Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 21

Right, so we are live and we have got a brand new microphone. So I'll be really curious— I just tried to get that up, no one can see it— um, really curious to know if anybody thinks the audio is any better. I spent £300 on a mic because someone said the audio for my live streams was rubbish. Um, I think it sounds pretty good, but I have no idea what it sounds like on the other end of the stream. I have also put up some links. So if anyone wants to join the channel, channel membership, £4.99 a month, you get early access to all the videos advert-free. And there are some absolute belters going on this week, I tell you. It has been crazy season, uh, some, some really, really good videos on there. So if you want to click that link there, you can become a channel member. Put that one down now. And then also the final shout out is, I can't believe how many people are buying Queens. The queens are going out like they're going out of fashion, and we're sold out again. I'll be closing down orders tonight for the 11th of May, and then the next ones are on the 18th. So if you are interested in queens, get the orders in early. But enough of the shameless plugs, I'm going to answer some questions. Lots and lots of questions coming in, and as I suspected, we're getting to the point of the year now where people are getting into their bees and everything's kicking off. and bees are swarming and supers are going on and filling up nice and quick, and then everyone's asking questions. I ask questions as well. Like, I went into the apiary today— uh, yesterday, sorry— when it was the one, the one day of sunshine we've had so far, and it was just, just mayhem, absolute carnage. The colonies had either failed to get some of the queens mating where it's just been shocking weather Or I've not put the supers on quick enough and they're trying to swarm, or I'm catching swarms in the action, like they're swarming as we speak, or virgins are emerging, holding them in my hand, or I've already lost the swarms, or I'm finding swarms. So if that's happening in my apiaries, definitely happening other people's apiaries as well. So let's answer some questions. I can see already on the chat there's, there's quite a lot of questions on there, but I'm going to start off with a couple from the Ask Me a Question link on on my website. Uh, I, I feel I should give priority to some people who asked questions on there a few weeks ago and I've not got around to doing them. So I'm going to try my best where possible to copy these across and show them because I do, I do like it when they're shown on the screen. So let's give that a go. So first off then, it's from M La Rojo. It says, how often can you or should you perform a demerit in a single season? And then there's another question further on as well, which is saying on a previous video I talk about doing a Demeray as a reactive split, uh, like a reactive method for managing swarms. And when I did that video, I still kind of was in the mindset that it was like a reasonable method, and I can completely and categorically say I don't endorse that anymore. So I only use the Demeray as a preemptive method. I definitely do not use it as a reactive method. If I find swarm cells, I'm making splits or I'm doing an artificial swarm horizontal style because I just— I've not found a good method to kind of stop them swarming once they've decided that they're going to go. So I'll take that back, old videos. I'm going to have to correct it again in the future. I definitely don't endorse it to do it, uh, reactively. If you find swarm cells, just make a split. It's the easiest way of doing it. Get that, get that queen out as soon as you possibly can. reduce all of the queen cells down to one, and then you'll probably save the majority of your bees. But back to the question here, how often can you or should you perform a demerite in a single season? Before I answer that question, it'd be good if anyone does notice a difference on the microphone before I forget that. Maybe go back to another video and check. I would like to know if it has made a difference. £300 spent on a microphone. Right, how often can you or should you perform a demerite in a single season? So for me, the timing of the first one is the most important one, and you need to time it when your colony is big enough and strong enough to be able to support it, and you need to do it early enough that you've not condensed down the colony so much that they're going to swarm. So I always like to have 2 supers full of bees before I do it. So you're always running the risk that you're going to have a congested brood box before your boxes, your 2 supers, are full. But the way that I like to do it, single brood box, put my 2 supers on with the queen excluder. I like to see 2 boxes full of bees. They don't need to have, like, they don't need to have filled those supers with honey. I just want to see all the comb drawn out. And then what that does is it kind of bridges the gap between the 2 brood areas when you do do the demerare. So for me, as soon as you see a full brood box and 2 full supers of bees and like the weather's okay-ish, I would just go for it. So for us, that's kind of like the first or second week in May, but take that date with a pinch of salt. For people down south, that would be far, far earlier than that. You could be doing this kind of like last week of April really, if the bees are built up nice and strong. And then in terms of how long or how many times you should be doing that per season, the first 8 days I've never lost a swarm. The first 8 days. You're supposed to go back after 8 days. You can, you can do it after 7 and take down all of the queen cells up in the top box. I've never lost a swarm in that first 8 days, but then I wouldn't be doing the demarée again the following week. I, I like to leave it to a point once all of the brood in the top box has emerged and they've backfilled it with honey, and then you can recycle it. So for me, it's, it's like a 3-week cycle. And if you do that twice, so for us, middle of May, you do that, takes you through to June, takes you through to the June gap. And then if you do it again after the June gap, for me, that's kind of as many times as you really need to do it. You do see some people do it 3 times as well, but it gives you an issue in terms of what you're going to be doing with all of these brood boxes full of honey. If you've treated with Apivar, you, you do have an issue. If you've not treated with Apivar, you're just stacking up lots of huge boxes honey. So not much to complain about there. But yeah, so how, how often? I would say no more than 3 times, but for us generally just twice. Uh, but get the timing of the first one right. Definitely don't wait until you see your swarm cells. Okay, right, I'm going to answer some questions in the chat. So Pink It's Honey, new channel member, how's it going? Hi Lawrence, have you used thymol crystals and added the mixed up solution to sugar syrup? I think it certainly helps with mold. What are your thoughts on if it also helps with varroa? So no, I don't do that. And B, you're not allowed to do that, so definitely don't do it. C, it does help with mold in sugar syrup, um, from what I've seen. Uh, but no, not seen, not seen any, any evidence in terms of helping with varroa. Like, I genuinely don't use, uh, thymol in my sugar syrup. We use invert, so it doesn't go moldy anyway. But there is like a school of thought, train of thought, I always get those wrong, that it's good for Nosema. So if you've got a colony with a Nosema infection, you can spray thymolated spitz syrup onto the bees, and apparently it clears it up. Again, you're not supposed to do that, and you're not allowed to do it, so don't do it. But I've heard in other countries where you can do that, it does help. I forgot to put the question up. Sorry, there you go. Put the question up, take it down again now. Right, Andrew Bradley says, had a strange thing. One of my hives that was a swarm swarmed yesterday. There is brood and honey only on 5 frames on a national brood box, but they swarmed back to their box. So that can happen sometimes. They go and swarm and they kind of look back and think, you know what, it's just rubbish here, really bad weather, um, we're going back. Or they might not like the queen that they've gone with, might have gone with the virgin and then she's not made it there, she's gone somewhere else. Or it might be a clipped queen, so you might have clipped your queen and the clipped queen is under the box, under the— your floor, and then the bees go and swarm and then they come back realizing they've not got a queen. So it does happen quite a bit that they, they give up on it and they do come back. I've had that a few times. Uh, Tom says he's ordered some queens from me going off the videos and how the hives are. Definitely hoping for some of that. I hope as well. You should get good results with the queens. It is quite quick, but I do always say wait until the next year to judge them. But getting them in this early, it should, it should kind of transform any colony within maybe like 6 to 8 weeks in terms of killing off all of the other bees. But it does have quite a dramatic impact, especially in terms of the amount of frames of brood and the quality of the frames as well. Says something very similar. Hi Sarah, she ordered 2 queens over the bank holiday weekend, looking forward to getting them and making up some nucs. So good luck with the introductions. We're doing proper no-nonsense here. I'm gonna, gonna fire through the questions today. So Damien, another channel member— hi Damien— he says, hi mate, the sodium hydrochlorite mixture used in sterilizing your polyhives, once this is made up, how long is it good for and how would you dispose of it? So good question regarding, uh, disposing of it. I'm not sure yet I'm going to dispose of mine, but I know that you do need a proper disposal route. But the way that I'm running mine, and the person that I've been speaking to, what they do is that they're constantly topping it up. So what I would say is just make sure anything that's going into it is properly scraped down. You don't want, like, you don't want bees in it, you don't want wax floating in it, you don't want propolis in it. You're going to end up with some of that stuff going in, but clean them with a hive tool as much as you possibly can before they go in. And then what he does is, as you do end up losing bits through drips and leaks and stuff like that, is when he's topping it up, he tops it up with neat solution. So you're just constantly recycling it and making it good, and then it lasts kind of a long, long time. I'm not sure how I'm going to dispose of it yet though. Probably some sort of pump and taking it somewhere for disposal because it is pretty, pretty bad stuff. My, my wife is so annoyed. I keep on going there with like new tracksuit bottoms on and new clothes and coming back and just like it's bleached my clothes. I've got just all my clothes have just got bleach marks on it now. It bleaches through absolutely everything. So do wear your overalls or your, your worst set of tracksuit bottoms if you are going to do any of that. And make sure you don't get it in your eyes, it will 100% blind you. Right, I'll flick through the shameless plugs for channel memberships. Um, if you do enjoy the stream though, what I would say is please do hit the like button, really helps out with the algorithm. So if you enjoy the stream and you're getting your questions answered, please do hit the like button. So James says, hi, used a pop-up gazebo the other day with the rain. Pleased I did. A few queen cells found and a demerit commenced. I've seen a few people using gazebos. Um, it's, it's cool. It's not for me using gazebos though. I just go out in the rain, get drenched, drenched through. But it's not that cold at the moment, and the bees, they soon dry off. As soon as they get back into their hive, they're dry again. So I just, I just crack on in the rain. When it's proper thunderstorms, then I'll come inside. Uh, said, hatched my first 2 queens out in an incubator this week, which was amazing. One of them died unfortunately after about 6 hours. Should you have fed it right away? So yeah, you need to make sure you feed your queens, your virgins, right away. They come out and they don't— in a hive like that, they'll just kind of go and find some food and the bees might feed them. They don't always feed virgins, but with, um, there's a little— in a lot of them they have a little container where you put a little bit of honey So you need to feed them within like kind of half an hour, get, get some food in there. There's— put a little bit of the colony's own honey in there and you can feed the virgins. I, I'll shamelessly plug the video again. So I've done a video that's gone live on the channel membership page that is £4.99 a month if you want to watch the video now. But I went there yesterday and I've just never had such a crazy colony. I've never seen so many swarm cells, but the virgins were emerging. Which is like a song there somewhere. But I had loads of them coming out, and in the colony— in that apiary, sorry— I had loads of queenless nucs as well. So I was just picking