Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with The Apiarist David Evans - Episode 31

Right, so we are live. Welcome, David. People will join as we've become live now, so I'm just gonna— I'm gonna start things straight away. So, so welcome to the No Nonsense Beekeeping stream. So we're just gonna kind of have a little bit of a chat. I'll just give you first, before, before you introduce yourself, I'll tell people about the reason why I've been— why I've asked you to come along. And that is because I've read pretty much every single page of your blog. I remember it from when I very first started out. Like, it's— you search for stuff and your blog comes up number one on pretty much everything. So you've got a lot of good content on there. And what I've always liked about the content is that it's kind of just straight to it, but backed up with science. So welcome to the show. Do you wanna give everyone like a kind of little background who you are?

Yeah, thanks, thanks very much, Laurence. So good evening everybody. So I'm, jobs-wise, I'm a scientist and my entire career has been spent doing science and I've been very fortunate over the last, I guess, about 10 or 11 years to do science on bees and specifically on bee viruses because I'm a virologist, but I've been a beekeeper for longer than that and I just managed to get the 2 things to converge, as I say, about 10 years ago. So, so I'm a beekeeper, I live in Scotland now, but I've also got bees in the Midlands, and I've run for that period about 20 colonies, and I'm interested in queen rearing and a few other things as well, but mainly queen rearing, I guess, is my major interest in stock improvement. And then about, I don't know quite what, I taught on my— on the beginners group, beginners course with my first beekeeping association. I ended up writing some stuff for their newsletter, I ended up putting some of that online, and that was the beginning of The Apiarist. And I think that was 7 years ago now. So I'd been a beekeeper for quite a few years before I started writing, and it's just kind of got on from then, and it's now a bit much to handle.

It's so interesting that you say you've only been doing The Apiarist for 7 years, because I've kind of been like, since I started, forever. And it didn't seem like when I started beekeeping that it would— that you just started that. It seemed like there was a wealth of information. So did you just kind of like download your mind one night and just put it all on the internet?

No, I pretty much started about— when I first started, I just used to just post stuff at random. Usually, actually, it was when I'd written something for the newsletter for my beekeeping association and I'd just dump it online. And then I got a little bit more frequent and I started putting things in between, you know, and I'd do things midweek and I'd get a bit disorganized, frankly. And then 3 or 4 years ago, I kind of knuckled down and I said, look, the only way to do this properly is to just post once a week. And since then, I've posted once a week with with a couple of exceptions due to power cuts and illness and stuff like that. I basically post once a week for every Friday afternoon and that's it. And so there's no, there's been no brain dumps or anything like that. It's just been just churning it out essentially.

So how do you pick your topics? Do you do just kind of what's seasonal or what you enjoy or do people request it?

Yeah, so there's a little bit of everything though. I tend not to do requests. Often people do request stuff and almost always 90% of the time I can actually point them to something I've already written, not because I've written and covered everything in beekeeping because I haven't even scratched the surface of the topic to be honest, but mainly because most people ask about topics that are pretty mainstream which I have covered and most people don't use the search facility in quite its, you know, most effective way and it's got a good search facility on it so and you can Google just about anything these days and you'll probably, as you say Lawrence, you'll probably find some of it on my website anyhow. So I like to mix and match the topics. The last couple of times, the last 2 for example, one of them was a sort of anecdotal type one about things they don't tell you on starting beekeeping courses. The one a couple of days ago, was it yesterday? It was yesterday, was on, I can't remember what it was on now, it was on finding new apiaries and that's kind of relevant to new beekeepers and so there's a sort of timeliness about that one. But every now and again I just drop in a, you know, hardcore science one, really trying to make science, that's— there's some really cool science done on bees that make the science a bit more accessible to beekeepers. So I've written about all sorts of things. I've written about RFID-chipping queens to monitor queen mating flights, for example. I've talked about bee vaccinations, all sorts of things.

It is great. Like I say, I love the content and the diversity of the content. I looked at that post the other day on finding apiaries and just thought it was great. like, love all the different screenshots, and it's kind of what I like especially is that there's a lot of crossover, so we'll pinch it and then tell other people that as well. But like, the tip I loved on that was just go and find your apiaries on Google Earth and then find out who owns them, as opposed to just asking people, because you do end up with rubbish apiaries if you just say, can I put some bees somewhere?

Yeah, they always point you out to a really poor site with poor access, poor light, poor forage, and then you feel rude by saying actually no. But you scope them out first, have a quick nosy around, don't trespass obviously. We have a lot of advantages in Scotland actually because we've got right to roam. I mean, you can't go traipsing around people's gardens, but otherwise you can go pretty much anywhere you want. So you can, so I'm looking at 2 or 3 sites around here at the moment, and I've done it on the other side of Scotland as well, and it works really well. Scope them out first and then And then go and ask the landowner, and almost always they'll say yes. It works really well.

Yeah, I, I find that as well. Like, they're very generous with land. Um, right, there's a number of questions coming in, so I'm just going to jump straight in and ask you some of the questions. Okay, for everyone watching, David's going to go at about 9, so if you've got questions for him, get them in, and then I'll hang around and answer some questions afterwards. Then, uh, what are your thoughts on VSH queens? And for anyone that doesn't know what a VSH queen is, tell them what a VSH queen is as well.

So VSH is Varroa Sensitive Hygiene. So these are queens that have been selected from colonies that will— my understanding of it is that they will essentially clear out Varroa parasitized pupae. And so the colony will identify Varroa parasitized pupae, it'll rip those out, won't let them develop, therefore won't let the Varroa develop, should keep the Varroa levels down. To be honest, I haven't got— I've got no experience of working with them at all. I've never used them. I don't know if any really good ones are for sale in this country. Do you know, Laurence, is anybody doing anything with VSH here?

It's a real buzzword, and I think a lot of people just say, oh, it's a VSH queen, and I don't know if they've got like an F0 breeder queen that's VSH and then they're open mated down to F1, you're talking about 10% are going to get that trait as a bit of a maximum. So it will take a huge amount of work and breeding to get to a point where all of your bees are like that, but it's interesting.

I mean, one of the things that's very clear is that different colonies in exactly the same environment that build up at apparently the same rate have very, very different varroa levels, and so it's pretty clear that some colonies are much better at managing varroa than others. And I know there's a lot of interest in treatment-free beekeeping, things like that. It's not something I have— it's something I've got an opinion on, but it's not something I have any experience of. But I do try and work with the queens or work with larvae and rear queens from my colonies that have consistently low varroa levels, but they're not VSH in the way that they're defined.

So we're not going to let you get away without saying what your opinion on treatment-free beekeeping is.

Do you want that now or do you want it later? I mean, okay, so my view is that you need to be an exceptional beekeeper to realistically keep your bees treatment-free. In a mixed environment. If you're living in an isolated environment, I think you can keep your bees treatment-free, and I think virtually every example where people are keeping bees treatment-free, the well-documented examples, have been in essentially isolated environments one way or another. They're isolated geographically because they're on an island, they're isolated by tall mountains on either side, they're in with dense woodland or something like that. I think for the majority of beekeepers, and I include myself amongst those, well within that group, I'm simply not a good enough beekeeper to keep my bees treatment-free. I need to intervene, I need to manage the varroa levels to keep the colonies healthy, and I keep my bees in areas where all my queens are open mated, so I have no selection whatsoever about what's going on. It's a right mishmash, there's a lot of other bees around. I think it's very difficult to maintain colonies treatment-free. A couple of other points, one is I think I've never really seen any, what I would as a scientist, and remember my evidence of proof if you like is perhaps greater than some other people would want, I've never seen evidence that treatment-free colonies are as good and perform as well as colonies that are managed and have, you know, are treated say twice a year and things like that. in terms of the health of the colony, in terms of the yield of honey, in terms of all sorts of other things like that. And I take that one stage further, and I think there's a whole bunch of stress indicators in molecular terms, stress indicators in the colony in terms of are they carrying a high pathogen load that nobody has measured yet in colonies that are managed without treatment. Somebody should do that because it may well be that these bees don't have or they can cope with high varroa levels, but they may actually have very high levels of antimicrobial peptides and other indicators of stress in the colony that actually might not be very healthy, even though you're not having to pour chemicals in there and manage the bees, manage the varroa, I should say. So, but the bottom line is I'm not a good enough beekeeper to do it. If somebody is and they can do it in a normal open environment, take my hat off to them because they're an exceptional beekeeper.

