Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 31

So we are live with another episode of Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards. That is what we've rebranded to now, so we are officially a podcast. And unfortunately, we're not on Apple, we're not on Spotify, but we are on YouTube Music. So if you are kind of watching a bit of this and then, I don't know, you have to go and put the kids to bed and you want to catch up at another point, you can watch this or even listen to this now as a podcast. I'm really excited about this evening. I've got absolutely loads to talk about, but the first thing that we need to get right out of the way is we've got some gifts. So not gifts, we've got like, uh, freebies to give away, some prizes to give away. And the first one is like super, super cool. So you might have seen this before. It just looks like kind of, I don't know, a piece of like plastic, pretty simple piece of plastic. But what this is is for catching swarms that you cannot catch on a ladder. So they've had these at the North American Honeybee Expo. The idea is at this end here you connect it to like an extension pole, and then on the top here you can connect like a frame, so like a used brood frame. And then the idea is that you put it up into the tree, try and get the queen down, basically queen fishing. So you can win this, that's one of the prizes that is on offer. And then the other one is my first batch of hats. Has arrived. So there we go. You can win a hat. It's like worth twenty-five quid. How do you win these prizes? You are desperate to know. So we're going to do something a little bit different today. So this is the first number, number eighty-six. That is the first number that you need. I'm going to reward people who listen to this podcast or this stream for a long time. So I've got some other numbers here that you won't be able to see. I think I flashed that up just a perfect amount so you couldn't see it. But I'll give you the other two numbers. a later point within this stream. And then what you're going to have to do is connect all 3 of those numbers together and share this stream on social media to a beekeeping group on Facebook. Now I think that's going to be a bit of a challenge, making you work a little bit hard, and I don't think a huge amount of people are going to do it, so you're probably in with a good chance of winning one of those prizes. Um, but let's get on to some beekeeping questions. So tonight I'm going to be here for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, depending on how many people turn up and how many questions are asked. I finally got my mic set up in a better place, so I'm hoping the audio is loads better for you today. I've upgraded the lighting behind me as well. So you know me, I love spending money on stuff that I probably don't need, but I really enjoy kind of upgrading my kit. Uh, the first thing that I was going to talk about today, do you know, does anybody listen to LBC? That's kind of what I listen to, like, if I'm in the car. So it's Leading Britain's Conversation, and there's a guy on there who I kind of half like and half really annoys me, James O'Brien. And what he does is he says, right, going to speak to the callers and we're going to talk about a subject, and then he just goes on for about half an hour going off talking on about it and just basically makes up his own decision. So I thought I'm going to take a lead from James O'Brien and just talk a little bit first, and I'm going to be a little bit controversial. And I hate being controversial, I'm always one for sitting on the fence, but I've decided to be a little bit more controversial this evening. Um, To align with the video that went out yesterday that was clearly very controversial, got people's pulses racing, maybe upset a few people as well. So sorry about that. But I have subscribed to, it's like a company called Pipedex. If anyone's heard of Pipedex, it's like a business strategy company. And I got like this freebie from them. It was basically how to build an impactful brand. And the first thing they said was, don't try and be the best company you can be. Try and be the only company you can be. Basically, you're not— don't compete with anybody. Just try and do something that nobody else does. Which I thought, that's really good advice. I'm gonna nick that and I'm gonna try and do that. And then the next thing that they said was, find your competitors on social media, find something that you disagree with, and pick a fight with them. And I thought, oh, I'm not sure about that. I don't like picking fights with people. Like, I'm pretty laid back and I'm definitely like anti-confrontation. But I was thinking about it. I can understand it from building like an impactful brand. So I thought, who, who, not necessarily who would I pick a fight with in terms of competitors, but like what aspect of something like that would I pick a fight with? And the only real thing that I could think that where I very much don't sit on the fence, I don't get into arguments with people about it, but it's clear like I sit on the Buckfast side of the fence and other people sit on like the Black Bee or the Native Bee side of the fence. And I've never really kind of like pushed that argument or tried to From the other side, there's a bit of smearing that goes on. So if you're kind of on like the native bee side, like the Buckfast bees are the bad guys. And I've never really kind of like tried to smear the native bee or the dark bee. And I was looking at this pip deck saying, right, pick a fight. And I was thinking, well, that could be a good area to maybe try and pick a fight, but I don't particularly want to do it. So I've sat on that and I've reflected on it and I thought about it. And my conclusion is I'm definitely not going to pick a fight because I'm going to go back to the kind of first part of that question, which is I don't want to cause confrontation. What my channel and what I'm kind of— my philosophy in beekeeping is all about is like giving everything a chance and not judging something until you've like kind of like fully tried it out yourself. So I don't want to go and say anything bad about native bees. Like, I've got my own opinions on native bees or near-native bees. They didn't work for me. But that's not to say that they're not going to work for other people, and I fully understand and I fully respect why other people are going down that route. They don't necessarily respect and understand the reason that I'm going down my route, and they might feel that I'm kind of influencing the, the drones that are in the air and impacting on their programs. But I guess you can argue the two the kind of other way around as well. So there you go, there's, there's my segue into tonight's conversation, which is I don't like confrontation. I'm a bit of a wuss. But we've got 2 more numbers, so you need to stay listening for as long as possible today. Um, it's good, I can see we've got quite a lot of people here, so hello to everyone. I won't go through individually, but I can see we've got a lot of people in this evening. I am going to answer some questions in a little bit. The first thing I'm going to talk about though is the beekeeping show. So I'm very, very excited about the beekeeping show. It will, it will be finished this time next week in Telford. It'll be done. And it's all— it's always really, really nice. Like, I, I enjoy going to these shows. I love talking to people. If you're going there and you see me there, just come and kind of grab me and say hi. I'll be there pretty much all day. I'll be there from the kind of first thing in the morning till late at night, and I'm more than happy to chat and talk about bees. So come and say hi if you are there. Um, I also spoke to one of the directors, Alex, and he said as well, just to give a shout out, that if you're thinking of what happened last year, which was do you buy tickets early or do you get tickets on the door? And I think last year, the way that it was organized, that people who hadn't bought tickets early got in first. So I was just chatting to him about that and he said they've completely changed that this year. So there's just going to be one queue regardless of whether you've bought a ticket or not, and then that is split into 6 queues, and only one of those 6 queues is going to be for people who haven't paid for tickets in advance. So basically, if you want to get in quick, the way to do it is to buy the tickets in advance, which I think was very different from the advice from last year, or the experience from last year, I should say. So there we go, 7 minutes. I didn't, I didn't do too bad. I didn't go quite as extreme as James O'Brien. 7 minutes of me just blabbing on, but we will get into some questions now because I love answering people's questions. So first one is going to be from Ed Walton, and he says, hi, do you think having a bigger brood box like a Langstroth would help prevent swarming? Uh, now it's very interesting you say that, Ed. I've been writing 2 blogs today very specifically kind of like about this subject, which is like, why do bees swarm? And one of them is definitely space. And I split this element of the blog into 2 sections, which is space is a massive factor. So if you restrict the space within a beehive, the bees will swarm. But I split it into 2 ways. So one, which is restricting space within the brood area. So within the brood box, if the bees don't have— if the queen doesn't have enough room to lay, that can definitely impact swarming. So the bigger the brood area, the less likely they are to swarm, but then the bigger the brood area, the more honey they pack into the brood area, which means the less you're going to get for honey extraction. So it's always a bit of a balancing act. But then the other part of that is the total space within the beehive and the fact that you never ever want your bees to ever hit the ceiling. As soon as your bees hit the ceiling of that hive, if they've not got sufficient space, they backfill everything down with nectar all the way down, and then they backfill the brood nest with nectar, and then that's it. If you get your bees into that position there, they're almost certainly going to swarm. So a bigger Langstroth box definitely makes a difference, and if you're comparing a single brood box management system, Langstroth versus National, then Langstroth is considerably bigger. It's a slightly different shape, but the square inch kind area of the combined total of the frames is, is way bigger on a Langstroth. So yes, a Langstroth box would help prevent swarming, double brood box would, 14 by 12 would, but it's not a silver bullet. It doesn't mean just by giving them a bigger box you still don't need to inspect. You still need to give them sufficient space up in the supers as well, but yeah, it definitely helps. Now my mug today is called the Big Mug. People tend to like that, and I've got a chamomile tea in here, and I'm going to do my very best to drink it before it goes cold today. Right, there we go. Uh, so John's saying about the swarm catcher, very handy for the association swarm catching. It's good, isn't it? I've got about 6 of these, so I might give a few— I might give a few of them away. I'm definitely going to keep one, and I'm definitely going to do a video on it. Um, right, we're definitely gonna have to talk more about this. So Jay's saying thanks for the heads up on the new BB wear veils yesterday, game changer. I thought it was a game changer. I thought, I thought it was pretty cool. I— it's rubbed, it's rubbed some people up the wrong way. Um, and I forgot I've got to turn my WhatsApps off, got my computer WhatsApps on. Um, wasn't as embarrassing as when my mum was calling me last time. That was quite funny. Uh, but the— yeah, the BBWare vow, I thought it was, I thought it was really, really good. I liked it. Some people didn't like it. Um, I got myself in quite a lot of trouble on that one. Um, and, and FYI, that bee suit that I burnt was, was absolutely knackered. And kind of like, it's my job to catch your attention in the first 15 seconds of the video, and I think burning the bee suit did that. So if you've not seen that video yet and you're wondering what is he talking about burning a bee suit, I did burn a bee suit and, uh, nearly didn't get the intro out by the time that it stuck and melted onto my hand, which I didn't include in the, uh, final cut of the video, but it really did hurt quite a lot. Right, Wildways Farm. I love seeing regular people on here. I really do appreciate the people who come on here every single time and, and listen to me just chat about bees. Um, got Harry from Wildways Farm says, hi Lawrence, I have 9 hives now and 7 are quite strong. I want to make 8 nucs from my hives using your mated queens in mid-April. How would I do this? So few options there to do that, Harry. What, what I would suggest, the easiest way of doing that Is I would just take a very, very small nuc from each of the hives that you've got. I wouldn't worry too much about what's strong and what's not strong. Doing it in mid-April, if you were just to take a 2-frame split out of each one, a frame of stores, your best frame of brood, a good shake of bees, you're not going to have pretty much any impact on any of those colonies. And all you'll really be doing, you might take a week off them, you might knock a week off them before they try and swarm, so which is kind of like a negligible impact. And then because you're making such small splits so early on in the season, you've not got to worry about robbing, you've not got to worry about wasps. You can just feed those colonies, the nucs, get them on 1:1 sugar syrup straight away, and they will build up. You'll probably be looking at full-size colonies come the end of the year for all of those splits. It really is amazing if you make early splits like that how quickly they build up. So that is the way that I would do it. Another way of doing it is to say, right, I'll sacrifice 2 of them So say you, say you take your 2 strongest and you just say, right, I'll sacrifice those 2 and I'll split each one of them into 4, and then that gives you 8 nucs. But I, I personally wouldn't do that. I just don't think you get any benefit from that, and all you end up doing is with the other 7 that you, you're just gonna have to deal with them swarming anyway. So you might as well knock them back a little bit, take out a frame of brood, try and delay the swarming a little bit. There is numerous ways to do that, but it's a good shout doing it in mid-April. Making splits up early in the season really makes your life so, so much easier. because it reduces the impulse to swarm and it just— making splits at that time of the year is so much easier than making splits kind of any time after, say, July onwards. But good luck with it, I hope it goes well. Right, next question from Robert Thomas says, I'm looking to go from 5 hives this year to 15 by the end of the season and have some honey. Have you got any tips? So it's similar to Harry's question there, but maybe looking at it from a slightly different perspective there, which is you want to maintain the honey production. So I would say that that is a good argument there for doing something a little bit different to what Harry's done. So if you want to go from 5 to 15, you could potentially just like sacrifice one of those hives. And what I would do is I wouldn't necessarily split it early on. I would say you've got 5 hives, you're going to make your splits from one hive, and you're going to have 4 production colonies. So with your production colonies, just put them off to one side, manage them however you want to manage them. I would suggest do a Demeray split before they try and swarm. That is how you're going to absolutely maximize your honey production. If you don't know how to do that, send me an email or put a comment in there, I'll send you a link to the video. Really simple manipulation to do that. But then with your one colony, focus on making the splits from that one colony. And the way that you do that is I would double brood it early on in the season, as soon as it gets warm enough. So it like kind of back end of March even, but early April, weather dependent, I'd start feeding that single brood box 1:1 sugar syrup. Once they filled up that box, maybe 90% full, I'd get a second brood box on there and I would continue feeding them. And you want to feed them up to the point where they are completely filling that double brood box. Once you've got them to the point where they're filling that double brood box, you might have, say, if it's like a Buckfast colony, you might have like 14 or 16 frames of brood. And what I would do is I would try and split that out into 5 nucs. Be really easy to split that out into 