Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 23

Right, so I am live. Um, I've not arranged to do a stream tonight, but I've got a little slot, an hour slot, to come ahead, uh, come in and do a live stream. So I'm gonna answer some questions that have been piling up on the website and I've not answered them. For anybody who— you have to have a proper eagle eye here, excuse the pun. I've got something wrong with my eye. know what it is, um, whether I got a sting close to it or got something in it, not sure. I don't remember getting stung in the eye, but I got a really swollen eye, um, and it's not, it's not swollen like kind of bee sting swollen, but it's just like, I think it's infected. I think I've got like a bit of grit or something in it. So excuse the gammy eye, uh, but if you've got any questions, uh, then feel free to stick them in the chat. I will answer them. It's, uh, still light outside. What's going on? Love it. I love long days. It is the best thing in the world. I hate short winter nights. So to see that it's like 10 past 9 in the UK and it's still like bright outside, like an hour of sunlight left, I love it. Right, gonna answer some questions. There's a— we sold lots of nukes this week. Uh, lots of nukes went out. So I think it was 83 that went out yesterday, and I've been, I've been battling with Royal Mail all day trying to get them all out to people. There are a couple of nucs that are still sitting in mail centres across the UK. Hopefully the bees will be okay. They should be okay. They're generally okay in the post, and it's not been really, really hot today. We fix any problems if they do arise. So if you do have questions, stick them in the chat, and I'm going to start by answering some of the questions that came in on the website. I hope everyone's doing well though. I have a peppermint tea today. Try not to get too rolled up before bed. So first question came in saying they left it too late to do a demerit, so they did a split instead, just split off a nuc. They're saying, can they still perform the demerit split later on in the year if the need arises? So yeah, definitely can do that. Uh, the demerit is so much better if you do it like early on in the year, nice preemptive demerit. And I think anybody who did that and followed kind of my advice of doing it like first, second week of May. And you can't give a fixed— you can't say it's this, let's do it this time every year. You just need to go roughly when it's feeling right. But anybody who did a preemptive early demerare split this year, I reckon you'll be sitting on a lot of honey at the moment with your queen still there. So well done if you did it. I didn't do it on all of mine. Gutted I didn't get around them in time. Uh, but doing a demerare now, I'd kind of— it's not really like my ideal slot for doing it now. You've almost missed the opportunity to do the early season demerare. I find as soon as you get into the June gap, like, the swarming just drops immediately, at least for a couple of weeks, or at least a week, like, throughout the June gap. So I wouldn't do it at this point. It's like the worst point in the year to do it because you've got the June gap coming up, and then you've got them going backwards, and then you're potentially going to be taking a spring crop. So if you take a spring crop, you're removing that distance between the top box and the bottom box because you're taking out all of the supers. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't do it now. If, if I was taking a spring crop, I would just take the spring crop and then just leave the bees to it and make sure they've got enough to get them through, and then reevaluate in a couple of weeks. And if I wasn't taking a spring crop, I still wouldn't do it at the moment. I just leave them for a couple of weeks and then maybe do it as you move into the middle of June. Right, next question then said, hi, I started beekeeping last year with a swarm that had a horrible temperament. Uh, they quickly swarmed again, resulting in me having 2 hives. The first hive I requeened with one of your queens and they calmed down. Good plug for Black Mountain Honey Queens there. This year I killed the queen in the second hive and went through the requeening introduction process 2 days before opening the tubs on the cage. The result was no queen and no eggs in the hive. I've now tried to requeen for a second time 3 days before opening the tubs in the cage, but again no queen or eggs in the hive. Any advice? So I see this a lot. The thing that I would say is just do a test frame. You've got another hive there, get a test frame of eggs and put the test frame of eggs in the hive, and then if they draw out queen cells, you should be okay. But I suspect they won't draw out queen cells, and you'll either have like a drone-laying queen knocking around in there, or you'll have a virgin, more likely like a runty virgin that's not laying anything, but she is still there. and that's what's killing the queens. So test frame is what I would do there. Next question says, will a Mini mating nuc or Apidex swarm if you can't sort it out fast enough, or is it too small to bother trying? Have you ever successfully got one through winter? A bit of a challenge. So they swarm all the time. I was doing my DASH training the other day, and as we were standing there around some mating nucs— they're slightly bigger, like the Mini Plus nucs, but they're not that much bigger than Apidae. Okay, they're like twice the size of an Apidae, and it swarmed. And they do, they swarm regularly out of space. Or I found with Apidae, instead of swarming, they just abscond. So they just go. It's kind of like a small colony swarm. So yeah, they do, they regularly swarm. I've never tried getting them through winter because I kind of think, what's the point? Like, you might as well just— at the point of trying to get them through the winter, you'll know that in kind of August. So just upgrade them into something else is what I would suggest. Um, right, let's have a look at that next question. Right, so I, I said last time somebody asked a question and it was a bit long, and I think I got a bit of stick from someone for not answering long questions. So here we go, we're going to answer a long question. It's actually 4 questions in one, but I will answer it. Uh, right, so he says, when you say use a Demaray technique as a preemptive swarm management technique, if I see play cups versus seeing charged queen cups versus seeing capped queen cells, is that too late? So no, it's not too late. You can do a Demaray split when you see queen cells, but I do not recommend it. And I find it just— it doesn't really kind of do anything to stop the impulse to swarm, whereas doing it preemptively really does seem to not put them in the right frame of mind to want to swarm. So for me, play cups, charge queen cups, or capped queen cells, it's irrelevant. Do it before you see any of those. Uh, next one is follow-on from that. So how many times do you do a demaree in the season on the same hive? So I would say an absolute maximum of 3 times. More realistically, for me, do it twice. Once in the spring like kind of early May, maybe like middle of May, to get them through, build them up strong, get them to a point where you knock them back with the Demerara, and then hopefully get through to the June gap. And then I'll build them up again, and then I'll go for probably one more Demerara split after that. If you get very long seasons where you are, you could get away with 3, but I think for us in North Wales, 2 is about right. Third part of the question is, as you mentioned, can't remember when, a technique of bruising a frame of stores from the brood box to get the bees to move the honey up into the super. Can you please describe bruising the frame? So I've had a couple of people ask me that question previously, saying, what is bruising? So bruising is when, if you've got— imagine a capped frame of honey stores. If you just got your hive tool or a knife and just cut all of the cappings off, that would just be called uncapping. What you want to do is just bruise the capping, so you're just running the hive tool along it, so you're not even taking the wax off, but you're just kind of almost piercing it a little bit and just separating the wax cappings from where it's fixed to the comb. It is quite hard to describe it. I'll have to do a video showing exactly what it means. And then the final question, he says, I'm currently on a single brood using a Flow Hive super on top. The bees want to swarm and I've been doing a reactive demurrer, which then uses the supersedure cells to create 2 nucs. I want to overwinter on brood and a half. When is the best time to introduce the shallow box without having the neck to flow stored in the shallow box, which would leave the Flow Hive super empty? You can see why sometimes I don't answer the longer questions. Not because I don't know the answers, I could just forget kind of halfway through what the beginning of the question was. Right, so I'm gonna have to read it again. Wants to overwinter on brood and a half. When is the best time to introduce the shallow box without having the nectar flow stored in the shallow box? Right, okay, I see what you're saying now. Do you know what my challenge back would be? just overwinter on a single brood box. It's overcomplicating it, adding the shallow in there as well. I don't think many bees need that. Like, I have prolific bees, like super, super prolific bees, and they do fine on a single brood box. A lot of them are single 14x12, so they're still quite big frames, but I have some on a single national and they're fine. But you're on a Flow Hive, so you're on a single either an 8-frame or a 10-frame Langstroth, probably going to be an 8-frame, that's plenty big enough. So my suggestion would be don't put the additional half in. The other suggestion would be is put it in early, let the bees fill it up, and then very quickly nadir them so it ends up at the bottom, and then that way they should kind of leave it and not really mess around with it too much. and continue to put honey upstairs in the Flow Super. Right, final question, and then I'll come and answer some of the ones in the chat there. Right, he says, question 1, can bees swarm without capped queen cells in the hive? So yes, they can, but on the first pass, I would say it's very, very rare. And what I mean by the first pass is that if you— if a colony is building up normally and then decides to swarm They will develop swarm cells, numerous swarm cells in the hive, and they generally swarm around the capping of the first swarm cell. I found one the other day. I don't even know if I've done the video for that yet. I've not done the video for that, and I will not promise I will not plug channel membership anymore. So I found— I basically give the video— I found a queen in a colony with capped queen cells, and she hadn't left yet. So there we go. You don't need to become a channel member. And, um, I reckon they would have swarmed that day. I reckon they would have swarmed within the hour because it was nice weather and they do generally go around that time. However, if you take down all of those swarm cells and just say to the colony, right, I've taken down all of those swarm cells, please don't swarm, you can get them swarming before the next round of swarm cells is capped. That does occasionally happen. They just go early. There's not really much timing to it that way. So they can swarm without a capped swarm cell, but it's generally on like the second time around that they have a go at doing it. And then question 2, this is a really— it's like the simplest question in the world, but it gets— it tricks a lot of people. I've been caught out on this loads of times. What are the signs that your bees have swarmed? So you'd think it's obvious. It's like your bee— half your bees are gone and you've not got a queen. and you've not got any eggs and you've not got any brood. But you know what, if you, if you go on holiday, say for a couple of weeks, and on the, I don't know, maybe day 5 of your 2-week holiday, your bees swarm, and then you come back a couple of weeks later, like, you won't see any noticeable difference in the amount of bees. You just, you just think everything's normal. The bees will be bringing in pollen because that's a myth that bees only bring in pollen if there's a queen there. Bees are opportunists, they just bring it in, they don't really care whether there's brood to be fed. So you'd look at it from the outside and you think, right, loads of bees bringing in pollen, everything's good. And then you'd open them up and then the first thing you would notice is that there's no eggs and that there's no queen. But sometimes you might not always be able to see your queen, and then sometimes throughout the season the