And that is kind of what I always say in terms of anybody who does it, Amazing, so good, but yeah, I can't do it.

Yeah, I think it's because I don't have enough time to dedicate to it. No, I think the colony manipulations needed to presumably have correct brood breaks and things like that are beyond, they're certainly beyond me in terms of the time I've got and in terms of the rest of my beekeeping, the rest of my research and stuff as well.

Yeah, excellent. Right, I've about 15 Questions come in there, some of them. So first one, what are your thoughts on using drone comb in supers?

Yeah, I do use drone comb in supers, it works great. I really like using drone comb in supers, and actually I went through a few years when I did nothing but have drone comb in my supers, and I've still got the vast majority of that comb. The stuff I haven't got is the ones where the queen got above the queen excluder and went on a drone-laying frenzy, And I've had a few colonies like that, and it's just cack-handed beekeeping, and I let the queen crawl around the queen excluder and stuff, but I think it works well. So I think it works well for 2 reasons. One is the bees don't need to draw so much wax. Secondly, the cell size is obviously larger. You don't need to have the— you don't need to either spin the frames as hard, it's easier to get the honey out. So I really like it, yeah.

That second point, I've never thought of that, you know, in terms of the extraction properties. What I found is that if you put a mix in above, they always leave the drone comb till last. It's definitely not their preference to fill it, is there? But if you give them nothing else, then they've not got a choice.

That's right, that's absolutely— that's right, right. And if you think about what they do in the brood box though, it's the other way around, isn't it? Because in the brood box towards the end of the season, they'll backfill the drone cells, but they carry on rearing brood in the worker cell. But yeah, I tend to use all— if I can, I can use all— sorry, if I can, I use all drone comb in my supers. I really like it.

Cool, right, next one is, do you know of any natural treatments for varroa?

Natural treatments for varroa, well, oxalic acid is pretty natural, thymol is pretty natural, okay, so those are 2 natural treatments. Now, thymol is dressed up as Apiguard, but it's essentially the active ingredient is thymol, and oxalic acid is a component in a whole host of different plants and therefore is a natural treatment. I suspect the question isn't asking about that sort of natural treatment. I suspect they're asking about something else like an essential oil. Yeah, okay. I have not seen any evidence to suggest that the essential oils on their own work effectively, and by work effectively, I mean knock 95% of the varroa out the bottom through the open mesh floor. Anything else I'm not really interested in because it won't manage the varroa well enough to make a real impact on the health of the colony.

Okay, cool. All right, next question saying, uh, BS 2-in-1 polynucs, what is the best way to make a split and get my own queen? Should I do a walkaway split or wait for a swarm cell? So I guess the question is really just an overview on how you would manage splits.

Yeah, so I, I, uh, what was the option? Wait for a swarm or do a walkaway split?

Do a walkaway or wait for a swarm cell?

I would learn how to rear queens because you have control over the timing then. And however, you may not want to go that way. Walkaway splits work, they're, you know, perfectly fine way of doing things. Swarm cells, I don't think there's— I'm perfectly happy to use swarm cells if I'm making up nucs and things like that. I'm not worried about, you know, generating swarmy bees or anything like that. So really, whatever works in terms of the timing. Remembering of course that you can't force it too much. If there's no drones around, your new queen's not going to get mated and things like that, and you also don't want to leave a colony depleted in numbers of bees too much early in the season if they're still building up and things. So take care with the walkaway split. I would think about learning how to rear queens, some sort of— some of the easy ways to rear queens, because then you can control the timing yourself.

I think we could do over an hour on that one quick. Yeah. So the next one's saying, what about organic treatments for varroa? And I know we kind of touched on that, but it's any addition?

Well, so, you know, I think oxalic acid is one of the best treatments for varroa. I think it's an exceptional compound. I think it's very, very well tolerated by Just about all the bees in the hive, perhaps other than developing larvae. It's dribbled oxalic acid is poor for developing larvae. It's an organic treatment. It's very effective when used properly, and when used properly means the colony has got to be broodless. But if you use it on a broodless colony, you'll kill 90% of the varroa in there. It's great, and you can vaporize it or you can whatever. I think the problem with oxalic acid is the way it's been licensed and the way it's sold. I think the products that are commercially available are probably substandard. standard. At least some of them are definitely substandard in my view. They have compounds added to them for a variety of reasons that are not to do with their ease of application or their efficacy of treatment. But oxalic acid is without doubt, I think, an excellent organic treatment and is very, very good at controlling varroa.

I won't take you down the rabbit hole of oxalic acid, or apibioxal as we call it in the UK, but Yeah, frustrating, isn't it? Right, I'll go on to the next question then. So would a vertical split with queen-right colony above and below a common honey super work with 2 queen excluders?

Yeah, so this is kind of outside my comfort zone here. There are a variety of 2-queen hive setups. The ones I've seen and have read about have actually had horizontal The boxes organized horizontally with like feeder tubes going to a central stack of supers is my recollection anyhow. My worry about having queens above and queens below would be the queen in the top box, for example, which is going to be rearing drones, and how are you going to get those drones out? Presumably you've got an upper entrance there, and then your supers in the middle, to get to the bottom box you've got an awful lot of lifting to do. when you actually want to inspect the bottom box. So I would not look at a vertical setup if you can, I would consider a horizontal setup. I have to say, I've never felt the need for 2 queens in a hive. I think it's just keep it simple, you know, and I, you know, just have a queen in the bottom box and pile the supers on top.

I would agree. All I would just add is in terms of the demo raise that we do, we often do it kind of like a preemptive, but if you do like a post swarming Demerara and lift it up to the top and put a top entrance in and then requeen from that top entrance, you do end up with a— for a while running 2 queens. And what it means, if you mate correctly, you can find the virgin killer and then you're just back to one colony. So it's a really nice risk-free way of trying to supersede the queen.

Yeah, so that I agree with, but I thought the question was really about running a double queen.

I think it is.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, no, no, you're right. the demerit and allowing the colony either to requeen and then unite them back down and got rid of the old one, or if the virgin doesn't mate, then yes, that works well.

I'd completely agree though, anything apart from that, yeah, don't, I wouldn't bother with 2 queens in a colony, right, just keep it simple because it's difficult enough with one queen, isn't it? Right, do you, oh, here we go, I told you there's gonna be some controversial ones, but I won't get you in trouble, right, do you agree that beekeepers should be encouraged to use Local or from other parts of the country?

You went staccato on me then, was that local queens?

Yeah, do you agree that beekeepers should be encouraged to use local bees rather than those imported from outside or other parts of the country?