5 nucs. There are 4 frames in each one. And then you feed the nucs and get them going. And I would say within like 5 or 6 weeks after that, those nucs will, will be pretty huge, um, and ready to be split again. And then I would split them out into another 5. So I'd take those 5 and I would turn them into 10, and then I would build those colonies up and I would overwinter those 10 as 10 overwintered nucs. And then the following year that should bring you up to where you— that brings you to 14. But it's kind of that, that would be the way that I would do it. So I'd sacrifice one colony, focus on that, build it up to as strong as it could possibly be, make all of my splits from one colony, and then keep my 4 for honey production. And that was another sip of the chamomile tea there. Right, next question from Paul. He says, I would like an oxalic acid vaporizer. What is the best one to use? Is it okay to use likes of an Instant Vap as a sole method to control Roar. Um, so the Instant Vap is by far and away the best one. It's worth, it's worth touching on this point actually, because I've had a few accusations coming in at the moment. I'm plugging products for companies, so let's get this one out of the way. I don't earn any money from any of this, any of this in terms of like recommending things. So like if I say to you the Instant Vap is the very best oxalic acid vaporizer on the market, I'm only telling you that because I've got experience of that and I want the people who watch these videos to go out and make like informed decisions on what they buy. There's no, there's no malice in there. There's no commission earned. I don't speak to Duncan Simmons and he, he chucks me a fiver for everyone I kind of recommend to people. There's literally none of that. I wish there was, believe me, but there isn't. I'm just giving you the absolute kind of best advice that I can give you because I want you to have the very best. I don't want you to waste your money on something rubbish. So the oxalic acid vaporizer, by far and away the best one is the Instant Vap. Um, the same goes for BB Wear. Like, I've only really got good experience from all of my BB Wear suits. And again, I'll give you links, I'll give you discount codes that I negotiate with BB Wear. I don't earn a penny, not a penny from any of it. Don't earn any commission. I just want you to have the very, very best. So sorry, there we go, back into confrontational mode. Yeah, so I would go with the Instant Vap. It is the most expensive. Uh, get yourself a good supply of batteries as well. Go for kind of at least 5 amp-hours, I would go, but 5 or 6 amp-hours, and get yourself like 2 or 3 batteries makes it loads and loads easier to go out and do it. And then in terms of the sole method to control varroa, I know a lot of people that do that sole method to control varroa, but all you would need to do is you need to target a broodless period in the winter. So go in kind of— for us now, it does, it tends to be like mid to late November is where we find that they are broodless. As soon as you get into December, it seems like it's too late and they've just started rearing brood, but that is going to be very dependent on where you are within the UK or where you are within the world. So don't take those dates as serious. You need to almost work out when that's going to work for you. But if you are going to use it as a sole method, I would say when you come to do the autumn treatment, because as the colony builds up and gets bigger and bigger throughout the season, the varroa load gets higher and higher as there's more brood cells that are there. And then as the bees ramp down on that brood, then that's when the varroa is at its absolute peak. And at that point, you, you can use oxalic acid at that point once your supers are off. Um, but really, with Apibiox, you're only supposed to use it once. So I will talk about the countries in the world where you can use oxalic acid as many times as possible. But what I would do at that point is you need to, you, you need to treat numerous times, 5 days apart. Or what I would suggest is a better way of doing it is, is do what Richard Knowles does and cage the queens and force the brood break, and then And then do it at that point, because then all of the mites will be phoretic. So they're kind of living on the bees, and you'll get really, really high mite knockdown loads. We're definitely, we're definitely not doing any cage matches. He would definitely win. But yeah, no comment. No vaccines for queen bees from David McDowell. I'm not sure. that's talking about. Is it, is it the kind of AFB vaccines that are in America? I had a very interesting conversation with the guys out there. It seemed really, really cool that what they're doing, putting vaccines, AFB vaccines in queens, or selling— what were they selling? They were selling some sort of— basically you feed the larva somehow. It was cool. I can't remember what he said, but it seemed, it seemed like a really good idea. It was very expensive though, and We don't have huge issues of AFB over here anyway, so maybe not for Black Mountain honey. Right, I'm flicking through. Here we go. Right, so one from Pink It's Honey says, "I have my own channel but struggling to grow. What are your best tips to improve my channel and getting more subscribers?" So first one is definitely anybody who's watching here go and subscribe. Like we're a beekeeping community and. I'm guessing I can give you some advice, but loads of other people can give you some advice. So I would just go and Google it. Is it called Pinkett's Honey? I'll have a look after here and I'll subscribe. So we'll give you one more subscriber. It's a really good question. I will answer it and I'm happy to go into more detail kind of offline if you want to have a chat about it. But I would say that the number one piece of advice that I would give you and kind of what I've learned from doing YouTube for a few years now is you need to put yourself in the shoes of the person watching the video and ask yourself what value are they getting from it. And as long as you're providing value to them, then, then it's great. That's kind of everything that you need to do. And if you consistently provide value to people, then, then hopefully they will return and watch you again and again. The other one, and like, you only get this from reflecting and watching back on your own videos and like some of my early, earlier videos are rubbish. Some of my most recent videos are rubbish as well. But you, you can babble on, as in like I babble on. I'm a talker and I'm just going to babble on. And the early videos, people say you, you told, you said something there like 7 times throughout the video. And I watched the video back and it's true. Like I just say the same thing again. So what I started doing now is I don't put a script in because I think if you script videos, it becomes a little bit like, uh, But, uh, I'll just try and like put some bullet points in and just not talk as much and just kind of condense it all down because you can get across most things in like 3 or 4 minutes. It doesn't need to be 15 minutes. Um, I'll take this one offline. Send me an email, we can just have a chat about this because, uh, it's kind of like my hobby. I like YouTube, I like talking about it, and I'm happy to support other people who, who want to get into YouTube. Um, uh, my WhatsApps are still coming through. I'm not really sure I had to get those down. It's embarrassing. Right, next question. Uh, oh no, it's not a question. It is a comment from Andrew Rogers saying that it just seems like people, uh, they're people getting to pick fights for clicks, likes, and the controversy. Probably have had enough in the crap in the world already. Yeah, maybe. And you know, maybe I'm not the best at doing those kind of thumbnails that, that spark controversy, but it's, uh, it takes me back to the exact— so the best video that we've got is you won't believe what's inside this abandoned beehive. And I had a number of comments on it which were just saying, why didn't you just call that Man Does Beekeeping Inspection for 25 Minutes? And I just thought, you do— like, you've not quite grasped the concept of YouTube. Because like, nobody would watch any of my videos because I would have just given up. I would have completely given up by then. Because if I put titles like Man Does Beekeeping Inspections for 25 Minutes, I'd probably get— it'd be my mum. It'd be me and my mum watching it, and that would be it. Literally nobody would watch the video. So you can't Gotta put a little bit of like drama and pizzazz in there, and it's not like you're not overselling. It's not clickbait. It's not like saying click on this giant inflatable explosive Donald Trump, and then it's just a picture of a bee. That's clickbait. But they got to try and like dramatize it a little bit, and hopefully once you've clicked it, you know, like if you get the payback on the video, then then that's all good. This feels like a counseling session, so I'm gonna I'm gonna get strictly into beekeeping sessions now. Beekeeping sorry beekeeping questions now. We're gonna talk bees right. Here we go. So Robert Thomas, are you going to the beekeeping show in the Royal Welsh Showground this year? Um, I probably will. I probably will go, yeah, depending on how far away it is. I think the last one was like Mid Wales somewhere, wasn't it? Where is the Royal Welsh Showground? Does that move or is it in Mid Wales? If it's, if it's Mid Wales, I'll go. Like, if it's anything over 2 hours away, it's a bit of a long drive to go for a day. But I would, I would like to go to, I would like to go to the Royal Welsh one. Yeah, that'd be cool. Here we go, another one. Evening, Laurence. I have a question about oxalic acid vape treatment. Does the heat of the gas not damage the bees? So I think if the heat— if you kind of like fire the oxalic acid vapor directly at them, it's probably not that good for them. But I think overall, no. If it did, what you would see is like you'd see a lot of dead bees afterwards, or you'd see like Loads on the floor, but you don't really tend to see that at all. You don't see any coming out of the entrance. So I think kind of on a very small scale, you'll get one or two that might die because of the heat if they come rushing out directly in front of it. But it condenses so quickly, like it goes from a solid to a gas, back to a solid so, so quickly. I think it just loses the temperature, and I don't think the bees have— I don't think it impacts, or like the bees have many issues with it at all. Uh, next question says, did you test the Anel boxes yet? Um, Anel? No, I know, and I've not tested these yet, but I will do this year. I didn't, I didn't have enough Langstroth nucs to go in them last year. Everything was on nationals, so I was trying to build up some Langstroth to go into them, but I will test them this year. I've still got it there ready to go, but no bees have ever been inside it yet. Right, I'm going to run through some of the other questions here. Right, so a question from Lorenzo says he's 27, recently joined his local beekeeping association and visited his first meeting. The average age was about 65. Had a lovely time, but how do you think we can try and get more young people involved? That's a brilliant question, love that question. It's really interesting because I see on YouTube, you see all demographics of people that like watch the videos, and it's really, really interesting because You get, you get like, I think 13 to 17 is the youngest, and I get like zero. Absolutely no one in that age bracket watches. And then the next age bracket is like, um, 17 to 24, I think. So like 17 to 24, and then it kind of goes up all the way up to like 65 plus. And the split between like from the 17 to 24, 24 to 35, 35 to 47, etc., is like pretty even. Like, we— the, the viewership is very evenly spread across all age groups apart from the 13 to 17-year-olds. Um, but I do think there are more people that you think, uh, kind of actually beekeeping. So if you walk into a, you know, like a normal beekeeping association, it might appear that the average age is quite high, but I just think that's the way that the people of that age might want to talk about bees and communicate with people. They want to kind of go and do something like in person, whereas the younger people are just quite happy to do stuff online. So I don't think it's necessarily a demographic thing where less young people are into beekeeping. Like, I speak to so many young people. Like, we've got the people who buy nucs and the people who buy queens. Got loads of really young people, like really young people. Got Harry on this call here. Harry, you can put how old you are. Harry's not— is not 17 yet, I don't think. Are you, Harry? like younger than that. Um, so I think it's just a way that they actually like engage in the beekeeping community, but it would be nice, wouldn't it, if they, if they did go to more of these meetings. And I, I have to agree, like, if, if I've ever been to anything like that, it is a, it is a little bit— I don't know, I quite like it now. It's kind of like, let's sit down and have a cup of tea and a slice of cake, which I'm, I'm all up for. That's, that's— I'm definitely up for that. Like, I don't drink, so I like a cup of tea. and a bit of cake. But maybe they need to do something a little bit more engaging, a little bit different, to try and kind of get people in there and try and attract, yeah, a younger beekeeper into that. So David, linking back to that AFB vaccine, so yeah, I've heard about that a few times. I think Fred did it as well, didn't he? But they had it at the beekeeping show. They were showing it, like the actual vaccine, and then you feed the queen this vaccine, and then I don't know, I can't remember how it transmits to the larva. I forget that bit, but it was good. And they were saying that they got like, um, there were other benefits involved in it as well, like it was reducing deformed wing virus, and they were talking about something maybe reducing the amount of CBPV. See, yeah, CBPV, chronic bee paralysis virus. Um, and then the impact that it was having on AFB. But the, the thing that I was worried— my first question to the guy about this was, okay, so it's a vaccine against AFB. So American foulbrood. So if a colony's got American foulbrood, like, what, what happens? And he says, well, they could— they can tolerate it because they've got the vaccine. And I said, yeah, but do they— like, can they still spread it? And he said, yeah, they can still spread it. And I thought, well, that's, that's kind of just maybe giving you like a monopoly on the market because everyone will need to have your queens in order to like fight the AFB. but you're just still actively spreading it around. And even worse than that, because, because there's no incentive for me to like do anything if I've got AFB. It's like, doesn't matter, I've got, I've got a treated queen that can cope with it and all of her offspring can cope with it, so it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter for me anymore. And then you've just got all these like billions of spores going in and infecting your neighbor's bees. Uh, so I kind of thought, I thought it's clever, like, yeah, nice idea. Um, and the guys were really nice as well. Like, they weren't, they weren't trying to hide that fact that there— that, that is an issue. But I just, yeah, I'm not, I'm not 100% sold on it because I just think with AFB, especially in the UK, like, AFB is not really— not a massive issue in the UK. And when you find it, it's, it's very, very easy to like see it, see it within your colony, say, right, you've got AFB. Um, you know, for anybody who doesn't know, you're looking for like holes in the cappings that may be slightly off-center. You're looking for like slightly greasy cappings, sunken cappings. And if you see any of that, you get a matchstick and you poke it in and you'll get like the long tails coming out. And then you can get like tests, really easy tests that you can buy from Thorns. And then it tells you, like a COVID test would, whether you've got AFB or not. And then if you've got AFB, that is the simplest treatment in the world, which is you just close the hive up middle of the night, trap all the bees in there, pour petrol all over them, and set fire to the whole beehive. Like, that is the recommended treatment for AFB, and it sounds pretty horrific, and it is horrific, like killing all of your bees like that. But the fact that it's a spore-forming bacteria— I think it's a spore-forming bacteria— um, it, it, they're just everywhere. So there's nothing really you can do to kind of any of the equipment other than to burn it. So that's what they do. Uh, but yeah, I like the idea, and