colony does go on a brood break as well. So you could be seeing all of those things and the bees haven't swarmed. So it's quite— it's like, kind of like a simple question, but like slightly more complicated question as well. I would say throughout the season, from say April through to August, maybe even July if you're a bit further down south or somewhere else in the world, if you're opening up your colony and you're not seeing eggs, I reckon they've swarmed. That's probably— that's, that's kind of the way that I see it. If I open them up at that point and there's no eggs They're swarmed. Gutted. I've lost a few swarms this year, I have to say. And I know it's like BBC News as well, isn't it? But how many swarms are there this year? I've never seen so many swarms. And I'm probably averaging like 4, 5 calls a day, people saying, got swarm, do you want it? Um, Ruth, do you want it? And I always ask them, even though I'm not coming to collect it, I was like, send me a picture and I'll happily identify them for you because 9 times out of 10 they're bumblebees. Every single one this year has been honeybees up in people's roofs and it has been going crazy this year. So hopefully, hopefully it calms down a bit now. Right, I'm gonna go through the chat. Uh, right, Ken Lutz says treating swarms. Not sure what that question's about. Um, do I treat swarms? I, I don't really do much. I I don't catch them anymore, but I did— I've given it away— I did catch a swarm the other day, only because it was someone who asked me very nicely if I'd go and collect a swarm, and I did. But I do— I don't treat them. No, you could. It's a good time to treat them. I see people doing it with oxalic acid because they're completely broodless, and any phoretic mites that are on them, if you zap them, perfect time to get the mite load really low. Uh, but you can't— you can, you can treat them. Good time to treat them. Uh, Alan Malone said he had a swarm overheat and die in a nuc even though it had ventilation. Is this common? It's so annoying when that happens. Uh, have you got top ventilation and bottom ventilation? Because it is really important. Like, the Payne's nucs are great for this because they've got good, good top and good bottom ventilation. But also, my Little trick, a little tip for you here. If you've got swarms, because they do, they cluster up and they overheat, is get a little water sprayer and we spray the nucs as they're going out. But with a with a swarm, sorry, if you've got the ventilation, you can pretty much soak them with water, and all they do is they just fan it off and then they can cool themselves down. They have like their very own air conditioning unit. Mary. Is it Marie or Mary? Sorry. How can I tell if my hive is queenless? My bees are very busy but no eggs or larvae. They have already swarmed. I'm in North Scotland. So that's very similar to what I said before. If you've got another colony, do a test frame. That's the best way to do it. If you add a test frame— so that's just a frame of eggs— into your colony, if they draw queen cells, create queen cells, then you've not got a queen and they are queenless. If they don't and they just turn it into worker brood then there is a virgin running around in there. If they swarmed, like, if they— from the point in which they swarm, you're not even going to have a queen going out to mate for like roughly a couple of weeks after that, maybe 12 days or so. I'd have to get my queen rearing calendar out, but it's something around there. I think they go on day 8 and they cap them, and then the queens emerge on day 17. So you've got like 9 days in there, and then you've got to wait for them to become sexually mature. So it's about 2 weeks before they go out and mate, and then it can take another week for them to come back to lay. So give it, I would say, at least 3 weeks, maybe 4 weeks from the day in which they swarmed to the point that you really should be seeing eggs. So if it's like a week since they swarmed, you're definitely not going to be seeing eggs yet, so you can give it a little bit longer. Um, Rick says, hey Lawrence, keen to know what you feel is the one thing that contributes most to your success in the beekeeping industry. Oh, it's a very nice question. Uh, nice that you think I'm successful. I sometimes look at it and think, oh, bloody, bloody nightmare, bees. Um, well, the very simple answer is YouTube. Yeah, I love it. Absolutely love YouTube. I, I would kind of just, I think, blend into the crowd without it, and it gives me an outlet to be creative and have some fun and talk about the thing that I like to talk about and film it and just do good cool stuff. And then people are very kind and they support me in my business, so they buy our queens and they buy our nucs. If that's not what you meant by that question and you meant kind of in terms of like success with the bees, there's a couple of things that really did make a massive difference in terms of my beekeeping. One is clipping my queens. That transformed my beekeeping because it means that the number of bees that your queens can rear or that your bees can rear over the course of the season, like you keep them all. You don't lose any of them. So if you've got, I don't know, like a million bees, and I know people like to say, I've got 10 million bees or something like that. So you've got a million bees and you lose 50% of them, you've only got 500,000 bees. And the difference between the amount of honey that that can make is obviously 50%. But by clipping the wings, you never lose them. So you can just, when the colony swarms, you go in into the apiary, pop the swarm into a nuc, and then you can just recombine it back again, and you've just constantly got all of your bees there. And they're kind of like— it's a bit logarithmic with bees, in that if you keep more bees, the more bees you have, the more bees they can create. And it's, it's this like logarithmic scale. So instead of getting to a point where your bees swarm and you lose 50% and it knocks you right back again, you're keeping all of these bees there, which means they can produce more and more brood, which means you get more and more honey, which is fantastic. And I know everyone this year is going to be sitting on like another ton of honey. Uh, and that's about it really. But yeah, YouTube, love YouTube. I love that I get to chat to people online whilst drinking a cold peppermint tea. Uh, Danny says, hello, is the UK F1 Buckfast Queen still arriving in June? So yeah, middle of June, we're on track. I know we had a slow start, but the weather, the weather's been great. You can't ask for better. Maybe a little bit less windy, but, uh, it has been good. So yeah, probably middle of June. We started putting on there now that you can select the week So just select the week that you want and then we'll send them out. We're doing them on a Thursday this year, so UK ones will go out every Thursday. Uh, John Marco says, is there any way to get them to move uncapped honey up to the supers? So if the honey is uncapped, they will move it up to the supers. The only reason they might not move it up to the supers is if there's not enough space up in the supers. Simple as that. I wouldn't do anything else. If you're trying to get them to move capped honey up there, I would bruise it, place it in between 2 frames of brood. But uncapped honey, they will, they will just move it there. If they're not moving it and they've, they've kind of fanned it down and it's becoming frustrating, I would do what I said there. Get your 2 best frames of brood, doesn't matter whether it's capped or emerging or eggs, 2 best frames of brood, and then in between those 2 frames, place the frame of honey that you want them to move upwards. And bees hate it. They kind of look at you when you're doing it. What are you doing? You don't put honey in between brood. So all they do is they just clear it out and it goes straight upstairs, and they'll do it kind of within, within an hour. Really good fun, right? Just had a fun experience. Set some virgin queens in some mating nucs. A couple of hours later, I walked out and caught a queen in front of an established hive on a stalk of grass. That sounds like great fun. I, I remember back thinking with mini mating nucs and, and trying to run virgins in. They've— they swore there. They are very, very difficult to get right. I don't like introducing virgins that way. I much prefer introducing cells, and I use the little foil, foil tip as well, where you don't just put the cell in, you put the foil-wrapped cell in, and you just leave the little tip sticking out the top. I find I get much better introduction that way around. Right, let's go next up. Right, so Cogs says, what do you do with the last— hopefully I pronounced your name right there— what do you do with last year's super frames that have some cells with mouldy pollen in them? I tend to scrape back to the foundation, but just wondering if I should bother and let the bees sort it. So it's always good to have a look. I would like to see how mouldy we're talking here, but if I have like a few cells of mouldy pollen in there. I just leave the bees to it. They fix that and they'll just, they'll just clear it out. Anything that's moldy, and yet anything that's a bit too moldy, just scrape it back. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry too much at all. Uh, so, uh, Alan Solomon says howdy from Texas. Hello. Uh, La Source says, what do you think the drawbacks are to taking out the queen just before the big honey flow? Uh, I, I do find, and, and people say this is anecdotal, I, I'm not sure, that if you take out the queen like before the honey flow and you just stop all of that brood activity in there and you've got a lot of bees, I reckon it boosts it. I reckon it boosts the honey flow because all of the bees have not got anything to do. You've got like X amount of bees. 10 million bees again, or whatever, 50,000 bees in a colony, and maybe, I don't know, third of them, quarter of them, however many it is, are on brood duties. And then you've just given them nothing to do, so they just like sit around. So then they get promoted up quicker. They're not just going to sit around in the colony doing nothing. They'll just get promoted up and they'll become foragers. So I do find if you, if you take the queen out or you, you cage that queen during a big flow I reckon you get a bit more honey. I've never tested it. Hi Lawrence, when doing a preemptive demerite, is it better to use a frame of eggs or a frame of capped brood in the bottom box with the queen? So I always use one frame, your best frame of capped brood, as close to emerging as possible. And the reason being is that I want as many nurse bees to come down and stay down with the queen and they're drawn upwards by the, the smell of all of the open brood. But I want that initial burst of nurse bees to stay down with the queen to kind of get her going. That's, that's my logic anyway, and it seems to work. He's caught 7 swarms so far this year. Can anyone, can anybody beat 7? Um, I've caught 1. I reckon I could have had a few more, uh, but definitely, definitely not got 7. Stuart Campbell says, regarding swarming, I think there's an increase in swarms due to a big rise in new beekeepers who aren't really understanding or preventing swarming. I know a lot in my area that that's happened to. Yep, so I think there's definitely— that's one of the factors in terms of more people beekeeping, so more swarms. I do think that, like, the weather this year, the fact that we had such a long cold spring— like, I had people, and we were similar, I just went and stuck some supers on in the end without even inspecting a lot of them. I think people are— people have this in their head, which is it's too cold to inspect. And if I can't stand there in shorts and a t-shirt, it's too cold to inspect. And you're doing more damage by not inspecting your bees. So you're doing less damage by not inspecting them. So I'm not going to inspect. And then it just went bang and it was hot. And the bees— the bees are kind of tuned into the length of the day, not so much as the temperature. So the bees were building up, building up, building up. And I think when— and everyone will agree here— the first time you opened your bees up this year, I bet everyone was like Wow, they are way further on than I thought they were going to be. So then we were caught out, and I think immediately that the bees get a little bit of sense of claustrophobia, like not enough space early on in the spring, it triggers swarming, and you, you get this early trigger that goes through, and then they just go. So I do think it was a combination of a cold, cold spring, early spring, followed by kind of like nice prolonged warm weather bringing in tons and tons of nectar. Uh, and then it's just clogged out an already congested