Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 19

Okay, so I think we're live. I like, I like to be prompt with a good 8:30 start, much better than my 11 o'clock start that I did with Mark the other day. I don't know if anyone saw that. It, it went well. I, I had such a good time chatting with Mark, but I was tired, um, and I hadn't even charged my camera up properly and it dropped out twice. So I will do my best to make sure that my camera is charged up and I've got a spare charged up battery. So, uh, There won't be any more embarrassing mistakes like that. But hello everyone, I thought after what was such an incredibly busy week for us, uh, I took a week off work and it's busier than when I'm at work, sending nucs out, sending queens out, going crazy. I thought it'd be good to do a video because no doubt some of the people that we sent nucs to or queens to might have some questions. So I'm gonna answer some questions. There's only 3 questions that are coming through the website. So I will— I'll answer those first, and then I will stay till probably about 10 o'clock. So good chance to get some questions answered in the live chat. As always, if you like the stream and I answer your question, do give it a thumbs up, helps with the algorithm. So I'll start with a couple of questions. I've just seen one from Stein Pinkish Honey in the chat, and it's very relevant because I'm doing both of those things tomorrow. So you say, checked one of your hives today and, uh, looks like Queenless hive, no eggs, no brood, and another that you think is a drone layer, just a drone brood process, but you saw eggs. What would I do? So I've got two hives that I'm going to go and deal with tomorrow, and it's exactly what you've just described there. So one of them, you open the box up and they're boiling over the top. Ten frames, they're swenty. So they're ten frames, and when I opened them up, I thought, wow, yeah, that is exactly what I want to see. And I went through the other day, started doing some inspections and looked in, and there is not a single egg. No brood, no capped brood, no eggs. And pretty sure there's no queen either. And I always think when that happens that the colony's built up the big round of early brood and the queen just like, I don't know, she has a little bit of a break and then just pegs it and the colony's left with nothing because there's no sign of any cells. So one of the colonies I've got that's like that, I'll hedge my bets and say there isn't a queen in there and there's no brood, there's nothing. So with a colony like that, I wouldn't even bother doing any sort of test frame, like putting eggs in to double-check. I'm just going to go straight in with that one and I'm going to put a queen in there. I'm not going to wait any time, I'm just going to put a queen in, pop the tab, and then leave it a week. I'll do a video on that and you'll see. I reckon that'll work, like 95% certain that will fix that colony. It's weird because you, you'd think that you'd have to go in there and check and double-check to see that there's a queen in there, but I find at this time of the year, middle of April, if you're going in and there's not a single egg and there's no brood but there's lots of bees, there's generally not a queen in there. Something's happened to the queen, and it's happened to the queen when there's been no brood previously. So that's what I'm going to do with that one. The drone laying one is, is always a little bit more tricky to do. So I don't think— it's very rare to get laying workers at this point in the year. So if I'm pulling out frames and I'm seeing kind of like spotty drone brood in April, I just discount laying workers. So I treat it as a drone laying queen. And it's really difficult. It generally at this time of the year quite difficult to find the runty drone-laying queens that are either queens that have just got old. So you might have like a perfectly marked 2022 queen in there that's just gone drone-laying. That can happen, happens quite a lot. Or you might have like a late-season supersedure and you've got like a runty, poorly mated queen in there that didn't get mated very well at the back end of the year. Either way, the way to fix that is you need to find the queen, whatever queen is in there, and kill the queen. But at that point, you don't need to follow this, the normal requeening mechanism of waiting the 8 days, because if they've just got tons of— if it's, if it's just all drone brood, then they've got nothing to raise a queen with anyway. So my experience with that one, and what I would do, is go in and find the queen, kill the queen, introduce a new queen, pop the tab immediately, and just leave them for a week. If there's a mixture of worker brood and drone brood and you've got open worker brood, then you do need to kill the existing queen, wait 8 days, then take down the queen cells and then requeen. But they're both quite easy ones to fix, and it's probably like the biggest bang for your buck fixing those at this point of the year. Like the one, the first one of those where you've got a box full of bees, like a really healthy prolific box full of these that were probably born in February or March with no queen will get through to May and there'll be nothing left. So you just have an empty box of nothingness. And by adding a queen, you'll get through to May and they'll be— they'll probably need a super. So it's, uh, yeah, like I said, good bang for your buck on that one. Uh, well, I'll answer some more on the chat first. So hello everyone, everyone's saying hello, hello, hello. Uh, Steve's Bees says the weather in his area has been so rubbish and he's not been able to get into them yet. I don't know if it's me, and I'm thinking like, is it always this bad in April? And I look back at my previous videos and it's— maybe, maybe I'm being a bit unfair. It is still the middle of April, but it does seem cold. It seems like we've not had a single day of nice weather really, or maybe down south you've had a single day, but we've not had anything up here. It's been really, really bad, and my colonies are really split. So I've got some that are like they're going to swarm, they're going to swarm this weekend, I think, if we get any sunshine. And I've got some that definitely don't need a super yet and wouldn't, wouldn't want a super yet. So if anyone, if anyone's got that question, when to add the super, I'd say you need to take it on a, on a case-by-case basis because it's not as straightforward as saying, right, the weather's good, uh, get your supers out there. Uh, right, so a question from Ben said, do you, do you still think spray painting polyhives, nucs is good to do. So yeah, I like spray painting them. I find, I find it's more based upon like the poly, the actual like poly manufacturer, in terms of how well they do. And I think people will know that I don't like my Suyensi ones. I've been doing, been doing a lot of cleaning and bleaching of my poly boxes and lots of cleaning, and it's amazing because the, the Abello ones come out and they look brand new. And I'm not joking, like brand new. The paintwork is flawless, like the spray painting that I've done on it, but there's no dents, there's no cracks, there's nothing wrong with it whatsoever. And then I compare them to the Suyenti, and I'm thinking they've barely got like a couple of years left before they're going to be unusable. And the, the, the Maysborne— I've got a couple of Maysborne, a couple of Payne's ones— they're fine. They're nowhere near as bad as the Suyenti, but the Suyenti have taken a real battering. But in terms of the ones where I spray painted them, or anything that's on a vertical surface that I've spray painted, it has done well. I think where I spray painted stuff on like a horizontal surface, so on a roof, I spray painted some of my, um, Suyenti poly roofs and the water sat on it and that's not sat so well. So maybe on the roofs I would go, if I was doing it again big batches, I'd go masonry paint on the roofs. Because it can handle the water a bit better. But I don't know, well, in terms of longevity, there's not much in it on vertical surfaces. On roofs, go with masonry paint. I do, I do still like the look of the camouflage style. Uh, right, let's see what else we've got in there. So Chris Matthews says, hi Lawrence, what do you do about the trapped drones above the queen excluder during a demerace split? So Normally for me, and in my videos where I've shown this, I just, I just let them out. So when I go back, most of them are in there. I've kind of maybe not using the queen excluder so much in that top box. Like, the reason that top box queen excluder is there is, is the combination of 2 systems. And I'm definitely going to redo this video to show the 2 different ones, because you can do the demerary split without the queen excluder, and then you don't have the issue with the drones on that top box. But you still got the issue with the drones down in the bottom queen excluder. So you don't need the top one there if you're not trying to requeen from that top box. But I do think the neatest way of doing it is with the Abello boxes, is just to let— take out one of the entrance blocks and let them fly from that top box. And then you can keep the queen excluder in, and then if you want to try rear a queen in that top box as well, you run the risk of them swarming. But it is, it is a good technique. and one that I'm definitely going to do a video on this year because it's quite good fun doing it. But in terms of the question there, I would just make an entrance at the top. You can do it with a board, like a Snellgrove board would work, or any board that you can just slip in that's got access through that queen excluder but then out so they can fly, and they will soon find it and they'll just leave through that. Uh, Tom Phillips says, hi Lawrence, one of my colonies swarmed. I was able to retrieve the swarm and get it into a hive. Do I need to feed the colony left behind, or can they rely on the stores that they already have? So I think it's more likely that it would be the swarm that's going to need feeding, because if you think about it, the colony's split and the colony that's left behind hasn't got a queen, but it's got the— what it needs to create a new queen. it's got all of the brood and it's got all of the stores. So what, what that, that split, that half of the split needs sunshine, and if you get sunshine then you're all good. The other half of the split's got no brood and it's got no stores and it's got the queen, so it's going to find somewhere. And you, you've got it, you put it in a box, that's the one that I feed. Um, because with this kind of weather here, if they're not flying, they've got no buffer whatsoever, and they've also got quite a mammoth journey in front of them, which is they need to draw out loads of wax foundation. So that's the one that I'd be feeding, but monitor the other one as well. If they've not got much left, you can monitor them, but I think they should be fine, that one. Uh, I always get the name wrong. I said it, you gave me the name before. Kill the World's Gundogs, you're right. You don't need, you don't need the queen excluder there. It's the queen excluder's there for the second part of the manipulation, which is when you, you try and requeen from that top box as well. and you don't want any virgins running down into kind of the bottom box and trying to fight. But you've got a second line of defense, which is the original queen excluder. So I will do the video again with that one, and you can do the manipulation without that top queen excluder. What are your thoughts on long hives? So I quite like my long hives in that they're quite fun and they look nice. And that's about it. It's not— they're not for me, like, in terms of a commercial bee farming operation. They're not for me, and I don't think anyone who makes them would ever consider them to be for a commercial bee farming operation. There's a, there's a, like, a few little things on them that are just niggly and annoy me. Like, I was trying to get a 14 by 12 frame out of one of the boxes, and you have to kind of lift it out and then tilt it a bit to get it away from the roof. And, and just, just annoys me, little things like that. But if I was going to have like 1 or 2 hives in my garden and wasn't that fussed about huge amounts of honey and just wanted to have some, like, some beehives there to play around with, they look nice. Um, and, and especially like, oh, this, this light, that's where it is. There we go. Especially the, the 8-nuc variant of it, that's good. And that is genuinely like a game changer for me because I've, I've had that up to 8 nucs. I've condensed it back down now, 2 colonies in there at the moment. Right, that light's going off. Cheap Chinese lights. Um, so, so, so like I said, I've had it down from 8 nucs down to 2 nucs, and now all I'm going to do at the moment is I'm going to build that back up again, get it up to 8 nucs, and then run it, make some queens out of it. It's so versatile and it's so useful. And the format of it being as a long hive, it doesn't actually cost that much more than buying 8 separate nucs. And with 8 separate nucs, you can't build the colonies up into like 2 or 1 mega colonies. So something like that, I really see the benefit of that, um, in terms of a long hive. But my standard long hives and my laying hives, you don't get that benefit. