Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 72
Laurence Edwards discusses spring beekeeping in North Wales, covering double brood boxes, super placement, and timing for inspections and splits in early April. His HiveWatch data showed only 1.2 kg gain despite daily nectar, highlighting spring weather volatility. He favors poly brood boxes and emphasizes monitoring brood temperature to balance space, stores, and weather risk.
Chapters
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I love the new 7 AM slot, I'm not gonna lie. 7 AM on a Saturday every other week we do Let's Talk Bees and it works quite well for me. I do, I do like this slot and I like that I get to have my first coffee of the day whilst talking about some bees. You will notice there that I've managed to get the comments up in— I can do it, there we go— in the corner right there. So first comment is from Jean who says, I love all the information that you share with us, Laurence. Gonna miss the live stream this evening, I wish I wasn't working tomorrow. It's been 80 degrees plus in California today. Wow. Well, it's been very nice in the UK as well. It really has felt like spring has sprung. It was like 17, 18 degrees, bees flying. And what's really interesting, you'll see on a social media post that I'm going to do later today, we're starting to see the very small impact of that nectar and pollen coming in on the HiveWatch, the, the weight tracking system that I've got. And it is interesting because you I perceive this, which is, right, they've had a week, they've had a week of summer, a week of summer's been there, they've been flying every single day, loads of activity, pollen coming in, it looks like everything's good. And then when you see the hard data on what's actually going on there, which is that they're going out, they're foraging some nectar, they're bringing it back in, they're fanning it down. So you see these spikes, which is like the peak of the day when the maximum amount of nectar's come in, but it's still quite high water content, to where it gets fanned down over the evenings. So you're seeing this kind of like increasing line, but with little mini peaks and troughs along the way. But when you zoom out to the axis, you see that like really there's not a huge amount going on there. Like the, the weight of the colony is going up, but we're measuring it in 100-gram, 200-gram increments. And I think overall it's gone up about— it's a fair amount once you build it up over the whole week, but over the last week, which is beautiful sunny weather the whole way through, they've gone up by about a kilo. which is, which is good. I think it's 1.2 kilograms that colony's gone up. But then when you look back at the data and kind of see the rate that they were losing the weight before that, the weight that they were consuming the stores, you see that additional kilogram as it's a few days buffer. It's a few days buffer if it gets cold and rainy again, which, like, I'm battle-hardened now in the UK. I know that it's not— we're not into it yet. This isn't spring. We're not going to go fully into the season, at least for us in North Wales. I think there'll be I know, a little bit of a cold spell, or there'll be some rain, or there'll be something that gets thrown at us. I think, I think someone there has just said there's frost in Northern Ireland this morning. There we go. It's so changeable at this time of the year, and I guess that's the only thing that you can really bank on, is the fact that it is just— you can't bank on it at all, the weather, at the moment. So don't make— my advice to anyone is don't, don't make any rash decisions based upon kind of like a week or 10 days of weather, because it can all still definitely change. What you're much better off doing at this time of the year, I think, is just preparing yourself for what could happen next. Could there be starve next? Make sure you've got feed on hand. Could there be swarm next? Make sure you've got extra brood boxes or extra supers or whatever way you want to manage your bees. And before I jump in and go back to some of the questions there, I will say just the thing that I said for the channel members this week, which was if you're— what I did for the channel members week before that and showed it on last week's Zane's feature video, which people definitely liked, uh, so we're gonna do more of those. But what I showed was this, this, the double underbrooding as a way of protecting colonies from early season swarming and starvation, but with the intention to split. And then some people said, well, what do I do if I don't want to split? What do I do if I don't want to go double brood at this time of the year? Do I just suck it up and leave them? And I say, yeah, well, that's— that is what I do. That's what most people do, which is you, you kind of like, I want to put the supers on, but I don't want to put the supers on. I want to put them on because the bees are running out of space, and I don't want to put them on because I'm not sure of the weather. So I don't have to go and take them off again. Don't want to put the supers on for it to go cold and then you have to go, you have to go and take them all back off, which is very, very frustrating. But if you're a beginner beekeeper and you've got a couple of beehives in your garden and you are, you are worried about that, and it is a real, a very real risk at this time of the year, which is people saying don't worry about swarming, it's March. There is, there's a, there is a small risk that your bees will swarm with this weather if the brood nest becomes congested with nectar, like they will at any time of the year, but The really easy fix to that is, and it's not something that I do, but it's something that I have done and does work, which is instead of just going and putting your supers directly on your colonies above a queen excluder as the first manipulation of the year, you can put them underneath, and you can put the queen excluder underneath the brood box. So you end up having a floor, brand new super, queen excluder, and then all of your bees in the brood box, and then everything else above that. And okay, it's not ideal, and okay, within maybe 1 to 3 weeks you're gonna have to go back in and reverse it, but what it does do is it gives you all of the benefits of that double underbrooding system without the benefit of ongoing feeding. So you're effectively saying, I'm taking a punt to say that I think the bees can handle that additional space now. I'm going to put it at the bottom to start off with, with the protection of a queen excluder, so if the bees were to huddle up in some extra space, they're not going to congest that brood nest, but I'm banking that I'm not going to have to come back and feed them. You wouldn't put the super underneath