Yeah, so I'm quite a big fan of local bees for a couple of reasons, but the main reason is from a scientific point of view they have been proven to be better. Than bees that are reared somewhere else and imported, for example. And there's a big study by Ralph Buchler, he did it about, I don't know, maybe 6 years ago or something like that, and it involved about 3 or 4, 350 colonies, 300 colonies, something like that around Europe, and they essentially took hives, they identified 2 hives per apiary in a range of different countries, one of those hives was then shipped to another apiary somewhere else in Europe and the other one stayed on site. They were all kind of uniform strengths and things at the beginning, and they did this with 300 all the way around Europe. And then they looked, and none of these colonies were treated for varroa. That's the extraordinary thing. They maintained them without varroa treatment. And there were 2 really important take-home messages. The first was that the colonies that were kept at the original location where the queens had been reared those colonies were all stronger, or the majority of them were stronger going into the winter, and that's probably because the bees are adapted to that local environment. They're set up for whatever it is, you know, something to do with the foraging or the climate or something like that. So that's one thing, and the other thing is the colonies survived longer without treatment, and I think the survival time was about another 2 months, which doesn't sound very long, and it isn't, but remember these are bees that are not being treated, and so they're all going to or the majority of them are going to die anyhow. So Buchler's study is probably the best one there is, but there's also good evidence that queens reared in one location generate bees that are well adapted to that location. So bees reared, for example, in very cold climates have— queens reared in very cold climates make bees that have adaptations, genetic adaptations to those climates, and vice versa. So I am a fan of local bees. There's a flip side as well, and that is that if you are working with local bees, it either means that you yourself are rearing those bees or you're getting those bees from another local beekeeper, and so you're essentially building up the skills of beekeeping within your area, which I think is a really positive thing to do.

Yeah, I agree with a lot of those points in terms of Like, I just, from my own experience, like local bees, I think all of it comes down to who you're getting your queens off, who you're getting your bees off, because some of them could just be absolute garbage. You can get garbage local bees and you can get amazing imported bees, and you can get amazing local bees and garbage imported bees. So I don't think it's completely clear-cut.

No, I agree. You know, you can't guarantee what you're gonna spend your £35 on or whatever it costs to import a queen these days. I've bought queens for some of our work colonies, we need to buy queens in and things like that, and they've been a mixed bag. Some of them have been good, some of them have been less good. I rear my own queens and have done for a decade or more now, and I'm perfectly happy with my bees. I'm sure there are much better bees out there, but they work for me, and the people who get them from me seem to be happy with them. So, but from a scientific point of view, I think local bees are overall preferable.

It is really interesting. I think the takeaway I would have from that is get rearing and rear your own queens. Yeah, there'll be more controversial ones as well. Right, so what would be your preferred method of measuring the level of varroa in a colony?

Yeah, so the easy method of sort of measuring the varroa level in a colony is to is to put a tray underneath the open mesh floor and to just observe the natural drop. I'm not aware that anybody's done a really proper study of how effective that is at measuring the colony drop, the mite drop, and the reason I say that is because the rate at which the queen is laying is going to determine the amount of larvae of the correct age for the phoretic varroa to reinfest, and therefore if the queen's laying rate is ramping up, the likelihood is there's going to be— it's going to underreport the number of Varroa in the colony. However, it's the method I use for about 90% of the time, okay. A couple, 2 or 3 weeks in the season, I slide the tray under and I have a look and see what's there. If you want a more direct method, you can uncap drone brood, and that works well because the Varroa preferentially parasitize drone brood. It's— they're something like 2.5 times as attracted to drone brood as they are to worker. So when you get that drone brood in the colony, Fork some of it out, look to see if you've got Varroa infestation. The way that a lot of people use, and I've used it myself, is either an alcohol wash or a sugar shake, and you get a— you can either make your own or you can buy little containers that are about the size of a tea mug sort of thing, usually have an inner sieve sort of area. You put a cup full of bees in there, you add some wash wipe fluid or some something like that, give them a shake, the Varroa washed off, they end up in the liquid, you pour it through a filter and you can count them against the white filter paper. That's the best way of counting, but what you're counting is the phoretic varroa, you're counting the mites that are present on adult bees. Most of the varroa are all going to be in capped cells anyhow, so none of them are going to give you a perfect way, a perfect answer, I'm afraid.

No, but that's a good selection there of different ways to do it. Right, thoughts on the movement to ban all imported bees? Are you For or against?

Yeah, so I'm against the importation of colonies or packages of any form because of the chances of importation of disease. The only thing they really look for is varroa and I think Tropilaelaps.

And small hive beetle.

And small— absolutely, small hive beetle. Okay, so all of those things you can see with the naked eye. Yeah, okay, varroa we've got already. Tropilaelaps, fortunately we don't have. Small hive beetle has never been eradicated when it's been imported to a country. There was one, there was a small hive beetle imported actually to Portugal and they did manage to eradicate it. It got to one apiary and they only eradicated it by soaking the entire apiary in insecticide and ploughing the whole place up. It was, you know, really— so, but they look for those because they can see them. But the bees themselves carry a wide range of other pathogens, bacterial pathogens, and much more importantly, viral pathogens. Now, I'm biased, okay, I'm a virologist, but the point is you do not want to go mixing viruses up. Look at the virus that's been causing some problems here over the last 2 years, okay, that was an import. Okay, we don't want to do this, we've got more problems than we need already with the viruses we've currently got here. the likelihood of importing a virus pathogen of bees that either then infects our own bees over here or somehow or other genetically recombines with the viruses that already exist over here. There is a potential all the time there for causing major problems for our bee population. I also don't think it's necessary because, and I appreciate your view as a bee farmer is probably different on this, Laurence, but For the majority of amateur beekeepers, we should be able to rear our own bees and be relatively self-sustaining in our beekeeping and therefore not need to rely upon imports.

So obviously we sell imported queens, so yeah, my view is that if there was a ban on imports, the positive that you would get, that would be an incredible positive, is that the level of queen rearing in this country would just be raised overnight and people would buy into it, and you'd get people moving into artificial insemination and working with the stocks that are here. And you, within a few years, you'd get some ones, but you wouldn't be able to get them until June. So people would have to start putting them into nucs and overwintering them and banking them and doing stuff differently in order to supply the queens when they're needed for people, which is in April and May. But I think It would be— well, I'll ask you next question then. So there's a lot of organic ones here. So part of the beekeepers in the US, they do organic homemade treatments for varroa.

Right, nice.

What are your—

okay, the question is, does it work well enough? All right. You know, there are some people who will rave about sugar dusting, you know, using icing sugar, dusting it over the frames. The bees sort of— yeah, I was going to say, they nibble away at each other and the mites are knocked off and things like this. But Randy Olliver's done quite a nice study on sugar dusting and he shows it reduces the varroa loads by about 5%. irrelevant. I've got colonies that have varroa loads that are different by 30 or 40 or 50%, and they're still, you know, there's still going to be problems with both those, whether it's a high or low varroa load. In my view, unless a miticide knocks down your varroa levels by 90%, it's not actually really effective and probably not worth using. And consider all the downsides in terms of the impact of the colony, You know, are you putting things in that are going to taint the honey? There's all sorts of considerations there. So I'm a strong believer, I'm afraid, in using miticides that have got some scientific basis of efficacy and then using them essentially according to the instructions and seeing and observing the varroa being killed. And do those things and your colonies will be cleaner. So I don't— I don't know the specific organic treatments that the questioner was asking about, obviously, and if it's homemade, goodness only knows what's in it. But I'm very wary about pouring stuff into the hive that I don't know is either going to work or quite what's in it. I'm a bit— frightens me.

I'm getting reports that my internet connection is a bit ropey, so I'm just going to try changing the screen. Okay, if that makes it any better. So sorry if it's cutting out a bit. Yeah, I think it is transcription to a better one next time. Right, next question then. So what about virus levels in such treatment-free colonies?

Yeah, so there's a few studies done on that. The studies that have done on that are actually on colonies that are, you might call them a feral colony, a wild colony, a colony found in a hole in the tree. Giles Budge did a study on that with Catherine Thompson, who was a PhD student probably a decade ago, and it's published. And what that shows is that colonies that are feral, that are wild colonies, have as high pathogen levels as managed colonies that are not actually managed for their varroa levels. What I mean is a beekeeper who doesn't treat for varroa, they both have high levels of DWV and other viruses, but DWV is the main one they tested for. So there is some data on that. We've done work looking at— so we work with Alan Bowman in Aberdeen, and he's a varroa specialist, and he's got an apiary that's filled with hives which are not treated for varroa, and we've measured the virus load in those bees, and it's stratospherically high, you know, something like 10 to the 10, so that's 10 with 10 zeros after it. viruses per bee. My bees, the bees that I work with routinely and my research bees, have somewhere like 10 to the 3 to 10 to the 4 viruses, so that's 10,000 to 10,000 viruses per bee. So that's millions of fold less virus per bee, and that difference is what is achievable between a colony that's well managed for varroa and one that's not managed for varroa. And I can tell you which of those survives better over winter. Okay, this is a no-brainer. The one managed for varroa properly survives very well.