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't personally go out and buy that. definitely go and buy the 8-nuc one because they're so useful. So says, have I put bait hives out yet? So no, I've completely— I've gone through, it's like purging some videos, and I'm taking that out and I'm not doing any more bait hives ever. Um, naively put videos up saying to put bait hives out, and I know people will still do it because it is good fun, but for me, with what's happened with EFB, I think it's— I think it's bad practice putting any sort of comb up So no, I'm not putting bait hives out, and I don't recommend people putting any sort of comb out in bait hives. If you're going to put bait hives out, I would recommend kind of just getting the, getting the dimensions right, getting the location of them right, and then trying to lure them in with maybe like some swarm pheromone. So just like lemongrass oil, uh, or just go, or just go and catch some swarms. But no, I'm not putting any out anymore. Stuart Milne says he's reading Roger Pattison's Beekeeping: Challenge What You Are Told. Absolutely love that. I'll say no more. What a great tagline for beekeeping. Love it. Challenge what you're told and experiment and try it for yourself before trying to pass it on. Hi Lawrence, I have a new apiary that is 2.5 miles away as the crow flies. Is that far enough to take my splits to stop flying, bees returning home. So yeah, the rule, the rule is 3 foot or 3 miles, but I do it in some— I did it in some the other week, took splits away, it's like a mile and a half, especially at this time of the year where they're not flying that far because it's cold. 2.5 miles will be fine. You might get 5% of the bees hovering around the original spot, but you'll get the vast majority, if not all of them. Hi Lawrence, will you be doing any more videos of managing your hive, long hives? I have 2 plus the 8-nuc long hive. So yeah, I will do— they're quite limited in terms of like the amount of videos that I can do on them. I'll definitely be doing more on the 8-nuc long hive in terms of how I'm building it up and how I'm setting it up to do queen rearing and stuff. And I'll give you updates on my, my other long hives as well, definitely. Uh, Dave Pimlett says he just checked one of his overwintered nucs today and found no brood and no queen. There are plenty of bees. Should have put a frame of eggs, young larvae from a donor hive. So similar to the manipulation that I'm going to be doing tomorrow, I've got, I've got a couple of colonies that are exactly like that, and, and I wouldn't be putting in— so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go there and just put a new queen in because I'm like certain there's no queen in there. If you're not certain that there's no queen in there, then by all means put a frame of eggs in, and if they draw the cells, it will tell you that there isn't a queen, and then you can take them down and requeen. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be letting them just go on to create their own queen cells at this time of the year because it's just too early. I still think you're not getting a million miles away. Like, I've got some colonies that have got packing in the drone brood, emerging drone brood as well. I opened one and saw like probably like a frame and a half of drone brood emerging, and not in a drone like this is in like 18 frames of brood. So it's getting to a point where they will be mature relatively soon. I think we're a good few weeks off yet. I would say I wouldn't want any naturally mated queens going out before— for us in North Wales, middle of May. Going back to raising a second queen via top entrance in a Demeray, how can you try and prevent the bottom box swarming, or do you need to put a board in between the supers and the top box? So it's, it's a little bit hit and miss. Because I found if you're doing a preemptive demo— if you're doing like a reactive demaree, it's very hard to stop them swarming whatever you do. If you're doing a preemptive demaree, then when you've got the queen cells up in the top box— I've, I've done this both ways where you take down all of the cells and they don't swarm, and you take down all but one of the cells and they just mate a queen up in the top box, and you've got like this this 2-queen system running. And then I've also done it where you leave one queen cell in the top box and then they swarm, and they swarm out of the, the bottom box. That's the one— that's what happened to me, they went out of the bottom box. It's a little bit hit and miss. So, so I don't like that version of the Demerite because it brings that element of risk in, and I'm not doing it to requeen colonies, I'm doing it to stop the original queen from swarming. It's the only reason I'm doing it, but I'll give it a go this year and see how we go. The one where I had it, where I had the 2 queens going together, I, in the end, I thought I just, I'm too scared to let this just run because I think one of them is going to swarm. But I had it going for a couple of weeks and it was, it was crazy the amount of brood. I didn't, didn't let it get to a point where all of that brood started to emerge and I got the benefits of like hundreds of thousands of bees. Would have probably got it up to, I reckon, like 70,000, 80,000 bees in, in a single hive. So maybe, maybe I'll do that this year. Be good fun. Um, Azadullah says, what to do with a colony the size of your palm, queen present and laying probably 10 eggs? So I did a video on this, this exact kind of conundrum, which is you've got like a mega small colony, and I've, I've built that colony back up. So you had a colony, like you say, size of your hand, a queen that appears to be okay in that she's laying eggs. And what I did was I caged the queen in, I merged it with some more brood, and then put some more bees in there as well, because that, that's the, that's the really important thing there is you've not got enough bees to keep the brood warm, so they can't get this exponential rate of growth. However, when I did it with that colony, you didn't see this on the video, which was it appeared to be working well, and then The colony failed like quite soon after that video had finished. So my view of those colonies now, and it's only my, my personal view because we've got quite a lot of bees and numbers to choose from, is that it's the queen that's the issue with those colonies. And you're looking at that colony there and thinking, well, the queen's doing her job, she's laying the eggs, and there's just not enough bees. But then you— my view is you cycle it back a bit and think, well, why is there not enough bees? Because of the queen. So what I would do with that colony now— really sad— I'd squish the queen. You should just shake the bees out and burn the frames and start again. But I appreciate that's not for everyone. So what I did previously, uh, and I got a good, a good tip off someone the other day, he was saying that he saw one of Bob Binney's videos. I'm definitely going to try this, which was when you're trying to combine When you're adding a frame of brood into a colony, really easy, you just take a frame of brood out, shake all the bees off, and you just put it in. And as long as there's enough bees in the colony to keep that brood warm, within 2 or 3 weeks, by the time all of that brood has emerged, you've given your colony a really good boost. Now I know I'm not doing any frame swapping or anything, but I think for the purpose of the video, I'm happy to give it a go. What he said though, and what what Binney does is that he gets the frame of brood with the bees on, soaks them in sugar syrup, like properly sprays them all over in sugar syrup, and then just introduces that straight into the colony. With the idea being that the bees that are covered in sugar syrup are not going to kill the queen because all they're interested in is just like living. They're just covered in sugar syrup. And all the bees that are in the accepting colony are interested in doing a kind of cleaning up the bees. They're like, covered in like sugar syrup, this is great, we're just going to clean you. So by the time they've had this intermingling, they're just all happy and get on and they don't kill any queens. So I've never tried that, can't recommend it, but the person I was chatting to, he said it works all the time. That's all he ever does and he's never lost a single queen. So I wrote it down on my little list of videos to do because I love a good video where it could go horribly wrong. Sounds, sounds, sounds like it would work. But back to the question. Yeah, sorry, I was I would kill the queen and I would start again. Another reason for second queen excluder is so you don't have drones running around eating all the honey in the supers. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know if that is it. That could be it. I think drones, they don't tend to hang around in the supers too much. They just— but they would. The thing is, if you took that top queen excluder out All that happens is you get exactly the same problem in the bottom queen excluder because all they want to do is go out and fly. That's what drones do. So you just end up with loads of drones in the bottom queen excluder. Much better way of doing it, regardless of whether you put the top queen excluder in, is to put a top entrance in. Solves all of the problems, I think. And it gives— if you put too much distance between the colonies as well, between the top half of the brood and the bottom half of the brood, brood, it gives them— it kind of makes them feel a little bit more separate. Uh, Claudia says— oh, Claudia, you had 3 nucs this week, I hope they're doing well. Uh, she says, hi Lawrence, is the Suyenti feeder compatible with a wooden hive from a bee space point of view? So no, it's not. So the Suyenti feeder is a good feeder, it fits on a wooden National, so it's a 460 by 460 millimeter footprint. print, but for some reason it's like top bee space. So there's just— there is no bee space underneath it. It's designed to go on a top bee space box, and the National is bottom bee space, which means it doesn't have the space at the top, which makes no sense. But if you put the— if you put that feeder on, it crushes all the bees. So what I've done is I cut 8mm strips of wood, but you could do it with, I don't know, Perspex or something as well, and I've glued them on and pinned them onto the bottom of the feeder. To give me my space. So that works. I have to say, after I think maybe 3 years of me doing that, they're starting to come off, and it's really annoying when they start to come off. So you could do that, or much easier way of doing it is you just get the Abello feeder, which is a better feeder, and it's got the plastic rim already built in. It's quite a lot more expensive, but it is a much better feeder. So if you've already got the Suyenti feeder, add the strips on. If you've not already bought it, get the Abello one. It's a better feeder and it's got the strips and the rim in place. Oh, Gene says hello everyone from sunny California. Well jealous. Hello Gene. Uh, Cat Bee Company says hello from Illinois. Hello. So Phil Howe says, hi Lawrence, what's the best way to draw extra brood comb from foundation for use in nucs? Um, so I know the standard way to say this is you get swarms. Swarms are great for drawing out foundation, but it's— you've got to get the swarms first to do it. It's not really scalable. The, the way that, the way that we do this is that it's your timing. You're kind of asking the question like— I know why you're answering it at this time of year, but we do— I— we get our comb drawn in like August, towards the back end of the season, because you get, you get 2 big benefits at that point. For us is that we're feeding, so that's the point that we naturally feed our colonies anyway. So we do our middle of August split, put our Apivar strips in, we put our feeders on, and then we're just not doing anything bee-related anyway. So what we do is at that point of the year, we cull the worst third of the frames within the box. Darkest frames, and then we put frames of foundation in, and then we feed. And then what we're getting is that we're using the feed to kind of get them to draw it out. But because you're doing it at that point of the year, you get all worker comb on your worker comb, so they're not mixing it up with drones, and then it's all nice and neat. But if you're doing it at this point of year, I just, I think it's a really easy way of doing it. and it would be great— this year would have been the perfect year to do this— is just double brood them. Like, so just put another box on top, all foundation, put the feeder on and just let the bees find the feeder. And just, you don't even need to trickle feed them, just stick like 10 litres of 1:1 sugar syrup on. And you— I would recommend some Hive Alive or something at this time of year, because if it sits there for a few days and they don't touch it, it will start going mouldy. So put some Hive Alive in and then just let them draw it out, and then you'll end up with like big booming colonies anyway. But that's probably what I would do if I was looking to get as much drawn out as possible. After your chat with John the other week, are you going to start a fridge or fish tank hive? So I've been thinking about doing a fridge one for ages. I've got like a couple of old big chest freezers that I could do, but it's the— what is the work to make it? Of fix. Gotta fix them up first, and I'm struggling for time, really struggling for time at the moment. Uh, JK Photography says, hi Lawrence, I've recently been slagged off for having my hives in straight rows, apparently due to drift. Do you see anything wrong with it? You're happy with a little drift? So interesting point. I, I used to be of the opinion that this didn't matter, didn't matter whatsoever. And I used to put 4 hives to a pallet and just kind of cram them in as best as I possibly could. And you see in most of my apiaries still, like, the entrances face the same direction. But I think I'm more leaning now to, if you can, just like change them up a little bit and not only don't have the hives so close to each other, but try not to have all the entrances facing the same direction as well. Just just like alternate them, change