up virgins and letting them emerge and just going and putting them in nucs. It was, it was so much fun. But watching them— you might have seen the shorts videos where I was doing it— watching the virgins come out is good fun. I love watching virgins coming out. Uh, Glyn says Demeray or Snell grow for a big honey crop. You know me, I love the Demaray. The Snellgrove, like the board, there's a number of different ways of doing it, but it's just a bit like— it's probably the reason that I went down the no-nonsense beekeeping route. And I know the Demaray is not much easier, it is still quite complicated, but it's that bleeding of bees on the Snellgrove that just always— I'm just like, just bleed the flying bees that way and turn it 90 degrees, and I just, I kind of lose interest. Um, but I've done the demerare hundreds if not thousands of times, and it does work, and it stops them swarming, and you get mega, mega honey crops. Right, Ned Taylor, any tips for promoting yourself locally as the go-to guy to collect bees when people find a swarm in their gardens? Uh, so, so tips— I, I've been there, done that, loved it. But also not collecting swarms anymore because I'm just, I'm not accepting the risk of any disease. But before I answer, I remember going to one that was on a school fence and it was a pretty good swarm. And I got there and I kind of set myself up and there were a couple of people watching. And as I set myself up, someone drove along and said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm just collecting this swarm. And they said, but somebody's called me to collect this swarm. And I said, well, Somebody called me as well. And they said, no, no, no, somebody has called me to collect this swarm. I'm collecting this swarm of bees. And I said, I'm like halfway— I'm halfway through doing it. They can't— you don't own the swarm. And he really wasn't very happy, and he just— he was just like hurling abuse at me and saying, I can't believe that you've come to collect this swarm when somebody else has called me up to collect it. And I was kind of thinking, well, I'm, I'm in exactly the same position here. And we were having like a proper argument, and then Somebody, somebody else pulled up and said, somebody's called me to collect that swarm. And you, you couldn't, you couldn't have written it. It was, it was great. In the end, I got the swarm and it was rubbish. It was a rubbish swarm. It didn't have a queen in it. So I kind of wish either one of them had taken it. But I thought at that point, this would make a really good kind of video, wouldn't it? Bee Wars or something like that. Sorry, I've not answered your question at all. So any tips? I see a lot of people doing this on Facebook at the moment. The tip that I will give you is do all of those other tips, which is, yeah, advertise in the newspaper, your local kind of village group, advertise on Facebook. Um, if you want to go like door-to-door putting leaflets through people's doors, you could go to that extent. But the one thing I would say in terms of the success rate that you will get is how reactive you are. It goes back to that story there. You need to be ready to go as soon as you get the phone call. You need to be ready to go then and there, like within 5 minutes. So don't not have your swarm kit ready. Swarm kits in the car, bee suits in the car, everything you need to collect them, your smoker, your box. But also give them your mobile number and get them to text you. Another good tip that I've found is you get them to send you a picture of it, and that saves a lot of turning up and it's bumblebees, or turning up and it's like masonry bees in a wall, or it's wasps. And you'll get loads of those calls. And it's a shame because like around here, I guess if you Google kind of bees North Wales, there's quite a lot of stuff on there that comes up with Black Mountain Honey and our email address and our phone number is on there. So I get so many calls for bees and I always, I'm curious because I have a number of people that I pass this information on to because they want to go and catch swarms and they're local. But I do, I do a bit of vetting first. So I always say to them, oh well, I might have someone who'd be interested, but just send me a picture of it. And then I start talking to them, and like, I reckon 70%, maybe 80% of them is, is like masonry bees or bumblebees or wasps. So there's not that many swarms. I hope that was helpful, not just me ranting. Another channel member says, regarding swarms or colonies about to swarm, can these colonies become more aggressive before they swarm? So I would say quite, quite the opposite. It is, it is the opposite. You know when a colony, when a colony swarms and you go and collect the swarm, like, a swarm is so docile because they've gorged themselves on honey. They're just like, whatever. It's like after I've had my roast dinner and I'm sitting down on a Sunday night, I'm not I'm kind of no trouble to anyone. And so bees are like that. So I find— and the colony I went into yesterday that is on the channel membership page, they were really chill, really chilled out, and very, very good form. So I don't find that they become aggressive. I find that once they go, once the swarm's left, they can become a little bit aggressive because then they've not got a queen and they're kind of— loads of the honey's gone and there's not that many bees there, and they're a bit like, oh, we're not— there's not as many of us as there was before. So I find once they swarm, they can become a little touchy. Did you find a capped queen cell, but when open, that cell was empty? So yeah, you get that a lot, and especially if you've got like a hopelessly queenless colony. I find before they turn laying worker, you often get this, which is like you'll be going back to a colony thinking, oh, they're Got like a drone— say you've got a drone laying queen, you find the drone laying queen, you kill her, and then you know you've got to come back and requeen that colony. You come back a couple of weeks later and then you see like a ripe queen cell. And, and I've been— I've done this. I've kind of thought, well, there must, there must be something in it. I'll let them— I'll let it see what comes out. And then go back and sit home and think, there can't be anything in it. Like, it was a drone laying queen that I took out 3 weeks ago, 2 weeks ago. How can there be anything in it? I'll give it a chance. I'll give it a chance. Give it a couple of weeks, and then a couple of weeks later nothing's come out, and then you go in and open it and there's nothing in it. So they do do it. You see it. I would say most of the time you'll go in and it's not—they don't cap it, but sometimes they do cap it and it is empty. Just some nice bees there. We'll, uh, come to the next one. Oh, the first feedback, the mic sounds good. Excellent, I'm really, really happy. Glyn, cheers for that. Right, Dale Hancock says, I got 5-frame nucs 2 and a half weeks ago. He's starting on new foundation on national deep and supers. How long shall I carry on feeding the 1:1? The weather in Cornwall is looking iffy for the next week or two. So the way that I would do that is I would definitely not feed once they filled up the brood box. So I would be feeding and feeding and feeding. Just take the supers away, just get rid of the supers, they don't need to be there yet. In the brood box, you've got a 5-frame nuc, say it's in an 11-frame hive, I would be feeding them until you've got 10 frames of bees. Give yourself like a 1-frame, maybe a 2-frame buffer, so maybe 9 or 10 frames of bees in that brood box, and then I would take the feeder away completely and I would put the queen excluder on and I'd put one super on and I would lead them to it. That would be the way that I would do that. Don't feed through the supers because it just— you can quickly, if they have a good day outside and they're taking the feeder down, they could backfill the supers and then they'll backfill the brood nest, and then before you know it, they're swarming and it becomes very, very difficult to manage. Like, the feeding is good to a certain point, but then it can cause a lot of issues if they start swarming, which is definitely not what you want. This is good advice from Stuart. He's saying, @NedTaylor, also speak to local pest controllers and your local council and let them know you collect swarms. It's a really good point with pest controllers. A lot of them will still take the £100 to kind of to go out and have a look at them, and then they'll just ring you up and say, yeah, there's a swarm here, you can come and get it for free, I've already been paid. But you know, they could have saved £100 a person, but still you do. I've got a couple of pest controllers who ring me up and say I've got swarms, and I pass their numbers on. But they do get—they get a lot of callouts. Tom HD Gaming 1996 says, "What's your opinion on the Flow Hive? Are they good or are the other traditional hives better?" Heard mixed reviews about them. So what a way to split the beekeeping community! Flow hives—I still don't understand why people get so frustrated about Flow hives. Well, I was going to say something then. I was just definitely not going to say it. So I'm going to have a sip of my peppermint tea in an insulated cup this time so it doesn't go cold. Um, so I have a Flow Hive and I have a fake Flow Hive, which Flow Hive enthusiasts get equally angry about the fact that I've dared to go out and buy something that's just on Amazon. But anyway, I've got a Flow Hive and I've got a fake Flow Hive, and they are so much fun. Really, really good fun. But you look at the marketing from Flow, and I know that their YouTube channel says no, you need to treat them as a normal beehive and do X, Y, and Z. Their marketing does not say that, and their marketing does not show that. It's like you just stick them in your garden, don't do anything to them, turn a tap, and you get honey. And they do, they do back it up and say that's not what we're saying, but they, they're kind of teasing it out in the marketing to make it look like you don't need to do anything. And I have real trouble, and I've, I've had trouble, and I'm not, I'm not going to shamelessly plug the channel membership again, but there is a video on that now showing the trouble that I'm having with a 10-frame Flow Hive in which, what do you do? They're starting to swarm, the super's full of honey, and the brood box is now full of honey, but the honey's not capped, the honey's not ripe, so I can't extract the honey and I can't do anything in the brood box. So I'm sitting there looking at it first week of May and thinking, what do I do other than just let them swarm and stop the cast swarms going out? So I quite like that because it's like a real— it's like a conundrum, it's a beekeeping challenge, it's good for YouTube, it is a good video as well. But for a beginner going in and looking at that, I can see how you'd get yourself into that position. You wouldn't know what to do. The colony would swarm, you'd probably leave, you probably wouldn't even go in and check to see if there's swarm cells. They'd swarm themselves down to literally nothing. The honey would start to ferment and people would be like, this is, this is not good. And then you see and you get one secondhand on eBay because people are giving up with it. So I've given you my kind of angry opinion there. What's my opinion on the Flow Hive? I think they're amazing, absolutely love them. I think it's the best piece of beekeeping innovation kind of ever that I've ever seen. I don't think they're necessarily well suited for a beginner And I think there's prob— it's probably more difficult to manage them than a traditional hive, and you're probably not going to get quite as much honey, but you do save on the honey extraction equipment. So I've got quite a balanced view of a Flow Hive. As I said, really massive admiration for the company and the product, uh, but slightly sneaky marketing. And I guess that's why people get a little bit irate about them, because people are sold this dream of, oh, it's amazing, all you have to do is put them in garden, you turn a tap and you get fresh honey, when in reality it's not that simple. And they're just— I'd love to know the stats on the amount of Flow Hive owners that colonies swarm in the first year, and I bet you it's up around like 70-80%. Right, I'll stop talking about Flow Hives. Hello, have you had a swarmy spring? The poor weather is keeping the already congested hives stuck inside, and I had all my 30 colonies throw up loads of swarm cells in the same week. So it's been really, really difficult, and I always err on the side of caution since I put all my supers on too early and then the weather just got so bad I had to go around and take all the supers back off again. Like, that— it wounded me doing that. So I've always pushed and pushed and pushed and thought, I'm just not going to put the supers on, I'm just going to leave them, they're not going to swarm, they're not going to swarm. And this year I've left it too late. definitely left it too late this year because I was going around yesterday, yesterday I think, yeah, putting supers on, and so many of them had started swarm preparations. And they were— and I was thinking, where