It's, it's so interesting to think that there's kind of that many viruses knocking around.

Yeah, well, DWV is so small that you can fit a trillion of them on the head of a pin. Wow, okay, it's—

yeah, the num— the numbers are quite severe, aren't they? Right, so here's a question from Richard. Jeremy says, what is your preferred method to maintain—

You dropped out on me there. What was my preferred method?

Yeah, preferred method to maintain colony numbers, so if you don't want to do splits.

Oh, okay, so something like a demaree and then reuniting, it works really well. That's probably what I would do. What I tend to do when I do my swarm control, I do do splits, so I do take the queen out and I let the colony requeen, and then I make a judgment as to which the best queen is or whether the old queen is quite old sort of thing, and then I decide which one to keep, and then I reunite them back together again. But a combination of some form of either making a new cup or doing just a Demery in the same box and then just essentially reuniting the boxes is all I do. And that way you keep the same colony numbers.

Yeah, that's a good tip. Solid floor or screen floor?

Yeah, I only run screen floors. I gave up— well, I don't think I've ever really used solid floors. I can't think of anything. Oh, other than in bait hives. Okay, bait hives have got to have a solid floor, but otherwise I only use screen floors.

Yeah, I'm exactly the same. Question from Joe, how likely is a swarm to pass disease onto your apiary? I'm trying to get a quarantine apiary for this, but what would you say the risk-to-reward ratio is?

I think it partly depends where you live, Joe, was it? I think it depends where you live. If you live in an area where foulbroods are prevalent, I would be very, very careful just because it's very clear that the foulbrood will be carried by the swarm. If you live in an area which has low or no foulbrood, brood, and you should be able to find this out from your local bee inspectors. If you live in an area with low or no foulbrood, you'd probably be okay. There's going to be potentially quite a lot of varroa in a swarm. Swarms carry quite a high varroa load considering, because they tend to carry lots of young bees in the swarm. So about 35% of the varroa in a colony leaves with the swarm, so I would always treat a swarm for varroa, or vaporize oxalic acid into it or something like that. And of course they'll carry whatever viruses are present, but most of the bee viruses are acute, you know, they cause a problem and the colony struggles sort of thing. It's the foulbroods I'd worry about. Check your area, if you've got foulbroods there, I'd be careful and then definitely have a quarantine apiary.

Yeah, and I'd add on to that as well, don't feed them, let them kind of empty their stomachs.

Yeah, good point. Yeah.

Next one saying, so when getting new foundation drawn, are there any tricks you use to keep it even?

Yeah, yes, so I have to— I have the— so the first thing is I use quite a significant number of foundationless frames in my colony, partly because I'm a bit mean and I don't want to spend all that money on foundation. Partly because the bees seem to really like it and you end up with foundation, or you end up with comb I should say, which has no miticides in it. But I make sure my hive is level and therefore they draw it vertical, is the first thing, and then I make sure that the flanking frames, so if I'm putting a, you know, the flanking frames are nicely drawn, and if they're not, assuming they haven't got brood in them, I'll just shave them flat with a with a bread knife or something like that, and that way I get pretty nice comb in my brood boxes. It's a bit higgledy-piggledy in my supers, but I don't care quite so much there, and I always level my supers up anyhow at the end of the season.

Cool. Do honeybees negatively impact bumblebees in your opinion? And I guess you could spread that to other pollinators as well.

Yeah, that's a very interesting question, and I'm probably not ideally placed to answer that for 2 reasons. One is I'm a pretty hardcore molecular virologist, I'm not an ecologist, and the second thing is I haven't attended the talk I'm going to in 3 days' time on exactly that topic when I'll be slightly better informed. So there's a lot of work that's been done on competition between honeybees, who are kind of generalist pollinators, they're not specialists, and bumblebees, and the outcome of those studies rather depends on what was looked for or looked at, if you like. So honeybees themselves are rather poor pollinators, but they make up for it by being present in vast numbers, and it's very clear that you can have too many honeybees in an area, in a, you know, an area in the environment, and it just competes out against the bumblebees. But conversely, there's some other evidence which suggests that actually there's sufficient forage in some environments that both can happily coexist. So I think it depends on the amount of forage that's available and the type of forage that's available, and I don't think there's any really hard and fast rules, I'm afraid. I don't think, you know, just looking at what's there, unless you do a proper survey, I don't think you know the answer, and I certainly don't know the answer.

I've got some questions that, um, that came in before, so I better ask those for all of the people that were prepared. Um, so someone, uh, so Peter's saying he'd been using apiguard for a number of years, do you think it's advisable to change up the treatments every now and again?

Yeah, so for those who aren't familiar with Apiguard, it's a thymol-containing compound. You get it in a gel and you leave it as a tray in the top of a hive, and the bees kind of pass it around the hive, and it kills varroa. It kills varroa pretty well, actually. Apiguard, the thymol active ingredient of Apiguard, There is no evidence that you get resistance in varroa with it, and I don't see any need to swap Apiguard treatment, you know, from year to year. But I think you do need to consider that you should be doing oxalic acid treatment in midwinter, in which— because there will be some bees left— sorry, there'll be some varroa left from the Apiguard treatment, and you still need to hammer those levels down with oxalic acid in midwinter. That being the case, you are alternating the treatments anyhow. But from year to year, I don't think you'd need to change from Apiguard if it works well for you in your environment, remembering that it's very temperature sensitive in terms of its efficacy. If the temperature gets too low, it's rubbish. We can't use it in Scotland. That doesn't mean people don't use it, but it doesn't work very well. So if it works for you, I wouldn't see a need to change it year upon year. When I lived in the Midlands, I used Apiguard pretty much exclusively.

And would you change your mind if someone was religiously using Apivar, so like, or anything kind of miticide?

Yeah, so Apivar is the one that I think there's going to be a lot of interest in over the next year or two. There's one pretty good paper on varroa resistance to Apivar and Amitraz, and Amitraz, which is the active ingredient of Apivar, is Resistance to that is well documented in one or two other parasitic— one or two other parasites. Frank Rinkeveld is the first author on the Apivar resistance paper, and he and I've just been in communication with each other because he's got some more up-to-date results, and we're going to have a chat about things, and I'll in due course write about it on my website. Apivar, I think at the moment, still is a good choice to use, and it's the one I use. I wouldn't use apistan unless you're absolutely certain you can demonstrate it works, because apistan resistance, which is a pyrethroid, apistan resistance is very widespread in varroa.

Very interesting. I've used Apivar for about 3 years now, and I'm changing it up this year to use— I'm going to go Thymivar just to change it up, because I found thymol-based products Pretty good. I think it gives you a good knockdown, so that's what I'm going to use for mine. Plus I'm always going to use like an oxalic acid-based one in winter as well. Yeah, but a couple of other questions not on the chat. So how and when would you feed in spring to stimulate brood, both for early OSR and to produce splits?

Yeah, so I very rarely feed my colonies in spring, but if I do, and it has been, for example, when I've wanted to get OSR I usually feed thin syrup from very early in March or even late February. Up here, it's too cold, I say up here, up here in Scotland, it's too cold to do it that then. They're probably not going to take it down very well, and I'm not too bothered about the spring honey anyhow. I'm more interested in the summer honey and getting my colonies ready for queen rearing, and it's so much later in the year, it's not something I've done up here. But down when I was in the Midlands, I used to feed thin syrup early in the year, and you won't— you'll need to use syrup. You can't use fondant for that. You need to have a— you need to essentially recapitulate, or yeah, recapitulate a nectar flow is what you're trying to do.