I think it's really good that people are putting money into looking at that and investigating how they can do stuff, but yeah, I'm not sure they, they looked kind of fully into the issues that it might cause other beekeepers that don't vaccinate their queens. Or maybe they did, and maybe they thought that was a really, really good thing. All right, next question. It says, um, we want to buy more equipment, but here in the Netherlands we use our own format. We would love to try other brands, types like the Anil hives, but this would be mixing up types. Any thoughts? So I would say it's— it is nice, yeah, to have like nice new bees. And so like different beehives, it is all good fun. But really, for me, like the, the beauty in having beehives is the bees, and it's keeping the bees in there. And like, speaking to someone who has a ridiculous amount of different beehives, and I'm talking like, you know, I've probably got 30 different types of beehives. But you know, you know what ones I love the most are the ones I love the most. Like, I just, I just have my favorite and that's the one that I want to use. And what I love nothing more is like going to a single apiary and having everything like standardized. So I have the same floor, the same brood boxes, like the brood boxes that I like, all of the same queen excluders, all of the same roofs. It makes beekeeping so easy. So I would just, I would say resist the temptation to diversify because there's no real benefit to it. And it only actually causes you problems and it slows you down and it makes beekeeping less fun. So just what I would say, here's a good tip if you're really into kind of going out and looking and exploring new types of beehives, like go to the beekeeping shows, go and test them and go and play with things and work out what your favorite's going to be, and then invest in the ones that are maybe like multi-purpose and that can be like used and compatible with one another. And then at least that way you can get a little bit of variety without taking away like the compatibility of the equipment. But I've been there, I've tried that, I've done all of that, and I go back to kind of revert back to the ones that are really my favorite. And that's what makes the beekeeping enjoyable. Oh, that was very nice. Robert Thomas has given me £4.99. Appreciate that, Robert. He says, hello from Wales. I bought 3 queens off you last year and I'll be buying more off you this year. Thank you, Robert, much appreciated. Um, I was, I was thinking this the other day, like, it's— I, I'm not sure how long I've been doing the, the queens now, maybe, maybe 3 or 4 years. And we've been doing the nucs for a while as well, nucs for a bit longer than that, maybe 5 or 6 years. And there is nothing I love more, like, literally without a shadow of a doubt, this is the best thing. And the, the proudest part of the beekeeping business is seeing the same people coming back and buying stuff again and again and again. And I mean like every year buying queens, buying nucs, they come back, they buy the same thing, and they tell other people about it, and they recommend us to other people. And I just think like you, you might get suckered in once by an advert, or you might get— you might watch a video and think, oh, that's, that's good, I'll buy, I'll buy some queens from him. But really, like, the true test is once you bought them, like, what do you think of them? Were they good, or were they kind of like overhyped? But by having like numerous people coming back again and again and again Makes me think like we're doing something right, and we've actually got like a decent product. So I do. I feel very proud of that. So thank you, Robert. I'm glad your queens are doing well. I'm glad you're about to buy some more. Right. Next question from John Hayes. He says, "We have five nationals and now have one flow hive. Should I add one more Langstroth hive just in case one gets into trouble?" Yeah, I think that's that's a good way of doing it. What I would say though as well is don't. Disregard like a really simple conversion board between a National and a Langstroth. So all you need to do is you can just get like some cheap scrap plywood, or I would say you can get OSB, like the orientated strand board I think it is, but it goes a bit weird in, in the wet. So get some, get some, get some plywood, and you want to cut it out to the size of— basically it doesn't really matter what the outside size is, it's the internal sizes that are more important. And it's a conversion board between, say, like a National and a Langstroth. And all it is is like the outer dimensions will be, say, the size of a National in one direction, so 460mm by the length, the length of a Langstroth, which I don't know off the top of my head. And then in the middle you just have like a hole. And then what that means is that if you get yourself into like a bit of an emergency, you can just put a Langstroth box onto a National and then get the bees to go up and just draw out some comb. I've done that loads, and they're really, really handy to do that, and it basically costs nothing because you can just go and get whatever you want out of the skip because you probably only want a couple of them. It's, uh, and you can do it on any single combination of hives. So whether you've got like Dadants or Commercials or Langstroths or Nationals, and it just makes, it makes kind of gives you loads more flexibility. So I wouldn't necessarily add an additional Langstroth hive in just in case the Flow Hive gets into trouble, and I definitely wouldn't add in like another Flow Hive just in case the other Flow Hive gets into trouble because then They're not cheap. But get yourself a couple of those conversion boards and then you can just like keep, keep, maybe keep like a box of Langstroth frames, drawn-out Langstroth frames in store somewhere. And then all you'd need to do if one of them got into trouble is take out a frame of brood from the failing one, chuck in some bees, chuck in a new queen, and you could start it again really quickly. So that's probably like a thrifty way of doing it. Right, so Steve's Honeybee says, hi Lawrence, as it's getting very mild, would you consider moving from fondant to syrup now? So it's really interesting you say that. Yeah, so I spoke to Richard, like talking to Richard doing all the nucs, and he's— Richard is already feeding syrup on a lot of them. And I've gone up to mine. I went— when did I go up to mine? It was like 16 degrees here on Wednesday. It was raining, but it was 16 degrees, and the bees were kind of having a go at flying, but it was a bit wet. But I fed them some syrup. I put some 2:1 in there. And you can kind of feed, you can feed 2:1 at any time of the year. 1:1 in spring is fine, but you don't want to feed 1:1 in the, like, kind of in the autumn. But 2:1 in spring is fine as well for the bees. So I put some 2:1 in there because I didn't want to go in it moldy, and within like a couple of hours they were there taking it down. So they will. I wouldn't go wild. I wouldn't feed them, I wouldn't fill the feeders up. I wouldn't give them 10 liters, but you can definitely give them like a liter of syrup. 2 to 1 syrup now. It's not going to go mouldy. They'll just take it down. They'll use it straight away. And if the weather stays good, like the bees are brooding, like there's massive amounts of brood in these colonies, like 2 or 3 frames in even the smallest nucs of brood now. So they're using that really, really quickly. So yeah, you can, like I say, wouldn't go wild with it, but you can definitely move from fondant to syrup now. But then the risk is that if it goes cold again then you're probably going to go back to fondant. And there's no real massive benefit to going to syrup now. So the only reason that I used it, the only reason that Richard used it, is because you just— we had quite a lot there and didn't want to have to go feeding fondant. The problem with— the problem that we've got is that the Payne's boxes, like the Payne's, uh, Polynucs, they're really not very good for feeding fondant. So the BS Honeybees boxes where you've got the fondant plug, perfect. Although they can, like, if they shift off to one side, they can miss the plug. A little bit, and the same with the same with the abello. You can feed fondant above the the abello nuke no problem. The pains ones though, there's no way to feed it unless you need like an eek to go on top, and if you've got the eek, then it's no problem. So previously, what Richard had done against my advice, probably the one time that I told him something that he that I was right on, but he he he rolled the fondant out and put it into the Into the feeder slot, and then I just— it just goes a bit messy, and you get— you do lose a few bees in there, and then you have to clean it out because the bees don't do it properly, and then you can get some comb being drawn in there. It's just a really messy way of doing it. So, um, yeah, you can do that. And what we'll do at this point as well, I will say, is if you are enjoying the stream— this goes for all of the videos— but if you're enjoying the stream, please do hit the like button. Really, really appreciate any likes. So the next number for the competition to win some things is number 11. There we go. So there's only one more number now, and, uh, I'll do that one at a kind of random point. It won't just be at the end. So if you're watching this back and think I'll just flick to the end, then it's not going to be at the end, but we'll do it at another random point. You'll have to try and find where it is. Right, a question from Lee Allison. Just gonna have some tea. How far will she fly? Will she mate with drones from the same apiary? So how far will she fly? I don't know, she'll fly pretty far. Will she mate with drones from the same apiary? Very, very unlikely. Like, very unlikely. The whole point for them is that they want to spread the genetics around. So if you're, if you're thinking about drone flooding, that you, you need to kind of get into an agreement with your neighbors, or you need to have like multiple satellite apiaries. Or if you're in like a really luxurious position where you're like strapped up against the coast and you can kind of work out right roughly. Like, if you're right on the coast and then you can like put a kind of like an elliptical shape around, maybe like a mile away from each of it, and have like these satellite apiaries— I know, I know people who do exactly that— then that's probably going to be the best way of drone flooding. Um, but then if you, if you treat all of your apiaries as drone flooding sites as well, then at least your drones are going to be contributing to the, the good of other people's beekeeping or or kind of like to the negative of other people's beekeeping, depending on which way you see it. Hi Lawrence, bit off topic of bees, but could I get some tips on how you express your brand and social media approach? I'm not the best at trying to sell my brand and would love some tips. So I'm more than happy to talk about stuff like this. And again, I won't go into a huge amount of detail on here because I think people want to just talk bees. But it's a difficult one. Like, I would say, like, I don't think we particularly do so. We don't do social media very well. Like, I look at my competitors and I think they do social media loads better than us. Like, in terms of like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok. Like, I think we do YouTube quite well. So we put all our eggs in one basket with YouTube and try and build a community there. But it goes back to what I said before. I— my personal opinion with social media is you need to add value to people. It's not just a case of, oh, look what we're doing, we've got some bees, aren't we great? Like, and, and that is some people's approach to social media. And I don't even think it's a, like, a, uh, just like telling stories either. You can tell stories, but unless you're giving people like a reason to come back— and like I said, I don't think we're very good at it. I definitely don't do that on social media, but YouTube's not too bad. But I think that's the way, if you build it around that, like what what can you give people? So are you giving people advice? Or are you trying things and like showing, showing how something works, or showing how something doesn't work? And just trying to add value in that way. I think that's a really good way of doing it. But like, again, if you're happy to have a chat on the phone or email or whatever, I'm quite happy to chat about these things. Sting that like button. Absolutely love that. So unfortunately not. We get a huge— I, I'm amazed with the amount of queries we get about like shipping queens outside of the UK, but unfortunately not. Like after Brexit, you can't ship anything out of the UK. Can't even ship to Ireland, but definitely not Sweden, definitely not America. So I'm really sorry, I can't, I can't ship to Sweden. Sorry. Or the Netherlands. Sorry. So back to beekeeping. John Hayes says, do you start 2:1 feeding as soon as you take off and harvest your supers in August? So yeah, I do. So my strategy that I always use now is kind of like mid to back end of August, I go around, I take all of my honey off, I put the feeders on the same day, I put the Apivar in on the same day, and I feed on the same day. I do it all on the same day, and then I take my honey supers back and extract them. Now, it doesn't have to be 2:1 at that point, and I think kind of 2:1 at that one's probably a waste because all they do, like, in that— at that point in the year, because I'm feeding so— because I'm feeding them so early, they just turn it into brood. So 2:1 is a little bit of a waste for them. So I would just go with 1:1 at that point. But I do, as soon as I take it off, I give them a good feed. And then what that means is that I'm, like, comfortable that I know they're going to get through until the ivy flow is there. and I've just not got to worry about the bees. There's nothing worse than like taking all the honey away and leaving them with like 6 boxes full of bees with no stores, and then it rains for a week and they're just dead. Everything's dead. It's not, not a good way to manage your bees. Has anyone run multi-queen colonies? So I've done it a couple of times where I've requeened the top box of a Demerara split and run them. Um, I'm gonna have a go at doing some more this year because it was quite fun and it did work. But the thing for me is that it— I never get the chance to run them long enough because I, I run them at a point in the year where they're doing the honey collection, and then I'm quickly ramping them down and getting them ready for winter. And then at that point I'm thinking, well, I'll just split them because I've got 2 colonies, 2 queens. I definitely wouldn't overwinter with 2 queens because I just don't think there's really any benefit to doing it. Um, but I do, I do think it's, it's an idea for getting bumper honey crops. Um, but I will, I will give it a go this year. Um, Jay says, do you know if we can get the patties like the Americans and Canadians can? I forget the name, but Apis Biologics within. Um, so I'm not sure, I'm not sure if you can get the patties. You can definitely get the kind of the, like, the formula and then make your own patties. Who was it who was doing it? I can't remember. I'll have to, I'll have to have a look into that one. There's definitely someone in the UK that's selling that, um, but I'm not sure who. Uh, Ed says, hi, if a hive swarms, can you just kill the queen and put the rest of the bees back in the hive, leaving them with just one queen cell? Yep, could definitely do that. That is a perfectly valid swarm management technique, uh, but it's— I wouldn't do that. Because it's— you're kind of putting all of your eggs in the— in a queen cell basket when you've got like a perfectly viable queen. Like, that queen could go on for another year. My take on it, always with a swarm, yeah, if a colony swarms, you've done something right. If a colony swarms, you're a good beekeeper who's not managed that colony well. If you've got colonies that never swarm and never build up and they don't get strong, kind of like, you know, maybe not a very good beekeeper, and there might be something like underlying or like EFB or something there, and that's the reason colonies are not thriving. So a thriving colony will swarm, pat yourself on the back, and then kind of you need to do better in the beekeeping management side of things and make sure that you're managing them so that they don't swarm. But you're doing something right to get them up to that point. What I would suggest there is that just take the swarm, take the swarm, find the queen, put her off in a nuc somewhere with like a frame of brood, one frame of stores, and just put her somewhere for the time being. Leave the one queen cell see if that queen gets mated. And then if that queen does get mated, then kill your original queen from the nuc and then just put the frames back together. And then you've kind of done the same thing, you've got exactly the same end result, but you've just banked your queen while you wait to see whether the other queen's going to get mated. Otherwise you've got to buy a new queen, or if you don't realize that you need to buy a new queen, the whole colony could fail. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't gamble on it too much like that. David says, when you say feeding to increase colonies, do you mean both providing sugar syrup and pollen patties? So it— this is relative to where you are in the world. So for us in North Wales, we never ever have to feed pollen patties, not at the beginning of the season, not in the middle of the season, not in the winter, like never, because there is always a more than adequate source of pollen. Um, so for us, like, just feeding sugar syrup boosts them, turbocharges them, because it gives them the carbohydrate that they need to go with the pollen that they've pretty much always got. Now, in other places in the world, like, that's just not the case. Like, you might just not have any pollen at all, and if you just fed them sugar syrup, they just wouldn't be able to do anything with it because you're just giving them the carbohydrate without the protein that they need to rear the brood. So it is very relevant in terms of where you are in the world. And I guess, I guess, like, you'll know that, you'll see what local people are doing around. If everyone's feeding pollen patties because there's like a pollen dearth on, then you'll need to feed the pollen patties as well. Hazelmere Honey says, hi mate, says, last year I started grafting using the Nicot cage with the specific queen, then using a frame of 20 cells I would put into the top box of a demerary split. It worked well. Any thoughts? Um, so this is, this is the thing with queen rearing, there's kind of working well, you never, you never really know, like What you're doing is the absolute best for the bees. But to get the bees to turn larva, the correct age larva, into queen cells is, is not really that difficult. You just put them in a place where they're far enough away from the queen's pheromone. But that's only really like half the battle, or like less than half the battle, because if you're not making sure that the bees have got enough carbohydrate, that the bees have not got enough pollen, but more importantly than that, that you've not not got enough nurse bees in there, you've not flooded that box with nurse bees, because they're going to be the ones that are eating that pollen, eating the carbohydrate, turning that into the royal jelly to feed up the larva, then you're not going to get like really big, fat, plump, healthy queens. So you could do it in the top box of a Demerara, but in my experience, top box of a Demerara is not really going to be where you're getting that prolific amount of nurse bees. So I would try and do it, do it elsewhere. And you can do it loads of ways. I was watching— who was it? I can't remember. I was watching someone doing it the other day, which was they basically waited for a colony to swarm. So they just, as soon as they found a colony that was going to swarm, they just put some larvae in, grafted them in, and then just— and they just went wild and just got like full racks, full frames, perfectly drawn out, because you've got like so many bees in there, they're just at the perfect density to do it. Um, but it's pretty easy to manipulate the colony to make sure that you've got exactly what you need there. Um, but yeah, don't, don't overlook the importance of the amount of young bees in there, I would say. Right, I'm just, I'm just having a look. I'm gonna have another sip of my tea. I'm just running through the questions. Right, so Ben says, so with the 2-frame splits you've spoken about making in mid-April, do you let the nucs naturally requeen or introduce a bought-in mated queen? So 100%, at that point in the year, you, you need to buy in a mated queen. It's the only way of doing it. Like, there's no way that you'd get a queen mated if you did that in mid-April. So I wouldn't even consider doing that until, for us in North Wales, around like middle, back end of May. Probably middle of May you'd get away with it if the weather's good. But yeah, I would be buying them in. If you're doing them early like that. Right, next question for Travel with Marty says, hello, I'm thinking to drop my travel channel and start keeping bees as I'm too old and knackered for traveling, so I need a new hobby. And keeping bees seems so interesting. I love that, diversify. I don't, um, I don't, don't give up a channel that's doing well though. Like, if you, if you've kind of built a brand around traveling, you can you can do other stuff. I would, I would do a new channel, do 2 channels, and keep your, um, Travel with Marty channel. It could be like, you could, I don't know, could do something, do something different with it. You do like a podcast on it or something, it'd be cool. I would go with a new, a brand new channel using all of your YouTube skills, um, and build up, build up a brand new channel and then have 2 channels. That'd be really cool. Uh, so Ben says, when are you starting your demo race? This year. So it is very dependent on the weather, the demerays. Um, like, if the weather at the moment for us is great, I really hope it just stays this mild all the way through until May. Obviously gets like a bit warmer, but I don't want any, any cold snaps coming in. And if, if it does, then I'll be starting my demerays kind of like May, first week of May, I reckon. If we get the cold snap, it's probably mid-May towards the end of May. But I like to do it before a single colony has got any charged queen cells. I don't like waiting for any of that swarming impulse to get into my bees, and I find that's loads and loads better to do it that way. So if you want a rough date, I would say mid-May, kind of early to mid-May, that's when I would start them. Sorry, Alan, I've not. I promise I will get around to doing it before the season starts. I'm just, yeah, I've got loads going on. I've, uh, I've got the beekeeping show next weekend, and then the weekend after that I do have a free weekend, so I will sort your hives out. Uh, right, let's have a look for some new questions. So Ben, another one on the demerare, says, when you do a demerare, do you use those frames for honey, uh, after they've had the brood in them? So yeah, so I've covered this, I've covered this. I'm going to do a video on this because that's definitely the the number one confusion I would say that people have with the Demaray method is to what to do with the frames once they're filled up in the top with honey. So I'll start from the beginning. The Demaray split, really, really simple. You've got a brood box full of bees, 2 supers full of bees, and what you do is you will get another brood box and you'll take an additional brood box and put it off to one side. And then you would take the queen, find the queen on a single frame of brood, take that off to one side, and lift up the entire original brood box and put it up to the top, and then in the place where the old brood box was, you put your new brood box full of frames, full of foundation, and then you put the frame with the queen into the demaray at the bottom, into the brood box in the bottom. 8 days later, you go back down into the top box and you take down all the queen cells. That's the demaray split. Really, really simple, really great swarm management technique. What you end up with, once all of the brood that emerges from the top box, is that the bees backfill it with honey. So if you've treated your bees with Apivar, you can't extract the honey from those frames because they're tainted. But what you can do, like perfectly legitimately, and like there's nothing wrong with it doing this, you take that box and you bruise all of the cappings. So you just get your hive tool, go over the cappings, bruise them, and then you flip it back down to the bottom underneath the brood nest and you put more supers above it, and then all the bees do is they just move all of that honey back up into your supers, and then you just take the empty box away, and then you start again. You can just do it again and again. You'll probably get— be able to do that twice in the season. The bees have no idea what's going on, but it stops them swarming. You might be able to do it 3 times depending on how long your season is, but that would do it. Doing it that way, you're never extracting out of the frames that have been tainted, and you're only ever extracting out of frames that like your super, your shallow frames. And it doesn't— it's not like cheating the system at all. Like, that is basically what happens with normal brood frames. The bees come back in with nectar, they offload into the brood frames, and then overnight they lift it all back up. So it's kind of exactly the same as what happens naturally within the beehive anyway. So no problem whatsoever. I'm getting out. I'm getting out of breath. I'm gonna have to drink from my big mug again. One sec. Right. Matt Burrows says, "Hi, if you do a demeray split and then reduce for winter in a double brood configuration, is it better to use the second brood box to split the following year as the frames will be treated?" Um, to read that again. Wait there. So let me read it again. If you do a demeray split and then reduce for winter in a double brood configuration, yeah. So you've got two two brood boxes. Is it better to use a second brood box to split the following year as the frames will be treated. So I think basically for us, all of our brood boxes are treated because we end up treating on a double brood configuration. We condense into a double brood and then we treat both of the boxes because we've got that many frames of brood in there. So everything is treated. If you've got a box that isn't treated, then I would just mark it up as not treated, and then you don't need to go through that cycle and you can just extract honey out of that box. I think, I think that answers the question. If it doesn't, put it on there again. I've maybe mis— kind of misinterpreted what you meant there. I love that people are going and subscribing to Pink It's Honey. Anybody else go and do it, it's brilliant. Um, I, I can't wait to go and look at it after. I've not— I don't think I've seen it yet. Really looking forward to that. JK says he uses AI for his YouTube titles. Very good. I've been using ChatGPT a bit. I do use a bit of AI. Um, do you know, do you know what it— I absolutely find like disgusting is when, um, like I get emails from people or social media companies and it's like, oh dear beekeeping enthusiasts, our buzzy little friends. And I just think, oh my God, you've just literally typed something into ChatGPT and you've posted it out to everyone and you've not even like taken out the extreme bee enthusiasm. Like it makes me like a little bit sick. So I think you must try harder. Sorry, I turned into a proper grumpy old man tonight. I'm— look, we're giving away free stuff, so that, that makes up for the grumpiness. So, you know, nice hat. Travel with Marty says, I've watched your old videos and your current stuff is amazing. Love your straightforward style. Now I'm thinking of getting bees this year. Excellent, I'm glad you like it. I do, I do try and refine the style. I struggle with it all the time. I just— I'm the biggest blabber in the world. I can't stop talking. I get, I get excited. And this is the thing, this goes back to the advertorials. People say, oh, it's just, it's just such a clear advertorial, like you're plugging someone and you're benefiting from it. And it's like, no, I'm just really excited. I'm just like a little boy. I just get excited about stuff. And I, I love bees and I love beekeeping and I love beekeeping equipment. And I do, I get new stuff and I'm like, oh, I've got this amazing new bee suit or this new beehive. And people think, oh, he's just, just trying to sell it. But I just like 12 deep down. So, um, I'm loving all the questions coming in about demerays. I think there's going to be some serious demerays going on this year. So David says, when you do a demeray manipulation, can you extract any of the brood frames that have been used for stores? Sorry, David, I, I did answer that. I've just answered that question. Hopefully I've given you what you need. So yes, you can, but you need to go through that manipulation. I love it when people give me permission to drink the tea as well. So do not forget the tea, it's getting cold. And I'm like maybe 10% into it, but it's a nice tea. David says yesterday he was at 99 subs and today he's at 98. So do you know what? So so I I have a chronic addiction for looking at my YouTube statistics, like every 20 minutes I'll be like. Like looking at it, and it doesn't matter. Every like oh got another subscriber or got but they never never really like you don't look at and think I've got another subscriber. I'm really happy I've got another subscriber. But the second that you lose a subscriber, you think what have I done wrong there? I've annoyed someone, and I take it all like way too personally. But there is nothing worse than losing a subscriber. I kind of think I've I've like. Failed at YouTube, so I am. I'm sorry about that. Oh, people are saying about ads. Are there ads coming on there as well? It's because I'm not doing it on YouTube. I'm on StreamYard today. Sorry, I have failed you if there's loads of ads coming on here. I can't. I've not got the option to skip them on StreamYard. If if I have set them up, hopefully they're not too intensive. Um, I'll make sure I don't set them up as intensive next time. Sorry about that. Oh, sorry if I've missed questions. Sorry, I just try and kind of like filter through them here. So, uh, missed Peter Badger's question. What causes webbing on queen cells when they're joined together? Is it too much feed? Um, I think bees are basically awkward little kids sometimes and they just do what they want. It could like It's definitely going to be as a result of there being feed in there. Like, if you didn't give them enough feed, then they wouldn't have the resources to do that. It more likely as a result of them being a bit too close together and just kind of like pushing too many together on the frames. And then if you, if you can imagine, you've got like, they're so close together that you've got like a, like a 6mm gap in between them, and then the bees don't respect the 6mm space, so then they want to join it together. So you need to make sure that once they're drawn down as cells, you've got at least 8 mil or 8 mil exactly in between them so the bees respect it as the bee space. So I'd say it's probably more a bee space issue as opposed to like kind of feeding the bees too much. Is it Gerald? Gerald says, if you volunteer for the Bee Association at an event, you'll meet loads of young people, get them interested. We take a viewing hive to a primary school every year. Yeah, I think that's— it's a really good point that like everyone has to take kind of some sort of ownership in terms of getting the next generation of beekeepers interested in stuff. Um, I, I love it. I love kind of getting kids involved in beekeeping because they're so like— they, they know so much. Like, I went to my little girl's school, she's only 5, and did a talk about bees, and they were just brilliant. They just like knew so much about them. My little girl at the moment, she came back the other day Uh, came back from school, she said, Dad, um, you've done something really, really bad. And I said, what have I done? She said, you've bought some peanut butter that's got palm oil in it. That means you've killed some orangutans. And I just thought, oh, bless her. I felt really bad. So now we— our game now is that we have to look at all of the different ingredients on things, and we're only allowed to buy stuff with sustainable palm oil in. But it was pretty good. It was only— it was only the peanut butter out of the whole cupboard. in the house that had palm oil in. So we're not, we're not killing too many orangutans, but it did make me feel bad. But then they, they know a lot, kids, and they are interested, and, you know, like, they like nature and they like the environment and stuff. Hi Lawrence, I'm new to beekeeping. If you had, uh, if you only had maybe 1 or 2 hives in your garden, what would be your varroa treatment regime with cost of equipment, etc., a consideration for so few colonies? these. So be really, really