have they got this nectar from? Like, there's been a couple of nice days up here, but apart from that, it's just been drizzly. But I was really surprised with the amount of honey that had been— that had come in and that was being stored in the brood nest. So I had left it too long, and I probably should have just taken that risk a little bit earlier and put the supers on. And I do think that would have alleviated the pressure in terms of the congestion. So I will— I'll take that learning on for next year and, uh, maybe not do it again. But I, I don't necessarily think it's, it's so much the weather that's impacted. I think that's just me not putting the supers on quick enough. Um, be interested to know if you've, if you've done the same, if you had supers on them. Uh, but I do think the next couple of weeks will be so many swarms. Oh, it's going to be crazy as soon as you get that little, that little spell of weather. I reckon yesterday a lot of people would have gone out and caught swarms as well. Hi, I found one supercedure cell in my new hive. The queen is overwintered and honestly the frames are all laid over the entire frame. I broke it down but now I worry I made a mistake. So I wouldn't worry as long as you've got open brood in there. So brood in all stages except capped, then it— they'll just— they'll recreate it again. If you took it down and they start creating like emergency cells, I'd be a little bit worried. But I've had this with colonies where they, they try and supersede a queen and they give it like 3 goes, and then you're constantly taking down the cells, and then they're just like, yeah, whatever, we'll stick with that queen. And then she turns out to be a good queen. And they'll supersede over little things like a, like a Slightly damaged wing or broken leg, something that's not going to impact the queen's laying ability, but they're sensing that she's not perfect, so they're going to give it a go. But sometimes then the other train of thought is that the bees know best and they're superseding her for a reason. So she might just be running low on kind of fertile eggs and her time might be up soon. So if they keep on doing it, definitely just let them supersede. And if it's only one cell, you're pretty safe that it is going to be a supersede and they're not swarming. I'm liking all the channel members here. Sorry, I will stop it now. Transferring a nuc into a full-sized hive, would you feed? So yes, definitely I would feed. The only time that I wouldn't feed is if you've got loads of drawn comb and you're filling it up with drawn comb and you've got stores that are going in there as well. But if there's any foundation going in there, there's no issue with feeding at all. Kickstarts the queen back into laying well, kind of stimulates her and gets your foundation drawn out a lot quicker. But do stop feeding once you reach kind of like 80% of that brood box is full in terms of number of frames, then, then definitely stop feeding. But I do recommend to everyone we sell nucs to to to feed the nuc on introduction. When— I think that says ordering queens, can a delivery date be specified or do you post them straight away? So for our UK-mated queens that we have not even started grafting yet or started doing cell builders because it's just too wet and cold here, no, we don't specify the dates. They just go when they're ready, but we'll give people maybe a couple of days notice. We send those on a Wednesday. Delivery on a Thursday. So we do all, all UK mated queens, we just do a batch and they go out on a certain day. The Yelanta queens, they come in when they're ready. Again, that's kind of like around the middle of June. I know they're about a week or 2 weeks behind. A lot of people have ordered Yelanta queens as well this year, but again, we'll give people kind of like a couple of days notice on when they're coming out, but you can't specify a day. They just come in from Murray and then we send them out the same day. And then the F1 butt file screens, you can specify the exact day, but just lots of people get this wrong and I spend a lot of my life tweaking people's orders. So I have changed the website a bit now to make it more clear. You specify the day that they're dispatched and they are dispatched on the day that you specify they need to be dispatched on and they arrive the following day, generally the following day, if not the day after. Normally we offer next day delivery service as well, so if you order before 3 o'clock— I don't know why I'm looking up there— order before 3 o'clock, we send them out same day. That's 3 PM in the afternoon. But we just can't get to the point where the queens are hanging around for more than a couple of days at the moment. Um, but hopefully next couple of weeks we've got some good orders coming in. I'm looking up there now, I've got my orders up there. We've got some good orders coming back in, so we will be able to start that again. next day delivery. Hey, from Southeast Louisiana, sounds good. Hello to you. What, I want to do a split using a queen cell, have 2 hives. Is there enough drones from the 2 hives to mate a virgin queen? So I'm not sure who I was talking to this about the other day, and they were saying like, is there enough drones? They've only got, they've only got one colony. and is there enough drones from their colony to make the virgin that's going out? It's a similar question, and I would say it doesn't matter. Like, wherever you are in the UK, barring like the most isolated of isolated places, they'll find drones. So as long as you've got virgins flying up there, you should be good. What I will say though is don't do what I have done, and every other beekeeper will have done this, which is you find a colony swarm swarming and there's swarm cells on every single frame and you think, 10 cell— 10 frames here all on different cells, I'm going to take each one of those frames and go and put it in its own little nuc and then I've got 10 nucs. I reckon at best you'll get 3 of them mated and you've wasted all of that good resource and you kind of think of it, oh, it's a bit annoying. And then there's not really any way of recovering it when you've got such a small split like that. If they— if the virgins don't mate Then to try and add a mated virgin— sorry, add a mated queen in at that point is just, it's just near on impossible because there's not enough bees to sustain that queen. So, so don't get, don't get greedy. Don't do what I did. Uh, St. Andrew's Hive says morning from Oz. Hello, how you doing? I should say g'day. Uh, I did a short video the other day. This is great. I love the power of social media. I did a short video because I was playing golf at Maisley Llaisdy, something like that. I can't speak Welsh. Golf course in North Wales. And I got onto the 16th hole and I was playing quite well, and I looked in the distance and I was like, I know, I know exactly what that is. I picked it out from probably about a mile away because it was a blue and yellow Abello poly hive, and there were 3 hives there. And I thought, I'm definitely doing a video. So I did a little video and I just— I didn't touch anything. I'm not going to go mess around with anyone else's beehives, but I just— I Saw them from a distance and took a golf swing, and I went over to have a look and just watched the bees flying at the entrance. I did the video, and then the guy whose bees they were messaged me saying, oh, hi. Um, he thought I had a reasonable golf swing, which I definitely don't. I am rubbish at golf. But it was cool that he got back to me just, just randomly, so I enjoyed that. Uh, right, let's get back to some more questions. Uh, what shire am I in again? I'm in Flintshire, uh, North Wales. So Shannon says, is anyone else struggling to do inspections due to the changeable weather? Yeah, nightmare. It's— I'm just, I'm just used to it now because we're in Wales. You just, you get used to the rubbish weather. So I just go out, like I said, kind of Friday evening or Saturday morning I go out, I do my inspections unless it is torrential, and then I might shift it 24 hours, but I just go out and do it in the rain. Jetpack says he's very new to beekeeping and recently joined my local beekeeping association. When would be the latest in the year to get a new colony of bees up and running? So definitely not too late at the moment. It's a good time to do it at the moment, and you almost get the benefit if get— if you're getting a nuc kind of around now, very low chance of it swarming because you're getting through to the point where, say you get a 5 or 6 frame nuc now, maybe going to take 6 weeks to build it up to fill up, fill up that brood box. Maybe a little bit less, but you're getting it to the point where the chance of it swarming is a little bit lower. There's definitely a cutoff to that though. I see— I've had it before where people have rung me up in September saying, I definitely want to start now, I want to start now. And I don't sell nucs to them because I just say, what's the point? All you're going to do is just get the nuc, feed it, and then might die over winter, and then you've lost all the bees. Let me take the risk on the bees dying over winter and just start in April. And if you're ordering, if you're coming to me in September, like, you're top of the list for nucs for next year. So there is a cutoff, but if you're doing it now, perfect time to get started. And good that you've joined your local beekeeping association as well. Really good to join your local beekeeping association and just get to know the people. They're generally very good. Marcus says he's started looking into plastic foundation. Is it worth the extra money? So plastic foundation on its own, like, I've minimal experience with it. I've got a bit of experience with plastic frames, a bit of experience with like fully molded the frames and feeders, plastic molded frames, and they're slightly different. I would say just on its own plastic foundation, it's not, it's not for me. Like, it's— I don't think it adds any benefit, and if anything, it causes, causes more issues. Means if you've got any disease, it's going to become an issue. The bees don't always draw it out straight. You might have to scrape it back, and you're adding kind of more plastic into the environment, and the bees don't take to it as well. So if you're just adding plastic foundation into a wooden frame and paying more for it, I definitely wouldn't do that. That one's not for me. But if it's like a fully molded plastic frame that's been coated in wax and you're getting it and you've not got to do any of the building, then it kind of looks at it and thinks, that's going to save me quite a lot of time. And as long as it's sustainable and you can reuse it lots and lots of times, then it's probably Probably works out a little bit better. I don't know why whenever I do the streams I get an itchy nose, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna have some more peppermint tea. Uh, Arctic Beekeeping says, what are my thoughts on an ecosystem versus grafting? I hear lots of people say grafting is better. Um, so in, in terms of queen rearing, absolutely identical. Like, there's no— all you'll do is just a different way of getting a larva into a cup. That's the only difference. Some of the, some of the very best people I know who do, who are into queens and, uh, and do queen rearing and lots of queen breeding, they use the Neco system, swear by it, absolutely love the Neco system. So I would just say whatever works for you. I don't think there's, there's any difference whatsoever in terms of the end product. I, I personally struggle with the Neco system because I, I can't always guarantee that the queen's going to lay in it, and that's what annoys me with it. I know when I'm grafting that I can always get the right size larva into the, uh, the cups, whereas the Nikko is a little bit more of a gamble for me. But once they're in the cups, there is no difference. Pat says she's got £100 of honey but finding it hard to sell as work, uh, as a different job. So ringing if you had any tips to offload the honey for the hobbyist. So I guarantee if this was 3 years ago, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be in this situation. The market at the moment is flooded with honey. There is so much honey knocking around, and I think there's a lot of Pat the 14ths with kind of £100 of honey that they can't get rid of— rid of even. And this is what makes it challenging at the moment, because there is just so much honey around. So maybe, I don't know, I've got a lot, got a lot more. I've got about £5,000 of honey sitting in the garage. lightweight. I would suggest just sitting on it. This is the thing with honey, and the beauty is that it doesn't go off. If you keep it kind of in an airtight container, it's just going to last pretty much indefinitely. And this season so far, there's no way this is going to be a bumper spring crop. So if it's a spring crop of honey, you never know, kind of September, October, people might start running short and it might become easier to sell. Uh, but yeah, I've not really, I've not really got any kind of other like tips in terms of getting rid of it. I'm not sure. Is it, is it in buckets or is it in jars? Maybe taking it into work. This is, this is a good