if you're going to start feeding from the top anyway, so you're kind of making the decision anyway, but it's a much safer way of doing it from the beginning. So you could do that this weekend if you're looking at your colonies and thinking they are running out of space. I want to put the supers on, but I'm looking at next week and thinking it's a bit miserable and a bit rainy next week. Maybe, maybe putting the supers on isn't, isn't the best idea yet. You can put them underneath and it shouldn't do you any damage, and it will mitigate the risk of them swarming slightly. Okay, let's jump into some of the questions. That was a preamble, wasn't it? A 5, 5 and a half minute preamble. Good morning. Good morning to you Walker Bee Honey, hello. I bought a breeder queen from Lutz last year, Monticola Island mated one drone line. Is this the line you'll be using this year? When do you think will be the best time to start raising queens? So luckily for us, we've got a full ongoing collaboration now with Lutz, so any of the lines that Lutz regularly works with, we have full access to, and we also have access to Lutz's full library of connections elsewhere. So there are lots of really exciting different genetics that we'll be using and working with Lutz over the next few years. Um, best time to start raising queens, we always we kind of work back roughly from the first week of June. We know that's about the time when, if everything is about an average year, that's when the first queens we should be going in and saying, like, they are good to go queens, they're good queens to sell. And then you need to work your process back from there. So what do you call a good queen? How long has the queen had to be in the nuc proving herself? And they need to work it back to the point of emergence, and then you need to work it back to the point of grafting. And it generally comes out for us kind of like It does depend. I don't like to go too early because we obviously sell imported queens as well, so the urgency for us on the UK ones, like a week or two late isn't the end of the world. And I kind of, I'd prefer to wait and get the good matings later on. So for us, it's first or second week of April we really start kind of going full pelt into it, but all of the pre-work is done before that. There's a lot of setup on the colonies, and I'll start showing that in some of the videos as well where it's applicable to queen rearing. But I would say, when's the best time to start raising queens? Back end of March, first week of April is when we're probably going to start getting the full colonies ready. And then maybe first grafts in the first week of April as well. We just— you have to kind of play it by ear, and it's always a bit of a gamble with the weather because you're effectively saying, what's the weather going to be like in 4 weeks' time? Is there going to be decent weather in 4 weeks' time when you're grafting? And you don't know that in the UK, so you do have to punt. But I think it's, it's a relatively Um, a relatively safe bet to go, yeah, around first or second week of April, I'd say, depending on where you are in the UK. Uh, Damn, it seems early. Yeah, it doesn't. I've been, I've been up for a few hours already, so this is lunchtime for me. Uh, Frost here in the morning in Northern Ireland. I know, it's crazy, up and down. I see it on my HiveWatch sensor, just how much it goes up and down at the moment. It really is like a big jump from the, the daytime highs to the nighttime lows. Um, quick one, I need to say I have to leave today at 7:45 AM because Helen has to go to an appointment and I have to look after the children. So we're having a nice day, but the official handover is 7:45, so I will be stopping. I'm afraid there'll be— there'll probably be some questions unanswered at the end. It's a hard stop, 7:45 today. So we'll see you then. Andy says good morning, fella. Hello, Andy. Oh, that is Andy. Hello, Andy. How you doing, mate? Jay says good morning. We're all— Honey says good morning. Oh, it's not doing well. I know, it's like we're in a Parallel universe, aren't we? Where Arsenal are competing for the quadruple, and as I said, I am battle-hardened. Yeah, so I think we'll probably still still mess all of that up. No, no, no. I'm not saying that anymore. Go Arsenal! Come on, Arsenal! Rebecca Taylor says good morning. Hi to you, Rebecca. Denby Honey Paul says good morning, Lawrence. Inspections are within touching distance. Have you ever had a swarm in March? So inspections definitely are in touching distance. You can you can feel it in the air, and no, I've not had a swarm in March, but. what's nice for me is that I do get visibility of kind of what's going on because I give a lot of people a lot of advice. So if I say to people, trust me, bees never swarm in March, and then their bees swarm in March, they do let me know. So I have had the odd occasion, I think maybe once someone sent it to me in March where they've said, uh, it wasn't their bees as well, they'd said, oh, you said they don't swarm in March, but here's some guy down on the south coast where his bees did swarm in March. So yep, Bees will definitely swarm in March, and I think swarming in March is probably triggered by overfeeding in the winter and then a really nice strong buildup of the colony as well and lack of space. But if you feed your bees too much and then you block out all of that brood nest and then they try to expand in the spring, that can trigger really early swarming, and it's not fair to blame that on the bees, kind of on the beekeeper, that one. But then as you move into April, it all starts kicking off. But definitely, I would say you need to prepare, or at least be aware that there is a risk that your bees can swarm in March. I have seen it a few times now with people sending it through. Right, where do we get to? We've got to Paul there. Said hello. I'm going to skip through the hellos. Hello, hello to everyone, thanks for putting the comments on. I think they're coming up there on the side, which is nice, but I will jump through to the questions. Right, Edward says, when would you do your first hive inspection? So for me, it's always around The first week of April. It's just everything seems to happen on the first week of April. It's like queen rearing's kicking off, I do my first inspections, the first nucs of the year going out, the first queens of the year coming in, all in one week. Gonna be brilliant. We'll get Zane here to film that one. But it, it's a good rule of thumb, first week of April. And it might not be perfect every single year, but what it does is it stops you inspecting in March, it stops you inspecting in February, because you realize that it's way too early. And I do, I've seen people doing it and look back on my back catalogue on YouTube, oh, there's