brood nest and sent out loads of swarms. But it has been, has been the worst year that I can ever remember in the last maybe like 8 or 9 years. Uh, Pages Farms has been catching swarms for weeks but never had one the other day. Never saw any evidence of a queen. It was a big swarm but had no queen. I requeened them, but is this common? So yeah, you do, you do get them going out because sometimes the queen will just Like come out. If you've got eclipsed queen, you can get that where the swarm will go and they just leave, they leave the queen behind. They do, you do get that occasionally. Um, and, and depend— depending on how long they were there, sometimes maybe they'll stay up in a tree for a couple of hours, then realize that there's no swarm, realize that there's no queen there, and then go back. And you might have intercepted them in between. I'd say it's rare. I wouldn't say it happens all the time. I'd say what's a lot more common is finding multiple queens in swarms. That happens all the time. You'll get like loads of 6 or 7 virgins in one swarm. That definitely happens. Uh, Alan Malone says the swarm in the nuc only had top ventilation, so going to put in a mesh floor in it too. Yeah, you got to do it. It's the worst thing in the world. It's horrible because with swarms, they're so big and there's so many bees, and then Oh, they're all dead. It's not nice. Right, Thomas, channel member, says one of my hives swarmed last week. They located on a fence post, but then they went back into the hive. I looked into the hive the day after. They started laying queen cells, but no sign of the queen. Right, so that— what, what could have happened there? So I reckon what's happened there is that maybe you missed the first swarm. First swarm's gone. and then the second one went on like the emergence of a virgin and then just kind of thought, yeah, don't fancy this, and then went back in. So I reckon that's what's happened, they're throwing out casts. When you went back in, did you see any emerged swarm cells or any capped swarm cells, or did you— had you removed any swarm cells previously to that? Be interesting to know that. Hey Lawrence, do you find any difference in the temperament of your bees in woodlands? I have an apiary in an oak plantation. I A lot of my hives are grumpy, feisty. No, I don't, I'd not see any correlation between that. Like, there's a lot of things that people say about not keeping bees in woods. My favorite one was that the rain spatters or kind of patters off the trees and then goes on to the beehive's nest and the bees don't like it. And I always thought, how'd they work that out? Like, they just made something up there. But bees do like woodland. They do like it, but I find in terms of disease and in terms of like getting good results from your bees, keeping them in full sun is definitely the best in, in the UK. Maybe not applicable in Australia or something where it gets very, very hot, but in the UK, full sun for me all the way. Previously the queen was clipped and marked, so you need to go searching outside the front of the hive because she is probably in the long grass somewhere. That's a shame. Uh, says, brought a queen last week from me. Thanks for the great service. Cheers, Mem. Pop the cap on Saturday. I'm going to the apiary tomorrow. Is it okay to do an inspection, or do I have to still wait till Saturday to inspect? Uh, so when did you— you popped the cap on Saturday? Okay, so that's fine. Yeah, you should be fine going back in there now. Uh, says, hi Lawrence, trying to get ahead of the game here. What's the best method for compressing bees into one brood box going into winter? So if you're, if you're like on say 7 supers, let's go ambitious here, if you're on 7 supers and a single national deep, then it's probably a little bit of a push trying to get them all down into one. So I would maybe do it in 2 stages and go take, take the 7 supers off, blow the bees out, clear them however you want to clear them, and then give them another brood box and go into double brood and maybe overwinter in that configuration. For me though, doing it into 14 by 12, I just— I'm quite militant with it. I just take all the 7 supers off, blow all the bees out, and just say, right, you will fit. And they look back at me and say, there's no way we're gonna fit. And you see them bearding out the front. And as long as you do that in good weather, the bees are fine just bearding out the front for a little bit. And I reckon within like 2 or 3 days, they work it out and they make space for themselves. And I do that at the same time as doing my Apivar strips, and at the same time as giving them the first feed. And it seems to work. It seems to work very well indeed in terms of getting them through. Right, Andrew Rogers, another channel member, says, I previously split a hive as I left it too late to perform a demerite. Can I perform a demerite on the original hive now if needed? So I answered your question at the beginning of this, Andrew. Yes, you can. It's fine. You can do the demerite on the colony at any point. I say a minimum make sure that you've got 2 supers full of bees above queen excluder. That's my kind of gauge for making sure that you can do it. Laurie Collins says she's honey bound, what do I do? So make sure that you've got enough space upstairs in the supers. If they've not, if all of your supers are full and they're backfilling the brood nest, then that is your problem. If you've got loads of space upstairs in the supers already but the bees aren't doing what you want them to do and you've got capped honey downstairs, you need to bruise all of those capped frames and put them in the middle of the brood, in between your best 2 brood frames. So you're just getting your hive tool, running it across the face of that wax cappings to bruise it, and then the bees will move it up. And then the other way of doing it is moving more foundation closer to the brood nest. So if you've got supers that are full, say like, say you've got 4 supers on and the top one is foundation and the bottom 3 are full of honey, I would just take the top one that's foundation, I would undersuper it, get that as close to the brood nest as possible, and that can help them start to move it up. Right, I'm nearly to the bottom of these questions here. I'm not going to stay around all night tonight, 25 more minutes absolute maximum. So if you want your questions answered, stick them in the chat, or I'll just have to talk about my new golf clubs that I bought. Split my hive 3 weeks back for swarm prevention, all with swarm cells, knocked back just to one, all walkaway splits. 7 hives swarmed, including those with just one cell. Luckily got 6 back. That's annoying. Do you— I wonder why that happened. So they swarmed with just one cell there? You, you're 100% sure you didn't miss a cell? Because that is properly unlucky. I don't think I've ever had a colony swarm when I just left it with one cell. I went— I did have one the other day, which is really annoying. I left it on one cell and I couldn't There were no decent open ones, so I had to give it a capped cell. And I went back in like three weeks later thinking we should be seeing eggs here because the weather has been fantastic, and there was still a capped cell. I was like, so annoying when that happens. And it was just yeah clearly a failed cell. So I opened it up, and yep, it was failed. It had gone like yellow, the queen. I was gutted. Kushtrim says, "Hi Lawrence, best wishes for you and your bees from Kosovo." Uh, we have only rain in May. What are your thoughts? What would happen in the next months? No honey so far. Oh, that's rubbish. It's, it's weird, like, how the weather changes throughout Europe. Like, I saw the weather in Italy. Italy's been having crazy weather as well. Like, I think on one Sunday they got 300 millimeters of rain. That much rain? Absolutely mad. And it's been all right over here. Like, it was, it was rubbish to start off. It was cold. But then the last 2 weeks, 2 and a half weeks have been very, very nice. Um, what I would say in terms of— let's look at it as a positive. Yeah, when you do get the sunshine, the ground is going to be very nice and moist. And as long as you get like a good week or so with the, like, the rain not washing out the flowers, you can get amazing yields. It doesn't, doesn't take long to get a bumper yield. We see it at the heather. and if you've got the right amount of bees at the right time, only takes a week and you can have 3 supers full of honey in a week quite easily. So you're talking maybe £20, £30, maybe not £30, call it £20 a super, you could have £60, £70 of honey in a week if you get the good sunshine. So it just keeps them alive, get through the worst bit, and I'm sure it will warm up shortly. In Texas with 100 Fahrenheit weather, I keep hives in the morning sun and after 12 it is in the shade. That's probably wise. Uh, says hello from Alberta, Canada. Just taking a break from working my bees. Hot 26 degrees today, we're not used to this. Thank you for the videos. Cheers, Darren. Um, it's, it's crazy the differences in time. It's like 20 to 10 here. I've had my dinner, I've done almost all my work already for the day. I played 18 holes of golf with my new clubs. I shot an 83. I was quite happy with an 83. Uh, right, says, I bought a colony a month ago with 2 supers that have been left onto over winter. Half of the contents of the frames are crystallized. What would you do with them? My second year, uh, so not have much drawn comb. So difficult to know what to do with them there because if they're fully crystallized, if they're like oilseed rape crystallized, you're never getting that out. It could be worth— that's probably the 4th time I've said it now— could be worth bruising them. You could nadir that super and bruise the frames and let them work it. So that's just like voodoo to anybody who doesn't understand that. So what you could do is take, take those box— that box of super frames, bruise them with your hive tool, break off all of that wax cappings, or you could even uncap them if you can be— you can do it nice and neatly, and then put that underneath the brood box with more supers on top. That's called a nadir, and bees hate that when you do it. They say, what are you doing? We don't put honey underneath brood, you put brood under honey. So they fix it for you, and the way they fix that is they take the honey and move it back upstairs to the supers. But they won't do that if it's too crystallized because they just won't bother working it. And if that is the case, the only option you've really got is to melt it out I don't really like melting it out too much because then you lose the entire wax contents of the frame. I can't believe I forgot to do this. I need to put my head up a little bit, put the questions up on there. That was like my favourite trick, right? I'll get back to putting the questions up. Here we go, right? So Robert Burgin— Burgin, how do you say it? Says, after doing a Demerara, what's the best way of getting the bees to remove the honey into the supers so you don't extract the brood frames? That follows on very nicely from the previous question. So I do— I would do a Nadir before they cap it, or after they cap it, bruise it, but before they cap it, stick it underneath the original brood box and they'll just move it up. That's great. This is the one about you being honey bound. So there is no brood nest, just honey. So I reckon you've probably got an issue with a failed or non-present queen. If they're just— if you've just got complete honey everywhere, then there's no There's no queen laying any eggs, so I would maybe put a frame of eggs in and see if they draw out cells. I suspect they will draw out cells, which means that there won't be a queen in there. And then by adding a queen in there and putting a space up should fix your problem. Uh, Alan says, can you do another queen rearing video as the last one was really windy? And also sell your golf clubs and come fishing with us. Um, I like fishing as well. That's like my second hobby. Love fishing. Gotta be sea fishing though. Not got any time for, uh, I don't know, it's not— I don't want to offend anyone here. It's not that I haven't got time for any fishing, uh, that's not sea fishing, but I like to eat what I catch. That's kind of like my motto. Um, so yeah, queen rearing video, that is on my list. I'm definitely going to do that one again because I'll be able to do it quicker and I'll be able to do it with a better mic because because it's a bit windy, that video. Hey, Aaron became a YouTube member during this chat. Cheers, Aaron. Uh, Is there any issues using the queen cells from a Demerara split? So no, and, and there is a way some people do this and they try and requeen from that top box like simultaneously with the bottom, with the bottom queen