way of doing it. If you, if you read your question again, finding it hard to sell as work, a different main job. Okay, if you've got, if you've got a job, one of the best ways, like an office job, is going into an office and trying and telling people you're selling your honey. Put up some signs. Loads of people buy it, and you probably get rid of it £100 quite easily like that if you put it in pound jars. Uh, Alan B says, is it possible to graft into a nuc and use it as a starter and finisher? Could you do a video if possible? So yeah, you can, you can. We wouldn't graft into the nuc, but you can graft in the normal way. But you can definitely set up nucs as starters and finishers. It works really well. You could— I will do it on a video. It's a good idea because I've not done that on a video. But like a 6 over 6 configuration is a very, very good way to do that. And then you can use the 10 over 10 method, which would then become the 6 over 6 method, and just double down. And all you're doing is just completely filling that box up with bees. And then if you wanted to break it down and use it as a starter finisher, you've got kind of all of those bees in there. So I would suggest— it depends how many cells you want to do, but you could break it down, use it as a starter, get all of your cells. Say you've got a batch of I don't know, 5 or 10 cells started using it as a starter. And then a box of bees like that, you could easily break that up into, say, 5 splits and then use those 5 splits as finishes. It's quite an efficient way of doing it like that. You end up getting the best queens, really well-fed queens, but then you, you break it back down to make your splits again. Good way of doing it. Do you expect the new plastic frames and foundation to overcome the 14x12 issues that putting you off those frame sizes, at least no more broken lugs and the foundation can't fall out. I broke 2 lugs the other day. Just this time of the year, getting them out for the first time is such bad practice, kind of levering up the lugs. But you know, you do get used to it, and, and when you break the first one, the first one of the season, you remember not to do it again and you remember to start levering away from the lugs. Uh, but no, it really annoys me breaking them. But I do, I do expect the plastic frames and foundation frames to overcome that issue with the lugs. And the foundation— yeah, I'm not sure the foundation really ever fell out on mine. The one thing I'm slightly concerned about with the Frames and Feeders frames is they always leave like a little corner or a little slit on the 14x12 so they can get around, and they can't do that on the Frames and Feeders frames. So with plastic foundation, you see some people that cut the corners off to give the bees like a little bit of an access route, and they, and they, they respect that route as well. But I've not done that on the frames and feeders, so maybe I'll drill a hole in them or something. But I'm excited to get them going, but they've not really, you know, not really done much with them yet. So Glyn says, can you work 2 queens in a Demaray method, or will they swarm when the new queen hatches out in the top box? So this is on the list for another video this year as well. So this is what you are supposed to be able to do the Demaray, which is leave one cell in the top box with an entrance and they'll run it on a 2-queen system. I've had that and the queen's gone out and she's got mated and come back and there's 2 queens in one colony, bumper honey crop. And I've done exactly the same and they swarmed. So it's not an exact science at all, that one. It would be nice because I would really like to say every time they leave it as 2 queens and they don't swarm, and you get the benefit of 2 queens, and then you get your pick of the queens at the end of the year as well. Or you can turn it into splits, becomes a very sustainable and usable system. But if they swarm because you've left a cell in there, then it's a little bit annoying and counterproductive as to what you're actually trying to achieve. So I never do that anymore because I— the reason I do the Demaray is to stop my bees swarming and to get a good honey crop. not doing it to, to have 2 queens. I'm not using it as a method of splitting. Doing it as a method to not split. But for a YouTube video, it's definitely worth another go, so I will do that. So Pat, same question. You're a hobbyist beekeeper and you're having trouble selling honey. Wondering if you have any tips to easily offload the honey as you're working another job, so time is short for farmers markets. I feel your pain working another job. We are full-time job in construction. But yeah, just try and think outside the box. I hate that term, but I definitely wouldn't be doing farmers markets like this. We don't do any markets like that, and it pains me going to farmers markets. It's like the worst thing in the world. I enjoy like the first hour, and then it really annoys me. I have to stand there with like a nice, oh, hello, yes, hi, welcome to the shop or the stall. And then people come and look and ask loads of questions and don't buy any honey, and I'm like, Um, I'm so miserable. But I don't blame you for not going and doing farmers markets, but there's loads of other ways. I tell you what, our honesty box sells so much honey, and we are in like rural North Wales. Like, not many people walk through the village, but you'll be amazed how much honey gets sold at the honesty box. And people just put cash, cash in, just go there and like— I shouldn't be advertising it, but there's loads of cash in there all the time. But, um, I saw a cool thing as well on the beekeeping forum about— because a lot of people don't have cash nowadays, and I think, I don't know, is it different in a village versus a city? I don't know. But what they're saying is they've got like a QR code where you can scan it and it brings up like a payment link to say, right, this jar of honey is a fiver, and you put your details in, you pay a fiver. I really like that as an idea. So you could do, do something like that. Honesty box with a QR code. Maybe that's a good way of doing it. Facebook Marketplace, we used to sell loads at the beginning before we had the website. Facebook Marketplace was where we sold the majority of our honey. Like village Facebook groups as well, if you just put on there, you've got to get some nice pictures of your bees, you in your bee suit. Definitely don't call it raw honey because that's not allowed, but might sell, might sell an extra couple of jars if you call it raw. We wouldn't do that though. There you go, there's a few tips for you. Zach Price says, what treatment do you use to be able to harvest the honey in the top brood box after doing a demerare? So good question. You can't use Apivar. You sorry? So let me get this right here. You can't extract the honey out of frames that have been used and tainted with amitraz, which is which is the chemical in Apivar. you are. But what you can do is recycle that box and nadir it underneath the brood box, bruise all of the cappings, and then the bees move it out of those frames and they put it back up into the supers. Now that might sound like cooking the books, but it's definitely not cooking the books. Because if you— I said this in another stream— if you think about it, say, say my bees that are out in my colonies now, the brood boxes, every single brood box that is there has been treated last year, kind of August— if you saw yesterday's video, August to say October— with Apivar. So every single brood box has been tainted with Apivar, and every single cell of nectar that goes into your colony gets put in those brood box cells. Every single one. They don't, they don't come into the hive and go up into the supers and put it up there. They put it into the brood box and they move it up overnight. So all you're doing is simulating that exact same scenario by taking your top demerare box that's full of honey, bruising all of the cappings, putting it underneath the brood box, doing an Adir, do it at any point in the season, and just letting the bees move it up. The bees hate having honey underneath their brood nest because they don't— it's more difficult to defend, so they move it up really, really quickly, especially if it's not starting to set. And then that way you're never extracting out of a frame that has been tainted with amitraz. You're just extracting out of your supers, and that is a really good method, and that is exactly what we do. Uh, good evening, good evening, George. I'm well, hope you're well. Uh, Lynn says she made a Flow Hive hybrid. Directions on their site, it had 3 Flow Hive frames in the middle with 2 regular deep frames with comb. You just use an 8-frame setup. That sounds pretty cool. My original Flow Hive, I've got it set up as— it was double brood, but it's not double brood anymore, but it's like a Flow Hive super and then a normal super as well, just because they've not got enough space and they're gonna swarm. Oh, definitely peppermint tea in an insulated cup. Living the dream. Right, so Pete says looking at spending this year getting everything and preparing yourself to get bees next spring. Very, very good planning. If that was me, I'd just jump in and get it. I'm so, so bad when it comes to just wanting to get stuff done, or just like I have some— I have like an idea that comes into my mind and then that's it. Like I got a nice pizza oven in the garden. You can— there is a video on the YouTube channel of me building my pizza oven. And then I saw an Ooni pizza oven 20% off, and I thought I could have that. So I ordered one, and it came this week, and it's amazing, and it's so much better than mine, and it's just so much easier to cook on. I could talk about food all day, so I'll stop talking about food now. I'm also going to double brood this year to hopefully have big strong colonies for winter. Would you stick with the previous advice and stop feeding once they're built over 8 frames? So, so yeah, because, because what though, what you'll find in a double brood configuration, if you, if you continue feeding like that, you'll end up with lots of stores, lots of feed being stored in the brood nest. So if you're going to double brood them, just take the benefit of what double brood gives you, which is it reduces the chances of them swarming, and it especially reduces the chances of them swarming when you put the second brood box on if it's foundation. Just like there's no way they're going to swarm whilst you've got a box of foundation directly above the brood nest. So take, take that for what it is and just, yeah, enjoy it while it lasts. And then your second comment there said exactly that, so new box would be foundation, I wouldn't feed through it and just, uh, enjoy it. Can you demerest split your Flow Hive or are the boxes a non-standard size? So I, I kind of looked at doing something like that last year, but I don't, I don't know if it worked. It, it didn't work as well as I would have liked it to work. And then the problem of like the brood going up, I don't know, it just doesn't work. It doesn't work as well. Uh, I did, I did do it. I'm pretty sure I did it last year as a video, but they didn't do what I wanted them to do. But I might give it another go. I, I feel, I feel like I need to kind of like crack the Flow Hive, but I'm struggling. at the moment with my limited Flow Hive knowledge. Weather in Aberdeenshire has been rotten and the OSR is only really starting to flow now as the last fortnight has been winter. Hoping the next fortnight is better. Have you seen the next fortnight? It is pretty grim. I, I keep on thinking, is this just me being like a natural beekeeper or a natural pessimist or both? Or, or is it just like— is it worse this year? I think it is worse this year as it. Like, we normally have like a little spell, but we've had nothing this year. It has been grim. Oh, I've taken that one personally. Any further plans for livestream guests? Not enough for Damien. So, uh, no, it's difficult getting guests, you know. People aren't up for doing it. I've been pestering Chris Manton, he's not up for doing it. I've done Richard, I don't want to pester Richard again. Done Griff, don't want to pester Griff again. Um, but yeah, no one wants to come on. I love it with— I love it when people come on because it means I don't have to answer questions and I can just sit back and listen to people who properly know what they're talking about answer questions. Great. But no, no more plans. You know, you can pester people and ask them to come on. My show is always welcome. It's not really a show, is it? My stream is always welcome to anyone who wants to come on, so Pest to them. Say, go on to Lawrence's one, it'd be good. Right, 2 hives sitting side by side on the same hive stand, uh, both swarms I picked up in the last year, both year '22, 2 queens. One is full of bees, the other 2 to 3 frames of brood, no disease. Why do I requeen? So possibly drift, you might be getting drift there. Possibly one that's a dud, and you, you'll get this if you've got one that's got like a dud queen in it, not very good, and one And one that's thriving. When the bees come back in and they see like a really busy entrance and one that's not really got anything going on at it, I know which hive I'd be going into if I was a returning worker bee. I'd be going into the one that looked really buzzing, excuse the pun. So it sounds like a duff queen, so I would be looking at requeening. Another thing you can do in that scenario, a bit more if you like, depends if you're a risk taker or or not. I've done this in the past, not sure whether I'd recommend it, but it does work, is just swap the hives over. If the queens are good, that, that equalizes them pretty quick. And I don't know what it is, they don't seem to kill the queen if you do that. It doesn't matter what hive they came from, it's like they kind of, they know if they've been out foraging and they come back to a hive to not kill the queen. I don't think I've ever had a hive or queen killed by reversing them. like that. And then if you wanted to, you could swap frames of brood over. I wouldn't swap frames of brood over because, you know, you say you've got no disease on there, you don't know if you're not— you've not got disease on there. Could have disease, could have EFB, and it's just not showing. Um, and then the last thing you want to be doing is swapping frames around, or reversing them for that matter. So I would potentially just look at requeening the one that's a bit of a duffer. Um, and also, they're swarms. So you say they're both swarms that you picked up last year, both year like 2022 queens. So is it, is it because they're like, they're marked yellow and that's how you know they're 2022, or is it just you caught them in 2022? Because if you caught them in 2022 and they're not marked, they could be 3 or 4 years old, and it could just be that they're really old. But hopefully that's helpful. I really should answer some of the questions on the, um, the ask me a question. I think there is— I'm gonna have to answer, I'm gonna be here all night. 