tons of times me going in and doing inspections when I shouldn't have done it. So I speak from personal experience and mistakes that I've done myself, but I see it when people do it and they go and inspect and they say, well, this is the reason that I have to do it, and it's, you could have waited until, you could have waited till April for a lot of the things that I see people doing with their bees at this time of the year. But what's nice now is that it's not that far away. But 1st of April, but what I would say is you need to calibrate that depending on where you are in the UK as well. So 1st of April for people on the south coast of England will almost certainly be too late, and then all you're doing is just increasing the chance of starvation or swarming without going in and doing the proper checks. So work it out, it might be middle of March, might be kind of this weekend for a lot of people, London area. It's just kind of finding a happy medium for you. There's queens available now, so we're only what, 10 or 12 days away from queens being in, so if you accidentally killed a queen, you've got a backup now, you do have a replacement. But only go in if you think that there is a need to go in. And a classic example of that, of one where you definitely don't need to go in and do an inspection, I wouldn't bother even doing this inspection, but if you open up a colony that's on, say, 12 frames, like, I don't know, a 10 or 11 or a 12-frame brood box, and the bees are on 4 frames, and then you can see the other frames are not all full of stores, like, I'd question what's gone on with that colony. I'd probably take it out, have a quick look. But in reality, you don't actually need to be pulling the frames out on that one. You might just reconfigure them in the box that they're in. I'd probably pull out one frame and see that it wasn't a drone layer, but if I saw a queen there with a nice brood pattern, I'd say, okay, it's just they've been fed too much, or it's a late season supersedure, and then a successful late season supersedure, so the colony numbers dropped and it's come back up again. But I wouldn't necessarily be pulling frames, and I think that's quite good advice for people on the first inspection, which is you don't need to go through every single frame. But also, The better piece of advice is if you're gonna roll your queen, if you're gonna do some damage to your queen or your bees at any point throughout the year, it's on your first inspection. If you're gonna snap the lugs off national frames, you're gonna do it on your first inspection. Everything is more difficult because the bees have had however long, however many months, 6 or 7 months of— probably not that long, but a good few months of nothing, absolutely nothing happening in there, and everything is stuck down and all of the frames are built out properly. So it's difficult to get the first frame out a lot of the time, so take your time doing it, but when you pull that first frame out, I would say that's the biggest risk of rolling your queen all the way throughout the season, so try to avoid it. Oh, choke on my coffee there. Try to avoid it where possible. I'll lean forward a bit, here we go. Good morning, after going in last week and seeing bees on 8+ frames in nearly all hives, going in this morning for the first spring inspection is going to make minimal decisions, southeast here. So I'd say, yeah, I think, I think that's about right timing. I don't want to be like a doom monger, and I, and I like to get my words out. From RBs, RBs are looking really, really good, but I keep on hearing, like, I keep on hearing people saying they have 30 hives in a place and they've gone in and they're all dead. I'm just like, I really do hope there's nothing major going on, and I'll be interested to see what, what the NVU say about it because they'll definitely be going out and doing like sampling and stuff like that, and I'm sure DEFRA are interested in what's going on as well. And, and there might— it might be anecdotal, but there might be something else behind it as well. And I think when you get large swathes of stuff in a particular area, um, it, it does lead to— and I have no evidence to back this up whatsoever, this is pure speculation, so don't say, oh, Lawrence said this. I'm just thinking out loud here, but I just— Is it like some sort of contamination or poisoning or Everyone, everybody I've spoken to says it's the damp, and I said last week I don't think the damp kills bees. It doesn't. The cold and damp doesn't kill them. Every single colony that dies over winter, when you go in and look at it, it's damp and wet, and they say, yep, it's been the dampest, wettest year in ages, and I say, well, that means you'll get the dampest, wettest, mouldiest hive in ages as well, because it's just those conditions. So I genuinely don't think it's the damp or the wind or the cold that's killed them. I definitely believe that late season damp and wind and cold probably stopped a lot of queens getting mated properly, like late season splits and swarms. But that wouldn't explain why if you've got a bee farmer who's got 20 colonies who he's just requeened, like with his own stock or whatever, and he's done all these checks and everything's good with nice new brand new young queens in there, then you should— you wouldn't be getting lots and lots of supersedure. Those queens would be good to go. And to get a complete wipeout in an apiary of, say, 20 or 30 colonies like that is highly unusual. So I'm following it with interest like everybody else, and it is pushing up demand for nucs. And I think everybody watching this will probably be feeling the same. If you're selling nucs, you'll be like, whoa, there's a lot of people struggling this year to get nucs. And I do think a lot of people will go without because there's not enough to go around, because all of the people who are losing their bees, are trying to hoover up any remaining stock. So you will, I would recommend, if you've not already ordered your bees from someone, to get in as soon as you possibly can. Right, here we go. Jason says, Lawrence, when would you do your first splits? So first splits are not that far after the first inspection. It's strange, everything gets like, for us here, is quite compressed. So you can split a colony pretty much anytime, I would say, in April if the brood box is full. You just want to make sure that they've produced enough brood. Don't go into a colony like that one I said before where it's on 4 frames and think, yeah, well, we can— that could be 2 2-frame splits. It doesn't work like that. You want to just get really nice, big, strong, healthy colonies that have the efficiencies of scale and have the correct number of bees that are alive in terms of their, their age, uh, profile, but also