simple. I would just treat them with Apivar, and I'd probably go with like Apivar in autumn, and then I'd go with Apivar in the spring as well. I'm doing a blog post on this as well at the moment, so if you're, if you're thinking, hmm, I didn't do an oxalic acid treatment, or I didn't do any treatment in, in the winter or the autumn, I'm worried about my bees, like now, literally today or tomorrow, is the perfect time to go and put Apivar in. It's an 8-week treatment. and you can't put the supers on while the treatment's in. But like, we're middle of Feb at the moment, so if you put it in now, 8 weeks takes you to like middle, just after the middle of April, which would be pretty much spot on for adding supers for most people. So it's a good way of doing it, and it— you get your bees into a really, really nice position. And it keeps for like a couple of years if you get a good expiry date on the Apivar and keep it sealed. It keeps for a couple of years. So okay, you need to buy— I think it comes in packs of 10, packs of 10, but you need 2 strips per hive. So you get a, like, a 1 pack, which is like £30, will last you a couple of years. So it's not expensive at all. I definitely wouldn't recommend going and spending money on an oxalic acid vaporizer for 1 or 2 hives in your garden. Not, not needed. So there you go. I'm not plugging, not plugging expensive things just, but just because I like them. You definitely get away with Apivar or Apitraz. I always forget you can use Apitraz as well. Um, are you Jeff? Jeff Horchov. I was reading that, I was thinking, who's Ben Horchov? Yeah, Jeff. And Mr. Ed is— he is literally like the best pick-me-up tonic you can ever imagine, isn't he? It's just like the man is a living smile. I love him, he's great. Uh, Travel with Marty says, I've been torn between sacking— oh, you said that, sorry, I've, I've answered that one. Is this— yeah, it's the same question, isn't it? Sorry, I missed the first one. Here we go. Right, Wildways Farm says, when is it a safe time to know if your bees survived the winter in Devon? Oh, that's a great question because I see so many like things about people saying, oh, my bees have survived the winter, and you just think, it's Feb— it's the middle of February, like how on earth do you know if your bees have survived the winter? I remember, I think, I can't remember, I always do this, I can never remember the titles of videos. But there's a really, really good example of a video that shows in like the first week of April a box of bees, 14 by 12 box of bees, and I open them up and it is just full, like full to the brim with bees. You've never seen so many bees in your life. There's no way that that many bees could fit inside this beehive, bubbling over. I'm going off with a salesman pitch, but I kind of thought, That's what I want to see. Like, if I want— if I was gonna rank that as a score out of 10 for opening up a colony coming into the spring, I'd give it a 10. I'd probably give it 11. It was that good. And there was no queen and no brood. There was not a single cell of brood, and there was no queen in the colony. And I shook them through a queen excluder because I just thought there must be a queen in there. There was no breed— there was no queen and there was no brood, but there was that many bees. So what must have happened is that she just— the queen in maybe January had just said, right, let's go, and just laid 10 frames of brood. And then they'd all hatched out and it had got cold, and then she just died. And then the bees are like, we've not got any larva to create any new queens, and it was game over. So, so slightly off topic there. When is a safe time to know? I would say middle of April. It really is. You've got to wait until middle of April, and there's like a kind of like a switchover day where you just know there's the queen's there, there's eggs there, there's tons of brood there. You're seeing this massive expansion like that. And until you get to that point, I would say your bees haven't survived the winter. I'm sure your bees will survive the winter, but you know, you know what I mean. Don't, don't count your chickens. Um, so JND's Bee says you have a lot of horizontal hives and some vertical ones. Also right. So I do like, I really like the idea of horizontal hives, and I think they work more for some people. So I think if like if anyone's got disabilities or you've got like a bad back or you've got like restricted mobility, then a horizontal hive is like a really good idea. And I do like the look of horizontal hives as well, but I do struggle swarm management in them. That's the one thing I would say. If you're running it for like a production colony with honey, running horizontal hives can be very, very tricky. Because bees naturally kind of move upwards, and like the swarm manipulation techniques, you're manipulating the bees by kind of working out the way that they naturally work. Whereas horizontal hives, it's a bit more difficult to trick them into doing things, and they just do what they want. Um, but the horizontal hives that I do have, like the Nucci hive— again, rub people up the wrong way, the Nucci hive— but it's And my hide hives long hive with the nucs in it. That's what I would say for horizontal hives. If you're thinking of getting a horizontal hive, get one that can double up as like a nucs hive as well. You can split it off into different sections and have like six or eight nucs in it because then you've got like a nice multi-purpose, like versatile piece of equipment. That's probably that's probably the best joke I've heard on today's live stream. That's good. I like, I like beekeeping jokes. Has anybody got any good beekeeping jokes? Stick them in the comments, that'd be cool. Uh, right, Darren's saying it's nice when people come back for the honey again also. Yeah, it's true. There's nothing better, is there, than the repeat customers and people who like— they just come back, tried and tested, and you, you kind of continue giving them exactly what they want. Right, so Gareth says, hi, just turned on. The 4 queens I got off you last year are awesome. The hives are thriving here in the north coast of Northern Ireland. So that, that's a slight error there because I didn't think we were supposed to send queens to Northern Ireland. That's obviously slipped through the, uh, the ordering system there. Um, whoops, sorry about that. I'm glad they're doing well. Uh, I'm really surprised how you've got that through. Our website doesn't accept queens to Northern Ireland. I don't know, we'll have to, uh, we'll have to take a look at that. I thought, I thought they were relaxing the requirements actually for them going out to Northern Ireland, but it doesn't seem that they are, that you still need an export certificate. But it appears that you've got through, so that's good news. So Jim says, I'll be multiplying what I have, but I want to get a bunch of different queens just for fun and to see the differences. It's interesting you say that because I am doing exactly that this year. So we've put a load of different queens onto the website now. So from all of the lines from Melitta Queens are on there now. So you can get like Buckfast, you can get VSH Buckfast, you can get Italian, you can get Carniolans, you get Elgon, you can get Pramorsky. I can't remember the other one. There's another one in there as well that I've forgotten. Um, but I'm getting— I'll get like 3 or 4 of each and I will run them all so you can see all the differences, which I thought would be really, really cool. But I like— I'm like that with different bees. It's like, I wanna— I wanna try the different ones. I want to see what's best for me. I want to see what works. Um, I don't want to just— I don't want to kind of have the horrible mongrel bees that we've, that we've got around here that just sting me and chase me. I want to have like nice friendly bees. Uh, Soapy Bath and Body says— I like that, Soapy. Um, I've got my first ever colony coming from you this year. I'm very excited. I've tended to my sister-in-law's hive and just fell in love. Any tips for a brand newbie? I've been watching all your vids. So what would be my tips for someone starting off beekeeping? I would say regular inspections, really, really important, but it doesn't need to be like a 2-hour kind of long thing. It just needs to be like 10 minutes, 10-15 minutes, but pick a slot in the week that you can really commit to. You know, there's not going to be like, oh, I can do, I can do Sunday afternoon this week, but then next week I'm not going to be able to do Sunday afternoon. Like, pick a slot. And considering, like, the beekeeping season is generally quite good, you can do it after work. So I just say pick a slot and that's your beekeeping slot. That is it. So every single week you go down there at like 6 o'clock on a Friday night and do your inspections then. And make sure that you don't miss an inspection, um, because that, like Sod's Law, the week that you miss your inspection is the week that your bees will swarm. Do everything in your power To make sure that your bees don't swarm. Because if you get through the first year and your bees don't swarm, you will have learned so much, like kind of like how to manage your bees, how to control them, how to give them space, how to do the inspections. And like, you have like a nice positive experience of your beekeeping first year. If your bees swarm, then it becomes really difficult quite quickly. So make sure they've always got enough space in the brood box, make sure they've always got enough space in the rest of the beehive. A young Buckfast queen shouldn't kind of be like particularly swarmy, but if you don't give them enough space, they will swarm. But then the number one tip that I would give, and this is the one I'd be— the majority of first-year beekeepers won't do this, and this is what will catch them out, is you're taking frames out. So you're kind of like, when you're taking the frames out, you'll be really careful to not squish the frames together, but obviously like DN4 frames or self-spacing frames should be pushed as close together as they can possibly be because that's the correct bee space. And kind of like, it's counterintuitive, but by pushing them together like that, you won't get the squished bees because they don't build out the wildness, and that's what causes the squishing. But I digress. What I'm saying though is when you're getting your frames out, so the first frame that you're getting out from an inspection, you're taking, taking your time, you're levering it out, you're pulling it out, you're looking at the bees, and you're kind of thinking, right, are there any swarm cells on this frame? You're looking and it's just a frame full of bees. And what I'm going to say just doesn't really sit well with a lot of beginners, but it is just shake the bees off the frame. Yeah, just shake them off. Just get over your beehive, go bang, shake all the bees off like that, and then assess the comb. Because believe me, the first time that you get swarm cells in your colony, you almost certainly won't see them because they're covered by bees. But as soon as you shake the bees off like that, you see them straight away. And it's at that point that you can actually do something about it. So if you catch the swarm before it swarms, that you maintain your queen, and all it means is you'll have to split your colony from one into two, and it's a really, really easy thing to do. But if you go in and you've got capped swarm cells and the queen's gone, then it can be really tricky from there, and it can be quite difficult to recover in your first year. So just by doing that really simple thing, which is just shaking the, shaking the bees off the frame and assessing the frame without the bees, you probably get kind of like a much better experience in your first year, and I think you'll eliminate the risk of them swarming by doing that. So that would be my piece of advice. Don't worry, Stacy, I've not forgotten your cap. Um, definitely got your cap there, but I look forward to meeting you too. Uh, how on earth do I do it all? Family, full-time job, all the beekeeping, YouTube, all the social media stuff, etc. Nuts. Uh, yeah, it's, it's absolutely nuts. I don't know, I struggle. I have no social life, um, and my wife gets angry at me. Yeah, it's good fun. I do live streams, I like them. Uh, says next question says, hi Lawrence, do you use Ultra Bee or any other pollen powder for the bees. So no. So as I said previously in this one, in Wales, we just, we just don't have the need to use anything like that because you always have like a pretty good source of pollen. Like at the moment, snowdrops are out, crocuses are out, there's other flowers kind of coming out here now. So for me, it's not a case of that we need the pollen sub, but I just think it completely depends like where you are in the world. Like there will be places where if you didn't feed pollen at certain points in the year, then I just, I think you'd be in real trouble, especially if you're trying to build up to make splits or you're trying to build up for like a pollination event. That's really where it comes into its own. Like, I guess the guys who are going for the almonds, like, if they didn't feed their bees protein to build them up to get them strong enough for the almonds, there's no way they'd be strong enough because it's such an unnatural point in the year to have such a big colony. But over here, no, I don't, I don't think it's, uh, it's anything that we need to worry about. So this, this is a very welcome message. Hi Ian, how's it going? I feel like incredibly privileged, like number one favorite beekeeper on YouTube, so he has stopped by. So good afternoon, I don't even know what time it is in Canada. It's quarter past 9 in the UK and I'm drinking a chamomile tea, so thanks for stopping by, much appreciated. It's absolutely made my evening, Ian stopping by. Uh, Gerald says, is there a difference in queen and drone flight distance? Can't remember. It stops crossing in theory. Um, I like— I'd love to be able to give you like a, a detailed kind of good answer for that, but I honestly don't know. Um, all I know is that the queens go off and try and find like a drone congregate— a drone congregation area, and it's generally not going to be anywhere near where your apiary is. But in terms of distances and in terms of location drones. I'm really not 100% sure. I'd love to go hunting for drone congregation areas. That would be like a really, really fun thing to do. Uh, Jim says, real question, I have hives in my garden and I need to move them. It's hard winter and I have a spot 100 meters away. Can I just move them there, or do I still need to go far away? Brilliant question, and so many people will be asking themselves that. And you're looking at the kind of the rule, which is, it's like the 3-foot or 3-mile rule, which means that if you're going to move your bees, you can move them up to 3 foot in any direction at any point in the year. You can just move them, the bees will find their way into the hive. Anything over 3 feet, you need to go to 3 miles, or the bees kind of lose track of where it is. So, so for your instance there, you've got a spot you want to move them 100 meters away. If you just picked up that colony in the middle of the year, like when the bees are flying, moved it 100 meters away, they would not find where that beehive was and they would just all go back to the original spot, like the location of the original hive, and you'd lose kind of the majority of your bees. However, in the winter, and like you— I like that you've put that it's a hard winter, so if the bees aren't flying, like you can just move them. It's great. You just pick them up, put them somewhere new, and even like in the UK, we don't get like proper winters here, it rarely gets below freezing. But in the UK, if you've got a period where it's like 2 or 3 weeks of like freezing or like -2 or something like that, you can do that in the UK as well. But you need to time it with that real like 2 or 3 week gap. Um, and you might lose like the odd bee, but you really won't lose that many. They do tend to go through a reorientation process kind of after about 2 or 3 weeks. It seems to be like, uh, their memories— they lose their memories a bit. And this is why on early spring days what you see is Um, you see like a lot of orientation flights again, and that's not only just the newbies. You get a lot of the old bees there that are reorientating because they've not been out for such a long time. So go for it, it's a really safe bet. If you've got a hard winter and it's freezing, anything below freezing, the bees aren't flying and it's going to be like that for 2 or 3 weeks, you can just move them to the new spot. Hi Lawrence, we brought some