14 questions on there. So, okay, let me answer a couple on there and I'll come back. Some of them are easy. So Ed Walton says, do you sell complete hives and where would you recommend I buy a package of bees? So no, we don't sell complete hives, we only sell nucs. Did do complete hives for a little while, but it's like, it's, it's not easy selling full hives, not easy to package them. Um, so we don't sell them anymore. And then I'm not sure, I've seen a couple of adverts for package bees, but I'm not doing package bees anymore in terms of buying them in because, oh, they're just a pain. Like, a nuc is so much easier than a package of bees, it really is. So sorry, Ed, that's rubbish. I've given you no answers for either of those. We don't sell them, and I, I don't really have a recommendation for you other than to just rethink whether you need a package or you can go for a nuc. But if it's like a top bar hive or a very peculiar hive, maybe you do need a swarm— a package, sorry. And then Ed also asked, he's just expanded to 2 apiaries, how would you advise me to deal with hygiene and possible contamination between the hives? You only have one suit. So get another suit is my suggestion. You can pick up just like a cheap suit maybe like a Simon the Beekeeper one. I've got, I've got Simon the Beekeeper suits, got loads of them here. But if you don't have that, I would just say wash your suit after every— in between each apiary. And I know that might be a bit annoying if you've— if you're only going and doing like an hour in one apiary and you want to go and do another hour in the other apiary. If you're going to do that, I just get 2 suits. It means that there's no cross-contamination there. I would definitely do that. But then it's all the other little bits as well. So I've got like a little square bucket now with my soda solution in there, a little selection of hive tools, and that lives in the apiary, so that never comes out. So I know I'm never ever transferring any disease from apiary to apiary. But then also it's the little other things like that— my car, like I'm quite fussy now about cars and like wiping them down at the end of the day with like disinfectant and wipes, making sure I'm not doing like any stupid things like wearing the same gloves across the apiary or bringing the gloves back into the car and using the gloves on the car. Also your wellies. My standard practice now before I get back into the car, I've got disinfectant spray. I spray my wellies on the bottom, all on the— all over the wellies as well, and I just let them sit in the car, give them a good amount of disinfecting time. So there's quite, there's quite a lot to it, and that goes kind of without saying any swapping of boxes or cleaning of boxes. But those little things there I think would, would help. So just make sure that you're not doing any kind of cross-contamination, but getting another bee suit would be good. There's a couple of, there's a couple of longer questions on here. I'm going to come back to the longer questions just so I can get through the majority of them. Sorry, Matt Wootton, sorry if you're watching. If you're watching, I'm going to answer your question, so give me a shout. I'll watch, I'll watch out for the comment, but I'm going to jump over that one because it's quite long. So Tracy says, oh, not a question, she's got an Abello 12-frame poly hive and she's taken my advice and she's swapping out all the National shallows for deeps, so she's just going to have deeps. So I like that advice still, I stand by that one and we have it. As long as you can lift a box like a National deep full of honey, I think that's really good advice and it saves you money, makes it a lot bit more kind of like cost-effective. But as long as you can lift the boxes because they do get quite heavy. Looking for the best advice regarding colonies with CBPV. That's chronic bee paralysis virus. So for example, shook swarm, euthanasia, additional varroa treatments, what do you recommend? So luckily we've not had— I reckon I've had one mild case of CBPV, so I'm not best place to give you detailed advice on it, but I know a lot of the things have been debunked in terms of what people said about removing the floor and letting the bees drop out. One thing I do know though is that you see it a lot more in the spring and you see it a lot more when the bees are congested. So even just getting some additional space in there, getting some— maybe doubling up the brood size, maybe additional supers on there should ease the congestion and then ease the transmission from bee to bee, and then hopefully they sort it out for themselves. Uh, next question on here from says he found my overwinter 2022 queen in his hive with a new queen this week that wasn't there last week, happily getting on, but the news— the new queen's wings have been chewed off. 4 feet from this hive had a nuc raising a queen cell. Could it be that the new queen has gone on a mating flight and returned to the wrong hive? The nuc is still queenless. So no, I would just say that that's— that they probably bald the new queen. You see that if they bald her. Um, so it— I don't know, there might, might be a swarm, might be a supersedure, and then they've had to try and make a decision on which queen they want. And maybe they've just— maybe like the original queen and the supersedure queen have had a fight and then the supersedure queen has been like slightly damaged, and then the bees have rejected her and they've bald her and they're like chewing her wings. You see that a bit after they've been bald, that you can get chewed wings. It's cool though. I just, I love it when you get 2 queens in a hive. It's very fun. Uh, I'm just going to quickly, quickly finish off the questions on here and then I can come back to the chat one. So Matthew also says you take your supers off and varroa treat on the 15th of August and this generates bumper honey crops. Definitely does. Does this also apply to your heather apiary? Your main crop is heather. So a few people have asked that. So with, with the heather, if my main crop was heather, I would do things slightly differently, and I'd probably do an Apivar treatment in the spring, early spring. So when you go in like 15th of Feb, something like that, or maybe even later than that, maybe like 1st of March, and go in for an 8-week treatment for Apivar then. And I know that's slightly different, and you'd still need to do something Like after the heather. But then you would also get that benefit of like your bees being really, really free of mites early on in the year, which would hopefully give you the same bump going into the heather. We noticed this back when we didn't do it the other way though. The ones at the heather were the worst by far when it came to them struggling through winter as a result of like the impact of varroa viruses. But it's interesting you say like, so somebody came back and said, well, I don't even take my bees up to the heather until the 12th of August. This is never going to work for me. And I, I said, that's way too late. Like, definitely for us in North Wales, we find the last, last week, maybe even like 10 days of July, is when we get the majority of the heather honey coming in, and then it trickles off. So you could almost say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick to those principles there and say, right, come the 15th of August, I'm— that's it, I'm done. And you probably wouldn't get as much honey You definitely would restrict your heather honey crop by doing that, but you'd have healthy bees. I wouldn't do that. You'd be foolish to do that, to knock so much heather honey off. There's other ways of doing it. But yeah, that advice doesn't apply if it's heather honey. Hi, how are your early season queens produced, please? How far off are your UK mated queens? So early season queens produced, they come from Malta, uh, F1. So they're just F0 reeder queen grafted and then they're open mated at F1. And then we're quite a way off for UK mating. We're going to be middle of June, I would say, at the earliest. At the moment I'm planning— I, I was planning this week and I'm not. I've knocked it back another week because I'm just not happy with the weather at the moment. And, and I know that it will flick and I'll be like, damn, I'm too late. but it's, um, I just, I've just not got the time for it to go wrong first time around, right? He says he has 6 hives, only, uh, only second season, but must spend a good 2 hours a week on inspection, sometimes longer. How are you managing to inspect all of your colonies, make films, rear queens, package queens, extract honey, and still have a full-time job outside of Black Mountain Honey? I need some of your speed as I expand. I don't know, I don't know how I do all that. It's true, it is manic. So the inspection side of things, I just get proper militant with my inspections, especially if it's nice weather. Like, this, this might sound quite bad, but I shake the bees off every frame. I just pull them out, it doesn't matter if the queen's on there, just shake them into the colony like that, look at the frame, and all I'm looking for is swarm cells. If there's not swarm cells on there, it's going back in. As long as I see eggs, that's it, they're fine. And if I don't see eggs, I don't really— as long as I don't see swarm cells, that's it, it's done. So you can do— if you don't find swarm cells, you can do an inspection in less than 5 minutes easily. It's when you find swarm cells that it becomes quite difficult to manage, and then you're— you've had to do other stuff like that. Making films, I do it all in a day. Rearing queens, again, the rearing queens is kind of done in cycles, so you, you batch up your time. It's not too had. Package queens, I've got that, got the knack down for that one now. Extracting honey is laborious and takes long, and I have to take time off work to do that. And then yeah, full-time job, non-negotiable. But you get, you get better, you get better with the practice. Right, Eric Wilson, sorry, I'm not going to answer yours. This is a re— it's a really long, um, one there. I'm gonna have to look at that again another time. Dan says, what would be the best practice to move bees from a National Hive to a Langstroth? So don't shook swarm them, definitely don't do that. I'm pretty sure that you can just fit the top bars to the top. I've done, I've done this before, I can't remember. Put me on the spot there. I'll do that on a video, that one, because I'm pretty sure there's, there's a method of fixing to the top bars, a fixing. So I'll have a look at that one. William West says, how long after doing a split, uh, can you bring the nuc back to transfer it from a hive? Let me read that again. He says, after doing a split into a nuc, how long do I need to remove the nuc before I can bring it back and transfer to a hive? So I think that was, I think that was last one, in that I would leave it always 6 weeks. If you're taking a nuc out outside of the apiary, leave it for 6 weeks before you bring it back because they kind of have, um, they'll just start returning to the hive. Right, so there we go. I'm going to close— I'm going to close down that spreadsheet. Amazingly, we've been on for an hour already and I'm about an inch into my peppermint tea. Right, so I'm going to come back up to where I finished, was somewhere around here. If I've missed you, comment again. Right, says, new beekeeper, just