. It's not bad. I'm not going to complain, Laurence.

No, no, I know. It's one of the things I learned is to never complain about a heavy, a heavy box of honey. What I was going to say was, I mentioned the cost of jars and lids.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we could sit here for the rest of the evening talking about price rises on everything.

We'll try not to moan. I think there's a good question here that I know know you'll answer very well. So it's from Hillbilly, says it's going to be his first season this year. If and when he has to split his hive, what would you say the easiest way to do this is for a new beekeeper?

Okay, yeah, hello, good evening, thanks for joining us. It's a great question because it's one that pops up every single season, and beginner beekeepers approach that initial split with such trepidation, but actually it's a really simple thing to do. So I would suggest an artificial swarm as your first and basic method. It's a really simple process. Wait until you've got some queen cells, and I'm kind of oversimplifying it here, But wait until you have queen cells, then do the split. In the spring, our honeybees are just designed to produce the very best swarm cells. You'll get some fabulous queen cells produced in the spring, and what do most of us do? We cut them out and either throw them away or take photos and post them on Instagram or whatever else we do with them. If you can save A really nice looking queen cell, and of course the follow-up question to that is what's a really nice queen cell look like? So I would look for something that's a fairly symmetrical queen cell. It doesn't really matter where it is on the frame. If your colony has a tendency to produce lots of queen cells, then you may be just reproducing a swarmy colony. So you have to bear in mind some of the things that are going on within that colony. And to give you an example of that, I would tend not to artificially swarm a colony that's producing, throwing up, let's say, 8 or more, 12 or more queen cells. They tend to be a little bit on the swarmy side. Having said that, if you've only got one colony, then you've only got that one colony to work with. So the worst-case scenario that we've had is a colony threw up 58 queen cells, and I managed to find 57, and they still swarmed. So, you know, you just keep going and learn by these things. So pick a very nice, plump, symmetrical queen cell, and you'll see them The really good ones have kind of got a dimple effect to them and a pitted kind of dimply effect. They're really good queen cells to go for. And I would suggest that you only select one. There are a lot of people out there that advocate selecting 2 in case one fails, but you've always got the fallback of your original queen. So if that one queen cell fails, you can always combine them again and start the whole process again. So having 2 queen cells, you do run the risk of losing a swarm from that colony. So I would advocate just one queen cell. So you found queen cells, the important thing to do is to try to find the queen. If you can find your queen, it makes the process so much easier. So the way I kind of describe this whole swarming scenario, and again, we could be here all evening with this, but if you think of your colony in 3 parts. You have your queen, your flying bees, and your brood. If you separate one of those from the rest, then they're not likely to swarm. So in this instance, in an artificial swarm, what we're doing is we're separating the brood from the queen and the flying bees. And the way that we do that is we move the original hive away from its original position, and we place a new hive in that original position. We put the queen into that box on a frame, ideally with emerging brood, so there's no eggs or very young larvae in there but just bees that are emerging. That will give the queen somewhere to lay her eggs in and continue to lay, but all of the flying bees will go back to that position, so the queen will gather in all of the flying bees. You then take each frame in turn from the original hive Which you can move it 6 feet away, 8 feet away, it doesn't really matter. Move it slightly to one side, it could be 3 feet away, but turn the entrance so the entrance is pointing in a different direction, and then go through each of those frames and find one of those queen cells that you really like the look of. Once you've got that, pop it in the middle of the brood box and take down all of the other queen cells, and you need to shake all the bees off to knock those down to make sure you get every single last queen cell. And then you just close them up and let them do what comes natural. The new queen will emerge, hopefully she'll go off, mate, come back successfully mated, and within 3 to 4 weeks you should have a nice brood pattern back in that box. And it's just a fantastic way to start that journey in your beekeeping and learn some of the basics of what's happening within the colony as well. So that's what I would suggest to— did you say Hillbilly? Sorry, Hillbilly. Hi.

Yeah, a great detailed explanation. I love it. You go into so much detail and you leave no stone unturned and What I would fully agree with on that is that it's your first year, why not learn as much as you possibly can? Like, that you're learning all about the different steps and the different stages of larva and the different types of swarm cell and seeing the process. And you've got virgins and mated queens, and so it's a— you're doing a necessary thing, you're making a split, but you're also just kind of gaining as much experience as you possibly can, which is really good. Yeah, question above it is Simple question, when do you think the first swarms are going to be?

Well, again, location is everything. Over here in the east of England, I would say we're looking at the weather warming up. I haven't been into any colonies yet, we're still holding off even though we've got temperatures of around 15 or 16 degrees Celsius. So we'll probably start getting into the hives the first week of April, which isn't that far away, let's face it. And I would suggest that most people will start losing swarms when they're visiting the BBKA Spring Convention. That's my bet this year, so towards the end of April.

Oh man.

And I speak from personal experience. I visited quite a number of years ago with my brother who had just started beekeeping. He'd got a few hives at the bottom of a friend's garden and he received a panicky phone call from a TV aerial guy who was fitting an aerial and his colonies had swarmed multiple times onto the chimney and onto the roof and this poor guy had been stung.

Hmm.

And we were many, many miles away enjoying ourselves at the trade show at the time. So yeah, it will be later for some people, it will be potentially earlier for others, but I suspect towards the end, mid to late April is the likeliest, depending on the weather, of course. If it suddenly turns cold, then, you know, we can kick that date into touch. For those of you that listen to my podcast, you'll know my predictions on weather and the like. not very good at all, so don't hold me to it. If you lose a swarm early—

Yeah, can you just do us a favour and just predict 6 months of really cold snowy weather then?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well, last year we had a failed borage crop because it was so dry, and the farmer chose the one position in his farm that he couldn't irrigate, and this year he's put irrigation in And he's putting borage in another location, so the bees are going to be fine, but I'm predicting a very wet summer because we've got irrigation now and we won't need it. So hopefully not. I think it is looking rather dry, isn't it? Certainly for East Anglia. Yeah, yeah, right.