Buckfast queens and some of the Italian Lagustica queens from You last year, and they all seem to be doing well. Well, that's good to hear. The the Lagustica ones are a very a very interesting strain of bee. They do you know what they're they're great for? And what the reason that we really like them is that they just create such an incredible amount of brood, and that is like a huge advantage and also like a massive disadvantage as well because they will starve quite easily. But it's one of those ones like boom or bust with the Italians. You either get— if you get the flows, you'll get an absolute bumper honey crop, but if you get any sort of kind of like issue or any sort of period where there's not that much coming in, they eat it all really, really quickly. But they're great for making splits, really, really good for making splits because you've just got like a constant supply of brood, and that's the exact reason that we use them in our kind of nuc apiaries. Uh, so when talking of syrup, does 1:1 mean by weight? So it's, it's confusing. The, the, the kind of ratios of sugar syrup can be a little bit confusing. Um, I get confused about it all the time. I have to go back and check the calculators and stuff. I know 1:1 though. So 1:1 is 1 liter of water and 1 kilogram of sugar. And if anyone did science, you will know that 1 liter of water weighs 1 kilo as well. So it is by weight for that instance there. And then I always forget the 2:1. I don't make 2:1, I buy it. So I buy invert, and that's kind of like— it's around 2:1. I forget the specific density of it. Um, but 1:1 is definitely 1 liter of— 1 liter of water to 1 kilogram of sugar, which I know for people in the US is— you don't use the metric system, so I don't know what the imperial equivalent is, but I'm sure someone will put it in the chat. Uh, Nicholas says he thinks water and sugar has the same weight and volume. Um, yeah, that they might do. I don't know, I don't know about that. I've never thought about the kind of like the equivalent volume of sugar. Hmm, you got me thinking then. I'm gonna go do some tests after this. Hi, VSH queens, are they really worth the extra pounds? So for anybody who doesn't know, VSH Varroa-sensitive hygiene, basically saying that the bees kind of know when there's varroa in the cells, and there might be like holes in the cappings, and then they go in and they clean out the larva and they clean everything. So they're like sensitive to varroa. So I would say in the first generation, yes, definitely. But the only real benefit that you're getting out of it is that you might not have to treat for varroa. And for me, like, treating for varroa is not really like that much of an arduous task, and it's not a huge expense either. But so in the first generation, you shouldn't have to treat those bees for varroa. As soon as you get down to the next generation, you're almost certainly going to have to treat them for varroa. So it's not a silver bullet, and it's not a long-lasting thing either. It's only really at that generation, but it's kind of up to you. Like, for some people, it's like not treating for Varroa is a very important thing. And like, if everybody went down that route, like if everybody bought VSH queens and then you somehow managed to eliminate all of your neighbors and all of the feral bees as well, then you could kind of collectively potentially build bees that would tolerate Varroa. But I, I think that is a bit of a pipe dream. I don't think that's ever really gonna happen to get everyone so coordinated. So are they worth the extra pounds? I'll give you my honest opinion, I'd probably say no. I would stick with the normal ones and just treat for, for Aurora. Uh, Hi, what's the earliest I can move my nucs into wood boxes? I'm 8 over 8 in poly nucs. Um, so definitely, I definitely wouldn't rush it, but I'd say as soon as they've got to a position where they're kind of like struggling for space in the poly nucs, then Definitely do it like a week before they're struggling for space in the poly nucs. But I would say you're not going to get a huge amount of benefit by moving them in because you are so well nicely insulated in the poly, and that's what the bees like, and that's what keeps them so warm overnight. And it's kind of like that nighttime temperature that gives them the ability to keep that amount of brood stable. So if it's dropping off cold overnight, the queen's going to say, I'm not laying like a huge amount of brood. because it gets so cold, because it might not have the amount of bees needed in order to keep that amount of brood warm. So you're definitely better off, and your bees will be better off staying in the poly nucs for as long as possible, but obviously not to the point where they're cramped in there. But I would say, don't— if you've got them in poly nucs on 6 frames, like, I always use Rob Tallis as the example, who sometimes comes onto these streams and bought a nuc from us maybe 2 years ago, 3 years ago. And he bought a nuc, one of the first overwintered nucs middle of April he got his nuc, and then he sent me a picture at the end of the year and it was on double brood with 7 supers full of honey, and it was a 6-frame nuc in the middle of April. So, you know, you don't need, you don't need to rush it. Like, they do well early on if you've got a good nuc. Middle of April they can go in, early April even if you've got good weather, but I definitely wouldn't be pushing it kind of any, any time before the 1st of April. I love these ones. I should read them and then kind of like think about them. Can you talk about your favorite encounter you've ever had with someone while beekeeping? Learning a lot from me. Well, let me think. My favorite encounter. I'm gonna keep that one on the back burner. I'm gonna come back to it. I'll try and think of it as I'm speaking, which might be difficult, but I think I'll think about that one. I'll tell you what, when I put— when I It's like a mental note for me when I come to do the final number, which maybe someone's seen there. I will. I'll do that question. But also, if you're enjoying the stream, definitely give it a thumbs up. That would be much appreciated. So no, I don't make my own pollen patties. So the question there is: Hi, do you ever make your own pollen patties? Pollen patties, and do you have a recipe for it? So no, I don't. I'm not one for messing around with things. That kind of come relatively cheap anyway. But as I said, we don't really have a huge requirement for pollen patties over here, so I've never really been too interested in making them. Uh, next question: if bees are more aggressive, could they also be more defensive against robbers and hornets and wasps? Right, that is a really good question and one that I've been picked up on a lot, which is to say, like, why would I want really calm, placid bees? Because I want I want my bees to like defend themselves against kind of intruders or robbers or wasps or hornets. And it's the biggest myth going, like it's just not true. And a lot of beekeepers use it as an excuse for kind of keeping really aggressive bees. They say, well, I want my bees to be aggressive because I want them to be able to deal with intruders and badgers and all that kind of stuff. And I can safely say like some of the calmest colonies that I've got, you watch wasp go in there and they absolutely blitz it. They really do. Um, it's a lot of these defensive strategies that the bees have, they become way more efficient when you've got more bees in there. So for me, having big, strong, prolific colonies, even though they're calm to me, it's because they don't see me as a threat because I'm not really doing anything. But if you— if I go in, if you get like wasps going in or hornets going in, they just kind of sense that immediately and they just try and go for for them. Not that they could do a huge amount to a hornet, but they definitely have a go at a wasp. Um, so yeah, I don't think that's, uh, I think that's definitely a myth, that one. Well, I'm just flicking through some of the other questions here. I'm trying to think about my favorite bee encounter as well. Uh, Darren says if somebody wants to make money as a YouTuber, beekeeping isn't exactly a profitable category. It's very, very true. It is not a very profitable category at all, um, because it's incredibly niche and there's not that many beekeepers. However, there is a bit— the only, the only slight kind of niche within a niche on that one is like the extreme factor of like catching mega swarms, that they potentially make good, good money from a mega swarm video. And you ask Yappy the Bee Man, I was chatting to him about his mega swarm one video and how much money he made. But yeah, you're never going to be the next MrBeast, unfortunately. Hi, when do you think the best time of the year to requeen your hive is? So for me, I think the best time of the year to make splits is early on in the year, and I think the best time of the year to requeen your hive is after you've done your honey crop, because it's just a really nice natural dead time where the bees don't really do much. And I find that introducing queens at that point, you get nicely mated queens, you're really, really young, the bees are so desperate they will take whatever you give them. Give them a duff queen, they'll be like, yep, we accept her. So you don't get any failed introductions. But then what I love is the, like, the boom that you get the following year. So if you introduce a queen in September, you overwinter, you generally get really good overwintering success with a nice young queen. And then that next following season, huge, huge honey crops in the spring. So September is my favorite time to do it. Oh, I'm loving, I'm loving this. People like leaving me tips. This is amazing. Thank you so much, Gareth. I really appreciate that. His question says, I overfed my hive sugar water last autumn. The super is full of this sugar water honey, which I wouldn't sell. What should you do with the super? So really easy way to get rid of that is annoying. Overfeeding is frustrating because you're like, you're trying to do the best for your bees, you're thinking, I want to make sure my bees have got enough stores, so you're feeding them, and it is easy to overfeed them. I've been there, we've all been there. It's a really, really easy way to get rid of it though. All you do is, once the bees are kind of active, once you get into the season again, you want to take that super and you want to bruise all of the stores down and remove it from the beehive and double brood your colony. So put an additional brood box on With like frames, foundation, and then take the super and put it at the very bottom. So basically you're doing what's called a nadir, N-A-D-I-R. And what the bees will do is they'll just take all of that sugar, all of the stores from that frame, and they'll just lift it up. And if you double brood them, what they will do is they will use it to draw out all of the foundation. So I know you might kind of think, I don't want to double brood, but if you do it the other way and you put the super back on, all they do is they just take it from one super and then they put it back into the other super. So you don't really achieve anything without putting another brood frame, another brood box on. But it's really worthwhile putting the other brood box on because you've got like an additional amount of drawn combs that you can use for splits, and you're getting them to draw them out a lot quicker by using that sugar water. That's what I would do with it anyway. And then the benefit and the bonus of that as well is that you get the super that's like nicely cleaned out that you can use again. So hopefully that was helpful. Uh, Stephen says, I was watching and the live went off. Have you did the third number? Okay, no, I have not done the third number. There we go. The third number is 56. So doing all— oh, I nearly just gave you all of the numbers again there, and I kind of realized that was completely what I was trying not to do. So there we go, I've given you 3 numbers. All you need to do with those 3 numbers is, um, post this— so share this stream once it's finished on a Facebook group, beekeeping Facebook group, and I'll just pick someone at random and you can win the swarm catcher. How cool is that? It's kind of the facial recognition for catching swarms and a hat. So 2 separate prizes. I'll pick 2 winners. There you go. I really like my new hats. I know, like, it's my own product, but I do. I like them, they're pretty cool. I did— I got one of those made up as well, like black on black, and it's, it's like my favorite new cap, wearing it everywhere. So there we go, all, all 3. Everyone can go now, you've got the 3 numbers. That's, that's clearly every— the only thing people came for. I'm only joking. Right, here we go. I've been talking for an hour and a half. That's a long stream, and my throat is is feeling a little bit sore. So I will I will do a few more. There's a lot. There's quite a lot more questions. I'm going to get to the bottom of the questions. That is my mission for this evening, and I'm going to drink a bit more of this tea. Right. So David says, "I joined a beekeeping association last year here in Northern Ireland. I found that they hate Buckfast bees and are always down on them." I bought ten queens with me last year, and I sit in silence. So I'm cringing a bit here because I didn't—I wasn't aware that I sold any queens to anyone in Northern Ireland. I'm gonna have to definitely tighten up the shipping on the website because that wasn't supposed to happen. But I do feel your pain. I really do. And like we started off this video talking about the differences between like native bees and buckfast bees, but they do. People who like kind of. Want to keep the native bees, um, they hate people keeping Buckfast. They absolutely hate it. And I don't understand the hatred. Like, I, I understand like the, the interference, or interference even, of that— like the drones from the Buckfast bees are breeding with their bees. But you can, you can argue the same both ways. You can say, well, your, your AMM near-native bees are breeding with my Buckfast bees and causing me issues. And my frustration with the whole argument is that they're not breeding for anything, it's just breeding because that was here first, that's the native bee, the native bee. It's not a native bee, it's just kind of like a part native bee or like a hybridized native bee. And okay, that's probably caused through hybridization, but we are where we are. But there's no You know, like for Buckfast, they're breeding for a specific reason. They're breeding for honey crop, they're breeding for disease resistance, they're breeding for swarming— like lack of swarming propensity, lack of propolis building. They're breeding for like placidity, calm. They're actually using like traits, breeding for traits as opposed to breeding for color or wing shape, and just not looking at the negatives that come with that. Like the colonies that I've had, like the local Mongols or the AMM queens that I've had, horrific amounts of chalk brood. But you speak to anyone and they just say, well, yeah, yeah, AMM bees do have a bit of chalk brood. And I just think it— like, Buckfast breeders, if there was a colony that had one cell of chalk brood, they would eliminate the line. They'd say that's not, that's not an acceptable thing to be breeding from. And you— and not, not only kind of like leaving it in there, but saying, well, it's chalk, there's a lot of chalk brood there, but you know what, it's really black and it's got the right wing shape is probably like the closest that we've got to AMM. So that's the one we're going to breed from. And don't worry about the chalk brood, don't worry about the fact they're really swarmy, don't worry about the fact that they're really aggressive. Like, I'm not— I don't want to like cause like arguments or like make people hate me more, but I'm not saying that all AMMBs are like that. Like, you can have perfectly nice, friendly, calm AMM colonies that produce lots of honey that don't swarm form. So it's not— they're not all bad, um, but like in my experience, the ones that I've had weren't particularly good. But that, that kind of interbreeding for negative traits definitely does happen. Like, you see that it happens, and people would admit that it happens as well. Um, but yeah, it's, it's a difficult one. I would, I would definitely sit on your hands and keep your fingers on your lips when, when you're talking about it and just enjoy enjoy whatever bees you want to enjoy. The funniest thing in the world, yeah, is, uh, I knew someone who, who— he didn't, he didn't infiltrate, but he was kind of like involved in it. And, uh, he, he had the darkest colony that anybody had ever seen, and, and the, the guys were literally in awe. They were like, that is the purest colony of AMM bees we have ever seen. They are just perfectly black, not a single cell of chalk brood, beautiful frames of bees, and he didn't dare tell him that they were just Carniolans. But you know, they were black, so they were kind of accepted. Made me really laugh, that did, right? Oh, I, I'm literally— I'm, I'm like totally made up, Jay. That's so incredibly generous. Thank you. Uh, you always come to these streams. I really appreciate your support. Thank you. And I'm glad the queens are doing well. I do need a thermal mug. It's literally lukewarm now, but it is a chamomile tea, so you can kind of drink like a lukewarm chamomile tea. It's, it's not that— it's not the best, I'm not gonna lie. Says hit the like button. 