awaiting my bees. I have joined an association, but your channel is invaluable, so thank you very much, Lee. I will have 2 nationals. How many nucs do you think I will need? I'm not sure. I'm not sure what that question is. So you have 2 nationals? Oh, you're just awaiting your bees, right? So, so just 2 nucs, that's all you need if you've got 2 nationals. Just get 2 nucs to put in there. Probably get away with 1 nuc, to be honest. Get 1 nuc, build it up, and just make a split. That's, that's what I would do, cheaper way of doing it. Oh, there you go, to safely split. So one nuc, definitely just get one nuc, build it up, feed it. And my rule as well, what I was saying before about stop feeding when you're, when you're doubling up, just ignore that. If you're, if you're, uh, doing it to split, just keep on feeding, and then you can kind of— you, when you make the split, you've got frames of stores to split as well. I just split a 5-frame nuc yesterday. How long will before I add a queen? Um, so I personally wouldn't split nucs before they've built up to like 10 frames would be my minimum. Um, but, but you can do it. You can do it at this time of the year. It's better to do it at this time of the year before the wasps start getting involved. How long before you add a queen? So if you split it, I would wait 8 days, take all of the emergency queen cells down, and then add your queen in. Give it 24 hours, 48 8 hours and then pop the tabs and then leave it for a week. Uh, Steve says, where did I get my light from? I got it made in Ukraine. Wrong hand. No, there you go. Made in Ukraine, like that. There it is. Yeah, cool, isn't it? I really like it. Something a bit different. Uh, Grant says, hi, great channel. What mating nucs do you use or find the most cost-effective? Apidex too expensive for what they are? And how come nobody uses 5-frame nucs that too fit on national hives? Paul in Ireland. So we still use the BS Honeybees 2-in-1s. That's the way we do ours. And I went through the exact same thought process, which was like, unless you're doing like thousands of queens, I don't think Apideas kind of really work. They don't— they work, they work perfectly well, but they don't become an efficient use of your resources. unless you're solely doing queens and you have like a queen operation and a nuc operation. But for anything smaller scale like us, it's much better to have something that's kind of dual purpose, and the 2-in-1 BS Honeybees nucs is exactly that. Don't get the Correx divider though. Oh my God, I hate their Correx dividers, but the metal dividers they do are perfect. So it becomes quite expensive, but they, uh, they are the best ones. And then you can, you can rear queens in them all year, and at the end of the year you can either overwinter 2 3-frame nucs, or you can combine them and overwinter 1 6-frame nuc. Gives you lots and lots of options. Hi Lawrence, love your content, keep up the good work. Thank you very much, Adam. Can you easily split a double brood configuration to a single brood? I overwintered on a double brood and the colony is huge and needs to be split. So yeah, that's the easiest split in the world. You just— if you want to do a walkaway split and you've got double brood, it is the easiest walkaway split in the world, which is just get another floor, get another roof, and just put one of the— one of the brood boxes right next to the hive, like 6 inches away, and just leave them. And the one that's got the queen— you don't even need to check for the queen— the one that's got the queen in just carries on as normal, and the one that hasn't got the queen in creates a new queen really, really easy. Uh, Adam says— oh, definitely not a silly question, good question— uh, what's your preference, poly or wood brood box? Um, so previously, like early, early videos, it was always poly because it was so much cheaper and it— people hadn't really— I, I'm not like I was like a trailblazer, but definitely not that many people had poly boxes back then. It wasn't anywhere near as popular as it is now. But my big benefit was I think the bees do a lot better in them, a lot more insulation, a lot more watertight. But forget all of that, it's half the price. And now the half the price is gone. I think if anything, they're more expensive than wood, probably like quite a bit more expensive than wood. So if you take the money element away from it, I would always choose a poly box. I do a lot— I love my Bello poly boxes, I really do. But if you're factoring in this, if you're buying like 30 hives and you're looking at it now and thinking like it's quite a lot more expensive, and the wooden boxes are very durable and my bees do well in the wooden boxes and they don't build up quite as quick, but they catch up just as well. So I don't think it makes a massive difference. What I would say though is not all poly is equal. So choose choose a good brand of poly. My shout would be for Abello, although I do do their social media, so I am definitely biased. But I do like I do like Abello ones. But yeah, and and also that's what I was going to say. If you're going to go with if you're going to go with wood, go with seconds quality wood. Definitely go with seconds because it is so much cheaper and it's not that much. Like it's basically just as good. Might not look as pretty, but it is just as good. So Ian, did I get a smart hive from Modern Beekeeping? No, I didn't, and I'm kind of, hmm, not 100% sure why I didn't get that in the end. But I did get a very nice letter from Flow Hive's legal team asking me to take down the video, so maybe that's got something to do with it. Uh, Adam says, are you thinking of doing any queen rearing courses? So I would love to do queen rearing courses, and I'd love to do like introduction to beekeeping courses, and they are very much on my radar. But whilst I'm working, definitely can't do it. I just not got anywhere near enough time to organize them because I want to do them well, and I'd want to do them with like, I don't know, a rotisserie chicken or something as well, or a pizza. Um, so it's too much organization for me to do it at the moment. You have to do— have to make do with the videos if that's all right. So Mike says, do I use any commercial hives? Is there any compatibility with national equipment? Just been given 2 deserted hives untouched for 3 years but huge amount of bees but only have national equipment. So no, I don't have any commercial hives, but I'm pretty sure they are compatible. I don't know, there is some compatibility with nationals, but I'm not, I'm not 100%, so I won't go on the record as saying it's one, what it works or it doesn't work. But if you research it, I'm pretty sure there is some compatibility. Maybe you can use the supers, national supers with the commercial brood boxes, but I'm not sure. From a so Thai Fry Honey Farm says from a technical point of view, how did you get this overlay that displays the name in question? What like that you mean? Calling it. It's StreamYard. So I'm running this through StreamYard. I'm surprised that my StreamYard they normally have like a logo in the top because I downgraded. Because the free one's pretty, pretty good. Um, but yeah, it's cool, isn't it? I hope people like that. I, I've kind of come quite accustomed to doing that. Hopefully it, it makes the streams a little bit better. I sometimes click on them before I read them and then think, oh, shouldn't put that one up. Have you got any videos on honey extractors, the manual ones? Just started keeping bees after watching your videos for a year, seeing various ones. So no, and it's something that I've thought about And I did this at the beginning when I was trying to build the channel up, which was just buying stuff. I'll buy that and I'll do a review and I don't even need it. And the honey extractors is definitely one where I can't just go and buy loads of honey extractors, and companies won't give me honey extractors because understandably so, like, they cost a lot of money just to give them to me for free to do a review. And I'm not going to buy them just to do a review, uh, but I, I have bought a cheap— I had a 6-frame manual extractor, and within the first year I'd upgraded it by taking it to kind of taking it apart and put like a drill bit piece on it so I could use a drill on it, and then I broke it by going too quick. So that was my experience with manual extractors, like just they're so hard, so much hard work. So if you're looking to save money, like I would probably go down the route of like a crush and strain, or maybe like a hydro press with plastic frames. I think that's like a cheaper, easier solution. And then because you put in new frames of foundation in each year, like, you're stopping the bees swarming. So if you just want a little bit of honey and an easy life and some bees in your garden, like, by having drawn comb, you'll end up with a lot more honey and you end up with not more swarmy bees, but you're giving the bees every, like, a lot more opportunity to swarm because you're not giving them the work to do from drawing out the foundation. Um, sorry, I've gone off on a massive tangent there. I enjoyed your video the other day of, of my queen. It looks good, doesn't it? I'm— I want to know who these people are who don't like my queens though. Uh, but anyway, let's answer the question. Um, you're definitely coming on for a chat. I think some— I saw further on down there that someone had voted for you, so you just tell me time. As long as it's after half 8 in the evening, I'm good any day whenever you're up for it. But you said, hi, you've got a couple of colonies that aren't coming up into the super, not drawn out, seem to have plenty of bees and brood, tempted to put a drawn super on to encourage them. Have you had this? So yeah, I remember all the time when I was starting out, I was thinking, how do I get these bees up into the super. And I just find they just come up on their own when they're ready. Like, you can tempt them up there all you want. Some people are spraying it with, with sugar syrup, and drawn comb definitely tempts them up there. So if you've got, if you've got drawn super, what I would say— and if, if people have got drawn supers, what I say is don't have, don't have like 9 supers of foundation and 1 super of drawn comb. have 10 all of the same with 9 frames of foundation and 1 frame of drawn comb in the middle for each one. That 1 frame of drawn comb, really, like, if they're ready to go up, they'll go straight up into it, whereas if it's all foundation, they can be a little bit reluctant to go up there. So I would mix them up a little bit and that should work. But, but yeah, just be patient, um, they will go up when they're ready, and it's probably still a bit cold. in Yorkshire. Uh, he had some hives swarm. The bees are backfilling brood box with nectar. I'm worried that when a new mated queen is introduced, there will be no space to lay. What do you do with 14 by 12 frames of nectar? So if you've got 14 by 12 frames of nectar, they will move it up, given sufficient space to go up when the queen is ready to lay. But when the queen isn't laying, they seem to get like a bit lazy with it, and sometimes they cap it over. So if it's capped I know it won't be capped if it's nectar, but if you've got capped stores in there, bruise the stores, put it in between frames of brood, they will move it up. But just make sure there is plenty of space up above them, and, uh, and they should clear it out. And they definitely will clear it out when— if they've got space above them and the queen wants to lay, then they will clean it out. Uh, Julia says one of our hives appeared to be swarming over the weekend, but their behavior and formation different to what we had experienced previously. Could there have been drones leaving the hive? So, um, maybe. But what, what I, what I definitely saw the other day was a, a virgin queen going out on a mating flight. So what you could have been seeing there is like a cast swarm going out. And it— so the, the virgin will go and then you take a little swarm with them, so it might not look exactly like kind of what's going on normally. It might look like a smaller version of a swarm. So you get that, you get cast swarms that don't come back, but also if you've got a virgin in a colony that's requeening, it looks like you get a little entourage that can go out with her. I've seen that a couple of times now, and then they come, and then they come, she flies off, and they kind of a bit get a bit lost, and then they just all come back, and then the virgin comes back at a later, like later on in the day. So it could have been, could have been something like that. Dale says, can I and will I need to do a demerit in the first year to prevent swarming and maximize bees for winter? Not looking at honey this year, just want 2 strong colonies for winter. Adam is welcome. So if you, if you just want 2 strong colonies for winter, the easiest way to do it is do a split. If you've got one colony and you want to split to 2 colonies, just, just target the split, go on a double brood. Moth in here now. Go on double brood, build them up to the point where they're like 80% full in that double brood configuration. You can have supers on at the same point, have 2 supers on, make sure