them up a little bit, just to try and reduce the drift. I think anything you can do to reduce that disease transmission, like possibility between the colonies, is a good thing. So I think in terms of drift bees going in, you're always going to get drones just going around and doing stuff anyway. But anything you can do to reduce that disease transmission is good. The actual drift of bees between them, I don't think. is an issue at all. But that's what we're, that's what we're trying to do now, moving away from just straight lines. So no one should slag you off. It should be a nice, it should be a nice friendly conversation. And I can see, I can see both sides of the argument, and I've done both of them. But yeah. Did you, do you give syrup in the spring? So I do give syrup in the spring, but only if they're like desperately need it, and only if the temperature is right. So we always will feed fondant in the winter, but I do, I do like to not overfeed them fondant and give myself a job to have to clear up all the frames with fondant on. So I'll, I'll make a judgment call. If it's getting warmer, I'll start to give them a little bit of syrup. And some of the colonies have had a few, had a few rounds of little mini, mini rapid feeders and like a liter, um, and they've been taking it down, and some of them are not taking it down. because they're not quite big enough yet. So you need to judge it by the colony size and judge it by the temperature. When do you do your preemptive demerit split? So for us, we go like the first round— it does depend on the weather. Like last year, we went middle of May, kind of maybe 10th of May. I don't think we'll be doing that this year. I just don't think they'll be in a position to, to kind of fill 2 supers. We're very far behind. But for someone like down south, you could be— you could have a brood. If you've got a brood box full of bees and you've got 2 supers full of bees, you can do a Demaray split. But it's like, it's too cold at the moment to do it. You're isolating the queen, you're isolating all of that brood. You need to make sure— you need to make sure there's enough bees to accompany the queen. for her to lay a new brood nest. You need to make sure there's enough bees to keep all of the brood warm upstairs, and you need to make sure there's enough bees to bridge the gap between the two. If you isolate them too much, it can fail. So it's a fine balance. What I would say as well is, don't— like, it's in the word of what you just said there, it is preemptive though. Don't wait until they start charging swarm cells. Queen cups are fine, but if they start charging them, it's not a good technique, and you will find that they'll almost certainly just continue to swarm using that technique once they've started to create swarm cells. Jay says, is it worth the trouble to use Apivar on first inspections to alleviate varroa numbers going into the spring/summer, even if it's just a prophylactic treatment? When you say prophylactic treatment, do you mean that it's not kind of getting the varroa mites within, like, under the brood, because it's an 8-week treatment. So it's designed that it stays in the hive, like, throughout the cycle. So every time kind of like a new bee emerges, you're getting those mites. So it does— you're never going to eradicate all of them. But formic acid didn't do that either, but it gave you like a bigger drop. But I know a few beekeepers that do that, and the further south you are, I'd say the more likely that is to work, in that if you've got the bees active and you've got them moving around and you went in, say, middle of February, and it's fine to go in your colonies if it's 12 degrees, 12 degrees in the middle of February, you can go into your colonies and just pop a couple of Apivar strips in. You don't even need to pull frames out to do that. Like, it's— you can do that quicker than you can add fondant. And then your 8 weeks gets you to now, which is middle of April. So then you'll be taking your Rapid Fire strips out, and then you can just go straight on with your supers, and you'd get the numbers really down very, very low. You shouldn't have to do that if you've treated in the autumn and then used oxalic acid, but it does work and you can do it. I wouldn't do it now though, like, that'd be the worst thing because it would mean you couldn't have any supers for until like middle of June. which might cause you some cramping issues. What is the best way for a new beekeeper to get experience raising bees? Any information about online courses you know of? It's different, so no, I don't know any online courses. Like, obviously I'd say watch the videos and stuff, but there's nothing quite like getting proper hands-on experience with your bees. So I would say join a local group, Perfect time of the year to go out and join your local beekeeping association and just say, look, you're willing to, willing to help out and do whatever, and maybe like wire up some frames or do something, offer them something and say, can I come down and just learn some, learn some stuff about bees and come and help out at the apiary? And a few sessions at the apiary learning from some of the beekeepers there have been doing it for a while, they'll give you loads of tips and you'll, you'll get stung and you'll see exactly what it's about. And my view is that is the best way to learn. Get get hands on, get stuck in. So Alan says after nasema treatment, can honey frames be given back to the bees? And also, is it fit for human consumption? So careful what I say there. So my understanding is there is no treatment for nasema legal treatment. Can't do anything. There's nothing. VMD approved, and that's me being genuine. We don't we don't do anything for nasema. We just if we get it, they die. But I've never used acetic acid, and I wouldn't want to comment on if it could be given back to the bees or fit for human consumption. If I was going to hedge my bets, I would say no on both fronts. But I genuinely don't know. Interested to know whether it worked. I know people have said. And again, it's not something that we've done, but like spraying with a thymol-based solution or feeding thymolated syrup is good to help against Nosema. But again, not approved, not something that we do. Alex Ward says he's awaiting his first nuc and curious if you think the bees would ignore lots of nearby wild forage in a rural area and be lured to some nearby rapeseed fields when the flow is about 2 miles away. So I'm gonna go, yeah, they probably would. They absolutely love oilseed rape, but 2 miles away, it might take them like, I don't know, a few days to find it. If they find it and it's flowing, they're gonna find it. But I like oilseed rape. It gets a bad rap. I like oilseed rape. I know it causes a pain in terms of it granulating in the comb. But just, just do a check kind of like middle of May, back towards back end of May, and just go and just check your frames. And if you're doing the shake test like that and nothing's coming out, always pretty much certain with oilseed rape that it's not gonna ferment. So if they started capping it over and you're not— you're shaking it, it's not coming out, just extract it, because come June they're not going to be foraging any oilseed rape. So once you've got that out, you'll be okay for the rest of the year. year, and it makes lovely, makes lovely soft set honey. Really nice soft set honey. Uh, Rack Attack says, nice to be in Europe instead of Canada for once to see your lives. Your videos are interesting. Oh, thanks very much. Uh, Brooklyn's Honeybees, uh, says the little one is not settling. I hope you get that sorted. Um, There we go. Right, Dave Pimblett, regarding nuc without queen brood, what should you do with the leftover bees? Merge them with another colony or drop them off in front of another hive? So again, like, I'm tainted by EFB coming into my head, but I would just close them up. That'd be my view. I just close up the hive because I know it sounds harsh and a bit like, oh, you're going to kill like 150 bees, but you're doing it for the greater good of, okay, not that colony, but you're doing it for the greater good of the apiary. And if there is an issue with the bees in that colony, if there is EFB and they've been like feeding larva and they've kind of got it in their mouths and you just shake them off in front of another colony and they go in, they're immediately going to be attracted to the larva and just to try to feed them. And then you could be passing on could be passing on the disease for the sake of boosting a colony with 150 bees, which is just not, not going to be boosting them at all. So you're just adding in risk. So for me, I would just close them up. It's a bit harsh, isn't it? Is keen to talk about football. I would— I'm happy to talk about it on, on chats. Uh, I was gutted, gutted about the Arsenal-Liverpool game. It's a good game though, but that's, that's all I'm going to talk about for football. Uh, Peggy Race says she keeps on finding random drones while working in the garden, on the bin at work. Poor drones. Yeah, they're a bit like— they don't know what to do at this time of year when it's cold. Uh, right, let's have a look at some more. Phil Howe says he totally agrees about the Abello feeders, likes them. Uh, so Grant Reading says, hey, good evening. When making frames, what size brads are you using? Any update on the small cell bees? So I've gone through a few different brands. So the ones we used a pin nailer for ages, like a 23-gauge pin, and then glued them as well. And that was, that was quite good. I remember doing that and thinking it's quite a good little system. It's a bit more time-consuming because you do have to glue the frames, but I think in terms of like long-term, like the longevity of the frames, that's probably the best one because the the pins are so fine that it holds everything together while the glue sets, and then it's perfect. But I would only do that if you're like pre-wiring the frames. If you need to get the bottom bars off to re-wax them, don't, don't glue them. You'll be in trouble then. But then we moved on to 18-gauge brads and stopped gluing them, and it massively sped everything up. So I've never gone back from that. Well, there was the next thing that I'll go on to. So I use that, but you end up getting a few more splits because it's kind of like a thicker brad. It does split it, but it is way quicker. And then now what we do is we just buy ready-assembled, pre-wired, pre-waxed frames. Absolute best thing I've ever done. But try both of those. The 23-gauge, and not a lot of people use that, gluing it with a 23-gauge pin is quite good. Itchy nose. evening. Right, Robert Virgin says, have you ever added a capped queen cell out of a cell builder direct into a working colony center frame to requeen as a supersedure? Will this definitely work? Worth a video. So I, I've seen, I've seen a couple of ones like this in terms of trying to get like a forced supersedure. I'm not sure whether it was you that said it to me. I think it is actually on my list in terms of doing that, so I'm going to have a look. Good one for a video though, and I I will have a go. And I've seen Murray's or Yolanda's technique with the foil that I think I mentioned before, and someone said, oh, stole that technique off someone else. I think everyone, everyone uses everyone else's techniques. That's just where I'd seen it. But they wrap the whole cell in foil just at the end but leave a little tip, because if you've ever seen like a failed queen cell where the bees attack them, they always go in at the side. for some reason. And you'll see like these holes, they burrow in from the side and like rip the larva out, the queen out. But if you put the foil around, they can't get in. And then you just— they don't go in from the top for some reason. I don't know why. So I might do that and I might try the little foil technique. Uh, am I importing queens this year? So yep, we've got queens already. They are here with me now in my incubator, looking very good. Ready to go. Mem Mustafa says he's been offered a site on an allotment. I'm gonna fill in the rest of your question. I guess you're saying they want you to put a beehive on there. I've seen the rest of it down there. They want they want you to put a twenty. I've got that completely wrong. They want you to put a twenty-eight day notice on the site. What do you advise to write on the plan to put a map showing where the hives will be? So I'd like. I was going to say a rude expression there. I don't want to— I'll say it— piss on your bonfire, but I wouldn't put bees on an allotment. My own personal advice, I know so many people that put bees on allotments and it's caused so much trouble because they put them on and they start off and they're all nice and gentle and small and it's a little 6-frame nuc and everyone's coming over and saying, oh, aren't they cute, little pollen, and then All hell breaks loose and you have to have like a pretty rapid exit plan to get away from an allotment. Not to say that it wouldn't work, and I'm sure people here have very accommodating allotments. The ones that I've seen, it's not ended well. So just if you do put them on there, just have somewhere else that you can take them at short notice and maybe design the floors So you can bung them at short notice as well. Because I found when I did that video where we moved a colony out of an allotment and they were on these floors with like these landing boards, we— there was a weird configuration and we had to try and like tape up the entrances. Really difficult to get them out and the entrances kept on popping open and like the people in the allotment, come on, get rid of these bloody killer bees. And it was difficult, whereas if I had my underfloor entrances there, I could have just turned up one night with like a a foam bung and I would