the, the correct amount of brood to go with them. And then you can make quite aggressive splits. And you can— I do make 1-frame splits, as in 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores, add in a mated 4 frames of foundation, new apiary, feed them, and that is a very, very good system. And you could, you could start that kind of first or second week of April. For us, it's our second, second week. Let things calm down in the first week where everything else happens. Hello Lawrence from the Isle of Man. I've only kept bees since April, May last year, so coming out of my first winter, and all is good with them. When first inspections are advised to happen? So yeah, I would say Isle of Man is going to be a little bit, a little bit later, but yeah, maybe kind of first, second 3rd week of April, something like that, depending on, depending on how they're looking and depending on how the weather is, I would say. This year I need to make a lot of splits. Would you do light splits across multiple colonies early in the season or aggressive splits on one colony and use that for that one just for splitting? So it's a really good question, and one it does depend on kind of your, your appetite for risk, but also your ability as a beekeeper and, and your want for honey, if you're happy just to say, right, no honey whatsoever, um, then aggressive splitting on big colonies is easier for the beekeeper, I would say. And you lose less because you've got one big 20-frame colony. Okay, you're going to lose all of the honey from that, but you, you had— you would have had to stop the swarming if you wanted to get that honey, so you probably save a bit of work back as well. But you've got all of the resources there to make lots and lots of splits. Now, if you, if you overwinter colonies for that specific purpose and then you It's a really good use case. I was going off on one on channel membership videos, but it's a good use case for pollen sub. So if you're doing aggressive expansion like that, you could go in in the middle of Feb and start feeding pollen sub and build up these really big strong colonies. And the reason I say that is that if you do it naturally, so if I made the decision to do that today and said, okay, I'll turn that colony into a big strong one, I probably wouldn't be able to make the splits on it until, you know, a good amount of time. So don't wait until like for us in the UK, the June, Julys, and the Augusts, to try and make the splits because you've built the colonies up so much, but then what happens at that time of the year is you need to use loads more frames and loads more bees to protect from the wasps. So I think a much easier method for the beekeeper and a more sustainable method is taking one-frame splits out of your production hives very, very early on in the season, because if you go into that colony that's on like a 10-frame brood box at this time of the year, on your first— well, not this time, but like in a couple of weeks after you've done your first inspection, if you've got 8 frames of brood in there, a couple of frames of stores, you can just take out 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores, take it off to a new apiary, 4 frames of foundation, give them a good feed, add in a mated queen, and, and that will— you'll be double brooding that nuc before the end of the year, and you'll probably run out of space as well. So that'll be a full-size hive by the end of the year. You might, you might even get a little, a little bit, tiny bit of honey from it. But the other one is negligible. Like, what you've taken away is they're just like, yeah, we're still, we're still very much a production hive, and we're going to produce you lots of honey probably give you difficulties with swarming as well. So like, for me, it's a much, much easier decision to make if you think of it like that. On a, on a, like, a commercial basis like us, it's not, it's not possible to do that. You can't take a 1-frame split out of every production hive because you need a lot of production hives, and then the management of the production hives is who manages them. Um, so it's not an efficient way of doing it. So for us, we have to think a little bit differently and overwinter the configuration that we want in order to make the splits. What some unscrupulous nuc sellers do, and it's always worth challenging this with your nuc seller, is what they do is they'll sell you— they say, we're going to sell you an overwintered nuc, and then they get the overwintered nuc in the spring and they put an extension box on it and they build it up and build it up and build it up and get it nice and strong. They take off a 6-frame nuc for themselves and they sell you the original one from underneath with the original queen. So technically it is still an overwintered nuc, but they've— I feel like they robbed you a bit. when they're doing that, because like that extra split that they got off that colony in that season, that should have been your split. That should have been the beekeeper's split. I don't know why the seller thinks he gets to have 2 for the price of one. So if you're ever wondering why some, some nucs are a lot cheaper than others, then maybe you should question some of the management practices there. I can guarantee every single overwintered nuc we sell at Black Mountain Honey does not go through that process. So the nucs build up in their own boxes, and once they're ready to go, we send them out to customers, and we encourage you to make that split for your own redundancy in your apiary. There we go. It's easy to trigger me, isn't it? I gotta go. Maybe it's too early in the morning, maybe I've not had enough coffee yet, and I chill out after a couple more. Let's have a little sip. I think double brooding in spring is a must-have with the Black Mountain Honey Buckfast Queen. Even on Langstroth, they're exploding out of winter. I've had so many people messaging me saying, well, the bees are looking really, really nice this year, which is nice to temper that with the losses that are clearly going on as well. But I agree, double brood is good, and it gives you— the bees always give you the sign that they're ready for double brood. For me though, like, knowing my own colonies, I don't do that if I can get away with it. The only reason I've gone through and done that this year is because of the situation that's going on with my wife having cancer. and my, my lack of ability to go out and kind of do anything with it. I don't do that on my production colonies for, for the reason that I've said previously, which is I like to keep them on a single brood. I like to get them to a point where they're on 2 supers. I do my demerare, I add in the double brood at that point in the year by doing the demerare, and then I try and recompress back down