137 people in the chat and 64 likes. I would really appreciate it if you could hit the like button. It does, it does help support the channel. Uh, Bada Bing Bada Boom says, I'm at 2K subs on a different platform and they want me to livestream beekeeping, but you want to be there as short as possible. Not an option in my opinion. Yeah, I thought about that, kind of about doing some livestreams at the bees, but I just think it's not— you kind of want like nice close-ups and stuff like that. You could— it's, it's difficult to get an an interesting perspective, I would say, actually, like live streaming whilst you're at the bees. Um, what you can do on a lot of the live stream platforms, you can do on StreamYard as well, and I am going to explore this a little bit more, is, uh, like record pre-recording stuff. So I could say, right, we're going to go off and look at some bees now, just hit a button, and then you'd get like a pre-recorded 2-minute video, and then I'd come back and talk about it a bit. So I think that would— you can do stuff like that that would be maybe a little bit more interesting. What platform is it on? I'm interested and intrigued. Want a better way to do my record keeping. I've used a notebook and also tried an app. Have you seen anything? So I, I've still not come to the, like, realization that there is a perfect method out there for record keeping, but what I have realized for myself is that I've, like, refined what it is that I kind of want to keep records of. And some people love it. Some people love a spreadsheet and want to kind of like go back and pore over the data. I'm definitely not one of those people. I just want to know the absolute basics. And I'm still— I, I just, I do what I'd always done, which is just write on the beehives or right underneath the roof and then just paint over it at the end of each year. Because for me, it's only like really like little things I need to know, which is like, is there a queen in there? And not even there, is there a queen in there? It's like, have they swarmed, or is there a virgin in there? They're the only things I really need to know. Anything else— I have a rule in life, um, I like to think of myself as someone who's relatively well organized. My wife would definitely disagree because in some things I'm quite well organized and in other things I'm shockingly bad. But I do have a 2-minute rule. I think it was in, it was in a book that I read, I can't remember the book was. I've got a shocking memory. But it basically said if something takes you less than 2 minutes to do, you just do it. You don't plan it, you do it. Um, so you're just trying to get stuff done. And I brought that into my beekeeping a little bit as well, which is like, say, say a colony has got, um, I don't know, like, say there's like a, a duff queen. The queen's not looking good. Instead of planning to go back and kill the queen, I just killed the queen. I'll just try and do— be like really proactive with doing stuff, and then I'll plan to go back and replace the queen at a later date. So I'm kind of just trying to do as much as— do as much as I possibly can while I'm there so I don't have to keep records. Um, and it seems to work quite well. I, I would like to keep better records, and it's always on my list of regrets and always things I'm going to do a little bit better, which is I'll try and keep better records going forward, and I never do. Because I just don't think I'm one of these people that wants to kind of have that amount of data available or need that amount of data. But I think, like, if you ask me what do I use, I scribble. I scribble on the hives and paint over each year. Um, if there was a— if there was a joke in there, uh, is that what it is, Gerald? To really— I definitely haven't watched it. This sounds way too scary. I, I'm the biggest wimp. I cannot handle scary things. At all. Um, in school there was a program called Through the Dragon's Eye. So this is in year 3, I was like, what, 8, 7, like 8 maybe. And there was a character in this children's program called Through the Dragon's Eye called Chan, and I honestly still have nightmares about it. Petrified me. And it's like a kids program. Um, so I do not watch scary films. Cannot handle scary films at all. It's um, I don't know if I don't know if anyone can hear that. It's really really raining here, like properly coming down. David says Griff did a YouTube video interview with a food inspector. Griff brought up the raw honey debate. Food inspector guy said that you can label it as such. Will you be returning it to your labels? I just it's absolute. I just I want to swear. I nearly swore there. Um, so for first off, it was a brilliant video. I shared it on my YouTube— uh, on Twitter, sorry. It was a really good video, and well done to Griff to get in getting that there. But the, the— this is where our country is just broken, because I checked it with Flintshire again and they said no, you can't use it. It's not, it's not a— it's not a reserved description in the honey regulations, therefore you can't use it. So basically the regulations are not only subjective But they are completely regionalized. So Flintshire, it's okay. So, so Flintshire, it is not okay. Carmarthenshire, perfectly okay. How is that fair? How on earth is that fair? And how on earth have we let ourselves get into a position like that where basically people can complain about me calling my honey raw, which I believe it is, and I, I've kind of had letters of intended prosecution about it saying if you don't take it all down We will prosecute you. Where someone in Wales, the same country that I live in, has got confirmation from the same food inspectorate to say that it's perfectly fine for them to do it. Absolutely shocking. It boils my blood. So now, like who has a massive competitive advantage? The person who can call it raw because anybody who's anybody who knows about honey. And wants honey, what do they search for? They don't search for honey, they search for raw honey UK, and then it would come up with Griff's Honey, and I can't call mine that. So it's just, it's, it's absolutely bonkers. Uh, Peter Badger says Sainsbury's now sell organic honey, a blend of EU and non-EU honey. Makes my blood boil. So yeah, it's ridiculous. And you, and people will see that and they'll be like it's organic, it must be good. And it's just like, yeah, but it's, it's not, is it? Because it's just Chinese sugar syrup that they've called organic. Like, it really does— it's the most frustrating and annoying thing in the world. I absolutely hate the honey regulations, and I hate the lack of consistency behind it, and I hate the fact that people are duped into buying it, and I hate the fact that, like, the Welsh government supports companies that quite clearly dupe people into buying fake honey. Like you know what? It's it's really really annoying. I feel I feel better now. I've got that off my chest. Here we go. Right, John Pierce says in a previous chat you mentioned about five thousand jars you had to fill. How long does it usually take to sell all of those? So depends depends on the time of year. Like if it's Christmas, we'll do easy do five thousand in a month. But maybe 2 months at the other times of the year. We sell, we sell quite a bit. It's like, uh, it's mostly shops. You know, shops take like 60, 90 at a time, so it doesn't take too many shops to buy, get through 5,000. Uh, JL Hayes says mild winter feeding, 2:1 syrup, okay, protein powder. Um, so yeah, it's fine as long as it's over like 13, 14 degrees C. Which I guess is—I don't even know what that is in Fahrenheit. I know, I know nought degrees Celsius is thirty-two, so maybe like, like fifty degrees Fahrenheit. My conversion may be off. As long as the bees are flying, two to one syrup is okay. And if you, if you need protein supplement, then yeah, should be fine. The only, the only caveat that I'd put in with that is that if the bees, if, if the bees are flying and it's nice and warm, it's fine to feed. 2:1 syrup and it's fine to feed protein. But if you feed protein and then you get a cold, like a prolonged cold snap, you can have real issues because you can have like a lot of energy that's gone into rearing brood and the bees get confined. And then you can have issues where they can't get out and there's like dysentery in the hive. It's rare, but just be aware of feeding protein too early, I would say. H, it's my dad's. My dad was called H. H says, I've built 8 nuc boxes. I'd like to split the 2 hives into 8. So if I buy 8 queens from you, would I be able to split the 2 hives into 8 all at once? And would 1 full frame of brood be okay? So yeah, that'd be absolutely fine. So if you've got, if you've got 2 hives and you buy 8 queens, so, so say each hive is on like 10 frames of bees and you've got like 4 or 5 frames of brood in each hive. Then yeah, no problem at all. Just do a completely even split. One frame brood, one frame stores. Split the bees evenly, add in a mated queen, and that'll work really, really well. And then as soon as you get them all set up, this is the big tip that I always give, is that it's much easier to do that and move it into a new apiary. So if you do that in the same apiary, it can work, but you'll get like the bees kind of balance themselves out quite unevenly, and you'll find like they all go into one And then they just abandon one nuc. But if you move it to a new apiary site, close them up, take them to a new apiary site 3 miles away, and then release them, they're like perfectly balanced. And then what you can do is you can feed them straight away, and I would just keep— just basically pump them full of 1:1 sugar syrup. Go for like, give them a litre, see how long it takes them to take it down. They'll probably take it down in a day. Go back again, give them another litre, and you want to like trickle feed them, just little and often. Just keep on going. And just keep on going until they've turned it all into brood. And don't do it to a point where you're like you're backfilling it all with nectar. You want to you want you want to turn the syrup into brood. You don't want them to store it. If they start storing it, just slow down a bit. Loving the jokes. Right, Travel with Marty said, "Why did the bees go to therapy?" Because it had too many issues with its honeycomb. That's it. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Maybe the second best joke on the live stream tonight. I like it. Oh, we've got more. Right. What type? I've already laughing at this one. What type of bee gives milk? A booby. That's that's definitely the winner. Oh wow! Next week we're gonna do we're gonna do bee jokes. These are great. Darren Smith says hi to all from New Zealand. How far from Wales do you send courier your queens, and how if at all? Is Brexit still affecting the UK keeps its ability to sell queens and honey? So, so, so we just sell mainland UK, so kind of Wales, Scotland, England, and we can't sell to Northern Ireland, which is, which is annoying. But it seems that some queens are getting through, so I'm going to fix that. That definitely shouldn't have happened. But we, so we send them kind of all over mainland UK, so they go. It's not, it's not very far. like maybe 300, 400 miles in any direction. But there's good demand for nucs and good demands for queens within the UK. Like, we have no ability to send them outside of the UK at the moment without a health export certificate, which is just not viable because we're not set up to sell, you know, thousands of queens in one consignment. So if we were, then health export certificates for 100 £150 each would be fine. But for one queen, I can't say, right, come and inspect this one queen. And all they're inspecting for— what annoys me is like, what they're inspecting for is small hive beetle. That's the risk with queens. Like, okay, there's a risk that you've got the EFB and the AFB as well, but like, if you're, if you're self-certifying for disease, then there's not really any pests in the UK. It's not like, it's not like you're in like a small hive beetle hot zone and you're going to be spreading it around. Like, the, the UK doesn't really have anything other than EFB, AFB, and VAROA. So it's just— I don't know, I— the Brexit red tape is, is very, very frustrating. Um, I'm not a massive fan of it. But I tell you what though, I am completely at peace with it now. I'm not like— I, I'll be completely open, I was a Remainer and I was a bit gutted when we left. But I'm fine with it now, and I just think it is done. Let's just go on with it. It doesn't, it's not crossed my mind, and I don't think I wish we were still part of the EU. I just think let's just, just make the best of what we've got at the moment. And I think there will, I think there will be good things to come from Brexit. I don't think it's all been negative. I think there has been quite a lot of negative stuff up until now, but I think as time goes on, I think the more benefit that potentially we will get. Um, so like one example is the exchange rate, you know, like if we split the way we have, we split away from Europe, and if we can boost our own economy and get it to a point where it's like outperforming Europe, and then we boost the pound, and then everything becomes a lot cheaper, then that's like, that is a massive benefit if we can, if we can get that. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not one to, to dwell on the past. Uh, Peter says, what happens if you graft 2 larvae into 1 cell? Will they reject or correct? So I think they, they generally do both. So they'll just feed 1, and then at some point they'll just clean 1 out. So they will, they will correct. I've, I've never, I've never seen, like, I've never seen it because I never put 2 in. I'd like to— I can do a test on that. We could do a test on that and just do like a frame, a full set with like 2 larvae. in each one, and then I'll go back in and see what happens. And I bet— do you know what I bet you they will do? Yeah, this will be my prediction. I bet you they'll clear them both out, and I bet you they'll be like, no, no, that's not right. I bet you they don't just take one out, I bet you they take both out, a lot of them. I'm really— I really want to have a go at that. Uh, Chunky says, thanks for all your awesome knowledge. Oh, thanks very much. Another question from me, can a drone fit through a Rhombus Portabee escape? I guess so. Yeah, the probably not the Portabee escape. Portabee escapes are rubbish, really rubbish. They just get they do get jammed really really quickly. But I'm they'll they'll get through the Rhombus escape like just yeah be fine. Next question says, did you by any chance see the video of David Burns and the pollen dust on a piece of carpet? was amazing to see. They hovered over it to get the pollen in the air. No, I didn't see that. I'm gonna have a look at that though. I think that'd be cool. Uh, If I haven't got any stores in my hives in April, will it be okay to add just 1 or 2 frames of brood and one of your queens? Um, if you've got any stores in your hive— I'm struggling to follow that. So you're saying you haven't— if you haven't got any stores in your hive in April, will it be okay to just add 1 or 2 frames of brood And one of your queens? I, I'm not sure I understand the question. Maybe it's getting too late. I don't understand it. Sorry, you'll have to ask that one again. I might be missing something there. I'm sure it's okay, but it doesn't read right to me, that one. Oh no, it's not caramel tea, it's chamomile tea. It's basically just like flowers and cold, cold flowers. It's delicious. Right, this is the last time I'll say this, but Travel with Marty has got a good point. It would be very, very nice if you could give it a thumbs up. Give it a thumbs up there. There we go. Right, won't do that anymore. Um, and, and my tea genuinely is stone cold. We are 1 hour and 50 minutes into the live stream and I've still not got anywhere near, near the bottom, right? So I'm going to go like