Unbelievably, we've got 9 minutes of Stuart left, so we're gonna cram as many questions in as possible. Again, if you're enjoying the video, please do give it the thumbs up, it does help with the algorithm.

I'll try and keep it short, Laurence, sorry.

Yeah, I've got a member, Joe Murphy, who asks lots and lots of questions, and they're always brilliant questions. And he asked me this question on one of my live streams, and I don't think I answered it properly, Joe. So I'm going to give it to you because it is a really good question, and it's quite a difficult one. So if you could get the government to do something for beekeepers, what would it be? So it could be like changing regulations, banning pesticides, Pretend you're the Prime Minister for a day, what are you going to do?

Oh, definitely grants to commercial bee farmers. I think quite radically and in all seriousness, I would license beekeepers. I would ask beekeepers to sign up to a licensing system, particularly those beekeepers that sell bees and sell Queens. I think it's really important that we try and set some standards. I would charge a small fee, and that could go into better education and better assistance to beekeepers. But I do think we're missing an opportunity, really. It doesn't have to be expensive, and it could be on a sliding scale. The more colonies you have, the more you pay. But it would be, I think, very, very useful to be able to help finance more education for beekeepers and grants for bee farmers.

You answered that so quickly. I really racked my brain as to think what I would do, but yeah, I'd agree with all that. I think a licensing one, particularly, yeah, for queens and nucs would be very good because the NBU will go around and they'll do inspections, and then they'll give people accreditation, but there's no real formal accreditation scheme, is there, to say you've passed a certain level of husbandry, or your bees have to be sold to a certain quality in terms of temperament, or number of frames of brood, or conditions for postage? Like, it just— really simple standard things that respectable beekeepers may do, but then A lot of other beekeepers may not do.

Yeah, just very quickly to add to that, as a seasonal bee inspector, I visited a beekeeper who was selling nucs to beginner beekeepers, and he couldn't identify that he had European foulbrood, and he'd sold— I can't remember the exact number— 20 or 30+ nucs to beginner beekeepers all over the country with European foulbrood. Fortunately, he kept good records and we were able to contact everybody and they were all given full refunds. But it just shows you that unless there is some standard, there are people out there through no fault of their own, they're trying to help, they're trying to make themselves a little bit of spare money by selling some bees But they just don't have the experience to be able to do it properly or safely. And you can imagine as a beginner beekeeper how devastated you would be if I turned up and looked through your bees in your back garden and said, I'm sorry, we're going to have to destroy them. It's heartbreaking, it's absolutely heartbreaking, and I do feel for any beginner beekeeper that's lost bees over winter because I do, I do understand how it feels. Sorry, I'm waffling. Let's go on to the next question, Laurence, quickly.

I was going to split the question on this one, so I'll just— what do you use for your varroa treatments? Do you have like a management process, or what chemicals do you use?

Yeah, so up until now we've used treatments in the autumn and then an oxalic acid treatment over winter.

And are they— are your bees coping well? What treatment do you use in the autumn?

So we vary it, we try to use different treatments. This year it was Apistan, so we won't use Apistan again for at least 4 or 5 years. We'll switch to one of the Amitraz products probably this year if we're going to use them. But I spoke to— you've got me waffling again, Laurence. I spoke to a bee farmer locally who has kept bees for 50 or 60 years, and he only ever treats with oxalic acid over the winter, and he uses no other forms of treatments, and that works great for him. So as a trick? We're going to, yeah, we're going to use that as a treatment this year on some apiaries and see how we get on.

Good stuff. Right, next question then. We're cramming them in. A question from Jan Swanwick, who you may know. So a question for Stuart: have you consolidated your premises yet?

No, it's a bit of a nightmare, but we're close. We may have a solution, so watch this space. But yeah, hi Jan, good to see you here this evening.

So I'm really sorry to everyone who answered questions there and we haven't been able to get around to answering them all. I just thought I'd give you the last couple of minutes while you're here, Stuart, to, to say anything or invite people to your Patreon or your YouTube page or anything like that and give you the opportunity just to have the last few words.

Thank you. Yeah, you know, a lot of you will know that we have our videos on YouTube, and some of you will know that we have a subscription site on Patreon where we have published through the active season something like 3, sometimes 4 videos a week. We've got the podcast there. If you put it in beekeeping terms, if you sign up to our coaching tier, it will cost you a lot less than a nuc will cost you this year, and it might just save you that nuc going through the summer and into the winter. We have one-to-one mentoring Zoom, regular monthly Zoom meetings there, but we can also give access to just the videos and podcasts. And to put it into perspective, we almost have 1,200 individual pieces of content on our Patreon page now, so there's an awful lot of back catalogue with all of the various topics that you could possibly want, and we're adding to that all the time. So, and it would be, it'd be lovely to see you guys there and to be able to offer you some help and support through your beekeeping season. But before we go, yeah, just, I'd just like to wish everybody a fantastic season. I'm really excited about where we're heading. I think spring is just around the corner for our bees, and then it'll be all hands to the pumps. So I do hope that you all have an enjoyable season. And if we don't catch up on Patreon, then do look out for some more videos on YouTube this year. We are definitely going to publish more videos on YouTube. And thank you, Laurence, for the invitation. It's been really nice to catch up and to chat with people.

Oh, well, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much, Stuart, for coming on. You are an inspiration to a lot of people, as you probably already know. But yeah, thanks for coming on and sharing your information. advice, and I will— I'll close down the stream there, and maybe we can do it again sometime.

Good night, everyone.

Cheers, bye-bye.