Yeah, good one. Next question is, will feeding leftover fondant stimulate brood production? And you just answered it. before. It's like the Two Ronnies sketch, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. So no, no, I don't think it will, certainly not in the spring. But what you can do with fondant, and what I do with my leftover fondant, I just take it, mix it with hot water, 1:1 ratio fondant and hot water. It's about right, and you end up with thin syrup. That's what I do.

Well, I've got one more question on my pre-list, and it's one— sorry, I've got 2 more questions and they're both mine, so I'm going to quickly get them in. What kind of hives do you use? You can ask that one first.

Okay, all right, a right mishmash. They're all Nationals basically. I use cedar and polystyrene Nationals. Started with cedar, still have got most of my cedar boxes in use, but they're all standard Nationals, so they're not 14 by 12s. I've never needed those. My bees are dark bees. I tend to favour bees that will fit in a single National box for the majority of the season anyhow. And I would prefer a box of that size for most of my manipulations and things as well. Polystyrene hives, I've got, what have I got? I've got Abelow, which I like. I like the old style anyhow. The newer ones with the lip that I've seen, I wouldn't touch with a barge pole because of the lip on the edge of the brood boxes.

I really like the lip. Do you?

Okay.

It's weird because I used to be, oh, don't, you don't use lips, lips are not good. And there is a bit of cross-compatibility, but having used the 12-frame, yeah, oh, it is good. And you know, the biggest— the smallest thing that makes it so good, yes, you can lift like 6 or 7 boxes at once and they can't tip over. Yeah, because, um, it's the small things, isn't it?

You must be like, you must be like Superman. I can't lift— oh, you mean empty boxes, I presume? Yeah. So the other, the other polyhives I've used are Swinty, and I've got quite a few Swinty and they're all right as well, but they only take 10 frames.

I don't like— I've got probably 90% of my hives are Suyentes, and I just curse them.

But yeah, the thing about the Abelos is they're a bit— well, certainly the iteration I've got, which are the pre-lip ones, okay, they're a bit fragile. You drop one and they crack, and the floors are an abomination. I never use their floors. I just— I've got a stack of their floors in the corner of my shed, you know, floor to ceiling. I just never use them. They're terrible. I much prefer my own.

I was speaking to someone the other day about like how to cut down costs on things, and I just think, buy your boxes, make your floors. Yeah, make your crown boards. And like, if you're good, make your roofs. If you're not, buy cheap second cedar roofs.

I would— yeah, so I would make, make your roofs out of Correx. I make roofs out of Correx. They're £1.50 each, and I just have a block of Kingspan underneath them and then a strap around them, and that's it. And that's the cheapest you can get.

Yeah, we like cheap.

Yeah, we do.

I mean, the final question for me was, what is your greatest beekeeping achievement?

Yeah, I don't know. Well, okay, I don't know about my own greatest beekeeping achievement, but I know the first time I reared my own queens was, it was like, it's the real eureka moment in beekeeping in my view. It's the thing that suddenly makes everything possible. I used to become a member of Warwick and Leamington Beekeepers, and one year I went along and helped at the BBKA convention, and I helped in the queen rearing course that Terry Clare, the late Terry Clare, used to run. And Terry was very patient, and I just basically you know, kind of tagged along. I helped a few people and stuff. I didn't know anything about queen rearing, but I picked up enough in that session to have a go myself later that month, it would have been, because it would have been the April convention, and I reared my own queens, you know, just a few, 3 perhaps or something like that, and suddenly you realize that all of the problems that most beekeepers have are suddenly behind you because you can rear your own queens. You can therefore get yourself out of the majority of those problems. So that's the real kind of light bulb moment. I think that's the major, you know, the thing that really moved my beekeeping on from just keeping a few boxes and being reasonably successful in honey and things like that to actually being kind of actively in charge of what I was doing.

Yeah, I completely agree. It gives you the ability not only just to split your colonies to increase numbers but to target the genetics that you want to propagate, and that's the big step, isn't it?

Yeah, it's also hugely rewarding and enjoyable. I give a talk on queen rearing, and in Ted Hooper's book, he makes a comment about, you know, how rewarding it is standing next to a big strong colony headed by a queen that you reared, and it's certainly the case, and it's just a great feeling. So it's something I would encourage all beekeepers to have a go at.

Definitely. All right, we're flying through, that's 40 minutes, so there's probably like 10 questions, so I'll try and find some more. How do you deal with set honey in frames?

Yeah, I try and get it out before it sets. I very rarely have problems with set honey in frames. When they're also— it's obviously rape is the main problem, And what I usually end up doing with those is I take them off probably a little bit earlier than many people do, and quite often I have a significant proportion of those frames are not capped, and I don't really care about that as long as the water content passes the, you know, shake test sort of thing, and I can test it on a hygrometer if I want as well. So that's the first thing I do is I get the frames off early. Second thing I do is I take those frames and I stack them up in a— I've got a big honey warming cabinet that maintains 37 or whatever it is degrees, and I stack the supers up on the honey warming cabinet so the warm air goes up through those supers, keeps the honey runny, and then I extract it as soon as I possibly can. So, you know, you have to remember I'm small scale, okay, I'm only dealing with 20 colonies at most, probably at any one time, and a lot of those colonies are dedicated for research or for queen rearing, a variety of other things, so my actual production of honey is not huge. So I tend to be able to get to the honey before it crystallizes. So yeah, and usually the ones I don't get to, they're the ones that explode in my extractor.

Indeed. You know, on top of that, if you do get to the end of the year and you have some frames that have set like concrete, just feed them back to the colonies in the spring. They'll quite— they'll just clear them out. They go straight through them, don't they?

Yeah.

This next question is perfect for you. How big of a problem and how prevalent in the UK is chronic bee paralysis virus?

Yeah, so it's an increasing— it's very clearly an increasing problem. So my lab are doing some stuff with Giles Budgie's lab. We've both got a set of parallel research grants to work on chronic bee paralysis. It's a virus that— where are we now, 2022? It's a virus that over the last 5 years or so has really significantly increased in prevalence. Not only is it more— is it causing more cases, but it's also more widespread around the UK. So it is becoming quite a major problem, I would say. It's quite interesting that it seems rather sporadic, as in, you know, some people see it and they have major problems in their apiaries and they lose half the colonies in the apiaries. Other people will never see it year upon year upon year. I very rarely see it. I think I've only ever had it once in my own colonies. But I've seen other people have it. We don't know why that is, we don't know whether it is carryover from year to year in contaminated equipment, we're really not sure, but some of the experiments that we're doing at the moment are trying to elucidate that. This grant runs until— the funding runs until later this year, sometime September or something like that, and JARS is going to continue doing some work on that, and we hope to have some answers there for beekeepers. We've got a few things, but some of the things I can't talk about here because, you know, we haven't analysed all the data and stuff like that yet, but it is clearly a problem, an increasing problem. The other thing that's quite interesting, it comes back to a question that you raised earlier, Laurence, there's an association with queen importation and Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus, and that's, you know, statistically relevant association, as in areas which have higher levels of imported queens have more Chronic Bee Paralysis. Now, What we cannot say is whether that is dirty imported queens spreading chronic bee paralysis amongst our lovely clean bees, or whether it's lovely clean imported queens that are highly susceptible to the horrible dirty infected chronic bee paralysis carrying bees that we have here already. We don't have the direction of transmission, but there is an association between imports and CBPV.

So That last point is so interesting because I've never heard of a link between imports and CPV, but what I've heard a number of bee farmers talk about is a link between Buckfast bees and CPV.

Really interesting.