for winter onto a single brood. So I'm kind of like doing this yo-yo effect throughout the seasons, going from single brood to double brood. But the double brooding, underbrooding in spring, very good if you're making splits, very good if you're making nucs. but it's not good if you're wanting to use it as a honey production colony because it gives you double brood too early on in the season. And then when you say to the bees, right, if you say to the bees, right, you're double brood now, so we're going to stick on double brood and we're going to go up above with supers, you've just become very inefficient at honey gathering. Because all you— it's nice for the brood nest, don't get me wrong, your brood nest is going to be perfect. You're going to have this lovely ring of pollen, lovely ring of stores, really good buffer down there, which for some people is very beneficial if they're worried about swarming— sorry, if they're worried about stores and stuff going into the back end of the season. So I'm not, not a fan of double brood. I'm very much a fan of it, but it's just working out exactly what you want. And 2 people can use like the same system to get 2 very, very different results out of it. But it'll be interesting— what, what I'm interested about with the double brooding is now that I've gone out and done all of that, and I can kind of show people that on scale. So you've seen that first. If anyone's not seen it, I went around and underbrooded every single, um, colony and gave them a good feed. And then what I'll be able to do hopefully is go there kind of middle of May and see if it worked, see if the bees did go down. Because what a lot of people say to me is bees don't go down, they do not do it. So I'll be able to show on the videos and I will be able to prove it because I know they do it. They'll go down and they might go down and hit the bottom and then swarm, but those, uh, those extra brood boxes are going to give them the extra space there. But it'd be nice. I will do that. I'll do a full, a full follow-up video on that showing kind of how my bees have been underbrooded and how well they've done. East Sussex Bees and Wildlife. I think someone's changed their name there. Is that you, Peter? He says, morning, Laurence, and hi all. Do you know what the half-life of amatraz is, i.e., how long does it take to break down? I don't. They've not released the information like that. They do— it is a bit of a grey area when it comes to things. They say, like, dispose of these responsibly, and then you say, well, what is dispose of these responsibly? I'm not sure what that means. Can you give further information and they say no, can't. Okay, take it, take it with a pinch of salt then, dispose of them responsibly. So I keep all of mine in a bucket, I've got loads, just got buckets and buckets of them, and then when they tell me what I'm going to do with them, I'll do something with them. But I don't know how long it takes to break down, I'm afraid, um, I've not got that information. Morning Lawrence, hope Helen and you are doing well. Thank you very much, Harry. Have Langstroth with super under already, have been there all winter, very heavy bees covering 10 frames. NL Hive, away next weekend, do I super up? I think you super up where you are, Adam. Yeah, do it. It's a risk, isn't it? Because I look at the weather, I was looking at the weather this morning for us up here, and it's so nice the last week, and it makes you think that's it now, it's summer every, every day until September, summer now. And we know it's not like that, especially not up here. So I look ahead at the weather forecast, it's like, oh, it's going, it's going to be 10 degrees and drizzle and rain. But I think, I think we'll get nice spells in there as well, so What's the big— what's the bigger risk to you? That's, that's the question, isn't it? Is the bigger risk the bees swarming and then you're losing your ability to have those bees for nucs and splits and further honey production, or is it absolute maximizing the honey and you're willing to take the risk on it? And, and only, only Adam can answer that one. Yeah, I'm excited to see how it goes though. Hi, I can't wait for my Black Mountain Honey Queen after damaging my queen last week. Oh no, she was laying in comb around the fondant tub. When I removed it, she scurried off, defo, missing legs. at least, what would you do? Oh dear, okay, so it's a simple fix. You killed the queen last week, so after 8 days there's going to be multiple emergency cells if there was existing brood there. There might not be an existing brood there, but hopefully there was. And then you, you need to go through them at that point after 8 days, go through, find the queen, kill the queen, remove her, shake off all the bees, take down every single emergency cell, and then I let you leave it for 24 hours after that, and then put your queen in. You can leave it for another 24 hours The, the timings here aren't very, very important apart from one, which is wait 8 days after killing the queen, take down all of the emergency cells. And then what I like to do, for me, the way that I make the splits— I always have to clear it up because it's different from what's on the website— for me, I put the queen in at that point. That's just my method. So take them all down, and then as I've taken them all down, I put the queen in, in the cage, and I don't open the cage. That's my, that's my method there. So that's a good way of doing it, is The reason I say it like that is that if you want the belt and braces method, you would wait 24 hours before putting the queen in, and then wait another 24 hours before popping the tab. But it just, it adds an, for me, an additional tricky visit that I can't, I can't kind of have the time to go up and do that. So I do it a different way. I take down all the cells, put the queen in, keep the tab on, wait 24 hours, go back, pop the tab, leave it 7 days. And that is a very good introduction method for queens. I'm going to drink this coffee. Did first handful of inspections yesterday in West Sussex, Black Mountain Honey Queen and some daughter queens doing absolutely mega, wall-to-wall capped brood and brood in all stages, almost spring proper, fingers crossed. Isn't it nice? Even though I've not been in and kind of pulled any frames out yet, and I know the weather dictates that a lot of people on the south coast probably, like, the time is now, or the time is last week, But isn't it nice getting the bee suit on and getting the smoker? And even the bit before that, like getting into the apiary and the sun on the face and the birds. And it's just, it's a very different apiary out there compared to what it's been for the last 6 months. And it does, it makes me feel, it makes me feel very happy. I like, I like being up there