they've always got enough space so they're very likely not to swarm due to being restricted. And then just do like a side-by-side split is the best way of doing it. I would add in a mated queen though, um, not, not because we sell queens, but just if it's your first year You don't want to— you don't want to have to go through the process of letting them requeen naturally and then it failing, and then having to find the virgin, and then trying to fix a broken split. Where for the price of a mated queen, you know it's gonna be pretty much seamless and you're gonna end up with 2 good colonies. And then at that point, like, you could easily get a nuc and build that up into a couple of colonies and still get honey in the first year. Just depends if the weather wants to play ball. That's what I would be doing there. So Harry says, have I put my supers on yet? So I have now. Hadn't yesterday, and I'd left it too late. So there we go. Next year they're going on end of April, um, no matter what the weather. Gundog says, can honey be extracted from a box which is being vaped with oxalic acid? Sorry, oxalic acid or apibioxal? Good question. So legally, you shouldn't have supers on when you're doing oxalic acid, and yeah, you shouldn't really have it on ever. We don't do that. It should just be the brew box only. But in America, they've proven that, yep, that is absolutely fine and regulated as well, which is you can use oxalic acid whenever you want with supers on, and you can extract honey from those supers. So seems okay in America, definitely not okay in the UK. Uh, how much honey do you— sorry, Harry says, how much honey do you get from your hives as an average each year? So we, like, we're still really low. My averages are low, they're like 50-55 pounds, but it's North Wales, and like 100% of the fields are just sheep. So we just have like bramble, a bit of clover, and the trees and some wildflowers. We don't have any arable crops. Um, there's quite a lot, quite a lot more oilseed rape around this year actually up here, but we're still not close to the majority of it. But our averages are not high, um, mainly due to, yeah, that North Wales, so the weather's not as good, but also the crops that are available. I would like to think if we were further south, we would be getting closer to like I don't know seventy eighty pounds something like that. Gundogs again, a vote for pure Yorkshire honey as a guest here, right? You're coming on, Andy. Make it happen. You're always welcome. Dale says thank you for the answers and comments. Enjoy it while it lasts about swarming made you laugh out loud. Yeah, you definitely enjoy it. Uh, Men of Gwent, of that name, says, had a flow on a couple of weeks ago, so added supers. Now weather means potential feed. Should I remove all of the art— the art field supers? Is that like half field supers? So if— I wouldn't, I wouldn't be removing them unless, like, at this point, unless they are on the brink of absolute starvation, I wouldn't be removing supers because the taps will come on, like, I think Friday, Saturday, there's like a little tube 2-day spell of weather. And if you get a 2-day spell of good weather and, uh, like the flow is on, which it will be, they're going to bring in a crazy amount. So I would, I would be holding my breath and just waiting for that good weather to return. Another vote for Andy there. Andy, you coming on? Uh, says, will leaving a frame of— sorry, will leaving a frame foundationless make the bees work harder and therefore reduce the risk of swarming. So doing that at this point of the year will guarantee you a frame of drone brood, which could be good. You might want that. Um, so I, I— it will make them, yes, work slightly harder compared to a frame of foundation, uh, but I would just use a frame of foundation. I think that seems to suppress the swarming instinct just as well and give you the right kind of brood. You don't want you don't want frames of drone brood. Um, interestingly though, do that in autumn, kind of like, I don't know, September time, and they draw it out like perfect worker brood. It's amazing how they change it depending on the time of the year. Well, I'm doing quite well, I'm getting towards the bottom now. So if you're enjoying the stream, if you're enjoying my new tempo, uh, do hit the thumbs up, much appreciated. I split a hive this week. If the new queen fails to mate, can I reintroduce Reintroduce the original queen, should this be done in a cage or just drop her straight back in? So if the new queen fails to mate, can you reintroduce the original queen? So yeah, you can reintroduce any original queen, but you will need to go and kill the, the virgin that's failed to mate, and then you will need to do like a slower introduction, uh, from the other queen. However, if that other queen is off laying elsewhere, you can Just pick up that queen from a laying hive and just chuck her in. But like, I've done that, I've done videos on that, I did that the other day. It does work, but it's a little bit risky. Like, we have so many queens that we can take risks like that. It— that can fail doing that. So if it was me, I would probably cage her up and go through the process of making the, the fail split hopelessly queenless and go through the proper introduction process. So JK Photography says, hi Lawrence, hope you're good. I'm very well, thank you. He says, got 2 of your queens received in perfect condition. Thank you so much, JK, thanks for the orders. Uh, Nicholas says, OSR flow starts here in southern Sweden this week. We have around 18 degrees during the day but around freezing at night, but I hope the flow gives a good amount of honey. Interesting that about the freezing at night. This is what we find in terms that was what I find, and speaking to other bee farmers, is one of the really important factors of getting a good flow, especially on the oilseed rape, is actually the nighttime temperature. And I've never really understood why. I've discussed it with a bee farmer the other day, and he was saying that it's to do with the fact that it's not— the oilseed rape isn't evolved fully for pollination by bees, and a lot of the pollination happens at night, so it's like moths things like that. Um, I don't know how true that is, could just be, could be a load of rubbish, but it made sense. And but he said if you look for when you get really high nighttime temperatures, that's when you get like serious flows. So it'd be interesting what you're saying there, Nicholas, in terms of 18 degrees during the day but freezing around night. Maybe that will restrict the flow, but I'm, I'm not sure. Interesting though. I hope it goes well. Dave B just ordered a new queen. So that Dave, uh, Valerie says, is it okay to take a large frame of capped honey out because it was too tight to get in and out of the hive because it's stuck together? So yeah, anything like that is fine, um, especially this time of the year. You can properly roll queens, and when I say roll, you're pulling out the frames and you spin them around and roll them because everything's so, so tight together. You see a lot of people as well, like on a— if you're using a wooden National and they're trying to get 12 frames in there. And 12 frames for me in a wooden nuc doesn't fit. Like, I know when you, when you buy them new and you put them all in, they fit, and then when you get the bees in them and they swell up a bit and they get propolised, they don't fit. So I would always go 11 frames and like a DM1 dummy board gives you a little bit more breathing space. But any big frames like that, especially if they've drawn them kind of big outside of where they should have drawn them, I'd just be taking them out, cutting them back, and then starting again. Uh, Jim Jim has a 2-frame hive that uses a drill on, works fine for now. I did enjoy when I put my drill on that hive, like I thought I was like some sort of like mad inventor, and I think it lasted about 3 extractions, like 3 days, and then I broke it because I got too— I got too like, uh, eager with the trigger, and I started off and it was like just going around slowly, and I thought, let's go for it, finger down. And then I heard clunk, and I thought, oh damn. But yeah, it was good fun. Oh, there we go. This is why, this is why this is so good. Matthew Godfrey says he has a few commercial boxes but run on nationals and can use national frames on both. So there we go, didn't know that. Cheers, Matthew. And Chris doubles down on it as well. So yes, Lawrence, you can use national equipment with commercial floors, roofs, etc. There is a 3/16 of an inch difference, but nobody makes commercial parts other than brood and supers. The rest of the kit is national. Excellent. Uh, Zach Price says, how about getting Wally Short on your stream? He would be always welcome. Would love that. Harbor Honey said, last week we had eggs and larvae in the supers— in the supers, nothing in the brood box. Tried to smoke them down at the time, thinking queen was up top. Yesterday we now have fresh eggs in the brood and super. Um, definitely double-check the queen excluders. I've heard that before, and you get like a dent if you've got like metal wire ones. If you've dropped them or something, you can get like a little, a little gap, or you might have been sold them by a dodgy supplier. Um, but there you've got a queen that can get through the queen excluder almost certainly. Um, interested, interested to see. I'll just put this up here. Queen excluder is all okay, have moved supers under brood box now, 2 queens or small queen? I— yeah, I would say either small queen or dodgy queen excluder, because it might look okay, but there might be— the sizing might be wrong. I don't know. There was a batch, I can't remember who it was, who the batch was from, with queen excluders where they were just too small. Uh, I'm not gonna guess because I can't remember who it was, but it was like a big beekeeping company. and the bees couldn't get through. So it wasn't that the queens could get through, but no bees could fit through the queen excluder, and loads of people lost loads of swarms because of it. I think that was quite an expensive mistake. Oh, love questions like this. What has been your greatest success as a beekeeper so far? Your best feeling as a keeper was discovering a mated queen in my split to a 5-frame nuc. Yeah, that's— it is good. That's probably one of my best feelings. Like, queen rearing is amazing. And thinking— and I'd love to do like a bit more, more breeding, but until I can do artificial insemination, I'm not gonna— I'm not gonna venture down that path. I'm quite happy just rearing queens. But rearing queens is incredibly fun. And like, the, the, uh, my 8— my 8-nuc long hive that I've got doing that last year and getting what I thought was 8 out of 8, but only— it was only 7 out of 8 because one did turn drone laying. But stuff like that where you kind of think, oh, that worked, like I had a plan and set out a plan and it worked really well. I love stuff like that. Probably only happens like 3% of the time, and then the other 97% of the time the bees just do what they want. But I would say greatest success as a beekeeper so far, it's got to be the YouTube channel, I would say. I know that's not quite like as a beekeeper, but I never expected I'd be sitting here Or 2158 on the King's coronation bank holiday, kind of talking to people in my living room, drinking peppermint tea, having a great time. So I do love my YouTube channel; it is good fun. Thanks very much, Cheers Steve. Right, so Mem says building my frames when I put the foundation in is brittle. Is there anything I can do to stop the foundation from breaking when putting them in? So it's annoying when that happens. Isn't it? You you can refresh foundation with like a hair dryer. That does work, works really well, but is quite laborious going through. You have to do it sheet by sheet, but it does really like it makes it a little bit well quite a lot more flexible. Takes away the brittle brittleness of it. But also the other one is just not not using wired foundation. As soon as you move over to a wired frame and wireless foundation, it doesn't matter how brittle it is because all you're doing is just lifting it up, resting it on some wires, and just putting an electric current through it and letting it embed in itself. Um, but yeah, really annoying. I've got loads of foundation like that. It's really, really brittle. Uh, Mike says, what could be the cause of just hatching bees— oh, just, just hatching bees being dead in the cell with their heads looking out as if about to emerge but are dead. Um, almost certainly like some sort of varroa issue, that sounds like. And the, the bees are just like, yeah, not dealing with that. Um, sorry, my eyes, my eyes are going a little bit— I've got a light. I don't know if anyone can see that there. I've got like a light in front of it and it is getting me in the eyes. So there we go. Uh, that sounds like varroa. I would do a test, see how many varroa you've got to do it, do a drop or do like an alcohol wash or something like that and have a look. Doesn't sound good. Anything like that, people, more than happy for you to email me stuff, blackmountainhoney@gmail.com. If you've got like a picture you want to share with me, um, and