have bunged the entrance in like 10 seconds flat. And then you can just pick them up, take them off. So you're almost trying to like think about it a little bit in advance. Uh, Rack Attack says, I heard about sacrificing drone brood to limit varroa. Did you try it? So that's, that's kicked off a bit on the No Nonsense, uh, Beekeeping Facebook group this week. If anyone's not joined that No Nonsense Beekeeping Facebook group, good group. And, uh, John had posted very innocently, uh, a description from someone about saying about doing this. So it's a well-known management technique in that, yeah, you, you put your drone frames in and then you sacrifice your drones because that's where the varroa like to lay their eggs. And by doing so, you get like a bump down in varroa and you sacrifice thousands of drones the same point, and then people feed them to their chickens and stuff. So I've done that in the past, not, not much, but just kind of like occasionally to see what would happen. But for the past few years, I'm definitely of the belief of some of the other people on that group there that like there's a real issue in terms of like poor matings in the UK. Like I've noticed it's not, it's not just weather-based in the UK, something else going on. And then also in terms of when trying to get matings, you're reliant on like a healthy drone population. But for me, I'm relying on like good, nice drones as well with good genetics. So, so I'm— I want to do the opposite from that. I want to put in dedicated drone frames in order to boost the drone population for for good bees, for my bees, for bees that I want to propagate good genetics from. So I'm kind of— I'm doing the opposite. I'm thinking I can, I can deal with varroa in a number of other ways. Like, that small bump down in varroa by killing all of the drones from the colony is giving me a very small benefit and loads of, like, really bad— like, loads of disbenefits in terms of the, the lack of drones that I'm gonna get. So it is something that's done. It's not something that I would recommend. It's definitely not something that I do. Oh, I'm nearly down, nearly down to the bottom. I've got four more comments and then I'm at the bottom. So if you've got a question, stick it at the bottom and I'll answer it. And if you enjoy the chat, please do hit the thumbs up. It really helps me out. Right, Chris says regarding videos of your long hives, have you tried rearing queens with vertical queen excluders in a queen right? My colony. Um, FWL Sladen queen rearing in England— is that like a, is that like a technique for doing that? When I bought those hives, they used to come with queen excluders, vertical queen excluders, and then I think Hyde Hives promptly removed them because they're a pain in the ass, really caused a lot of issues, and, and they don't move through them in the same way that, uh, they move through like a horizontal queen excluder. So I ditch mine straight away and don't use them. But I could have it, yeah, I could have a look at that. It's quite, it's maybe like quite niche, but I'm up for having a look. But it's not something that I've tried. Joe Creaser says brood frames are still precious to me at the moment. What would you do with ivy honey from last year that has crystallized in the frame? So I would give it a go trying to feed it back to the bees. I know it goes like concrete, yeah, but Maybe get it in a warmer first, warm it as much as you possibly can, like 40, 45 degrees, something like that, so you're just softening it up a bit. Uncap it, get all of the cappings off, and then put it one frame at a time in between the 2 most packed brood frames in a colony, and they will just devour it. They really will, even if they're just using it for food. They're not going to move it anywhere. They will get through it at this point of the year because they've got so much warmth. They will use it. And if they don't, come back and let's, uh, let's see. But I reckon, I, I would wager that they would use it. It's a massive allotment, so be well away. Okay, wicked. That sounds good. Good luck with it. He's got the last of 10 inspected today, but so much crystallized honey blocking the brood frames. What's the best plan. There's tons of it. So similar, similar to what I just said there to Joe, get like checkerboard it in between the brood frames, bruise it up. So you've taken the cappings off and the bees hate that. They absolutely hate it, but it's good. They hate it in such a way that they're saying, well, hang on, I've got, I've got like a brood frame and then capped stores, like crystallized stores, and then you've got another brood frame and they're saying, no, I want that frame to lay eggs in. So we want to clear that out. So they're not thinking of it as like, oh, nice tasty bonus. They're saying you've put something there that's really inconvenient for us, we're going to clear it out so we can lay eggs there. And I guarantee, go back in a week after doing that and you— they just turn it into a frame of eggs. It's great. Gordo says, hi Lawrence, what are your bees feeding on? Do you chat to farmers about spraying, or are you in arable or dairy country? in North Wales, does habitat improvement come up in conversation? So we're kind of like catch-22. I say we're lucky because you don't get— you get kind of— the only thing they spray up here is horse muck, and you can smell it when they're doing it. There's no arable crops up here, so we don't get sprays. You don't get any like insecticides or herbicides or anything like that, which is good. So we never lose any colonies due to that, but we also don't get much honey from sheep. So every single field here is just sheep. Uh, so balancing both sides. But it's— oh, what, what the other part of your question about habitat improvement? So it's interesting because a lot— some of the farmers are getting pretty good at this and they're moving towards like regenerative farming. So moving away from putting loads of fertilizer on their land in order to grow their kind of grass or their wheats or whatever it is they're feeding to their animals, and leaving some of the, the fields, like big fields as well, leaving them for like 2 or 3 years with a herbal ley. Talk like I know what I'm talking about, I only know the very basics, with the idea that it improves the soil and fixes nitrogen back into the soil. So after it's sat there and not been used for a couple of years, they can, they can grow their stuff on it again. And I've got bees on one of these places and it is, it is really, really good for the bees. The bees get so much out of it. So one place they grow sunflowers, and then they put the sunflowers in between this herbal ley, and they let me choose the mix. It's great. So we go up there and we speak to them, and they say, well, I need this, this, and this in the mix for what I want. Is there anything that you want in it as well? So we suggest different types of clovers and things that are good for honeybees, but also good things that are good for like diversity. It's not all about— for us anyway, it's not all about kind of promoting and doing what's best for honeybees, because I think it's like what's best for like the diversity in that area. Um, but yeah, so some, some are moving towards that now and doing very well out of it. So we do— I do— I love a conversation with a farmer about stuff like that, habitat improvement. And we do, we sit there and we chat and we try and, try and work together. Not to say that all farmers do it, but I generally find farmers care quite a lot about like what they're doing to their land, and they want their land to be sustainable. And it's interesting, I was in work the other day doing a presentation about sustainability, and the lady who was doing it, it was really good, was talking about like the first thing, the first thing about sustainability that you need to know and you need to get is that companies need to make sustainable profits. And it was really interesting to hear them talk. You think they're going to talk about like, I don't know, bat boxes or reducing carbon. She said no, it's all about like, if you can't make sustainable profits, then you've got no companies to improve the, um, like the environment. And it's the same, it's the same for the farmers. They don't want to, they don't want to kind of just keep on like, I don't know, chucking loads of fertilizer on their land for short-term gain. Thinking that in the longer term it's gonna, it's gonna wreck their land. They wanna, they want it to be sustainable so that they can do it for generations as opposed to doing it very quickly. Uh, Zach Price says, hi Lawrence, I'm curious how you managed to get mated queens so early. So that they are, they are imported, imported queens. They're not mated in the UK. Uh, Steve's Bees has got a natty badge because he's a channel member. So if you want to be a channel member, instead of hitting subscribe, you can hit join, and then you get access to all the videos early with no adverts if the adverts are annoying you. What bee suit do I recommend? So I've tried a number of different bee suits, and I don't wear any of my other bee suits except my Beewear Ultra Suit, which is a very expensive bee suit, but it is the only bee suit that I've got that do not get stung through. And for me, that's what I used to hate. And even my old BB Wear suit, like, that was expensive. That was like £180, just like the polycotton one. And it's great, and it will go on for decades probably. I used to get stung through it a lot, and I used to hate getting stung through it. And all of my other suits that I've got, I get stung through as well. But you don't get stung through the BB Wear Ultra suit. So that that's definitely the one that I would recommend. He's got a few hives that have 7, 8 frames of brood already and you're seeing charged queen cells. What would you do? So are they definitely charged queen cells? They're not just queen cups, kind of empty queen cups, or even queen cups with eggs in? They are queen cells with like royal jelly and larva, like chubby larva in? If that's the case, then you need, you need to do something about it. At this point of the year, it's a difficult one to do. It really is difficult to do at this point of the year. If it was me personally, like, I wouldn't leave anything to kind of chance because of the weather. So you could make a split, you could do any variation of an artificial swarm and keep your queen in one box and keep your single open charge cell in another box and let them build it up and let Queen going mate. I wouldn't risk that at this point of the year, but it could be 22 degrees next week, so it— you're always— it's always a little bit of a gamble, but you need to do something. What I'll tell you what not to do: don't just knock down the cells and hope that the problem will go away, because it won't be the— it won't be the problem that goes away, it'll be like half your bees with the queen. Uh, Mem says, do I clip my queens, and should we clip them to help with swarm control? So there's probably like 2 or 3 big, like, eureka moments for me in my beekeeping. I've covered most of them on my videos, but one of the— I would say probably number 2 is clipping queens. And I wouldn't keep bees without clipping queens now. It's the best thing ever because they don't— bees don't swarm. They literally do not swarm. So that does not mean that you can clip your queen and leave them for 6 weeks and not do inspections. They still manage to swarm, believe it or not, if you don't do the inspections. But what it means is you always catch the swarms, so you're not— you're never losing big massive clusters of bees into the, like, I don't know, over the horizon. Because if you're going around doing your weekly inspections, you, you— what you, you either find one of two things. One is you've got capped queen cells in the colony and the queen, the clipped queen, is still running around. So what you can do at that point is just cage up your clipped queen, knock all the queen cells down except one, leave that colony to requeen naturally, and then you've got your queen, you've got your resource still, so she's not flown away, and you can make a split with her. Or the other thing that happens is you come back and then underneath your mesh floor there's a swarm, so your swarm's just underneath with a queen with clipped wings, tried to fly, she's gone outside, she's fallen down onto the floor, all of the bees cluster around her, she tries to get back into the hive, she generally manages to get back underneath the mesh floor, and then you just bump them into a box, take them away, knock all the queen cells down except one. So you enter this swarm and you kind of end up with an artificial swarm, but you don't lose your bees, and not losing your bees is the way to make honey. That's a surefire way to not make honey, is to just leave your bees to swarm. So it's, it's a game changer for me, and I recommend everybody to clip their queens. I appreciate why some people might not want to do it though. Says leather gloves or marigolds? So neither, but definitely not leather, definitely not leather gloves, no way. Just, it's just, it's a massive disease risk. Like, you're never going to get them clean. And if you're going from hive to hive, from apiary to apiary, which you probably will be with like £20 or £30 leather gloves, you're just, you're just spreading disease. And also you don't get that kind of same feel that you would. And you get it a bit with a marigold, but with like a disposable nitrile glove, or the one that I use that's like a cross between a marigold and a nitrile. You get that feel, and I'll never forget it. Like, the first time I put nitriles on, you squish a bee and you feel it. You feel that you squish that bee and you think, oh, gutted. Like, you don't feel that with leather gloves. You're just kind of like plodding