fast-paced. I'm going to answer some questions and I'm going to get to the the bottom and we'll finish on 2 hours. So 10 minutes left. Um, can you store Apidonda? I'm guessing that's happy fonda that has been in a hive for later use for the same bees. So yes, definitely can do that. Wrap it tight in cling film, keeps for ages. Um, a big one for us: for the love of God, I cannot get normal baker's fondant here on the continent. I'm getting told that has more to do. Wait, I'm getting told that it has more in it that you do not want in fondant for your bees. Yeah, so there is different types of like baker's fondant. You get some baker's fondant with loads of crap in it, and then you just get like standard baker's fondant that's just, just like glucose and water and something else. Let's forget what it is. Go and speak to your bakers, they'll definitely do it. You just gotta hunt around for it. It comes in like big massive 12.5 kilogram slabs. That's probably the way to tell them. You say, "I don't want like the little ones. I want the big twelve and a half kilo boxes," and then they'll be like, "Oh yeah, we know the one you want." I bet you they do do it though. Right, flicking through, flicking through the questions. Peter says, "Not that you haven't got enough going on, but would you ever consider writing a book about your beekeeping journey?" So I have considered it, and I don't think I would. I don't think I would write a book because I'm not— I've never kind of proclaimed to be like, oh, I know everything about beekeeping. Like, far from that. In fact, probably like the complete opposite. Like, I don't, I don't know the facts, I don't know the figures, but I like the experience of it. I like, I like showing the experience, and I like kind of interacting in a way that I find I try and make like a bit more— a bit like two-way, a bit more interactive. Um, and for me, like, I'm not one for reading books, so I don't think I'd be able to write a book that would kind of like capture people in the same way that the videos do. So I don't think I would write a book. Hi Lawrence, down here on the south coast, a lot of concern about Asian hornet colonization this year. Do you have similar worries where you are? Are you strategizing? So yes, I definitely do have similar worries. I don't necessarily have the worries for this year I think it's just a matter of time before they get up to us now. Basically surrounded in, in like the northwestern tip of Wales. I know we're northeast Wales, but it's like northwestern tip of the country. Um, like that— I saw, I saw a thing today, and I, I know I shouldn't badmouth kind of anyone, but it was, it was a report from, I think, from the, from the NBU coming through like the BBKA saying there is a low risk that there might be some overwintered Asian hornet queens in this country, and like, this is, this is the plan. And I just thought, there's clearly hundreds. Like, don't— it's not there is a low risk, there is an absolutely bang-on certainty that there are overwintered queens. Like, there were massive nests in the cliffs like that you couldn't get to. So what do you think happened to all the queens, the hundreds of queens that came out of the colonies? Of course they're overwintering here. There's gonna be tons of them. I hate that there is a, there is a low risk just don't try and warm people up to something that's an absolute banker. It's just, it's here, it's happening. So we are surrounded all the way along the south coast and up in North Yorkshire, and it's just going to be a matter of time before they get to us. So I am strategizing a little bit. I'm not sure what we're going to do other than just kind of like shift what we do to certain times of the year and then hunker down when the Asian hornets are a problem, and then just hope that we can get enough bees through and do what we need to do. Early on in the year, so in North Wales it's not going to be an issue in April and May, and hopefully not in June. And you can do a huge amount in April and May and June, and then when they do become an issue, then we just need to battle them as best we possibly can. So I'm trying to get through the questions a bit quicker now. Here we go. I would I would like this. She's she's gone gone like mega viral, hasn't she? With she's got like two million subscribers now. I do think I do think a lot of it is set up, but I don't I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't just think like completely fair play to her. She's seen a niche and she's filled that niche and obviously doing very well from it. It's a fair play to her, and lots of people are copying her now, and lots of people are finding really massive success with that. If you're a good-looking woman and you handle bees without a beekeeping suit on, like, you're guaranteed success on YouTube. It's just like the easiest thing in the world. I'm completely jealous. Michael, thank you very much. You enjoyed the Q&A, and I'm still enjoying your honey. It's very nice. Thank you for that. Peter says he breeds for sustainability. When people ask me what I breed them, I tell them Apis mellifera-ish. That's good. I see. I like that. As long as you're— as long as you've got like something that you're breeding for for in terms of there's not just the color or the wing morphology. Um, like, it's got— they've got to be good bees, haven't they? You've got to breed, you've got to like keep good bees. I like that, that's cool. And I like— and like I said at the very beginning, it's not— it's never a witch hunt. Like, I have total respect for people who are doing their own thing, and everyone's got their, their own way of keeping bees. And some people want to treat for varroa, some people don't want to treat for varroa, some people want to keep native bees, some people want to keep Buckfast. And I just think everyone, everyone needs to do what's right for them and have the opportunity to do that. This is— I can't believe it, people have been so amazingly generous. Thank you, Mark, £4.99, it's very kind. Um, Edward says, did you ever do a follow-up on the trance hive? How did it go? I can't remember the trance hive. The only one that I can think of is the one that was like a bit UV. Um, but that was— they do well, the UV paints. I've painted up loads of things in UV. I love that. How's it going? Uh, John, who is our moderator on the No Nonsense Speaking Facebook group, does an amazing job of kind of keeping everyone apart, stopping all the arguments. Thank you, John. He says, I started recording my inspections using a voice app on an old phone and now bought the Anel tags to add the info into the app to save having paper copies getting lost damage. Nice idea. Hi, do you think you can double brood a 14 by 12 hive? So you definitely can, but you'll sacrifice a huge amount of honey doing it. You can see I'm getting through the questions now. Um, I'm reckoning this year will be an eye-opener because of Asian hornets. I'm really worried about what this year will bring. There must be thousands of queens hibernating. That, that's my view. There's going to be thousands of queens hibernating. Like, Asian hornets are here, they're here to stay. And we need to move to the next phase, which is living with them. John says he has a cunning plan on getting raw on my honey labels once I get around to getting them made and I have enough honey to sell. To be continued. Look forward to seeing that. Um, Bada Bing Bada Boom, I'm going to call you BB from now on, says whenever I see a YouTube video with pollen patties in them, I always see them hardly being touched at all. And this was the issue that I had when I used them They just like they touched them for a bit, and then as soon as natural pollen was available, they just shunned them, and then I had to clean them all up, which was a real pain. Right, one more sip of tea. I see the tea's finished. Right, Nicholas Stromberg says, "I am a system developer and will make a logger for beekeepers if anyone wants to help. Please message me." Definitely up for that as well. Keep me involved. Thank you very much. Much appreciated. Nicholas also says he's building an ERP system to keep track of everything, to keep up with regulations. Full trace down of purchase jars. Sorry, purchase of jars to apary, withdrawal days when medicating beehives, etc. That is brilliant. So in the EU, you you would have seen coming from Sweden the regulations that are coming in for the EU doing something similar, and. We need that for the UK as well. Aperita jar tracking, 100%. We need that. John says he checked YouTube and Chan is a nasty looking character. Chan is the the absolute center of everything that is evil. Yeah. I'm gonna. I see there's some more jokes in there, but I'm gonna flick through the jokes because I I do. My wife's just texted me saying, "You know what you're doing?" You said it was gonna be one hour, and that's two hours. So she is literally just through there. So be quick. BB says had to pay a ton of import fees on my BB Wear Ultra, even though it was made in the UK. We should not have import tax on them. Yeah, but you didn't have to pay VAT though. So you kind of like don't have to pay the VAT, but you do have to pay the import tax fees. Interesting to know. how much the import tax was on it. Plan to graft my own bees this year. When's the earliest I can start the process? I live down south. So for us, we'll go like first week of May. So for you, it's probably like a week or so before, maybe a little bit earlier. What I would just say with it though, if you go a week earlier and you're doing like grafts every week, doesn't really— if you lose the first batch of grafts, not the end of the world, just do the next weeks. Um, but if you want— if you wanted a date, I would go like the safe dates, first week of May for you. You'll be absolutely fine. Uh, says, not a question, but licorice tea is really nice too. I cannot stand licorice. Like, I, I love a herbal tea. I've been working my way through them. I have like fennel tea, chamomile, nettle, mint, and then like all different like variations. But like I cannot stand licorice, but it might be nice as a tea, so I will give it a try. Stephen says, can we sort out a visit to my apiary when the weather is better in Conway? 100%. I said I'm well up for going to people's, um, apiaries, and especially if they're not that far away. Conway's not far at all. I'm actually going to Conway tomorrow. My little brother lives in Conway, so I'm going to Enoch's. You'll know Enoch's Fish and Chips in Llandudno. Very nice. I'm worried my hives won't have any stores by the time that April is here, and I want to split my hive. So we're just wondering, if I don't have any honey stores in my hive when I split, would it still work? Right, okay, sorry, that makes sense. So you almost certainly will have honey stores in there, um, and it would, it would still work. But the easiest way of doing it is just give them a feed. Just give them a feed before you make a split, and then you'll have a couple of frames of stores. It's easier to feed them before you make the split than trying to feed them afterwards. Just for some reason. You can— you do both, but just give them a good feed first. You'll be fine. Um, Mark says, you are too humble for me. I have learned so much from your videos. I think a step-by-step guidebook would be amazing. No-nonsense guidebook. I make my own step-by-step guides from your videos. Okay, I, I'm not— I'm not dead against it. Like, I— it's, it's, it's not something I've ever like thought about because I just don't think I'd be very good at putting it together. And I, I don't know. Yeah, I might give it a go. I might give it a go, maybe when I'm a bit older. Oh, I'm very nearly down to the bottom. Here we go. Right, so, uh, first up, Dirt Rooster is a stud muffin. True. Uh, Pat the 14th says, have you ever tried feeding Mountain Camp with plain sugar? And if so, what do you think of it? It's much cheaper than fondant here. I'm not sure about the mountain camp, but I've seen people do like sugar patties or just feeding like dry sugar. The only problem that we have here is that like it can be, and anywhere really, it can be quite cold. If you're feeding dry sugar, the bees do need to be able to get out to get the water to break it down. Like they can't just eat the dry sugar. So that's the only constraint with feeding plain sugar, but I think in an emergency situation it's fine. Over here in the UK, like it's not that much Like baker's fondant, it's not that much more expensive and it's like completely ready to go. Um, so I would feed that. BB says including VAT it was €137 or so on top of the £333, £400 with the discount code. Yeah, so it's not, it's not, yeah, it's quite a lot more than the VAT, isn't it? Because that would be like £64 or something on that. Oh, it's a pain, isn't it? Yeah, import fees, nightmare. I have a hollow log about 8 foot long. Is there a possibility of getting a swarm to go into it? Thoughts? So yeah, could definitely get a swarm to go into it. Um, maybe like hang it up somewhere, put a like a plug on the top. The only problem is that it's a bit irresponsible keeping bees in logs. Only like, it's cool, like it'd be great, I'd love to do it on a video, but the only problem is, is that You can't go in and inspect them, which I know like people will say, well, that's good because low interference. But then if they've got EFB and they're just like dying and then getting robbed out or chucking out swarms, it's gonna be like— it can be a bit of a disease risk. But it could, it could be, it could be fine to do it. So I'd have a go. A hollow 8-foot log sounds really cool. See if you can suspend it. That's what I would be looking at. See if you can like hang it up vertically somehow and then put like a plug on the top and then put like some entrances in it somewhere and then like some lemongrass to mimic the queen pheromone and bait it up. Really cool. Thank you, Stefan. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Uh, Peter says, how long can you bank queens for in an incubator? So not that long, and they're not really kind of being banked in an incubator. They're just really being like held, um, because is that the queens need to be fed by the attendant bees, and the attendant bees like lose the ability to feed them from that fondant, like when they're not in the colony, very quickly. So they're not really banking them in an incubator. To bank them, you need to put them into like a queen bank, like a proper colony set up with lots of young nurse bees that are of the right age to feed the queens. So I would say keep them in an incubator for a couple of days maybe. Is a top-notch bloke though, love that man. Amen to that. Uh, John says reminder to all on the competition sharing things folks need to do. So all you need to do is just when I finish this stream, which I'm finishing right now, is you need to share the link to the stream to a Facebook beekeeping group and you need to put the 3 numbers in the comments. So when you share it, you say here are the 3 numbers, simple as that. And then I'll pick someone, and someone will win the hat, and someone will win the little nifty beekeeping frame gadget. So there we go. I said I was going to do an hour-long stream, uh, it's been 2 hours. I said I was going to give you advance warning, I definitely gave you advance warning. We had a surprise visit from Ian, Ian Stepler, Canadian Beekeeper's Blog, which was amazing, made my night. Um, and I got to the end of it and I finished my tea and it was a little bit cold. So massive, massive thank you to everyone for dialing in. Um, Bada Bing Bada Boom says, yeah, the link to the stream. So basically just post my stream on a Facebook group and say, listen to this guy, he's giving loads of free stuff away, and here are some numbers, something like that. Um, the idea being, you know, share the stream, we'll get more people here. That's, that's the idea. A little bit of logic behind it, a little bit of strategy as well. So hopefully, hopefully everyone understood that. We'll do more freebies. I just think every live stream I'm just going to do something different. I'm going to give some stuff away. I've got loads of stuff, um, and I like giving stuff away. I think it's quite, it's quite fun and it's quite a nice thing to give away stuff to people who come and support me on here. Um, so thank you very much. If you're at the beekeeping show next week, I will be there. I'll be at the bee farmers dinner on the Friday before. I'll be milling around the show the day before as well. I'll be there the whole day before and after, so come and say hi. Uh, and I hope, I hope you all have a good evening. Yeah, it's probably, it's probably getting a little bit late now, so I will go. Uh, but take care, and I'll speak to you all soon.