at the apiary, just any of them. I like just being outside in the sun. I'm quite, quite simple. Right, Ryan says, morning, hope you're okay. I've seen posts online of people doing varroa treatments and full inspections this week. It makes me panic thinking that by sitting on my hands is going to cause issues in the next few weeks, but I am doing— the colony is doing okay, not too small and bringing in pollen. They are light and I've given 4 liters of 1:1, so I'm praying I'm doing the right thing. I only do the, the puff there, Ryan, because I don't ever want to give anyone like bad advice. But yeah, you just have to be aware that my advice will be generalized because a lot of different people are viewing it. So someone, if someone from Scotland Rung me up and said, "Can I have some advice?" And then someone from not that I'm like an expert in Scottish speaking, but they said, "Could you give me some advice on this subject?" The advice for the person living in the Highlands of Scotland is going to be very, very different to the the advice that I'd give to someone living kind of like in Portsmouth or Cornwall. So the sitting on the hands is good advice in terms of not inspecting in February and then not inspecting in March. But the March one, it's like, "Oh, maybe maybe you do need to inspect in March." And I would say it's just it's working out roughly where you sit, and it it might take you a. Season, it might— you might have one colony like, oh, I left it a bit too late, or I did it a little bit too early. But you do, you work out the rough point in the year for you when you know you can kind of do nothing and not give them any additional space as long as they're hefting heavy enough where they're not going to swarm, or where less than 1% of your colonies are going to swarm, which is a tolerable risk for me. What you can do it this year, that like I said, there's mitigation measures if you're worried about the swarming. So what I would say there is full Seeing other people doing full inspections is no sign for you to go and do your own full inspections. Seeing people doing varroa treatments, I would say, why are you doing varroa treatments now? Probably the worst time of the year to do varroa treatments. It's a belt and braces method to go in hard for varroa at this time of the year, maybe over the past few weeks, but really you shouldn't have to. If you've managed your bees properly and you've managed varroa in the late summer and like in the autumn or the winter, 2 opposing different methods, and you're not seeing any visible signs Varroa, you've got good healthy brood, like you're not seeing the, the impact of the virus, then I would say you don't, you don't need to be doing Varroa treatments at this time of the year. So neither of those things should make you panic at all. The things that should make you panic at this time of the year is, are my bees going to swarm or are my bees going to starve? It's the space versus stores dilemma. And as long as you're managing that via hefting, so if you're hefting, you're saying, okay, I'm confident that bees have got enough stores, and then you've added some 1:1 on there, so you're praying you're doing the right thing. if the hefting one becomes a little bit easier because each year you realize like how, um, how heavy things need to be and how light things shouldn't be, and you can only do that through trial and error. And then the only other thing that you need to be worried about then is the swarming. So the, the way that you can mitigate the swarming is by either underbrooding if you're going to split that colony, or by undersupering, and that would, that would mitigate that risk pretty well. Like if you're lifting it up and saying, right, it's definitely really, really heavy, then undersupering gives you the additional buffer against swarming. So don't worry about people doing inspections, don't worry about people doing varroa treatments, worry about the things that matter, which are space and swarming, and manage those 2 things kind of independently but aligned next to each other, and then hopefully all will be good. There we go, good answer for Ryan there, good man. Morning, Laurence, the Buckfast bees are expanding rapidly and have built comb in the upturned Ashforth feeder. What kind of— can I do a demerit in May with double brood? Interesting, that one. So you'll see on today's video that's coming out at 7 o'clock, for anyone who's interested, we did another day in the life. So if people liked last week's video of Zane following me around, there is another one being released tonight, and I would say this one's probably a little bit better as well. Um, but where are we going? Where was I going with that? Oh, expanding rapidly. In that video, one of the spoilers is the little sign of upwards wax building is just the clearest trigger ever, the clearest sign ever that the bees are saying like any space above me. Now if you've underbrooded and the bees, if you, if you had a brood box there and you underbrooded and the bees are on the top box building wax upwards like that, then it's a sign for me, clear sign, you just switch the boxes around and it should work very, very well, which is that the bees, the bees clearly want to work up there and they're saying we're strong enough to be able to work up, there's enough bees here in order to generate the heat, to generate that wax to go upwards. So they're saying, we don't want to go downstairs because it's cold, we'd happily move down there, but it's a bit, it's a bit too cold for us, we've got space above us, so we choose upwards. And this is where people— don't get confused about the fact that bees like to work up. A lot of the time bees do like to work up because it's much more thermally efficient for them to have all of the bees and the brood underneath and then a nice warm space above. Like, I know where I'd I'd want to be doing the work, but they will work down as well. The reason that they've worked up for yours is because you've got an upturned polyashworth feeder, so you've effectively given them space below and really nice warm insulated space above, and they're saying, yeah, we're going, we're going up. So a couple of ways of doing it. If you're feeding in the polyashworth feeder at the moment, like fondant, and they're building wax going up and it's on double brood, I'd say they've probably got enough food. So you could maybe take the wax off, flip the polyashworth feeder around, Um, that means they can't build up anymore and they have to build down. Or you can just say, weather's good, let's flip the boxes around, we're good to go. There's a few, few different options there, but yeah, they're giving you, they're giving you a nice little sign there that something, something is ready to go. Do you have a perfect hive in mind? I know