around, big sausage fingers, my sausage fingers, killing bees without feeling it. And then as soon as you put nitriles on, oh my God, you feel the bees and you kill them. And then you immediately, the next time, oh, I'm going to go a little bit, a little bit kind of more gentle. And you get to a point where you just, you never kill any bees through kind of like squishing them because you're so— you've got all of that feeling that remains. And then the clear benefit that you're not spreading disease because they're very, very easy to— they're disposable, but they're very easy to clean as well. So you can— I wash them in my like soda bucket now just to get any propolis off in between hives. You see if you can spot the point in time where I started doing that on my videos. Used to not do it, and then you can see it now. There's all that white crystal crystallization on the gloves when I do it, but definitely disposable gloves for me. Uh, Dominic says, hi, from your experience, how successful are Russian scions? So not very good, not very good. I know, I know the video is like, oh, it's the best thing ever, but they didn't work. Um, it's still up and I've not had a swarm on it, but the thing with those, I will say, if my, in my defense, is that they're not like long-term swarm catchers. It's not like a bait hive where you put it up and then you can go back 2 weeks later and they're there. What the way that they work is that they're like a transitional somewhere for them to cluster up while they're just getting ready to go. So I think they would work better, and I should probably put a camera on it, but I think they would work better if you had them like in your garden where you could look out the window and say, oh, Wow, there's a swarm on my Russian Scion. I'm gonna go and grab it. But yeah, didn't catch anything. It's good. Damien O'Hare. Hi, Damien. He says, I have a farmer spraying Roundup on an entire field so he can reseed, and you were advised to move the bees for at least 2 weeks. That sounds right. So sounds right, doesn't it? You should move it like Roundup. glyphosate. But I know farmers that have sprayed glyphosate right in front of beehives and had no effect on them whatsoever. But I don't think we really know the impact of glyphosate. I think I saw a thing today saying it's probably carcinogenic, and I think that kind of says it all, doesn't it? It's like, it's definitely carcinogenic. But there's so much money in that business of killing soils and then selling fertilizer to people who've killed their soils that they have quite a lot of influence, probably have influence on the people that have commissioned the studies to say probably carcinogenic as opposed to, yeah, it's definitely carcinogenic. So if I were in your situation and they said that they were doing that, yeah, moving away for a couple of weeks. If you left them there and they died, you'd be annoyed. If you left them there and they didn't die, then I don't know, maybe they'll be impacted at a later date. But I do, I do know a lot of people who say they have no issues with Roundup or glyphosate being sprayed in front of the hives, has no impact on the bees. But if they were mine, I would move them. Says he's noticed a possible link to winter failure and plastic foundation in the brood box. I.e., if you only use wax foundation in your brood box, does your hive stand a better chance of surviving in winter? Not sure, I've never— I don't use a huge amount of plastic foundation, I've got my frames and feeders boxes, but I'll have a look into that, maybe give it a little trial. Hi, lol, hi, late into session, oh sorry, but been very cold in Notts, did the first inspection some days ago when it was warm did have some drone brood, but very little other brood. Had larvae of different size. I think I missed the question there, sorry. Um, Ben says hi. Uh, say hi, making stuff up now. Ben says he's in North London, so it's a bit warmer than other places in the country. Definitely charged queen cells, unfortunately. Did a Demerara on one already. I've been slightly worried, but it was massive. Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it, how that you get the different Climate's nowhere near that up here. Um, but I see— I've seen people posting on Facebook they've lost swarms already, so they will go. Uh, there's been swarm alerts going out. I know it's funny, you get like swarm alerts and starvation alerts, but you do have to— you have to judge each one. And if you see them— and this is the problem, I reckon what's probably happened there is you might not have got your supers on early enough, but it's is such a difficult one to judge, and I always err on the side of not putting my supers on early. But we are North Wales, we— the cold will keep bees from swarming a little bit more up here, whereas in London, because they'll just be thinking tropical, we're off, we're gonna go and, uh, gonna go and have some fun. Ben also says, do you find you squish a lot of bees with the 12-frame Abello hives because of the interlocking rebates? So no, no more than I squish on any other hive. Suyenti hive's bad for squishing because it doesn't even have a, um, doesn't have the recess above the lugs on the box below. So you just, you put the box on, you're just like, oh, lots of crushing dead bees. But no, no, no more on the 12-frame, the rebate one. I find like any, any beehive design, you end up crushing a few bees when you do it. But if you, if you use a smoker and like them away with a brush, you should be able to minimize it. Uh, Zach says he has a hive of nasty bees. He's thinking of splitting them now so I can find the queen and buy some mated queens to requeen them. Do you think this would work? So this is a shout out to anyone, anyone who's trying to requeen an angry hive, anyone who wants to mark their queen, anyone who wants to do anything which involves finding a queen, do it now. As opposed to doing it in the middle of May. Like, it's so much easier going through a single box of 10 or 11 frames and finding a queen than it is going through like a double brood with 6 supers on. And I can see why in that instance there you might be thinking, I don't have to go through this colony because they're vicious. But they will be more vicious. They'll just be getting more vicious and vicious as the days go on. So get in there early and do it as soon as possible. And, and mark them, mark them properly. If you're going in to mark them, don't use the Posca pens. Rubbish Posca pens. I know, I don't know why they're sold so widely and that they are the pen to use, but they're just useless. Get a good oil-based pen and, and, and, and pin the cage down on the queen so she can move. Or like, mark her with the oil base and then leave her in the cage for 5 minutes with like as few bees as possible in there to let, to let the paint dry. And then you'll find that will pretty much never, never rub off if it's, if it's a good decent pen. Uh, Robert says, when you're queen rearing, do you use the incubator to finish, then add as a virgin or a queen cell? So we, we do use the incubators, but I kind of like, with the scale of my queen rearing at the moment, I'm thinking, do I really warrant Keeping my queen incubator on, but I'm definitely one for adding queen cells as opposed to virgins. I just I never get on adding virgins. I know a lot of a lot of places do add virgins, but I've always preferred to nice nice ripe cell. I find find they tend to do better with cells. Dominican beekeepers is green from the Caribbean. I'm well jealous. I had I had I got some beef. gin this evening, and I did it with like jerk, like, uh, some allspice and Scotch bonnet pepper. It was properly nice, but it's drizzly here, so it's no comparison. It's been so cold on the South Coast last few weeks, only been 12 degrees. Yeah, it— anybody who's been experiencing bad weather over the last week, I— that is entirely my fault. I took a week off work, annual leave, first annual leave week of the year, and it just rained. It was really cold. Uh, Jan says she sees that I'm selling, uh, my heather honey needle press. Can you share your newfound improved way of extracting heather honey? So I've sold that, it's gone. Uh, but yeah, so I did, I did a previous, uh, chat on this. So I— it's not a new technique, it's a technique that I used before I got my needle press, but it was done on a smaller scale. So what I did previously is I had a hydro press and I just scraped back heather honey down to the midrib of the foundation. So just kind of like coarse honey and wax and all bits go into this hydro press, and then it's got a fine mesh on the hydro press, and then you just fill it up with water, as in you fill the bladder up with water, which is great. So it's like not even— you don't even need electricity, you can do it, you can do it in an allotment, and then it just pushes it all out and it's really effective. So I've tweaked that. So I sold my old HydroPress, I had a 40-liter one, and I bought a 90-liter stainless steel one from Vigo, or Vigo, I don't know how you say it. And it's really good, great, but I've not even set it up yet. And then I've moved on to frames and feeders, all plastic, fully molded frames Because when I was scraping back to the midrib of the foundation, I was just getting loads of cut-throughs and it was driving me mad. So doing it with plastic foundation, like a fully molded plastic frame, can be really easy. I'll just get a plastic scraper, scrape it all in, and the big benefit for that for me is the fact that you don't have to filter it again. That's what was killing me with the loosener, is that I did all the loosening, which took ages, And then I filtered it once. Oh no, sorry, I did— I, I— no, I didn't filter it once there. So I did the, the loosener, swing cage, and then put it into a bucket and then stored it with bits of wax in. And then when I came to jar it, I had to heat it back up again and try and filter it, and it just is so slow filtering it. So I'm thinking the hydro press is going to be probably like a similar-ish time. I lose all of my wax, but I'm fine with that, uh, but I get filtered honey, so I'm ready to go. I just see Edward has said, can I make a video on it? So I will, definitely going to do that. I'll do a couple of videos on that this year in terms of like the, the new process for the heather honey and also, um, yeah, so the hydro press as well. Yeah. How many frames of brood and resources do you start your nucs with? So varies depending on what time of the year we do it. We've settled now, we'll go with like 3 frames, 2 frames of brood and a frame of stores, kind of like June, just after the June gap. But you can start them in the June gap as well. I think that's roughly where we've settled as a happy medium. I tried to push it later on in the season, and you can make them quite late in the season, but I just find when you're gambling on matings as well it's better to push it into the time when the drones are in a better condition. Didn't get all his questions in, so could not get all of the last question in. Do you feel it's just a late start with our hive with the low brood because it's been cold, or should we be doing any more? I've got to remind myself at the beginning of it. So you did your first inspection some days ago when it was warm and did have some drone brood, but very little other brood. Oh, it sounds like drone laying queen. So you've got loads— you've got drone brood but very little other brood. If you— if you've— if that's right, you've got drone brood but very little other brood at this point in the year, I would say almost certainly going to be a drone laying queen. Nothing to do with temperature. They're not going to put resources into drone brood over worker brood. They're only going to do that because the queen's not able to produce fertile eggs, which is kind of— they're doing it just because like she's broken. So I would double-check, um, and kill her and get another queen, see if you can save it. Um, Peter says, hi, varroa treatments, are you using the same this year or best just to stick with what works? So I get where people come from in terms of like changing it up, but I do think make sure what you're changing it up to is like a Proven technique. Don't like think I'm just going to chuck some some rhubarb leaves on this year. And in terms of like oxalic acid, it's not oxalic acid is something that the bees the mites are never going to like build resistance to oxalic acid because it's it it like mechanically gets them. It's like it's like building resistance to like a whip or something. You can't you can't really do it. Whereas amitraz something chemical like that, the bees they'll just Sorry, the mites—they'll just get—they'll just get used to it. They build up a tolerance to it, and they—they can—they can tolerate it to some certain extent. And that definitely happened with not Amitraz. I forget the other one—the one that's used in Pakistan, I think. And they've said that they're building some resistance. So I can see if you're using different types of chemical treatment, then yeah, I would change it up a little bit. But my bees—I don't like Apivar works really well. So Amitraz. Still works, and then you're supplementing it with oxalic acid, which is a different form of treatment. It's not really a chemical treatment; it's more of a mechanical treatment, especially if you're vaping it. But yeah, I'm sure if you use both of those, I'm sure you'll be fine for the next few years. I'm down to the last, the very last question here, so I will jump back onto the forms. I've got three questions off there, but if you do want to ask questions to get. The chat. And again, if you enjoy the chat, please do give it a thumbs up. Uh, Zach Price says, we have gently heated our honey, which has made it runny, but it is still opaque. How to get it clear? So you don't, you don't