Linking breed of bee, which to me seems like crazy. How can that mongrel bee, which isn't kind of equal, be so susceptible? But then predominantly it's Buckfast that are imported. Yeah, so There's definitely something there, isn't there?

Yeah, it's interesting. So I don't think in the data that we've got, we've got enough to pin it down to individual races. We do have an association with— we know where some of— most of these bees come from, but it's a difficult set of experiments to do, but it— and we're doing some more work on it at the moment. And we're talking— we talked with the bee farmers about it. They've very helped— been very helpful with us.

Yeah, nice one. Next one, kind of leading on in terms of bee races, So should beekeepers try and play their part in bringing the native British AMMs back? I want to pick apart this question so much, but I'm going to let David answer it. Seems to be what Bibber are promoting at the moment.

Yeah, so Bibber, I think, originally were really big on the native bees, and then they've kind of gone a little bit more towards local bees, I think. But, so, and I should actually put all my cards on the table here, I'm a member of the Scottish Native Honeybee Society, which— and there's an Irish one as well and things like that. So should we— well, okay, so at the moment there's no restrictions and no regulation of beekeeping. People can do what they want, and my view is as long as they've got nice, well-tempered bees that don't annoy the general public, that are productive, that aren't diseased and things like that, I don't really care what they keep. Okay, I tend to have largely dark bees, partly because they're frugal over winter, I don't need to feed them huge amounts of stores, partly because they fit my sort of beekeeping, they certainly fit the environment I now live in. I mean, I live in the howling wilderness here and black bees are brilliant up here. You put a Carni up here and things like that and it would probably starve to death in mid-April. or something. So, you know, my bees fly at 9 degrees in the rain, they're perfectly happy doing that. If there's any forage out there, they'll go and get it, and so it's horses for courses, I would say. But the stories that you hear about black bees being horribly aggressive and things like that are really not the case. Maybe some hybrids of them are, but I've been out to Colonsie to see Andrew Abraham's bees there, which are native black bees. He's had them for years, they're lovely bees to work with. I've got some of his bees here, they're great bees. So I think it's what suits your environment is the main thing. Up here, dark bees definitely are very good in that area. They are, you know, they're best adapted to this area, so it's what suits me.

I think you get a lot of myths peddled on both sides of the argument, which is if someone is really dedicated to black bees, they'll say stuff derogatory about other bees and vice versa as well. Yeah. And I've always said I don't— I never attribute that dark bees are aggressive. I say I've had some horrible Buckfast bees.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Really, really gentle. Yeah, dark bees, genetics and how they're bred and what they're bred for. Um, Paul Kitto, I'm gonna, I'm gonna answer that one afterwards because that's a bit, that's a bit specialist in terms of like a complete experiment that I'm doing with checkerboarding. Um, so it's just, I, I'll cover that one at the end. Best and worst locations in the UK for beekeeping?

Well, it's interesting. So, okay, I only have experience of 2 or 3 locations. Okay, the Midlands, which is, you know, pretty good forage. Actually, the area I lived was pretty good forage. I was out to the east of Birmingham. Good forage, mixed farmland, perhaps a little bit intensively farmed, I would say, for Really good forage all year round, but it really wasn't bad. And in Scotland, I've kept bees on the east coast and the west coast. The east coast in Fife, where I've currently got bees, is quite intensively farmed, but I'm just on the edge of that farmland. It means I get the oilseed rape, and that works really well, but I've got a lot of lime where I am, and lime makes fabulous summer honey, so I really like that. Here on the west coast, you know, the only real honey crop is heather honey in the autumn, So from a forage point of view, you have to make the best of what you've got. And unless, you know, I would prefer not to keep bees in an area that was so intensively farmed it was absolutely boom and bust, as in, you know, they got tons from the oilseed rape and then there was nothing for the rest of the year. I think that's just an awful sort of environment to keep bees in. It doesn't, you know, I like the range of different honeys. But I think there's another aspect here, and that's how easy is it to keep bees in these various areas. And I would argue, or my argument, I would, my feeling is it's easier to keep bees when you have a proper winter, because if you have a proper winter, you can be pretty certain that the colony is going to be broodless for a period. If you have a broodless period in the winter, you can manage your varroa better because you can treat them with oxalic acid. So my varroa levels and the virus loads in my colonies is better, and it's easier to manage in Scotland than it was when I lived in the Midlands. In the Midlands, we didn't guarantee to have a kind of broodless period. Sometimes the colonies would carry on with a bit of brood all year round, other than really hard winters. Up here, we almost always get a good enough winter to be broodless, and that, I think, that makes beekeeping a little bit easier. Of course, we have a much shorter season.

I think another interesting slant on that, in terms of, take the forage argument out of it, and the bee farmers talk about this all the time, the Goldilocks zone of where you are in the, in the country. And what they're saying is that Goldilocks zone is transitioning north. And I think even, even in my experience over the last 5 or 6 years, it's definitely moving north. Like, I speak to beekeepers on the south coast and they say that the, the season is over kind of like first week of July, right? And then into winter feeding in July. I know it's not winter feeding Yeah. And they just had— I'm like, well, we, we go out and forage bramble like end of August.

Yeah.

I think I'm hoping as well it's moving, it's moving more northwards.

Yeah, well, that, that wouldn't surprise me. And, and, um, you know, with global warming, you're going to see that. I mean, everything's shifting, shifting further north.

Yeah. Um, right, we've got, we've got 12, 12 minutes left to go. Okay. And very good questions right now. Now, with cedar hives being cheaper and more robust than poly, would you consider going back to wood? I guess the question is, what would you buy if you were going to buy a new hive, poly or wood?

So I think if I wasn't living in Scotland, I'd probably buy cedar. You know, they feel nice, they're nice and lightweight, they last really well, nothing wrong. They're easier, they're a lot easier to butcher when you come to do some DIY on them and things like that. I think they're probably overall easier to sterilize as well because you can just flame them. So if I wasn't living in Scotland, however, Up here, I like the additional insulation that a poly hive gives, and so up here I'd probably end up buying more poly.

It's interesting because one of the first videos I did was talking about poly versus wood, and I've— pretty much all my hives are poly, and the argument was always, why do you have poly hives? And I said, well, they're much better insulated and they're loads cheaper, and you can just take the ladder away. So yeah, I don't think— as long as you're insulating above the cluster, I think cedar hives are great.

Yeah.

Right, next question. Ollie, I'm gonna leave that one. I'll come back to that in a bit because we've done quite a bit on like natural Varroa ones. I'll answer that in a bit. Is New Zealand the most profitable beekeeping location on Earth? Yeah, location on Earth. Gotta be, innit?

Well, I guess if you looked at their production of Manuka honey and the sale price, it probably is the most profitable. If you looked at the absolute— the amount they really produce as opposed to the fake Manuka, I'm not sure it is the most profitable, but I'm not the person to ask about that. I don't know really anything about that commercial, international commercial beekeeping honey production. I'm really not an expert. Oh, actually, I'm not even a— I don't have a clue.

Okay, I'm getting a lot of comments saying that my internet's really bad, so I am sorry, I'm gonna have to shut things down. I'm hoping it's a bit better now. Right, so I'm just, I'm flicking through a few questions, so sorry if I don't ask you all, there are a lot of questions. Is it the time that the BBKA stopped teaching that the British National Hive is the hive of choice as opposed to, say, a Langstroth?