downstairs. I kind of have mixed results doing it. So the idea being that when they create the queen cells upstairs instead of taking them all down, you leave one and then you put an upper entrance in, and then you can leave them to requeen up there. I've done it and they've swarmed though, so I've not like nailed it. I wouldn't want to recommend it and say this is a good technique, uh, they definitely won't swarm, because they swarmed on me a few times doing that. But in terms of the swarm cells— sorry, in terms of the emergency cells that are up there, you can make splits out of them, but I don't like making splits. out of emergency cells. It's just, yeah, it's not for me, but plenty of people do. It's the same impulse that you would get on a walkaway split. So if you, if you get good weather, good regular kind of sunny weather, then there's no issues with using those cells. Oh God, I gotta go drink my tea, too much talking. I left my bees with a capped queen cell and left them a few weeks When I checked back, they were laying workers. I assumed the queen died. I shook them out, but can you ever fix a laying worker hive? And so yeah, so maybe the queen went out and tried to get mated and never came back, or the cell failed and they took it back down. Um, laying workers are a real pain. All I ever do with laying workers, I do, I just shake them out because that by the point they become laying workers, the bees are so old that there's just— it's not really much of a valuable resource for me. So all I just do is I shake them out and let them just go into the other colonies, and I've never had any issue with them going in and causing any issues with the other colonies. So it's just like an easy fix for me. I wouldn't kind of try throwing resources after it. You can— this is what some people say you can do— is you add brood, but you don't add brood all at once. You just keep on adding like a frame of brood and then give it like 5 days and another frame of brood and you get them to a point where they become receptive and the bees become young enough to accept a new queen. But it's like, what, like frustrating way to have to do it, like trickle feeding this brood to a colony. So you can do that, um, I wouldn't recommend it though because it's kind of quite long-winded. Uh, Adam says he's been trying to build his inventory of comb. What is the best way to choose frames to steal and save? Honey frames, brood frames? How do you store them long term? So I don't— I only store like my supers at the end of the year. I don't have inventories of— definitely not brood frames, not with the risk of disease, so that's not for me at all. And honey frames as well, like I don't— we don't kind of actively store honey frames to give to colonies. If they need honey or they need food, we just give them sugar syrup when they need it. But then in terms of the ones that we do store, we just store our drawn-out super frames. And I'm still kind of like 50/50 on whether you store them wet or dry. I like storing them wet because I think it's easier for me and the bees like it more, but it takes a little bit more work, I think, storing them wet, and it increases the risk of them robbing. So that's the only like negative for it. But my— generally the way that I do it now is I will extract, put them back into the supers that they came, and then ratchet strap them between like 2 roofs or 2 crown boards, and then plastic wrap them, and then they just go into storage. And then they don't go moldy, you don't get kind of wax moth— generally don't get wax moth on the wet ones because we keep them outside where it gets cold. And, uh, and then the bees loved them in the spring. Absolutely love them. Right, Neil says, has— have, have I or any viewers noticed a lot of queen wasps this year? So yeah, I wouldn't— don't know if there's any more than normal, but I've, I've definitely seen a few. You do see a lot of this, like, maybe not like now, but a few weeks ago they were properly coming out. Um, I think, I think I found a hornet's nest the other day, European hornet's nest, which was pretty cool. Alsoc says, hi, looking at starting beekeeping early next year. What books would you recommend for the best start? I do plan on doing a course with local beekeeping association. Any tips appreciated. So definitely go to your local association like this year. You're thinking of starting next year. They'll do like member days or association days where you can go down, have a play, get stung, see if it's actually for you before you invest all of the money in bees and kit and stuff. In terms of books, I've never, I've never been one for books. Like, I got the attention span of like a goldfish. So if I read, like, if I get to the contents page of a book, I'm really proud of myself. So I would— I can't recommend one that I've personally read and thought, oh, that was a great book. But I do hear people talk about the Haynes B Manual. That's like the simplest one, um, and talk very positively about it, but I haven't read it. But good luck. On average, how many full supers are on your hives now? So between like 2 and 3, but we're North Wales, we don't get like mega honey crops. I always compare myself to Chris Mountain, that's just the way it goes, Chris, if you're listening. But no, I don't know, he's very honest about his honey crops. I think the biggest one that he had this spring was 7 supers. I'm not jealous. I'm not jealous, Chris. Oh, here we go. Joe Murphy, fivers in the post, right? Bit of a plug for you. Bought a Black Mountain Honey Queen last August. I've already had to split it into five hives. It's so prolific. Never had a queen like it. Rearing queens from her too. Excellent. Like I say, checks definitely in the post. Cheers, Joe. It's true. It's true. Not everyone likes how prolific they are, but they they certainly are prolific, aren't they? They're prolific, they're healthy, and they gather honey like it's going out of fashion. They really do. I like our queens. Um, and has this spring been a bumper season? So I think it's probably going to be one of the best springs on record for most people, which is weird, isn't it? Because you think middle of April, if you'd have said, do you think this is going to be a good spring, I think the majority of people would have said no, it's either going to be like average or below average. It was not looking good. But I'll tell you the reason why I think it's been so good though, in that you've got all of that cold weather, but while it was cold it was quite wet, so the ground's taken a really good soaking. But then the temperature, just like someone flicked a switch, and the temperature's been really, really good. So good daytime temps, good nighttime temps. But the biggest thing, and this is the most important thing for me, this is what I think, I just hypothesizing, it's not rained. And when I say it's not rained, it's literally not rained for 3 weeks, not a drop. So all of the, all of the flowers, they've just been just like secreting all of this nectar. And if you get like a big shower come along and just like wash all of that blossom off and bash it off and like saturate the flower, the flowers don't last anywhere near as long. So then you lose kind of all of the nectar yield for that day until the tree can kind of build back up again and have new flowers come and open and secrete more nectar. But where just been sun and nice warm temperatures. You've not had any of that. So the hawthorn, for example, like hot, hot and mild and muggy is what you get good yields on the hawthorn. And then if you don't get that rain to wash the flowers out either, you get mega crops. Um, but, and the sad irony I think behind it all though is that it's not, it's not really what anybody needs because it— all it's going to do is put further pressure on the honey prices, which I know for kind of like beekeepers who keep bees in their garden, it's irrelevant. They just want to get as much honey as possible. But I do think bee farmers are looking at that a bit and thinking there's too much honey. We could do with a couple of poor seasons to maybe put the pressure back on the market in terms of supply and demand, because at the moment the demand is The supply, sorry, is far outstripping the demand. So the demand's going down, but the supply is going up, which means that the price is only heading in one direction. Uh, I waffled on a bit about that one. Yeah, bumper spring harvest, definitely. Uh, Thomas says, out of interest, what got you into beekeeping? Everyone's story is different. So I don't know what got me into beekeeping. It's a bit of a weird one. It's not like I didn't dream when I was young, I thought, you know, I want to keep bees and I want to be a bee farmer, I want to have a YouTube channel. I definitely didn't. I think the most appealing thing for me when I started beekeeping was honey. Like, I love food, and like, we have chickens and like, neighbor keeps pigs and we get sausages and bacon. And guy that I do the nucs with, he gets cows and he sold me half a cow last year. And it's amazing. I did some brisket in my Komodo Joe the other day. If anyone hadn't realized, I do love to go off on a completely random tangent, so here we go. I did some slow-cooked brisket in my Komodo Joe, 8-hour brisket with a rub from a cow that I had met, and it was just, it was amazing. So taking that back to the question, I like the fact that you can get honey, and what I really liked about the bees and the honey was that it was Like it wasn't down to me in terms of— you know, with a cow, you can, you can feed them a certain type of food, or you can put them on a certain type of pasture, and that will affect the way that the meat is. But with bees, especially in North Wales, it's kind of just like, it's up to you. There you go, I've given you a house, now you just need to go out and fill it with food. So I love the fact that you've got all like different variations. Uh, but it was mainly— yeah, it was mainly the food that got me into it, kept me there anyway. Uh, Joe says, any idea why Langstroth frames don't have the slit that you get on national frames to keep the foundation straight? Wish Thorns would put that on all frames. That's very strange that you mentioned that. I was— I've been, um, doing frames this week. I've been putting together a couple of hundred frames, Langstroth ones, and I was thinking the exact same thing. Why don't they have the groove? But I like that they don't have the groove. I don't find it's any issue with keeping the foundation straight because as long as you're storing them vertically, they just kind of like naturally fall straight. So I found that I could put Langstroth frames together way quicker than I could put National frames together, exactly because of the fact that it didn't have a groove. So goes to show, doesn't it, 2 different beekeepers wanting 2 different things. Uh, but yeah, I don't like the groove in the Nationals. Going back and doing the Nationals now, I find that— I find it a pain, and I don't think it really necessarily keeps the foundation that straight. It's— it just takes ages to slide the foundation into it. But I got sausage fingers, so I'm rubbish at stuff like that as well. Says he does carp and sea fishing, but just want to— he wants to say thanks for all the vids. Me and Griff are the reason he has his first hives this year. And like the fishing, it's a bit of a headspace in a hectic life. Uh, it's so true. That, that's the thing. Like I say, I, I came for the food, but I stayed for the, the peace and the calmness. Because I never got into beekeeping thinking, oh, you know what, I'm going to be in a— in someone's farm, on someone's farm, just in the middle of nowhere, just really enjoying like the peacefulness and the tranquility. But I do every time I'm at the bees I, I'm always rushed off my feet, but I do appreciate how calm it is, uh, and it's nice. It is one of the pla— the only places that you really get like some downtime. Even if you're doing work, you get some quiet time. You can't answer your phone, you can't speak to people, it's just focus. So yeah, I completely get you on that. But I'm just going to chuck back in there, Alan, the only thing that surpasses that is a bit of golf. Golf You can't get better headspace than golf yet because it doesn't matter how much stuff is in your mind. You think, I've got to do this, got to do that, got to do that. When you're playing golf, all you think about is, I've got to hit that ball straight. That's it. And then you shank it. Uh, Do you prefer to use Apideas or the BS Honeybees 2-in-1 nuc for queen rearing? Working out which to buy and use for yourself. So I tried both, uh, and many other variants as well. I much prefer doing it with the BS Honeybees 2-in-1, but get yourself the metal divider. Don't be fooled into the cheaper, more rubbish Correx divider because