need to get it clear. Like, educate the people, I would say, and, and show them that good honey is not clear. But the re— the reason it's probably not clear is because it's not been finely filtered and it's got good, good amounts of different pollens in there, and it's causing it to, to not be clear, which is a good thing. Like, promote the fact that it's a good thing. I know I go on about it all the time, but like the, the Wainwrights— and I was chatting to the guy who supplied this honey, I won't say who it is— to, uh, to Wainwrights. Um, but heather honey, when it goes off, it goes crunchy. And they've just said, right, this is called Marks& Spencer's Crunchy Heather Honey. And they just turned what was a perceived negative into like a positive. And I would just do the same with that. Don't just— if I was— if I want to go and buy like a jar of honey and I look at 2 jars and one is like, like hazy and one's like perfectly clear, I'm going for the hazy one because I know, I know what good honey is. And, and this is why I don't get like the honey grading competitions, the honey shows, in terms of like Needs to be perfectly clear. And I think this one's perfectly clear. Funny, like, I don't know. I would go— I would just go with it as it is. But if you want to get it clear, you've got to heat it up more, and you've got to kind of filter and filter and filter, and then let it settle and let all this stuff go up to the top, and then maybe cling film it on the top and pull it off and do, do whatever it is to get it through various grades of filter to get it to a point where it's perfectly clear, but I wouldn't bother. Uh, Brisinger says, what do you think of the EWK mini mating hives? From looking around, they seem to be used more in Eastern Bloc, uh, Eastern Bloc and some continental European countries. So I've not, I've not seen them. I, I might have seen them, but not under that branding, EWK. So I've not— send me a link if you want, I'll have a look. They sound— I like, I like looking at new cool things. But I've not heard of them under that name, sorry. Edward says he's loving the live streams, trying to keep 2 hives in the garden this year. What is the best way to manage and check a double brood, trying to avoid swarming bees and angry neighbours? Good luck, it'll be fun. Beekeeping in a garden is great, like I love sitting by my bees and watching them, and when I had bees in the garden I liked that as well. I remember looking out, um, when I had 35 hives in my back garden. I remember looking out at my neighbor mowing the lawn, and like, he was with a petrol lawnmower. Every 10 seconds he was stopping like this, and I just— it got— I just— I can't, I can't. It's his garden. Like, he's, he's bought his house and he wants to have like a nice time in his garden and just mow his lawn in peace. Um, so hopefully they're nice calm bees. In terms of stopping them swarming though, yeah, double brood, there's no doubt that double brood does help in the battle to kind of give them space. You're taking away that space constraint issue, but it's not a silver bullet. It doesn't stop them swarming just by giving them space. And depending on the genetics of the bees as well, um, I saw someone post this on Twitter today saying What— why are people splitting? Um, if you've got like a 10 or 11 frame colony of bees at the moment, why are people splitting them and adding imported queens in? Because all you end up is just with like 2 weak nucs. Why don't you just double brood them and then build them up, and then you can split the 2 boxes and make a split that way, and then you've got 2 strong splits? And I thought, I disagree. Like, I think that's a really good thing to do is make those splits early on in the year because you're mitigating that swarming. And if you've got the wrong genetics of bees, just by adding another box on top and double brooding them— if you do that with it, if you did that with an AMM colony of bees, like a pure AMM colony of bees, I'd be very surprised if they were on 20 frames of brood. They're just probably going to like— they're just going to— just because you've given them additional space, they're not going to say, I'm going to use that to my benefit to create additional brood. They just say, well, That's above me, and we store honey above us, and you'll just go back and you're just going to have like a brood box full of honey above the original size brood nest. So it is dependent on that, but I do think double brood does help, and with most colonies of bees, giving them the additional space will at least set them back a little bit. But the Demaray splits do help as well, as long as you keep on top of them. That is a good way to stop them swarming. But also the other, and this one is maybe overlooked by some people, I know you've got 2, you've got 2 hives in your garden and you do want to stay on 2 hives, but you could kind of build, build them up, get them onto double broods, and then, I don't know, middle of May when they're filling that double brood, split them out into 4 colonies and let them just like naturally, you could just like walk away split or whatever, whatever way you want to do it. Just do walk away split. I wouldn't, I wouldn't add mated queens in. You'll see why in a little bit. And then see, see what happens. And if the queens get mated, great. So coming into like August with 4 colonies, hopefully with all queens mated, and then just take your honey crop off, work out which ones are the best. They might be the ones that produce the most honey. the ones that are the most gentle, and then just kill the worst 2 and like newspaper combine them back to 2. And there's a really— it's a really good system that, because you, you— okay, you might not get quite as much honey, that's the downside of it, but what you're doing is you're, you're kind of doing like a little bit of like mini selection, which is you're, you're taking 2 colonies, you're turning it into 4, and then you're choosing the best 2, killing the worst 2. So you get this little bit of mini selection going in there, going to be dependent on the drones in your area, but you end up with massive colonies going into winter, like really big strong colonies going into winter, which in my view gives you a very good chance of getting big massive colonies coming out of winter. Or you could do that manipulation and combine them again in the spring, so take 4 colonies through And then say, okay, maybe one will die and combine them up that way. But it doesn't work like that. If you take 4 through, you'll just end up with 4, and then you'll end up with 8 and 16 and whatever. So combine them back. But that is a good way of doing it. It pretty much like fully mitigates the risk of them swarming because you've split them. It's rare to take a split— it's rare to like double brood up a colony make a split, let them like do an artificial swarm, and then for either half of those splits to swarm. It is a— it's not to say it wouldn't happen, but it's— the chances are way lower. So I would do that. Hi Lawrence, just a year and a half into beekeeping. You missed any varroa treatment in January. You have 2 hives which are now looking weak. Can I treat them now, or should I let them strengthen first? So Yeah, so how do you mean looking weak? Is it— do you think it's varroa-related? And did you— you missed varroa treatment in January, but was there like an autumn treatment that was done on them as well? Because if there's no autumn treatment and there's no winter treatment, then yeah, you definitely need to do something. Um, you are limited in terms of what you can do now though, but now is a good time of the year to use like Formic Pro. It's like used to be called Max, but I wouldn't use that on a weak colony of bees because it can, it can just wipe out a weak colony of bees. Wouldn't use Apivar because you're— unless they're so weak that you're just going to say, right, I'm not getting any honey from them this year, I'll use Apivar. I'd probably go with like repeated blasts of oxalic acid, 5-day intervals, and that will knock down the mites. But I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't let them strengthen first because all you're doing, if you're— as you let the bees strengthen, you're just letting the mite strengthen as well in terms of numbers. So I would like a— even on, even like a small, like a 3-frame colony of bees, let's say they're 3 frames, doing an oxalic acid blast on them is no, it's no bother. Doesn't bother the bees whatsoever. Doesn't really seem to impact them at all. and that will give you a nice drop. You'll get a good drop of the phoretic mites. So that's what I would do. Says he bought a nuc that was overflowing, moved it to a hybrid foundation, newbie, so no drawn comb, and it is drawing swarm cells already before it has drawn out the foundation. Any ideas? So yeah, they think the foundation is a wall. I've been there, I've done that. And they think the foundation is a wall. So are you, are you feeding them? Which is definitely feed them. If you're not feeding them, feed them. Um, those, those swarm cells, they think— they just think that you, you've got them up against the wall. Maybe you've got them up against like a, the wall of the hive and then foundation, or you've got them in the middle and foundation either side, and they think that foundation is like the extent of the box that they're in. So they're just saying, right, we've maxed out, we've reached the capacity, so we're going to swarm. So that's a space constraint swarm. Um, the way that, the way that I would fix it is that you— doesn't sound like the right thing to do on, on a nuc like this, but I would try and checkerboard them a little bit. If it's a strong 6-frame nuc, checkerboard them and put the foundation on the inside, and then it gives them— they can't think that it's a wall because it's in between them. I had exactly the same thing happen to me. Uh, and then that's the that I fixed it is I put the foundation in between the 2 biggest frames of brood and just kept on putting it in like that and kept on feeding them, and they did really well. He knows I like smokers, but what's my favorite gadget that I use regularly? I'll show you my favorite gadget that I use regularly. No, not that one. My Leatherman. I've got the Leatherman, like, there we go. Let me get it off my face. There you go. See that? It's called like a Pico, I think, or something. It's so cool though. So it's got like scissors and it's got like tweezers. It's got like a little knife, one of those, whatever that is. But because it's on my keys, it means I've Always got it, so I use that like every day, like four, five, six times a day. I always use it when I'm up at the bees, like doing like little things. I need to like cut something with a knife. I use the tweezers occasionally, make sure I clean them afterwards, and I use the scissors for stuff. So yeah, that is like the best thing ever because it's on my key ring. It's just it's always there. Gets use it all the time. Great present for someone that one. Storaged some supers wet but they've gone slightly mouldy. Not bad, but they would— would they be okay to use? What do I find is the best way to store? So first bit, they're fine. Wet supers, if they've gone a little bit mouldy, the bees will clean them out really, really quickly. They just, they'll go in, it's just like mouldy pollen, and the bees will say, yeah, don't like that, right, that's going out. And you see them dumping it out front, so they're fine. If they're like mega moldy, I don't know, like 70, 80% covered, then yeah, maybe chuck them, melt them out, and put some new foundation into it. I do, I like storing stuff wet. I find it best to store it wet, and but it's just, it's like convenience for me in terms of I can extract it, store it wet, nice and sealed up, ratchet strapped in between the boxes, So it's easy when it comes to honey extraction. Um, it's like no mess, there's no disease risk because I'm ratcheting everything down. I started covering some of them in plastic, they got a bit scared, but I think that's maybe overkill. But the biggest benefit of storing them wet is that like this time of the year when, when you want, you want your bees to go up into the supers, there's no better way to get your bees to go up into the supers than putting on wet supers. they're just like, oh, they go up and you— they're full. The supers are full on day one because the bees are up there just cleaning it, and then they're there. So definitely wet for me. So Norway says, best tip for a new beekeeper, how to maintain and keep good healthy hives? So there's a video coming up on this shortly, which is, is the varroa treatments, doing the varroa treatments at the right time of the year. And I— people might get bored, but I will, I will say it again. But not doing it when it suits you as a beekeeper, but doing it when it fits in for the bees. So I used to do it, and you, you're knocking it back until like September, like maybe even into October, and thinking, right, I've got all of my honey now, great, loads of jars of honey, I'll then do my mite treatments. And it was too late. Bringing it forward, and I'm not sure how well that would work in But you'd have to, you'd have to find out exactly when the right time is to do it. But bringing it forward and making sure that going into winter you've got really healthy bees going into winter nice and early, and then you get really good crops the next year and really good success rate in terms of getting the colonies through. I know you like 14x12, but if you do a demaree, wouldn't you end up with a box of 14x12 full of honey? So yeah, would. And I got told by a very good beekeeper, never ever moan about a heavy box full of honey. You just can't do it because it's like a 14 by 12 box of honey is like £60, £70 worth of honey, which is pretty good. So yeah, it is heavy and you