you tested many hives out, uh, out there, but often they have a few cons. What would be a perfect hive for Lawrence? What's your must-have in a hive style? It's a good question. I will sip my coffee first. It's a good question, and it's one that I can answer very, very confidently because I do have experience in a huge amount of different hive types, like way more than most people ever would. And that's not— I've not said that in like an arrogant way. I could say, you know, what a silly thing to have spent all of the business's money on, to do videos reviewing every single hive that is out there. But it does— it gives me the ability to compare and contrast the different styles and what I like. So worth bearing in mind as well, what works for me won't necessarily work for you, but it's very clear for me now, and I said it from the beginning and didn't listen to my own advice, but standardisation and compatibility is just— that's where I want to be. Everything needs to work with everything else for Langstroth and for National, obviously not kind of crossing over. The bee space needs to be correct, the exterior dimensions need to be correct, the interior dimensions can be a little bit off, but as long as that exterior dimension is fixed and there's no landing board— I'm not a fan of any landing board on any of my floors— then I'm quite happy and I can use a lot of the bits interchangeably. There's some bits that I will tend to go towards. I did, I did a post on this the other day, but I'll regurgitate it for you because it is useful. But then as long as everything's properly cross-compatible, then I can mix and match a lot of different things. So starting off on the floor, I'll go a homemade floor because they're very, very good. Uh, the design, like, you can't really buy them out there unless you want to pay silly money. And I find the features that are available from the homemade underfloor entrances are just like, it's really good. There's nothing else out there on the market that is as good as that. And they're like 75% off versus the cheapest wooden floor that's out there. So make my own floors. And then brood boxes, for me, I go with the Abello 11-frame brood box. That's my favorite poly brood box. And then if I wasn't going to go down the poly route, I'd go with like a Western red cedar second-grade brood box. That's what I would go for. But if people said, oh, make a decision, which one would you go for there? I would go with the abello. And the only reason that I would go with the abello there is because of the, the additional insulation that I like to give my bees in winter. But you'll see when I get to the top, wood in the brood box is still fine. It's not— it's a very, very, um, minor one to toss up because when you add the polyester You're insulating the bees very well, and you're actually giving a greater distinction in insulation values between the roof and the walls. Doesn't make a massive difference in terms of where the condensation forms. It still forms on the walls because it's lesser insulation in the polybrood box than it is in the roof, but with the wood, it tracks out as well. When I look at my colonies though, and especially up in North Wales and where we live, we kind of like live in a cloud a lot of the time, but you go up there and you look at the polyhives and you think Just looks like a poly hive, and then you look at the wooden hive and you look like it's been—it looks like it's been chucked in a river and submerged, and like it sucks in all the wood. So it's definitely less thermally efficient. I do have a preference for poly. I think my definite preference now is for a very simple—can be plastic or it can be metal—but a simple queen excluder, one that's not got a rim in it. I do find I like the logic and I like the idea behind the rims. I don't like the additional maintenance. that comes with them, because when you clean them, they start coming apart, and it's just very difficult and frustrating to put them back together again. And then the bee space that they add can complicate this system a little bit. So I like a flat one. I particularly like the White Thorns queen excluder. I think you've got to pay— you can't go bargain basement for queen excluders because they don't— they're not durable, but also the tolerances in them can sometimes be out. You get a few people laugh about that, but they can. where like the— not only can the queen not get through them, but none of the bees can get through them either. So check, check the sizing on your queen excluders. But I do— I like the White Thorns basic one, not the XP Plus, just the standard White Thorns one, or a wire, like a steel wire, stainless wire metal one without the, without the frame. They're my 2 picks. And then this is the one where the compatibility really comes in. I go back to wooden supers. So Depends who's— depends who does me the best deal at the time. I'll either get pine-dipped wax because they come nicely well made and the wax dipping is very, very good, so they last a lot longer and they are considerably cheaper now than the cedar ones, or I'll get second-grade cedar ones and I'll make them up myself. It just takes a lot of time to do that, but wooden supers are no issue whatsoever. You do get a slight improvement on honey yield with the thermally efficient poly supers, but I really like Wooden supers is the cheapest way forward and it simplifies things nicely. I then don't have a crown board, and this is the one where people get a bit confused. They say, oh no, I like to have a crown board, but I don't. I just put a polyash forth feeder in there. So my polyash forth feeder is effectively my crown board all the way throughout the season, and it, it does— it simplifies things quite nicely, gives you the ability to feed syrup, gives you the ability to feed fondant, and it gives you that perfect insulation exactly where you need it, which is directly above the cluster. That is what keeps the bees safe from the damp and the cold. If you, if you've been hit by damp and cold this year and it's killed your bees, you, you look inside a polyhive and it's dry. And it's dry because there's a lot of heat and energy that's being produced in there, and there is a huge amount of moisture. Like, it's an unbelievable amount of moisture that is in a live colony of bees. But if you set it up correctly with a polyhive where it's insulated well The water can't penetrate from the outside because it's impermeable, and then anything that's generated on the inside can't get out for the exact same reason. So if the top is insulated way better than the sides, the water sits and condenses on the sides like that, and because it's a vertical surface, it tracks out of the beehive and out through your open mesh floor. So people say, I don't like polyhives because it's all— it's