it didn't work. So get the upgrade kit with the, the crown board that's got the queen excluder bits in— they are good— and the metal divider, and then that is a much, much more flexible system to use. Maybe notch in some of the frames in the top box using the OTS method, then emergency cells are Quite good. I can't speak for other areas of the world. I know a lot of people all over America where it's warm get good results using emergency cells. I just find over here, I just, my fingers burn early on with them. But I know a lot of well-respected beekeepers that will only split doing a walkaway split, and I've seen their bees, their bees are great. So there's definitely something that works. Keith Jenkins says, if there's lots of honey in the brood box, can you remove some of them and put new frames in? So yep, you can definitely do that. It's a good kind of like swarm prevention technique, that just giving the bees foundation regularly. I couldn't do it because it'd just be storing honey all over the place, but yeah, it works really well. Giving them foundation in the brood box is a very good way to stop them immediately swarming. I think you've asked for this before, this one, Joe. I'll have to have a look. So he says, don't suppose you've got any hygiene and disease videos out, maybe a list of things for beekeepers to remember? See a lot of beekeepers very lax with the disease, would be good to raise awareness. So I agree, fully agree, and I look back on some of my older videos, which is on my to-do list to delete them completely, and just kind of like, oh, like shudder in how bad they were. And it's— you don't— you just don't get the whole disease thing until it happens to you and you have to listen to all of your bees dying because you've poured petrol over them. It's pretty grim having to do it, even to kind of one colony, but that sharpens the mind. And then you look and you look at your whole setup and you think, right, I need to do this, I need to do that. So I'm definitely going to do some more disease videos. The video that I need to take down is the one putting up the old comb to catch swarms. Great way to catch swarms, but highly irresponsible. Really shouldn't be putting up any old frames to catch swarms. I look back at that one and just think, oh, what was I doing? So I will delete that one. But in terms of what I'm doing now, like, I just did my DASH training last week, so this is all fresh in the mind. Uh, which is the Disease Assurance— I forget what it's called now. Some something like that. I was going to be all posh and give you the acronym, and I've forgotten what it is. What is it? Someone will put it down there. What's DASH mean? Oh wait there. Just this is my mum. Hi mum. Bit too far. Bit too far. We'll go with the world. Thanks. You if you can't do a live stream and get your mum to post positive comments on there, then I think you're doing something wrong. Wrong. But that's very nice, thanks, Mum, and highly embarrassing at the same time. So we'll take that off now. Uh, where were we? Right, so in terms of the things that I want to say, it's like the disease accreditation scheme for honeybees, something like that. I didn't just Google it. Uh, so DASH taught me loads of good things and a lot of the stuff that I was doing already, but it does— it gives you, uh, it really, yeah, sharpens your mind again in in terms of what you shouldn't be doing. So the, the small things that I've changed and that everybody should do, I think, now in terms of cleaning your hive tool and your gloves between every single hive that you inspect. So what they suggest is get a bucket that can hold a few hive tools and then get one— this is, this is something I learned, I wasn't doing this. So I used to always mix my washing soda in the bucket that had the hive tools in So what they say to do is, no, don't do that. For every 5 liters of water, you take 1 kilogram of washing soda, which is just like clean cleaning soda, and then mix that up in like another bucket or like a, a container that you can decant out of. And then get your bucket and put some hive tools in it, maybe 3 or 4 different hive tools, and then pour a few inches of this solution into the bucket. You only need enough just to cover the hive tools, and then they chuck in a pair of tweezers, and they chuck in a pair, like a little scouring pad, and all the bits in there that you're going to be using in your hive. And then before you go into every single hive, you're washing your hands, so you're going to have clean nitrile gloves on, disposable nitrile gloves, a new pair for every apiary. But then in between hives, you're washing your hands and you're washing your hive tools. Every single, every single hive. And then when the, like, the water in the bucket becomes a little bit mucky, you discard the water in the bucket and then you decant some more in from your container. So I like that. I wasn't doing that. I was just using a single bucket, and then I'd get to like the end of my inspections and I'd be like, the water's looking a bit grubby here, but I can't do anything else. So that was a good tip. And then they were saying in terms of like disinfecting yourself between the apiary, so never getting into the suit with your— sorry, never getting into your car with your beekeeping suit on. That was a really good one. I was doing that all the time. Cleaning your boots, they had like welly buckets between apiaries. A lot of this like might seem like overkill, and a lot of questions came out in the training which was like, well, this is my setup, how do I adapt this, and they said, look, what we're teaching you here is absolute best practice. Take what works for you and make it work for your situation. So I would say, you know, if you've got 2 or 3 beehives in your back garden, you don't need to be washing your wellies in between each hive. Not that they suggested doing that, but what you should definitely be doing is washing your hive tool and your gloves between each hive, and you should be using like washable nitrile gloves and not like big thick leather gloves. Because what they say, and they say this happens every single time, they'll go to an apiary and there'll be like 20 hives all in a row, and they'll inspect hive 1, nothing wrong with it. They'll inspect hive 2, nothing wrong with it. Hive 3, hive 4, hive 5, nothing wrong with it. Get to hive 6 and they find EFB. And they say what always happens every single time is that the first 5, no EFB, hive 6, EFB. And then they say to the beekeeper, what way do you work this, and they say 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. So they say, right, we're likely to find EFB. And they say after the first one, they find it always like in a big row all the way down. And it's because it's the beekeeper that spreads it. So it's the dirty hive tool, it's the dirty gloves. And they say what, what an easy way to fix that is to just wash your hands and wash your hive tool in between each hive. And it doesn't take long. I reckon it takes like Maximum 30 seconds to go in and just wash it, wash your hands, get any honey off, pick out a different hive tool, give it a little scrub with some wire wool, and you're ready to go. It's 30 seconds, and all you're doing is you're putting in place a barrier in between a potentially infected hive and another hive. That's such an easy thing to do, really is an easy thing to do, and I would recommend that everyone does it. So good question, Joe. I've spoken about it for nowhere near long enough. An important topic, that one. Hi, hi there, greetings from Italy. Very nice. I was talking about Italy before and the incredible rainfall that you've been having. How far are we from there not being enough moisture in the ground for nectar like last summer? That's your only worry with this weather? So it's weird, we don't have this, we don't have this worry in North Wales. It just doesn't affect us whatsoever. It's strange, like it could not rain again for the whole of the summer and we'll just get like proportionally bumper honey crops for North Wales because I think most of ours just comes from like deep-rooted plants. Hawthorn's pretty deep, um, the brambles maybe not so much, but the trees, trees are okay. However, for down south, yeah, they need some rain. I think I've already seen people moaning that there's not, there's no rain coming in. So I think kind of the further south you go, the more, the more you need a little bit of moisture. David Hayes says, with the weather being so good, does this mean we will avoid the June gap? So I've already seen reports of people saying that there's like overlap with the bramble. So it's— I really like the years where you avoid the June gap because it gives you 2 things. It means that you get— well, a few things actually. One, the bees don't get grumpy during the June gap. 2, they don't starve, especially if you're taking off a spring crop. But my favorite one, and people never really kind of see this one, is that the season is kind of like a finite length almost, and it shifts. It goes like that. It doesn't kind of like lengthen or shorten by much. So if you don't get a June gap, what you always almost certainly get after not getting a June gap is a much earlier finish to the season. Which some people don't like, but I love. The earlier that you can finish the season in the UK, it's the best thing in the world because it means you can pack up all your stuff and just get on with getting ready for Christmas. But for the bees, you get the best benefit, which is if the flow finishes down south by, I don't know, middle of July, just get the honey off and get your Apivar strips in and do your varroa treatments. And by the time your bees come to produce their winter bees, they're in like perfect health with no mites, which means that like under the viral load on those winter bees is really, really low. And then you just get such good success in terms of getting the bees through the winter. So I do think there will be either no June gap or like a shorter June gap this year if we don't get the rain. Um, I just chucked my mum back up there again. Hope you're still watching. There we go, right, no more mums. Uh, David Bay, channel member, says, would you recommend all plastic frames or is it better to keep with wooden frames and foundation? So I've got some plastic frames, I've got the Frames and Feeders ones, and I've got the Bits, Beehive Bits plastic frames with wax foundation. There's no denying it, the bees prefer the wax foundation. But I've got— I did some shook swarms the other day, I did a whole apiary shook swarm and I shook swarmed it all onto Frames and Feeders. So like fully molded plastic frames, and they're drawing it out like okay. I wouldn't say it's like amazing. It's nice. It's being nicely drawn out, but just not very quickly. But I didn't want to feed them after the shook swarm. You're not supposed to feed them for like at least three days so they can utilize everything that's in their stomach if there's any kind of EFB sitting in there. This was just a. a proactive shook swarm. It wasn't— there's nothing wrong with them. We had the MBU round last week, was it last week? And they inspected every single colony and I got the all clear. I was so happy. But I'd already committed to saying this year I'm going to shook swarm at least 50%. So I did one colony last week and I got doing another. I'm doing a full apiary on Friday as well, and then I'm going to do another one possibly at the weekend, and that will be 50% shook swarmed. And if I get around to it, I'll shook swarm them all this year if I've got the time. That's going to be the plan. Right, Rob says, just about finished my extraction room. What food hygiene course do I need to do before you get the council out to check it all? So it's like a level 2 in food hygiene and manufacturing. I think they tag on something else to the end of food hygiene. It's definitely a level 2, but loads of it's is surprisingly easy. Loads of like online providers do it. I think it's like £25 or something and you get a little certificate. It's like being back at school. Would you always take your hives down to one queen cell following a swarm or a split before leaving the hive to requeen? So yes, I do not get the people who say leave one, leave one swarm cell and leave one just in case. they just swarm on the one, the just-in-case one. So always, always, always take it down to one cell. That's my mum again, she's still there. Do swarm cells make better queens than emergency cells, or is that a beekeeping myth? So I've got nothing to back that up, but I wouldn't use either. There's my food for thought. So swarm cells, I don't use swarm cells because I don't want to propagate swarmy bees. Could well be another myth, but I do find that like the bees that swarm are the bees that swarm. You really do get that, like