can't do it if you've treated them with Apivar. But this is the problem with demerays and with my system here. I think demerays work best on a national deep system. as opposed to like the jumbo 14 by 12 system. You wouldn't want to go double 14 by 12, it's just, it's way too much and you'll lose a lot of honey doing it that way. But I had one of those last year, 14 by 12 at the top, fresh frames completely full, and oh, it was beautiful but very heavy. I have a colony that has zero brood since July last year and they're still still going over only 2 or 3 frames. You've noticed some dysentery in the hive. Should I shake them out, block them up? So yeah, it doesn't sound good. Zero brood since July last year. They must have had brood at some point in there. Like, there's no way that the bees can live from July last year through to now, um, unless they're on their very, very last legs. But yeah, dysentery in the hive, like, it's probably just— you do tend to find that with dysentery in the hive, in that when there's something else that's wrong, they start to say, yeah, I can't be bothered, I've not got the strength to go out, so they just go and do it on the inside. But if there's no brood, there's dysentery inside the hive, and they're down to 2 or 3 frames, and you're sure that there's been no brood, like, even adding a queen in there is not gonna It's not going to fix the problem, and it would take a very, very long time to fix. So yeah, I would just block them up, block them up, let them die, clear it all out, start again. Ben Wong says he bought black tub like I suggested to submerge polyhides for cleaning. Do you then scrub them afterwards or just spray them down with a pressure washer hose? So the technique that I use is I'll give them a scrape before they go in. just to kind of get off, like, if there's any big bits of propolis, any big bits of wax, I'll scrape them before they go in. And then all the scrapings go in the fire, and then they're going to sit in the sodium hypochlorite, not hydrochlorite, um, you know, blowing stuff up. Uh, and then, yeah, pressure wash them, like the lowest, the lowest pressure wash setting. But to be honest, you could just hose them down as well. I think hosing them would be fine. It's more just to get the remnants of the the bleach off. And then what I've been doing with mine is then I leave them out then in like to dry in the sun. I'm just going to leave them out there completely, like couldn't be more sterile. Um, but I think it's, I don't know, just like let the, let the vapor and the fumes go off it a little bit before I start putting frames back in them. Um, and then in, in Wales, like a few cycles of rain as well just to get them nice and clean. But pressure wash is the one. Uh, Joe Creases says he's got the Leatherman Wave, the same as what I reviewed. I've had it for years now, still as good as when I first got it. Do you know what? I lost my Leatherman Wave and it is in an apiary somewhere under the long grass. I'm gutted. And I'll never forget, I, I rung up the guy who, um, who like owns one of the apiaries and I said to him, I said, you've not found a Leatherman knocking around? I said, I lost my Leatherman. Gutted. Love that Leatherman Wave, and he said, "Yeah," he said, "Yeah, I have found a Leatherman. I'll bring it round," and he brought it round, and it wasn't mine. It was like somebody else's Leatherman. Like it wasn't. It was an old one as well. The chance of that! So I lost mine. So I got it. So I bought. I bought a new one. I've not got it here. No, it is in. Oh no, I do wait. I got. I got one second. Well, that doesn't bode well because it's not where I thought it was. I probably lost that one as well. But I bought another Leatherman, but I do like it, but I don't use it anywhere near as much as the little one on my key ring. And I also bought, you know, the, the scissors, like the proper mega Leatherman scissors. That they've got. That's in my car just in case I'm ever in any like massive road accidents and need to cut someone out of their seat belt. I've not found a good beekeeping use for that yet. I love, I love a gadget. Love a good gadget. Uh, Mem says he's moving hives to a woodland next week, going to close them up on Friday, moving them on Saturday. Can I open them up on Saturday or should I leave them closed up till Sunday? So the second they get to their new apiary, open them up like the second that you get there. Doesn't matter whether it's middle of the night, just open them up. These really don't like being like condensed in or closed in. Um, so yeah, as soon as they get there, just open them up. Uh, Gordo says, oh yep, it says helpful. No problem, thanks for being a channel member. Uh, Dave says, have you put your Flow Hive supers on yet? So I have, yeah, I've been going around. I looked at that apiary the other day And they were just covering all of the frames. Like, it was— I think I've got a 10-frame. No, one of mine's an 8-frame, one of them's a 10-frame, the fake one. And both of them were just covering every single frame of brood. So I just thought, yeah, why not? I'll stick them on. So both of them have got them on, and I'm interested to see how they clean them up because it's got all the wax cappings on it still, but they're empty. So hopefully they go well. Uh, Keith Jenkins says, what do you think of just jacket or veil, or do you prefer the full suit? So just all the way full suit for me. I used to do stuff with like a jacket. I think it's easier, isn't it? Just put a jacket on, just put it on, done. And they just get in every single time. They get in, doesn't matter where. So for me, always full jacket, always a full suit. Sorry. Brandon's Bees. Brandon's Bees, he says, hey, did 8 demeray splits this morning. Thanks for your videos. Thought you would try it out. Oh, very good. There you go. Put that on there. Just trying out new things. I should do that, shouldn't I? I could have done that before. I was trying to click on your video, your YouTube thing there, because it's got like a cool picture. I'm gonna, I'm gonna check out your YouTube channel. Um, I'm guessing you've got a YouTube channel there. I'm just getting everything wrong, but if you don't, I'll, uh, I'll take it back. But yeah, good, good stuff. Let me know how they go. Um, I love it, love a Demerace split. I'll take that back down. I've learned a new skill here, look at this, teaching old dog new tricks. He checked that hive September, November, and February and no brood, and they killed a mated queen in September. Okay, that's That is very, very strange. Uh, right, let's hide that one. Oh, we're cooking on gas now. That does look cool. You're right, Ben, it does look cool when you put the question on screen. Right, there we go, we found a new trick. And the perfect timing in that I've not got any questions left. So if you want, if you want to ask a question and you want your question to go on screen, now is the time to do it. But I'm going to go back and answer some of the questions that came came in on the website. So if you ever want to answer a question— sorry, if you ever want to ask a question, you can go on the website, click on the link that says ask a question, and I will answer it on here. So this is from Mitchell Osborne, and he says, hi Lawrence, being new to beekeeping, you spend hours researching online and doing courses. The hardest thing I'm finding, which you've covered a little, is which system to start with. It's an expensive mistake to make. For preference, I want to go with Langstroth, but I'm worried that being in the UK, it's not the best choice for practical reasons. Is it an error to go with Langstroth considering the widespread use of national? Also, I really like the setup you recommended for national with the homemade floor and polyash forth. If I went with Langstroth, is there a setup that you would recommend? So I can't put that question on the screen, but I've really— a really good question, that one, and a difficult question to answer. Because if, if we all just— if we just reset everything and there was no such thing as a national And they said, well, what beehive do you want? I would go with Langstroth because it isn't— the only thing I like about National more than Langstroth is also something that I hate about Nationals, which is the long lugs. And anybody who's on Nationals, like, when you move over to Langstroth, the first thing you really— you drop frames. I drop so many more frames when I'm using Langstroths, but it's just because you're not used to the small So I think that's something that you get used to quite quickly. But what annoys me more than anything on Nationals is when you break a lug. You break a lug of a frame, you just got to chuck the frame away, and you don't get that on Langstroth. Also, Nationals, I just much prefer top bee space. So I don't like the bottom bee space of the National. I don't like the sizing of the box on the National as well, although I do like the fact that it is square. you can, you can alternate the way that you, you have the boxes, whether you have it the warm way or the cold way. So there's— I much prefer Langstroth, but the thing that's always stopped me going to Langstroth or starting off on Langstroth is the fact that everybody is on National. And like, we sell, we sell Langstroth nucs now because there is a demand for Langstroth nucs, and the, the ratio of what we sell in Langstroth, like like we've sold like 300 and something National Nukes this year, and I think we sold like 12 Langstroth Nukes. So it goes to show like where, where that difference is. So if we were just on Langstroth, if we, if we made the decision, right, we'll start on Langstroth and just starting afresh, right, we'll go with Langstroth, and then we couldn't access that, that nucleus market, the National Nucleus market, then we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot. And then we'd probably have to branch off and have 2 different sets and then you'd end up with a problem of how you're going to extract your national honey because you've set yourself up for Langstroth. So I do think you just need to stick with one. Whatever you do, stick with one, um, and, and think to yourself, do, do you think at any point in the future you're going to be selling nucs? And if you're 100% confident that you're not going to sell nucs, then go with Langstroth because it is a much better format. if you think that you are going to sell nucs, then I would go with national. Uh, well, I'll close that question down. Right, next question I've got on here, um, is from Jazz Payne. I think Jazz was on here earlier. Hi Lawrence, you recently posted about sending out a large number of nucs on one day, all with at least 3 frames of brood and 2 of stores. Please, can you explain your process for doing this on such a large scale? I'm assuming you must feed with syrup as we go into spring and guessing that you might be swapping around frames of brood to even out colony strength. What percentage of nuc losses do you allow for over winter to end up with so many to send out on time? I'm not setting up in competition, just intrigued. Sure, right, get your nucs from Jazz Pain next year. Um, so yeah, no, good question though. So we, we've tweaked and changed things, and I say we because I work with someone else as, as we're doing the nucs because it's just— I can't do all that on my own, it's too much work. But we've settled pretty much now on making them up, like I said, around like end of May, early June. 2 frames of brood and a frame of stores, and they go straight into a feeding cycle. And I just like to— we like to get them to a point where you're coming into kind of August and they're just done. 6 frames, done. The chances of them swarming at that point of the year is pretty low. Like, they don't really do a huge amount in August and September, and then when you get into October, they're kind of on the way down. But I find doing it like that, you get to a point where they're coming out of the winter really, really strong. And then you're always going to get a little bit of variation, so we can't send— we can't send them all out at once because it's not logistically possible for us to send them all out at once. So you do have to go through them and you kind of pick it and say, right, these ones are ready now, and try to arrange dates with people to get them sent out. I think in terms of losses, it's the same that you'd get with kind of any beehive loss. You'll get issues with queens whether you've got them mated here or you bought them in. So I think we're still like, yeah, maybe 10-15% losses on nucs, which is normal. We don't do any sharing of brood or any balancing between them though, just as a safety precaution. So all that happens is is that you get makeup splits into either new nucs or bleached nucs, so completely cleaned. The brood goes in and then we feed them, and then some will build up quicker, some will build up slower, but we don't do any balancing, and it seems to be a good system. So I've got one more question on here from Matt Wootton. He says, hi Lawrence, I have an owl apiary on a farm about 5 miles from my house. I did a full inspection last Thursday as I was going away for Friday for a week. Plenty of capped brood, brood in all stages, and eggs. Fast forward a week and I went up there this morning not to do an inspection, just have a quick look. I hope to do a full inspection tomorrow, the weather is supposed to be okay. It's a long question, this one, Matt. I got there and the hive was on its side. Oh no. Boxes separated and basically a mess. Luckily I had my suit in the car, so I picked everything up and put it all back together, then went through the frames. No queen, no eggs, no larva, and not a great amount of capped brood left, and lots and lots of dead bees everywhere. I feel bad for saying this is a long question. I'm sorry to hear this, Matt. To