too damp and can— like, there's too much condensation and dampness, and it's like It's the opposite. The opposite applies. It's probably the driest, warmest place that you're ever going to find in a beehive because it's set up to be exactly like that. If they die, if they become a drone-laying queen and she dies throughout the winter and all the bees die there, then it becomes a soddy— like a soggy, cold, horrible mess. And people say the bees died because of the cold, and it's not. You need to assess it before that. A lot of people are saying that, and I do think it needs nipping in the bud. I don't think the bees are dying because of the cold or the damp. There we go, the Arctic Beekeeper. That is a full one. I missed off the roof, that would have been annoying. I go for a solid metal roof if I can get away with it. I do use the Abello Deep Roof as well, and I'll put the Abello Deep Roof with a metal casing on the top. I don't like having a poly roof on the top, I like it to be metal to put my hive tool on it and sit on it if I want to sit on it as well. But the— what I quite like about like a cheap The cheapest— Simon the Beekeeper is good for this— a cheap pine, like solid roof, the heaviest one you've got is good because it sucks up all the water. It doesn't matter that it's not insulative because it's going above the crown board, but it's really heavy. And that heaviness on the top means that— it doesn't mean that you don't strap, like I still strap with them. The metal gives you protection against strapping really hard to the hive stand, but you get that weight on the top just holds them everything down. It does increase the center of gravity a little bit by having so much weight at the top like that, but if you're strapping it down, it doesn't matter. But if you've got it— pardon me— if you've got it on a single brood, so a floor brood box, polyasphalte feeder, and then a roof, that's only like, what, 600mm high? Or I don't know, not done the maths. It's not that high, it's a couple of feet high. So it's not— it's quite a nice solid setup to use without, um, a ratchet as well, I would say. Uh, right, I've got 4 minutes before I have to go, so I'm gonna do as many as I can. With your HiveWatch sensor, what brood temperature does it tend to read, uh, is this in the brood or in the crown board? It's interesting, that one. I've been following the, the brood temperature and it's so clear when the bees are brooding up in that specific area. It's not foolproof though yet because the bees do move kind of in and out from where the sensors are. My sensor's embedded kind of in the middle frame— not, not like embedded, but it's in the position of the middle frame, basically the middle of the middle of the hive. It's there, so if the bees are there around the sensor, it's 32, 33, 23 degrees C, like that. And then if they all move away, if the cluster moves away over winter and the sensor's still just here, it's like 15, 16 degrees. Never goes, never goes below that. The ambient temperature seems to be around 15, 16 degrees. But then when they hit the brood, you say, oh, it's 32, right, they're definitely brooding. But the problem is, without multiple sensors in there, I don't think you can make a decision to say— you could, you can see when they're brooding, but you can't guarantee when they're not brooding, I would say, because they might be over there brooding. the sensors here not reading. So that's the only, the only kind of— not glitch, but that's the thing that I would look out for on that one. Gerda says, early coffee? No, this is, this is in fact my second coffee, and I've not been drinking it that much yet. I do like the early, the early season ones. I've just realized that Gerda's comment is at 7:11 AM, so, so I'm gonna miss a huge amount of comments on here. I'm really sorry, I will have to answer these questions a little bit quicker. But yeah, it was an early, an early coffee. How can you start queen rearing first week of April with 10 over 10? Surely you don't have have the resource that early. You— so, so this is, this is the one day you need to set up your resources the previous year to make sure that you've got them. And it's, it's getting all of that set up in place. But also, we, we use, we use a lot of different methods. There's quite a few different methods that you can use for queen rearing, especially on the earlier rounds. So the one that I showed, uh, the— oh no, that's not even been released yet. So the Melitta Bees one that will be released— you like a queen rearing video? Should be released I don't know, the next 3 or 4 weeks shows a completely different system where you can raise queens. It's not similar to Richard's system, but it's, it's a queen-right system. So you're raising queens and getting your grafts in there when you're, um, when the queen is still there. And then it's a double brood system that's fed with early pollen sub. Yeah, so you're really boosting the colonies up early, but it's all done within the single hive. It takes 3 weeks to get them into a position to do it, but if you time, if you time that and start doing the manipulation Like very, very early, you can prime up colonies for those early season grafts and get them in there. The thing is, is that the risk that you take by doing it, like I said, you, you're punting on good weather later down the line, and that's the problem. So you, you do end up with losses. You do end up with losses doing that. But if you don't do the— if you don't punt, if you don't make the effort and say, right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put all of that resource resource into doing that now in order to gamble for the weather in 4 weeks' time, then you never get to a point where, like, you never make the gamble, you never make the queen. So you just kind of have to go ahead and do it. It is all in the winter prep. I will— I'll add it to the list of videos to show how they get done that early. Um, but yeah, we can, uh— I'm gonna have to go, I think. I think that is it, 7:45. Let's see if there's any other urgent ones in there. Like, people are saying good day with the family. Uh, Nothing dead from 12 so far, which is really really good. Um, The Arctic Beekeeper says, what's your thoughts on making splits overwintering over a Snellgrove double? Oh, I'm not going to do that one. I'm not going to do that one because it's a bit complex. I think we're done. It is 7:45. I'm so, so sorry, yeah, to everyone who I didn't ask the questions on. I will normally do it a little bit longer and go through to 8 o'clock, but I do have to go. I said 7:45 and I like to stick to my timings as well. So I hope you all have a lovely weekend. Don't go putting out too many frames. Um, we're very, very close to the season starting, and I hope you all enjoy the sunshine.