Yeah, so that's a very interesting question, good question actually. So You know, one of the things I think Langstroth's got a lot going for it, and probably one of the things if I were really starting afresh I might do these days is go for a Langstroth hive. I don't like the short lugs quite so much, I have to say. I do like the long lugs because they just fit my fingers a little bit better and things, but I think one of the major problems— I think turn the question the other way around, okay? If you're teaching beekeeping, I think one of the major problems that a lot of beekeepers face at the beginning is getting their heads around the kind of the compatibility of equipment and the investment that's required to start beekeeping, and the reality is it's blooming expensive, and they have to, I think, promote something, and the reality is Nationals are pretty much the standard in the UK, not necessarily amongst bee farmers and things like that, and clearly a lot of people switched to Langstroth But new beekeepers, they've got to buy a nuc from somewhere, they've got to, you know, share equipment with people and all sorts of things like that, and they'll find national stuff, but they might not find, you know, other hive sizes and other hive types. If everybody used Langstroth, then bingo, you should talk Langstroth, but we're sort of, we're in a kind of cul-de-sac, we've painted ourselves into this corner of it being British Nationals. Again, it depends also on the type of bee you keep. If you've got dark bees, Nationals are pretty good, they're about the right size, but if you've got a really prolific bee, then you need to think about a 14 by 12, or you need to think about a double brood box, or think about a hive which is a much bigger hive size in the first place. So I think the BBKI, I mean, I'm not defending them, but I think even if I were teaching a start beekeeping course, I think I would stress the importance of of compatibility with what the local beekeepers use. If everybody around you uses Langstroth, use Langstroth.

Yeah, I think it's national for eternity, isn't it? We're never going to get out of it. I like the small lugs on Langstroth, not to be old, but just because they don't break. Oh my God.

Yeah, well, that's true. Yeah, I know it's the whole—

yeah. Right, this is a good question for you again. What are your thoughts on the government deciding not to ban farmers using bee-killing Insecticides, and I guess this is the sugar beet—

Yes, neonicotinoids. Yeah, so there are clearly some issues with neonicotinoids, though whether they're a major problem for honeybees is not quite so clear to me, and the studies that have been done seem to suggest to me that they're probably more of a problem for other pollinating insects like solitary bees or bumblebees and other things like that. I think for beekeepers, they're probably less of an issue.

So I—

overall, I think I would prefer not to use these insecticides. It would be great if we didn't have to use persistent insecticides. Unfortunately, there aren't at the moment alternatives that allow the— as my understanding is, at least— that allow the farmers to be as productive as they seem to want to be, or we want them to be, and that aren't actually more harmful. Insecticide. Actually, I answered a question for somebody earlier, not in this session but online, where they asked me about spray insecticide killing, and I said I haven't— I'm not aware of beekeepers losing colonies from spray damage for years now. It's not something that's really an issue at all. It used to be, and that's because the insecticides were really toxic and very acute, you know, and if they were sprayed when— if your bees were flying when they were spraying them, you just get a pile of dead bees outside the hive. You don't see that with the neonics, and so in a way that's a plus as far as beekeeping is concerned, but obviously I would prefer the environment to be clean of all of these things.

I think the irony of the original argument with neonics for the oilseed rape, because it used to coat the seeds, didn't it, is that they banned it to protect the bees, and then everyone boycotted oilseed rape, and it wasn't grown anywhere near as much, and all the farmers were like, oh great, we've got nowhere to take our bees in the spring to build up. Yeah, but it seems to be coming back with a bang now, doesn't it?

Well, some of it's used for fuel, I think, now as well, isn't it? Biofuel, as opposed to oil itself. Yeah.

Any views on audio monitoring of varroa mites? There's some good science on using audio to detect varroa.

Yeah, I don't know about— okay, I'm not up to speed on the audio to detect Varroa, so there's some stuff going way back now. I can't remember what his name was now. There was stuff on audio to detect swarming in colonies, and it's a piece of equipment called an Apidictor, I think it was called, and I can't remember the name of the inventor, and it was patented and stuff like this. I've written about it on my website actually. It's quite interesting, they're supposed to give a particular frequency that allows you to intervene and stop the colony swarming. For varroa detection, I'm not sure, I don't know anything about that side of things.

It is quite a fun one, what's your biggest beekeeping disaster?

We've only got an hour, no, we've had an hour, I don't have time for I guess no beekeeping disasters are big, really big, you know. I've never set my car on fire with a smoker or anything like that. I've run over a smoker, but that's not a big disaster. A lot of small cock-ups, I think, is what characterises my beekeeping. So, you know, queens above the supers, every year probably I'll get a queen above the supers. I'm just, you know, a bit of a klutz like that. Dropping supers, Last year I dropped 3 full supers, tripped carrying 3 full supers and bees all in one go, tripped over something in the ground, wrenched my back really badly, supers were broken, all sorts of— those are the sorts of things. No really big disasters. It's some— and actually, just to go back to the point about queen rearing, okay, I do remember in the early days, you know, going down to my apiary and finding not a single, you know, a hive with not a single queen in because they'd all swarmed or I'd done something wrong with them or something. All of those problems go away when you rear your own queens and you've got spare queens in nucs and things like that. So those panicky moments, they've all gone now I rear queens.

Do you know the one that gets me that I kick myself, and it happens all the time, it's so annoying, is if you close up, you're vaping them, you close the entrance up, or the entrance just spins down, and then you go back to check on them and they're dead. Oh, it's happened about 3 times, and every time If a colony dies and it's not— and they just die through their own fault or the queen goes drone laying, fair enough. But if I kill a colony, like when I toasted one the other time in a car—

Yeah, that's right, that you feel really guilty then. Yes, very rarely have I had any catastrophes like that, I guess.

It's just me. All right, next one. This is a good question. Has beekeeping always been so cutthroat? I'm fairly young and thought it would be a calm, relaxing hobby. The beekeepers I'm familiar with always seem to be arguing or getting irate about something.

I tell you, if you're just talking about beekeepers arguing and you want cutthroat, you want to go to a couple of honey shows, then it's cutthroat, okay. Normal beekeeping is completely peaceful in comparison to honey competitions. No, there's inevitably a little bit of competition in beekeeping, I think. You know, you always want to have your colonies that are a bit more productive or the queens that are a bit more productive or a bit calmer, a bit more, you know, all of those sorts of things. And I think that's kind of then distilled when you get to the honey show and you have to make the best cake or the best wax block or the best jar of honey or something like that. I think one of the beauties of beekeeping is the fact that everybody's got a slightly different opinion. I think it does make beekeeping kind of difficult when you're beginning. And my view, and it's something I talk about in some of the talks I give, is, you know, find a method that works for you, stick to that, learn to be really good at it so you're really confident with it, and then start trying some other things. And I think, you know, read widely. There's all sorts of information out there. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, but inevitably, I mean, I think you'll find the same sort of things apply in all sorts of other hobbies and pastimes. It's not just beekeeping, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Okay, cool. That was just me trying to lower the image of my thing if it jumped out a little bit there. Right, you've got 1 minute left, so I'll ask you a couple of quick ones and then—

Make them good ones, yep.

Your thoughts on plastic frames and how would you recycle them?

Well, I wouldn't use plastic frames because of the Because of the issues with recycling. And, you know, if you can avoid using some of those things, then I would want to, you know, I try and achieve some level of sustainability in my beekeeping. So I recycle my wax, I reuse my frames, you know, all of those sorts of things. And I assume he means plastic frames, and he or she means plastic frames and foundation. Yeah, I don't know if— can you recycle plastic foundation?

Not sure. Don't know. There's a new set of frames coming out and they say that it's made from a recyclable one, but unless they're offering it, who's going to take them?

Yeah, I don't— well, okay, I don't see a need for that in my beekeeping, and unless they were, you know, it was really clear-cut that first of all they were recyclable and ideally that they were made from recycled plastics or something in the first place, I wouldn't use them because I'm perfectly happy with wood, and they do break now and again and all of that, but they suit my beekeeping. I'm happy with them.

Okay, I've just— I was going to play around with the— I'm just cutting out, aren't I? Right, I will call it a day there at 1 minute past 9. So David, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a real great pleasure talking to you. Sorry if my feed's been a little bit rubbish. I will hang about for a bit longer to try and answer some questions, but it's been great chatting Thank you. I would just say to everyone, get over to the blog. It's theaparist.org. Is that right?

That's right. It's on the— I think it's on my screen here.