say you were gutted was an understatement. There was, however, what looked like a small capped queen cell on the bottom of one of the frames. Should I wait to see if they raise a new queen, or should you just requeen? You're concerned that the larva inside will be damaged, and also the small amount of capped brood might not be enough to maintain the colony until they get a Lang queen. Hive was strapped to the pallet it's sitting on, but screwed-in eye was attached and pulled out during the gales. Wow, that is some serious gales. Um, so I'm really sorry to hear that. That sounds, that sounds terrible. And, uh, yeah, it sounds like the queen died, and that's like an emergency queen cell they're trying to requeen with. If there's enough bees in there, I would just take down the emergency queen cell, add a new queen in, and, and feed them that's gonna be kind of— you need to get them back to a point where they're going again. So yeah, sorry to hear that. How much honey do you eat yourself? So not that much. I like— I have— my wife makes very nice porridge, so we do like porridge, like grated apple, and there's a bit of cinnamon, and then I have like cranberries and like a selection of seeds and some nuts. It's it's proper healthy. And then I have that drizzled with borage honey. I like that. And then I like toast, just like white— that's really healthy, that one there. And then I just like nice cheap white toast with butter and soft-set honey. And then I like a bit of yogurt with some heather honey on it as well. So I do, I do, I do a little bit. Next question. So Ben says, are you rearing any UK-bred queens yourself this year, or do you use UK breeders? So no, I Our UK-mated queens are reared by me, but it is maybe something that I'll look at working with other people this year because I just don't know how I can— I don't know how I can juggle everything that I'm trying to do at the moment, and that's something that does take quite a bit of time. Um, I'll definitely do it because it's videos. I like doing them for the videos, and I like doing some from my breeder queens, but we might, we might collaborate on that One. I love this. It's great. Joe Creaser, who is the next special guest on the live stream? I think Joe should be the next special guest. He asks he asks the most questions on here. We should get Joe on. That'd be good. But in terms of I don't know. I don't know. I ask a lot of people, and a lot of people are just like, "No, who are you? Why why would I do a stream with you?" And that that's a good response. response, because generally I just don't get any response at all. And so I'm up for doing live streams with anyone. I think it's all good fun. But now you just have to put up with me for a little while longer, Joe, I'm afraid. I've not got anyone, anyone on the list. I'm going to try and get some— I'm going to try and get some bee farmers on because I think bee farmers are— you might not know who they are, but they're like really experienced people. So if any— if anyone here knows of any bee farmers who want to come on, do a chat, give them a shout. Uh, Robert says, do you trap pollen to use for your queen rearing? Have you thought about selling it? What's the rules and regulations of selling pollen? So I've had— I've got a pollen trap and I've trapped pollen and it was quite easy. I looked at the pollen cleaners from Mabello, from Lysol, and they were hell of well expensive, but they look like they do a good job. It's got cold peppermint tea. Um, but in terms of selling it, it's not— no, it's not something that I'd look at. that, like, I don't think commercially it would stack up. I've had a number of people try and sell me the pollen that they've trapped and said, I've got loads, can't sell it. And so I thought, okay, well, I'm not gonna buy it because you just told me you can't sell it. Um, but I think it's super niche as well in terms of like a food product. And then in terms of for my own queen rearing, I just— we just use pollen frames, like a good pollen frame is just exactly what you need. So no, it wouldn't do that one. I love this. I'm so, I'm so excited with the new technique that I found. How have I gone to— have I got to episode 6? I know you just worked out how to do this, right? Warm way or cold way, what's the benefits? So for the bees, I genuinely don't think they care or know that there's any difference. For me as the beekeeper, warm way because I like to work from the back. If you're the person who likes to work from the side, then the cold way. It's simple as that for me. I much prefer to work at the back, back of the hive though, as far away from the entrance as possible. Joe— oh yeah, sorry, am I messing or mixing up the Joes? Sorry, yeah, sorry about that. Dave Dennehy says, is there a way to tell the difference between different types of Honeybees. So yeah, not anything that's like really massively scientifically proven, but they do like what you do like wing things called morphology, where you're looking at the different wings, and then the colorings are going to give you a clue. But I guess it's just DNA analysis is going to be the real way of telling. I've asked Murray, and he's—he's—I've asked him twice now, and he's—he's not got back to me. So I'm not going to ask him again. I asked Jonathan once, and he said he's not got time for it. So both—both in this don't think so. Brandon's Bee says, "When do you start queen rearing? Got some cooking in the cell builder, and was wondering what time of year do you start?" So last year, I waited and waited and waited and waited. and then when I started, it was too late. As in, I probably could have started 2 or 3 weeks earlier. So with, like, if you take the temperature element out of it, I would say you could start now. Because looking at my colonies, there are tons of drones. Like, you go into the big colonies and there's 2, maybe like 1.5, 2 frames of emerging drones. So if you fast forward that 2 or 3 weeks, they're going to be— come the middle of May, you could, you could have queens going out mating. So you just need to work out where that point is. When, when can you have queens going out mating because the temperatures are okay and you've got sexually mature drones in the air? And then work back in terms of when you want to start doing your cell builders. And you're not far off from now. I wouldn't do it now because it's still just too cold for us, but like maybe next week, week after that, somewhere around there. And it's always a little bit of a gamble, and the first one might not work. You don't— it's not a huge amount of resources that you lose. You can just break it up and give that brood back to some other colonies and then go and pinch another frame of brood and just start another cell builder or cell starter. So it's a good gamble because if you are doing it in a place where you can't get imported queens, then, and you're the first one to the market with reared queens in your kind of vicinity, then you're going to sell out. When you rear your queens to sell, do you have a dedicated apiary? So I did. It was my Treffnant apiary that I was originally using for this because it was, well, properly isolated. And, you know, in terms of— well, it's never going to be completely exclusive, but it was good. So that's where last year's ones were done. And this year I've not got that apiary anymore, so I'll go, I'll go to another apiary where I've just got the majority of my nice bees. So where I've got my breeder queens and where I've got my good F1 daughters of those queens that are going to be producing good drones. Um, I've not got anywhere really near here where it's like perfect. So the next thing that I look for is like, what's bad? What, what are the, what are the sites that I've got that are not good? So I've got that's 950 feet up a mountain, which is— it might be slightly better in terms of isolation, but it's cold and it's windy. And then I've got one that's 150 feet above sea level, and it's like, like low down, much warmer, um, really, really kind of like secluded, so nowhere near as much wind, and the queens get really well mated there. Oh, that's a good idea. Get Barnyard Bees in here. I've given them all a shout. You know what, actually, I did have— I did have a message about— I messaged Cayman Reynolds and Cayman said he was up for it, but he said give us a month because it's just— we're quite busy. Um, so I'm not going to pester him. I will go back to him exactly 30 days after he said give it a month and say it's now a good time. But he'd be cool. I like Cayman. Oh, that's a good idea. Roger Patterson as well, he would be good. Um, there's a guy, I won't say his name, the guy near us though who's like a really good beekeeper, quite old, um, and retired, but just like just knows, just complete, just knows everything there is to know about beekeeping, but in, and, and is more than happy to chat and gives it in such a nice like approachable and welcoming way. So maybe, so this is the thing, I, I think they'd be good guests if people are up for me getting those kind of people on, that, you know, it might not be a sellout, but it'll be better than me just talking. They know loads more than I know. So okay, we'll get some, we'll get some different people on. That would be good. Uh, Mem says one of his mentors, uh, at his club has traveled the world teaching beekeeping. You should ask him. His name is Rudy from Ruxley and Swanley. Very interesting and has had over 50 years of experience. I'd be well up for that. Yeah, I I don't mind Ruxley. I know I used to play— I played golf at Ruxley Golf Club, Ruxley Manor. Um, I used to go— I used to go swimming in Swanley at the White Oak Leisure Centre, so I know the area well. Oh, Edward's going in with the flattery! Thank you, Edward. My video production skills have improved greatly over time. How did you learn, and any new filming ideas or equipment for this year? You're a film and TV lecturer. Oh, this is— this is going to bore everyone else, but this is like my favorite question of the night, I think. So thank you. I've been putting loads of effort into my video production skills, and I was doing— I've decided I need to post more about older videos to say, like, you know, I did one today about when to put supers on, maybe not putting them on yet. So I go through my old videos and I look at them and I just think, oh man, I was like— and not that I'm amazing now, but I think I've improved a bit. but the production was shocking. So I'm just always on a mission to improve everything that I do and iteratively improve it, kind of with whatever I can do to get people to watch the videos longer. So if you watch the videos longer and you give them a thumbs up, that's good for me. But I've spent, I've spent a lot of money on the equipment. So I'm just looking over there now, like I bought like a— I've not bought anything new yet this year, but last year I spent like 15 grand on camera equipment. Um, we'd like new cameras. I tell a lie, I did buy— bought a drone, didn't I? Bought £1,500 drone this year. Um, but I do— I— you'll see, hopefully you'll notice it on like the new videos, the B-roll is the best pun ever, I know. But the— it's not just me talking, doing 30 minutes of me just talking about stuff. That's what the live streams are for. So I'm trying to just change it up a little bit. Um, so how did I learn? So I didn't— I've just learned through doing it really badly and just trying to improve little tiny bits at a time. I also chuck loads of money at the equipment, don't know how to use half of it, but it helps having good equipment. Any new filming ideas? So yeah, so the B-roll that I do now, you'll see this on some of the latest videos that are coming out, I I've got 2 cameras. I film into one camera that's just like me talking to the camera, and then I have my gimbal camera. But I've also got a mount for my gimbal camera now, and then I point that at me. So I've got like a secondary filming of me, and I just record them both and like clap at the beginning to sync the audio. And then I use that for my— for not only for my B-roll when I'm like picking up the camera and like zooming in and stuff, but also for me, like maybe if I'm pulling like a frame out or something something like that, it takes loads longer to edit it all together, but hopefully it's more enjoyable for people to watch. I'm seeing the numbers drastically dropping as I'm talking about video editing, so I will go— I'll quickly move on. But Edward says B-roll is king, right? I've also got to the end. I think I've done nearly 2 hours now. So if you enjoyed the stream today, let me Take that down. If you enjoyed the stream today, please do give it a thumbs up. It does massively help out the channel. I will do these streams kind of— I'll try and do them every week, but if not, I'll definitely do them every other week. If you want to ask a question in advance, do go on the website, uh, on the Ask a Question section, and I will answer it. But I'll always try and get the ones in the chat as well. Hopefully you're all getting ready for like a really good beekeeping season. Um, That's a great shout, Steve. Steve would definitely come on. Um, but glad— yeah, thank you. Thanks for everyone coming on. It's great. I love coming on, having a little bit of a chat. Anybody's got any ideas, or if anybody wants to come on, I'm thinking Andy, if you want to come on, we just have a chat. Like, I'm well up for that. Anyone wants to come on and have a chat and just do a little chat about beekeeping, just give me a shout. And we could even do— if you fancy, we do like— I think I can get like 9 people on my StreamYard account. just have like a— I'd call it a gangbang, but a group session. So let me know if people are up for it, let me know. But, um, I'm glad, I'm glad everyone's still here. I wish you the very best of luck for the season, and I'll see you all soon.