they'll swarm once and then you think, right, they've swarmed once, so I'll let them build back up, and then they swarm again. Some bees are better at swarming than others. And then the emergency cells, I don't like doing that because they're kind of like, it's the emergency response feeding larva. at the wrong age, as opposed to it then being completely queenless and you giving them like a day 4 larva, so an egg that's just hatched, as a grafted cell. And then also the final thing is that you're not selecting, so you're not improving your colonies there. And if anything, you're selecting for the wrong reasons. So you're letting the bees select by— they're saying, right, we're swarming, so therefore this is the colony that you're going to use to propagate, as opposed to you looking at your 20 colonies in your apiary and saying, this is the one that I'm going to use to propagate, or you're buying in breeders. So I wouldn't use swarm cells and I wouldn't use emergency cells, but I would graft. Right, so this is getting ridiculous, Mum. If I were a bee, what would be your favorite flower? It would be a dandelion. Um, Mem, what is the first video you did? So you can filter it, you know, if you go into the channel, that is like 1,200 videos on there. And the first one I'm pretty sure was— I could, you know, I can do like videos and stuff and I haven't worked out how to do it yet though. Um, so I'll tell you what, let's, let's, let's go crazy and let's try and find it. You have to bear with me. Uh, so I'm just searching for it now, but there is— there's 1,200 videos on here. And if you're not aware, this is me trying to do something else and talk at the same time, which I'm not very good at. Right, so if I try and share my screen, I want to say, can you see that? But you're not gonna— you can't get back, so you should be able to see that. I do love the analytics of YouTube. So there we go, it's the first one, 29th of December 2019. It's It's a 14 by 12 national frame hyperlapse, and it's got my daughter in it. She wasn't— she was quite ill at the time. So let's play it, see if I've got the bandwidth to play it. Here we go. She was really ill, and she was just lying there ill with my dog. And that was me just making frames that I didn't need. And I think she kind of climbed on me for a bit, and then, uh, and then I gave up and then thought, this is, this is too much. So there we go. That was my first ever video. Did that work? If someone could just give me a thumbs up and said that worked, that would be good. We can do— we can have some more fun, do that again. But yeah, that was my first video. It was riveting, absolutely riveting. I'll tell you what, talking of YouTube videos, I get some serious grief from people loading them up with clickbait. So people may have noticed that yet, but in my defense, clickbait is something like, um, like you click on something and it's just completely different to what you thought it was going to click on. So you might— something like, um, oh, Donald Trump has been killed, click on this video, and you click on it and it's like a video of a bee just buzzing around. Like, that's clickbait. And that is a, is a YouTube term when the YouTube algorithm used to be based on If you clicked onto the video, that was it. You got the click. I'm still sharing my screen on it. There we go. So that's that's clickbait. Saying something like it's time to say goodbye, and then people clicking on it and being like that wasn't what I expected. It's like that's not really clickbait. That's just me being slightly imaginative with my titles because it was it was time to say goodbye to the colony that died. That's all it was. It's time to say goodbye to the A.M.M. colony because they've become drone layers. And I killed them because they were drone layers. If if people think that it was something else, and then they get angry. This is the thing: people get really angry. They said, "That's it. I'm unsubscribing now because it's clickbait." And it's like, "Well, it's not. It's like I want you to click on the videos to watch the videos. So I'm going to give them slightly imaginative titles." My in my defense again, what I would say is if you're not like fulfilled after you've clicked them, then that's that's on me, and I need to do a bit better. But I like to think that when people click on the videos. Then you, you're getting something out of them. So, so there was another video which was, this, this beehive is full to the brim with problems. And, and people said it's just too generic, like, I don't— you need to say what the problems are. And I'm like, you're not really understanding, like, the whole— I need to get, I need to get people to click on the videos, and then I kind of try and capture you to, to, like, entice you into watching the videos because It's interesting. So the first thing is I need to get you to click on them. Yeah, so if you click on the videos, then it's my job to make it exciting for you. If I just, if I just said, um, the title of the video was that this colony is a drone-laying queen and I've opened it up and it's got drone brood, so I'm going to kill it, I don't think anyone would watch it. Or, um, I had another video which was, you won't believe what's inside this abandoned beehive. And someone said, that's, that's completely misleading. You should have called it Beehive Inspection and Moving Colony 12 Feet. And I just thought, he's missed— he needs to get himself a job in a newspaper, like a high-level newspaper, because that is quality tabloid work. Um, but yeah, there we go. Sorry, proper, proper tangent there. I'll get back to standard beekeeping questions. Sorry, man. Yeah, I didn't. I did not. You would think that my mum would give me the heads up to say she's going to come on here and spam. I had my little brother spamming me on here as well before. So Thomas says, "Why don't you use bee escapes?" Interested to know. We use them. Didn't know if they're. I'm going to finish the rest of the question. So I used to use bee escapes. You'd have like porter bee escapes, and then they just get filled with dead bees, and they're just no good. Rhombus bee escapes are good though. I got a couple of rhombus clearer boards. They are good, but I, I found when I use the rhombus clearer boards, there's still a few bees left over. So I don't want to take any bees in the back of the truck. So I'd end up going and doing the clearing with the rhombus clearer board and then using the blower to finish it off. And then I thought, I'll just blow them off. If you're gonna get— if I'm gonna use the blower anyway, what's the point in the rhombus clearer boards? So I stopped doing them. Oh, Little Nest Crafts suggesting Beekeeping for Dummies as an easy reading book. I've heard that one being talked about positively as well. Uh, Joe Murphy says, you've reminded me, where do you get your disposable gloves from? Trying to get some with longer cuffs. So I was, I was given a box by the people who sent me all those, uh, gloves, and then they— I didn't realize at the time, they said, oh no, we don't sell individual boxes, so you need to buy like 72 or 36 or whatever, like a crate of them is. Um, So you can't really get them. Uh, I think she said that she was selling them to a guy called Sean Mooney. Sean Kill Line Mooney sounds like a wrestler. And then he could sell them. Uh, she asked me if I wanted to sell them, but I said no, we don't, we don't sell stuff like that. Uh, but yeah, so I can't, I can't give you a place to get them as a box. Sorry, Joe. I love it. L, do you have a plan to go full-time commercial? Goals? How many colonies will be able to take on an employee? So it's strange, isn't it? Because this was like originally my— not my plan, but like that's what you would think for like a beekeeping outfit with ambition to take over the world. Like you're going to go full-time, you're going to build up your colonies, you're going to have this, this amount of honey, and then you're going to take on an employee. I see it slightly differently. Like, I love the fact that we don't have any employees because, like, it comes with a whole host of risk. You, like, start taking on employees, and it shows how, like, risk-averse I am. I'm, like, the least kind of growth-oriented person in the world for my business. But I don't want to take on an employee. I don't want to have to make sure that the business can cater for somebody's salary and have that, like, on, on me. So I'm quite happy with the way that it's going at the moment, and I'm trying to keep my numbers down as low as they can be so I can focus on my actual job as opposed to trying to grow the business and it getting too big and then not being able to kind of manage everything. So I'm quite happy with it how it is at the moment, and I'm doing my best to get my numbers down to keep it manageable. Says he had bees 6 weeks now, already lost a swarm from a nuc. I'm guessing due to the get this crazy flow. This year my second hive is still there and now working the super. I've checkerboarded the stores and foundation. Good stuff. You're not a beekeeper until you lost a swarm, so don't worry about that. They, uh, they will bounce back very quickly. Would you say your environment conditions are the same as ours here in Liverpool, as we are pretty close? Would you say there is a difference? So not— I don't think there's much of a difference across the whole of the UK. Like, I know, again, I don't want to alienate and make people angry, but where you hear people say, oh, you need to get local bees, you need bees that are local to you, and they're saying like, oh, don't get bees from Manchester, get them from Liverpool, because they need to be like local, they're in tune to the local climatic changes. It's like, there's really not that much difference between like Edinburgh and London. Not, not in terms of bees. Okay, it's warmer in London, and the seasons are going to start earlier and finish earlier, but, you know, it's not wildly different in terms of max temperature or min temperature. And bees, you know, are fine. You look at Ian Stepler's videos, bees are fine down to like -32°C, and I'm pretty sure it's -32°F as well. It's like the one where it crosses over, isn't it? it? Uh, so it makes, it makes little difference in the UK where your bees are from. They're, they're pretty much able to cope with anything the UK has to throw at it. So no, I wouldn't say there's much of a difference. Be fine. So Andrew's saying no June gap in Gloucestershire, bramble is already opening. I've definitely seen it, it's starting to open up. It's— yeah, it's going to be a short season, which is good. I'm hoping it finishes. That sounds really negative, doesn't it? It gets too much. It gets too much, right? Says the honey is not getting capped in my long hive with the strong flow. Checkerboarding and pulling back just turbocharged them. Any ideas, or do I have to remove some wet to give them space? I'm struggling a bit with my long hives, I'm not gonna lie, because they're just— there's not much that you can do Like there's no, there's no techniques that are really there. Like you talked about checkerboarding and pulling them back, and it does, it turbocharges them. And if they're bringing in that amount of like raw wet nectar, there's just nowhere for them to put it. So you just, they seem to just leave it. It's, it's a bit of a challenge. So sorry, I'm not, I'm not going to bullshit you and say do this, do that. I don't know, I'm struggling a bit with mine as well. Uh, Alan says if he likes all 1,200 vids on my channel, can I spend a beekeeping day with you? It's a bit weird, um, but yeah, why not come down, have a cup of tea, peppermint tea, cold peppermint tea. That's a one good point that you got there though, is got 127 people watching here. When you watch the videos, please do like them. You can start by liking the stream really does. It helps the algorithm, helps the, the reach of the video. So if you do watch my videos and you do like them, please do hit the thumbs up. Can you find a swarm that took off? I've not— I'm not really sure I follow with that one. What's your rough schedule for making overwintered nucs for sale in spring? Which months do you start? How many frame splits etc. So I've changed. I think I've done 3 different iterations of this in 3 years now. This year, I think I'm still gonna probably go with like middle of July and just leave it late. Leave it late and make them big is probably the way that I do it. So I tried doing it before, which is make them small and do them early. So just a couple of frames of like one frame of brood, one frame of stores, and like maximize the amount of bees that you can get from like a single colony. But with, with the help that I'm getting doing it now, like partnering up with someone else for the nucs, it makes it a lot easier to do it. And there's