Yeah. Oh, it is. Yeah, it's on the screen there. And also, if you, if you enjoyed it, like, I've not paid David for tonight, so he's done this for free. But if you've enjoyed the talk, he's got— you can buy him a coffee on his blog and you just click on it. I'm going to go over there after this and I'm going to buy you a couple of—

That's, that's great, right? Thanks, thanks very much, Lawrence. Enjoy the rest of the evening. I'm gonna go off and have a cup of coffee myself right now.

Perfect. Thanks, David. I'll see you soon. Cheers.

Take care now.

Bye. Right, so that was David. I'm, I'm sorry about my stream. I, I thought I got all kind of cocky with a new camera, and I think I probably put it on the stream, uh, quality down a little bit. Now if someone can just I don't know, confirm that you can actually still hear me. Um, otherwise what I might do is I might jump back out and jump back in again, uh, on directly on YouTube as opposed to StreamYard. So if someone could just say if they can actually hear me, that would be, that would be appreciated.

Through—

sorry, sorry if I missed out your question. There were quite a lot of questions there to get through, um, and I missed quite a lot out. Uh, so going through some of the ones that I missed, um, it was interesting though. A lot of David's, a lot of David's comments, like, we could have, we could have had a conversation all night about that, um, and how different his opinion is from mine on a lot of things and dark queens. Um, but as, as I've always said with, with all things beekeeping, like, I just, I completely respect everyone's opinion to what they believe, and I, I'll admit that I'm wrong If if someone proves to me that what I'm saying is a load of rubbish, then then fair enough. But it is interesting. I do kind of get where he's coming from with with the local. Get all of the queens in the UK at the time I needed them, but can't really do that at the moment. So let's have a look at some of these questions then. What ones did I miss? So we've got the bumblebee one. Uh, nice, interesting one on that bee suit that you won. I had a message from Simon the Beekeeper saying, uh, that the batch in that, that, that suit came from had faulty fencing veils and they were cut too short. So they were really annoyed that they sent that to me, so they're going to send me out the replacement, which I will send to you. So you're going to get another veil coming through today. People might not be aware of it, but YouTube has the best feature in the world. It is literally the best feature, which is, um, instead of blocking people— so like on Twitter, say someone was giving you loads of shit and trolling you, you block them, and then they try and go on your profile and they see that you're blocked. And you've blocked them. Where YouTube has this great thing, which is you hide a user from the channel. So if someone's giving you loads of grief on the comments, you hide the user from the channel, and then it just means that they can watch your videos. They don't know what's going on. They can still put comments up, but I never see them. So to me, they just disappear. And I did that to someone today. I don't— annoys me with the comments that they're making. I just You get hidden and then I'll never have to see you again. And I'll tell you the reason why I hid them as well, which was, um, so I did a video last week about a colony, Droneland Queen, that kind of didn't make it through. And I always do show you the videos of when they die, and I've just done another one as well, and quite a lot of dysentery in it. So that's a video that's coming up soon, but he hadn't seen that one yet. And he was giving me such a hard time saying, you, you don't know what you're doing showing all these colonies that died. I've lived in the UK for however many years and I've never lost a single colony in over a decade, so you're clearly doing something wrong. And I see a message and then I just, I just blocked him because I just thought, what's ridiculous? Why, why be so confrontational about things? And there's no way you've not lost a colony. So you're saying over 10 years all of the queens that you've had mated have mated 100%? And I bet you any money his answer would be no, they've not. I've just combined them when they didn't mate. It makes it a lot easier, doesn't it? So you can tell I'm a bit, I'm a bit wound up by that. So if you, if you're commenting on loads of my videos, um, I get back to all the comments. If you're commenting on loads of my videos and I'm not getting back to you It's because you've been barred. But I'm sure no one on this stream has been barred yet. Right, so I'll go to— I'm gonna go to the— I will do. And you know what? I take great pride. I take great pride in blocking people. And it's— it sounds like such a weird thing because previously, like, I would be so conscious about what people would think, and I'd want to keep everyone happy. And I'd want to be friendly with everyone. And then, and then you just realize you have this kind of epiphany and you say, I don't want them to be part of the community because if they're going to be kind of rude to people and judgmental and say, oh, you're doing that wrong, without saying, oh, here's a better way of doing something and actually contribute, then what's the point in having them here? So I see it as kind of weeding the people out who, who don't really make the cut. And I would say 99.9% of people on the channel who do comment A real— And, and polite and courteous. Like, there's no need to kind of come in. And you see it, I see it across all different platforms, forums in the UK and abroad and on Facebook groups, and it's just horrible. People are just horrible to each other and don't have any respect, and it annoys me. Right, so I'm going to ask somebody, right? Right, so how profitable is our 100 hive business? Um, it's, it's quite profitable, but you need to look back at how many, how much money you've spent over the years to get up to that point. So in a year, it's quite profitable. Over 5 years, it's— but I'd say, I'd say we're making a profit now overall. Which is which is pretty good. Let me read some of these other ones then. People checking to see if they're blocked now. Right, Joe saying how much time does it take to run 100 hives? Come too roughly. So I I skip things. I don't do things like so I don't do things properly, but I. Do the absolute bare minimum. So I inspect 100 hives in about seven hours. I try and get it down to five minutes, and then something happens. And when something happens, that's when I get in trouble. So there'll be like us, the colonies, or they're gonna swarm. So I need to find a queen. So then that five-minute inspection turns into like half an hour inspection. So then it just gets completely out of control. Hence why I've asked Richard to come along, new guy, and help me this year. Um, and he just wants to— he just wants something to do, come along and help. So that should— but it's all of the other stuff. Like, the inspections are only one side of it. Like, the, the jarring of honey, the labeling of honey, the promotion, the social media, the YouTube, the selling the nucs, the selling the queens. And then all of the other stuff that kind of comes with it, like all your paperwork and your accounts, it's— that is like a full-time job, really. I'm bonkers doing it alongside a full-time job. Right, let's see some of these other questions. This connection, I've got like 50 meg download speed. So I reckon my upload speed might be a bit iffy. I'll have a look at it next time. So, so what I'm going to do next time on here is I'll just invite a few of them, like anyone, and you can, you can come on board. Brooklyn's Honeybees coming next week, aren't you, Andy? Uh, Joe's saying, in a warm winter like this, a good— or is a good— is it a good or bad thing? Benefits and negatives. So I did a video a little bit on this. It's, it's really difficult to say until you get to like— at the moment it looks like an incredibly mild winter, which is a good thing I think overall in that your colonies are strong. It's a bad thing in that you're less likely to have a brood break, so the varroa levels going into the year are going to be higher. But if you have like, oh, I don't know, if you have a really bad cold snap in March, then you're in trouble, and it doesn't matter how mild the rest of it was. And that's what happened in 2018, I think, when the beast from the east came in. So if you get colonies back end of Feb, early March, big clusters of brood, boxes are full, and then it goes down to -10, then it really— Joe's got loads of questions. Benefits overwintering in the double brood configuration? I wouldn't say so, no. I like to, I like to overwinter on a single box. I just find it easier in terms of winter prep, and I find it easier in terms of getting a spring crop as well, because if you're on double brood in winter then you're going into spring, and where we are, you lose pretty much all of your spring crop into the double brood configuration. For early queen rearing in the UK, would an indoor setup work? Maybe, but you're kind of completely dependent on the out anyway, so trying to force it, I just, I don't think so. A good idea, really. Um, my opinion on artificial insemination. So I'm— artificial insemination, and I will do it, 100% will do it when I have some time, because everybody I speak to— and I know a lot of people that do, um, artificial insemination— and they say it takes so long. Oh yeah, the stream is bad, isn't it? Um, exit this broadcast and I'm going to come back on live via YouTube because I think, I think it's StreamYard. So I'm not going anywhere, I'll be back online in 5 seconds.