maybe we can do that on like— if people want to send in questions on the thing, I think you can send me pictures to go with it as well, and then I can kind of on here, I'm pretty sure, yeah, I can present, I can put pictures up, we can have a look. So that could be fun. Maybe we'll do that next week. Uh, Chris says his original boss said the same about honey flows. It's the nights when you can't sleep because of the heat that the bees really pack it in. Yeah, it's interesting. It does make sense, doesn't it, about the nighttime pollinators? I've never really thought about like moths as being like kind of prolific pollinators, but you know what, you go outside at nighttime, there's moths everywhere, isn't there? So This makes sense. Uh, Keith says, what do I think of the entrance? So I, I do, I do like them. My colony that's got the 3, like, the underfloor entrances in, it's doing really well. But I don't necessarily put it down to that, but it is very, very strong, doing really well. So I do like it. And I also like the fact that you don't actually have to have a floor with it, so you can do away with the floor completely, which is pretty cool. Uh, John says, hi there from Ireland, love the channel, keep up the great work. Thanks very much, John. Um, Marcus says, earlier you mentioned you do have a day job, go and tell us what you do, I'm intrigued. Also, the mic is still working perfectly. Glad it's working good. I'm going to listen back and compare it because when the guy said about my mic, I started to upgrade like audiovisual equipment, but I did go back and listen to the streams and thought, yeah, you know what, he's got a point, it doesn't It doesn't sound as good. And then on my other streams, I've got my Rode wireless mic, which is which is another expensive piece of kit. So I'm looking forward to going back and listening to this here. But my my day job, I am a project manager, and I yeah, it's weird because I work with a guy that's got same name as you. But yeah, project manager in construction. Right. How were the Jonathan Getty colonies? Doing? You have 2 and they're very calm, nearly a full super. So I can't actually tell you how they're getting on because all will be revealed on the channel membership page this week. Genuinely, there's kind of like quite a big update on the Jonathan Getty AMM colonies this week on the channel members, and it'll probably be released like— I'd be like 5, 6 weeks away for everyone else because there's quite a lot of videos going through. So I know, sorry, I shouldn't shamelessly plug it like that and leave you all hanging, but I will leave you hanging. Right, I'm 6, um, I'm 6 messages down from the bottom here now, so here we go. If you've got another question, stick it in the bottom, you'll definitely get answered. Uh, Jean says, Lawrence, hello, what is the best type of beeswax to put in my new frames? Thank you for any advice. Um, so I wasn't really sure there's like different types of beeswax to put in your frames. I would just get, get good quality foundation from any of the reputable suppliers out there, and I'm sure it will all be beeswax, not mixed with anything else. Thanks, Peter. I'm glad you're enjoying it. Peter has been a— Peter has been a member for a long time. He's great, and he sends me like a watercolor— no pressure to do this every year, but he sent me a watercolor postcard for the last couple of years, and now I love them. They're my favorite cards. I don't get any cards from anyone And I get one from Peter and I really like it. So thanks, Peter. Uh, Mike says, great, found one of them, uh, found them on one of the deserted hives I mentioned earlier, so varroa is most likely. Okay, previous question there. Um, Mem says, can you tell YouTube to stop putting adverts while your live stream is on? How annoying. Sorry, Mem, gotta put the adverts on though. Can't, can't do it without the adverts. Um, I think, I think it's YouTube telling me that they like the stream if they put adverts on it, so I'll take it as a compliment. Um, Blue Lab says, out of the 4 queens I've had a few this year, 3 are laying like mad. The last one only went in on Friday and I cut the tabs on Saturday. Hopefully she'll be doing the same by the next inspection. That seems like a plug, doesn't it? It's like I paid you to say that. Thank you very much, Blue Lab. It— I'm, I'm always amazed when putting kind of like my queens in the colonies, like the, the F1 Buckfast that we get from Malta, like the transformation and the speed in which they lay up the frames. Like, because I— when you get a lot of colonies, you're not, you're not as invested in each colony, so you're not going in like religiously every 7 days. Sometimes you say, well, I don't need to go into that one again. And I remember going in and like putting a queen in, and then you go back like 3 weeks later and you're just like Wow, it's just like there was no brood and now there is 10 frames of wall-to-wall brood on 14 by 12 covering everything. So they are, they are good queens. Uh, I've got— I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do 10 more minutes, um, because I've been doing it for an hour and 35 minutes now. I've really enjoyed tonight though, but I'm gonna do 10 more minutes. So if you do have any last minute questions, I'm, I'm on the last question as we speak now, so get them in. Um, And I will answer them. So Simon says, I'll have a virgin queen emerging this week sometime. What chances does she have getting mated with the poor weather at the moment? So if she's an emerging virgin this week, so what day are we on? Monday. So say she emerges like tomorrow or Wednesday, I think it's like 3 or 4 days before they're even gonna get mature enough to go out and mate. But Saturday looks pretty good. Especially around like up here, it's like 18, 19 degrees, fair, not much wind. So if she emerges like today or tomorrow and you've got— you only need one good day, one good day, and they will go out and they'll get fully mated and they will never leave the hive again. So chances are pretty good. Like, I'm just looking at the weather here now. Yeah, so it's quite a lot of rain, but you just need that one good day around 20-ish degrees, even like 18, 19 degrees, they'll probably probably go out and, and make the most of it. But yeah, so there we go. Once again, thanks everyone for coming on and doing the live streams. Like, I love coming on and doing these. I've really enjoyed going out and filming all my videos this week. I've not filmed videos for ages, and it feels like the season— this week feels like the season is properly getting underway again. So I'm going to go and do some more videos. I will continue doing these live streams though. Uh, because I know that this is the point of the year where people do want to ask questions. And as I, as I always say with these things, like, don't take my answers as, oh, Lawrence said it, so that's definitely right. Like, it's— I don't know everything at all, and there's plenty of people watching this stream here now that know tons more than me. So just continue asking questions and asking other people and getting lots of different, different opinions and trying things out yourself and and try to form your own opinion. Um, and as I've just done my kind of like closing speech there, there's like 6 more questions come up, so I will answer them. I did say I'm going to do 10 more minutes, so here we go. Just did a couple of splits, bees highly aggressive. They were docile before winter, same queen. Is this normal or could it be the weather? So definitely the weather massively impacts it. And then if you've done the splits and you've taken the queen away, taking a queen away from a colony can make them can go horrible as well. But the weather really is the worst one because I find it's the older bees, the bees that will go out foraging, that are the most aggressive bees. So if you take them out of the equation and they're off out gorging themselves on nectar and coming back, you're just left with all of the pussycats and the nice young bees, and it makes inspection so much easier. So queenlessness and the weather has a massive impact. Been having issues with a lot of varroa this spring, and Formic Pro has worked great. All hives are doing fine now since treatment. Single drone cell holding 10 mites was a surprise. Wow, I've never ever seen that kind of levels in a single drone cell. That is crazy, 10 mites. Good to hear that Formic Pro has worked though. I really don't like Max or Formic Pro. I can't get on with any formic acid-based formulation. I know it's, it's powerful stuff and it is effective and it does work, but like the temperature parameters for me are just a bit too fine for not killing your queens. Um, but good, good to hear it's working for you and getting those mites down. Uh, Claire says, if a clipped queen lands in the long grass, will she be able to get out of it, i.e., back up under the hive floor? So probably not. Um, that happens quite a lot, but I, I like— I clip all of my queens and I rarely come to a colony and they've swarmed swarmed and you've got like capped swarm cells and you don't find the queen, I would say 90% of the time I come back, capped swarm cells and the queen with the clipped wing is just like walking around the hive thinking, oh, that was annoying. The other alternative is that you've got the big swarm underneath the ventilated box, your OMF floor. That happens kind of, yeah, like maybe 30% of the time as well. But I find she's just in the hive and they swarm at all. Love clipping queens, I think it's the best thing ever. What is the best time of the year to get a nuc? So it's good, early is definitely better in terms of getting the maximum amount of honey. For learning purposes and kind of easing yourself into it as a first-year beekeeper, I would say probably later is better. Get past the worst of that swarmy season, so getting them kind of first, second week of June is good. So you've missed the worst bit of the swarm season, you've missed the June gap, and you can just build them up, get them ready for winter, learn about beekeeping, and then next year is when the fun starts. Says he's going to graft off the queens I got this year. So you'd be amazed, I, I've got— I've grafted off good F1 queens before and the results you get are really good. You do get a lot of variety in there and some of them can go a bit angry. But that, that can happen with, with any colonies of bees that you can get. You get, you get variation and some can get angry. But what you definitely still get is like very prolific colonies. You still get lots and lots of honey. And then if you're grafting from them, you can just, you take the good ones and you kill the other ones and you just replace them with good genetics and keep on doing that and boosting the, the drones in your area as best you possibly can. And then you'll end up with nice stable bees at the end of it. See Bob Binney's video a while ago regarding killing the queen in around an hour, introducing a mated queen and walking it into the hive, no problem. Any thoughts? So it— you, you can do, you can do that if you've got— if you go in and kill a queen and then walk in and introduce a mated queen, and— but is that an egg-laying mated queen from within the apiary, you can just chuck it in. Yeah, it's fine, it works really well. But she does need to be like fresh. She needs to be in another colony laying an egg, and you just pluck her out and just say, right, no, don't lay that egg. And then you pop her in, and then they, they will accept her. I've done, I've done a video on that showing exactly that. It does work, but she needs to be fresh. You can't do it with a posted queen. If you do that with a posted queen, they will kill her. Like 99% of the time, and then that is a waste of money. Lots of thank-yous coming in now. I picked that one out. Is it Zova? Hi, Zova, she loves the channel. Thanks very much. Jean says thanks, Lawrence, for doing livestream. No problem. George says great at this time of the year but not too hot here. Worth noting you can't use Formic Pro with honey supers, but Max you could. However, Max seems to have been gone, can't get it anywhere. So it— I'm pretty certain it's the same company that have done it and they just rebranded. So yeah, you can't get Max anymore. And you're right, Formic Pro, you can't use it with supers, um, but Max you could use it with supers, which was— but for me, the one huge benefit of Max was that it was the only treatment that was regulated to work with supers on. So it gave you something if in the middle of the year, if you needed to get the varroa numbers then you had a tool, and now we have no tool whatsoever. The only tool I'd say we have now is what Richard Null does, which is caging, caging them, getting them broodless, and then doing something with them when they're broodless. But yeah, you're right as well, Formic Pro, this time of the year is probably quite good in terms of temperatures. Marcus says, thanks for tonight, first time watching live, and I found it very informative and also very easily listening. Thanks very much, Marcus. And finally, Julia Banks says thank you as well. So I will leave it there. Thank you everyone for your support and your questions and your engagement. I'll see you next week.