more bees, so you can make bigger splits and you can do them later on in the year. You can't make late splits small because they just get battered by the wasps, absolutely battered. Um, but that's probably around, probably around the time it works well for me, like middle of July. There tends to be tons of brood around that stage. And you can just pinch as much as you want. But I would say if you go middle of July and go with a 6-frame nuc and go with like 2 or 3 frames of capped brood and then just like a good shake of bees, fill the nuc with bees, and you shouldn't, you shouldn't need to feed them. And then get the Apivar strip in early. That's a good tip. Don't, don't— if you, if you're keeping them on a separate site, so you've got a nuc site, don't just think that Apivar, you do that at the end of the year. Your nucs, you're not taking any honey off them, so you can do Apivar really, really early. Like, you can start it middle of June if you wanted to start in middle of June, and that's just a good way of getting the mite load down as low as it can go. And then you shouldn't really need to feed them if you time it right. You don't need to feed them to kind of stimulate them to get them growing because you've put loads of bees in there anyway. And if you've done them early enough, then there should have been enough of natural forage to get them them heavy enough going into the winter. So I think that's what I'm going to go with this year. We kind of like still fine-tuning it a bit. Oh yeah, it's a good point, Mum. Why are you not a channel member? I'll refund you. I can do you a refund. Um, is Jonathan sending me another queen? So no, I've not, I've not, I've not contacted him. Um, I've got a lot of hate on that video, I'm not gonna lie. A lot of people, like, it kind of rubs people up the wrong way talking about AMM queens for some reason. Uh, but also, like, I thought I was doing the right thing there. Let's do a fair comparison between Buckfast and, and the purest of AMM that I can get, which is like, you know, supposedly pockets of good AMM. in Northern Ireland, so let's get an F1 from a good breeder out there. But that wasn't good enough for some people. They wanted 15, 15 AMMs in a dedicated AMM apiary because doing it on one isn't a big enough data sample. And I get the argument, but I'm in— it's not just all about experimenting for YouTube. So I might get another one, I might not, I don't know. Thanks, David. Appreciate that. Okay, you've thanks. 1,200 videos. Very good. I'll have a go on the spot method. I've not seen that, so let me have a look. Doing it with the right age larva. I'll give it a go. I'm I've always said with with things like this, I'm not like I'm not saying like oh I do it this way and that's the right way. Like Plenty of people know tons more than me about beekeeping. I can just tell you what has worked for me and what hasn't worked for me in the past, but I'm definitely up for having another go. So I'll Google that and I'll give it another go and we will see how it goes. Oh, it's the wrong one. All right, Dan, another channel member. Got loads of channel members on, it's great. Hi everyone. Right, says, good evening, stupid question, but if a colony prepares to swarm with queen cells, can you Expand the hive and avoid the swarm by taking down the queen cells, or is it better to do a split at that point? So there is so much bad teaching on, on YouTube, me for one, but, uh, in beekeeping in general. And one of the biggest ones I would say is that taking down queen cells stops the bees swarming. Definitely it does nothing. It all it does is it just like makes the bees more angry and they just swarm Anyway, so no, if the bees have created swarm cells, you have to do either an artificial swarm or, or a split. And, and the split can just be as easy as taking out like a 2-frame nuc with the queen and just putting her off to one side. I know some people that do it with an Apidea. They do. They'll just take the queen and just chuck loads of— like, get a cup full of bees with the mated queen from the hive and just chuck it into an Apidea and then just like put it on top of the hive, strap it to the hive, and for like a couple of weeks, like, the bees will in the Apidea will just start drawing out the cells and the queen will be up there happily laying away whilst downstairs you've left one queen cell. Now some people, they just let that queen cell emerge and then the colony will get back to normal and they'll have a mated queen, and then you've got a queen upstairs that you can do something with. You can sell it, you can give it away. Or what other people do is, depending on the timing, is that before the queen cell in the bottom part of the beekeeping— of the beehive emerges, they just take the cell down and just reintroduce back the queen. And they say that way it's like it, it actually works quite well. Speed. So if you see swarm cells, you need to take action. You can't just take them down because it didn't work. But yeah, make a split. Peter says, got my single nuc last year and it has expanded to five hives with eight full supers on at the moment. Wow! Already pulled 25 kilograms off them. When will this flow stop? I can't keep up. Never moan about heavy supers. That's like beekeeping rule number one. I'm sure you're saying it tongue in cheek, but it was the funny thing is is that it will stop and it will stop dead. It really will. If the June gap comes, crazy Eric. Just like one day, it's. Like today, beautiful, warm, the nectar's coming in, and then the next day they are pinging you because they get angry when it stops. But I reckon it will stop. Uh, unfortunately no, we don't, we don't ship to the US. It's— I get that, I get— do get asked that quite a lot. No, we can't, um, just, uh, export and import stuff. You can't get them out there. David Hayes says he caught a swarm which looks like a combination of native British bees— and I'd say native— and Buckfast. Are my eyes deceiving me? There's a queen in there from somewhere, but she is not marked. Um, so no, I don't think your eyes will be deceiving you. You do get that. That's the beauty of open mating, is that the drones are completely non-selected and wild. And if you did watch that, that video, the clickbait video, it's time to say goodbye. with the AMM colony. That's definitely what happened with that. So, so I had an AMM colony that was an F1 mated, but it was mated in a place where predominantly they had native AMM bees, supposedly. I don't get into the debate on that, but looking at the bees, they all did look very, very uniform, very AMM, very dark-looked AMM, but very kind of like homogeneous. So there wasn't one bee looked like this and one bee looked like that. Really did all look very, very similar, very dark bees. And then what I think happened was the queen failed, so they superseded the queen, and she was in an apiary that's got like 20 Buckfast colonies in there. So I think that superseded queen went out and got mated, but mated poorly, and then she came back, laid a little bit of brood, then failed, and then turned drone laying. So that when I went into the drone laying colony you could see they changed. It wasn't all like bees that looked the same anymore. It was bees that— some of the— some that were dark, some that were a bit ginger. And it's because they've gone out and mated with kind of like wild, wild native bees, native bees and my Buckfast bees as well, which, which gives you that mix. So you do get it. I've got a lot of colonies like that, like kind of locally mixed mongrels where they're just Some are dark, some are ginger. But yeah, you get it. Right, Lou Lewis, Louis, Louis. I want to say Louis. Right, Louis says, "Hi Lawrence, done a demo six weeks back. Bees are filling the top boxes but have not touched the supers. One was foundation and not drawn it. Should I remove one or both or leave them on?" So yeah, so probably did the demo a little bit early. I always say. Brood box full, and then you want 2 supers full of bees. And if you've got 2 supers full of bees, it means you never have a super full of foundation in there. But it's not the end of the world if the bees are quite happily doing it. I would remove it though. You want to condense them back down and get them a little bit closer to one another, and then, and then they'll start drawing it out. You don't want it, you don't want it like completely separate, like 2 completely separate different colonies. You want them almost attached together by bees. And by having a super foundation in there, you, you block them out a little bit. Uh, Flower Street Farm Bee says hello from Colorado. I like your name, Flower Street Farm Bee, it's a cool name. Uh, Alan says you did say you would get a few AMM queens to give it a fair test, as the chalk brood might have just been down to the queen you had, so it'd be interesting to see. Yeah, I could, I could get a few, but like Every time I've had an AMM queen or like local dark queens, they just get chalked through. Drives me mad. And there's, there's no way that it's just like chance. It's a well-known fact that AMMBs are very chalky. It's true. I don't care what anyone says, it is true. They're very chalky. And I think it comes down to the fact that when like local associations breed for these bees they— all they care about is just getting them as close to the— as pure AMM as possible. So they'll be looking for like darkness, they'll be looking for like the right wing shape, they'll be going off getting it DNA tested. If it comes back at 98%, 99%, they say, right, that's the one, that's the one to use. And then if you look at it and there's loads of chalk brood in there, they say, oh yeah, but that's the one that's 99%, so that's the one that we're going to use. So it seems to propagate this chalk chalkiness. Um, I've seen it many times with my own eyes that it does exist. Not to say that you're not going to get AMM bees or native bees that, that don't have chalk brood, but it just seems that there's more colonies that do have it. And the one that I had was very, very badly infected with chalk brood. Hmm. Right, Joe says, if I were to use a 2-in-1 nuc to make queens at this time of year, could I get away with putting a virgin a frame of brood, a frame of stores and nurse bees, and 2 frames of foundation. Um, so wait, a frame of brood, a frame of stores and nurse bees, that's 4 frames in a, in a 3-frame nuc. Yeah, am I reading that wrong? I would just say, Joe, don't, don't get carried away. Just go with a decent amount of bees in there. So what, 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores is fine, but be careful with adding virgins. It is It's much easier to do it with cells, I would say. Oh, how about this? Drone Style received 2 nucs off me today. They're in their new hives and looking forward to seeing how they get on. Thank you, thank you for buying them. Um, I love, I love seeing people with their kind of like new nucs that they've got and, and following their stories. It's great, really good fun. Uh, Little Jiminy UK says, are certain breeds of bees resistant to mites? I was given a swarm 3 years ago and I have never had to treat them, and it's a thriving colony. So you hear that some are— to be honest, I see a bee farmer on Twitter and he is adamant that he doesn't treat his bees, at least in like one or two of his apiaries, and you look at the pictures and they look good and they look thriving. So I do think the bees are able to like tolerate the diseases that are transmitted by Varroa better than others, and this is where the swarminess gene comes in. So some colonies, they definitely swarm more than others, and by swarming, you're kind of introducing like natural brood breaks in there, which means that you're getting relief, the bees are getting relief from that transmission of diseases from Varroa. So it's kind of like a bad thing for us but like a really good thing for bees, but You say it's like subjective. A thriving colony, a thriving colony to some people could mean a colony that never dies, so it's, it's alive, it's bringing in nectar, it's bringing in pollen. Every time you look at the entrance, there's bees there. Or, or it could mean to— like, a thriving colony to me would be like minimum 4 supers. It'd be minimum 7 supers. So it's always like a little bit subjective in terms of what's a thriving colony, but it's more— so for me, they have to thrive and not just survive. And you see this a lot in that bees, I think, can tolerate and bees can survive the impacts of varroa, but whether you can get them to a point where they can compete with colonies that are being managed for varroa, I'm not so sure. But interesting. Aidan says, hey, I've been watching your videos by broadcasting them to my TV. My mom said she is going to charge you rent as you've been living in— I've been in the living room. I bought 2 nucs 2 weeks ago and caught a swarm. So hi, Aidan's mom, how you doing? Send me, send me the bill, I'll pay that, no problem. Um, I like watching it on my telly as well. Bit of YouTube on the telly, it's good, isn't it? Famous last words. What is it, 25 to 11 already? Well, there was 3 questions left when I said that, and then I went off on a ridiculous tangent about golf and having a rant about something, and then you filled it back up with questions, so I've just kept on going. I'm less than halfway through my cold peppermint tea now. Let's— I'll go a little bit longer. My, my wife's left me. She's gone, completely left me. She's on holiday for 2 days. So like, I even talk in the style of a YouTube title now, don't I? My wife has left me. For a two-day holiday, so I can stay up all night. Normally, she's kind of in this room here texting me, saying, "Stop talking so loudly," and tonight she's not here, so I'm on my own. I just got Jasper. Does anyone want to meet Jasper? Jasper, Jasper, good. See if we can get him in. See him there, Jasper? Not interested. He's he's out for the count. I will go on for a little bit longer and finish my tea. So Stuart's got 20 hives here in Scotland, a mix of Carnies and Italians with 2 hives of AMM. How do you find the differences between the 3? I'm going to scroll down to the bottom and you're going to tell us what the differences are. Do any of them have chalk brood, and if they do, is it the AMM ones? You hear it from Stuart now. Uh, Aussie Beekeeping says, morning, Lawrence, 7:30 AM here. Would you mind starting your lives at 2 AM your time so I don't miss out? So I, it could— I could do that, couldn't I? It was when I did the Bush Bee Man, I was knackered, and we delayed it by a week because something happened. So we, we did it— we were going to do it while I was on Greenwich Mean Time, and then we had to do it on British Summer Time, so it knocked it an hour forward. So I don't think we started till like 11 o'clock. I was knackered. Absolutely shattered. Um, but I've been speaking to Cayman Reynolds to see if we can do— I'm going to do a live stream on his channel, and we're, we're trying to sort out a time, and it's going to be a late one. It's going to be proper late. I think he's going to want to do it at like 2 AM. So if you get an alert on your phone in the UK at 2 AM that I'm doing a live stream, make sure you get up. You've got to watch it as it's live. But no, really, just catch up, catch up next day. Sorry. There we go. Great, I love it. Thanks, Stuart. You could have made me look really, really stupid there, or you could completely vindicate my point, which is AMM do have chalk brood. It's not to say that it's like the worst thing in the world, chalk brood's going to kill the colony and it's, it's terrible, but they do. They kind of all have chalk brood in, in some degree, to some degree. James says, do you keep a record of your hive inspection? So no, I don't. I used to, I used to try my best to keep records to the nth degree, but I don't anymore. The only records that I keep are like the VMD, so the Veterinary Medicinal Records. That's not right, is it? VMD? No, direct— it's the Directorate, the Veterinary Medicinal Directorate. I don't know, it's too late for acronyms. Those ones that you need to keep, which is when do you do your mite treatments, But I don't do hive inspection records anymore. And then I'll kind of like go for different things. Generally what I'll do, I've got my pen, I'll write on the back of the poly hive what's going on, like anything that's important. So if, if like if a colony swarmed, I'll just write on it swarmed, write the date, and then when I come back next time I can say, right, I don't need to go in there for 4 weeks, whatever. So I just write down the important stuff. Arctic Beekeeping says, uh, how is the honey flow? What's the average honey crop for May in your area? Here in the Arctic, it's actually snowing today. Just horrible. One of the worst Mays I can remember. I don't want to rub salt into your wounds really bad now. It's been absolutely amazing down here. It really has been the best, the best late May we've ever had, I would say. because everyone's completely full crops, uh, supers are full. Um, it's, it's different North Wales, we don't get loads of honey, so we're never going to get bumper crops. But I would say average, like on mine, between 2 and 3 supers, like jam-packed full. But further south, I have seen big stacks. I won't, I won't tell you about Chris's 7 supers again. How far do keepers— keepers, That's cool. How far do keepers take their hives to the heather? The closest to us is Longmin, which is about an hour away, so that's, that's fine. I know some people— did I meet someone the other day? And they go like, they go to Scotland from like down south. They drive to Scotland because it is like next level heather up in Scotland, and enough heather for like everyone. Everyone gets a slice of heather there. But yeah, you can take them, take them very far. Just make sure they're okay. So Peter says, if the flow stops and I don't take off the supers, will the bees eat all the honey? Yes, they definitely will. So they won't, they won't eat all the honey, but I've had it before where you get like a spring crop, so you've got a couple of supers as a spring crop, and then you get the June gap, and then you get 2 weeks of rubbish weather, and the colonies are like peak numbers because you're getting past the equinox as well, so the numbers will start to go down a little bit. They just eat it all and it's gone, and you just think, oh, that's annoying, could have taken it. But then if you do take it, then you've got to feed them because they will die otherwise. So it's weighing up what's more important to you— saving the time of not inspecting— sorry, not extracting— or kind of like maximizing the amount of honey that you can get, but it takes you longer because you've got to go back and feed them. We don't inspect Oh, it's getting late now, I need to finish. We don't take our spring crop anymore and we leave it on them, and then we just take it at the end of the year. But we're, we're quite lucky, we don't have any oilseed rape, so it doesn't set, so we can just leave it on all season. I'll just double down, only the 2 hives with chalk brood are the AMM. Both have it, not bad, but it's there. That's exactly what we found as well. Right, I'm getting, I'm getting closer to the bottom, right? I'm gonna, I'm gonna speed up. So Tim says he was going to make splits to the queen cells. How important is it to avoid any eggs, young brood in the split? So no, that's fine as long as you've got enough nurse bees to go in there as well. That should be fine, just fill them up. Alan says, why do you say North Wales doesn't get a lot of honey? What causes that? There's also heather on my farm. Yeah, so heather's all right, you get like a reasonable heather crop there, but apart from that, like, there's no arable crops. So if you go down south, they're like— they go from the oilseed rape to like the field beans, and they've got the borage, and then you get like mega, mega crops down there. And then they get all of the, the bramble and the wildflowers and the trees and the limes and stuff as well. And, and not to mention the cherries and the apples and all of the, the good crops that they get down there. Whereas up here you just get sheep. It's just fields of sheep and grass. and then you'll get the hedgerows and you'll get the bramble and you'll get the wildflowers, but the temperature's not quite as good, and then the forage just isn't anywhere near as good. So we— I'd say we would average like 2 or 3 supers a year. That's probably our average, like £50, £60, something like that. Whereas down south, to get £200 per colony is not uncommon in a good year. I'm trying not to expand my hives. How do I manage swarm control without making splits. So I know I'm a one-trick pony, but the preemptive demerare is by far and away the best way of— you are doing a split, you're doing like a vertical split, but you're keeping them on one hive stand, and then you condense them back down in the winter, or in— sorry, in the late summer into autumn, and then you're back to the same numbers. That's the best way that I've found doing it. The other way is you just take it on the chin and you expand them in the year, And then come August, you combine them back together again. So you need kind of double the kit, but then at least you're condensing them back down to the right number each year, and then it gives you the ability to go again. Sheep, it is Wales. How long before a newly made Apidea become laying workers? I have no cell to put in. So I would say with it, with, with an Apidea, you know, it's much easier to do yet is just shake them out in front of a like a new colony. So shake them out in front of an established colony and just let them join back in, and then just restock them with the right age bees, because you do need like young bees in Apidae for some reason. That's what I would do. Otherwise, you, you'll just find that you won't get the right level of acceptance with the new cell that you put in there, and then they'll probably have absconded. That's what I would do. Do you get honeydew, and when, if you do? So You do, you definitely get honeydew in this country, but very, very rarely, like, and not in great quantities at all. Like, you might see like a tiny little bit on a bit of a frame. I think I've only ever seen it a couple of times in like a few cells, and I speak to some people who they said they've maybe got like half a frame of it. Um, I can't remember when, I can't remember when it was. It's not something that you could plan for. It's, uh, it's a shame because I, I would quite like that. It would be quite a unique honey to get. Right, last question. Aiden says, the 2 nucs I bought are mongrels with dark abdomens. I bought them on 5 frames of brood and they're still on 5 frames of brood and growing in stores. Any tips on making hives strong? So I went through this quite a bit when I was starting out in terms of like, what can I do to make the hive strong? And I've just come to the conclusion that if the colonies want to make themselves strong, they will make themselves strong, and it comes a lot down to their genetics. So for example, if you've got a colony on a single brood box and you say, right, I'm going to give you another brood box because I want to make you strong, and they, they can't support that additional brood box, they just turn it into a super and they just put honey in it. So there's not much that you can do to force— it's like trying to kind of eke value out of something that doesn't want to give you it. So if they're mongrels, I would suggest you're probably not going to get them booming over double broods and producing like crazy amounts of honey, but you don't necessarily need that or want that. So it's all about kind of what you want, but I wouldn't try and force them, wouldn't try to push them into anything like giving them too much space or double brooding them or trying to feed them. Like, they will just build up naturally and you'll get to know like What what size they should be at? I couldn't say it better myself, Philip Morse. 117 watching and only 42 likes. I've been here for an hour and 42 minutes. I'm only joking. Why did you up? It would be very nice if people hit the like button. If you especially if you got this far through the end of the stream, if you're ever watching it live or you're watching it tomorrow or the day after, if you got this far, I reckon I deserve a like. There we go. Andrew Rogers says, can I boil sterilized wooden hives rather than burning? Uh, you can, yeah. So you can do them in caustic soda, that's what some people do, but burning them so much easier. It really is. Like, I've been burning loads of stuff this week, like scorching it, and I just— it's, it's really easy to do. Just like scrape it down, get the blowtorch on it. I find it, it's like one of the most therapeutic things to do. In the world. I'm going to post a short after tonight showing how I flame some of them. It's so much fun. So you can, you can boil them and just make sure to Google caustic soda boiling. It's like really alkaline, really dangerous, but like strips everything back. It's good. And the big— the even bigger benefit with this year with that is that you can do it with the frames in. So say you've got like manky old frames with wax in that you don't want to reclaim any of the wax from, but it's all like gunk up if you can boil the frames in the boxes. So you just dip the whole boxes in with the frames and then you boil it all up and they come out, and then you just pressure wash them and they come out like new. Really, really good, but quite like heavy duty. I would just chuck the frames, get new frames, and then just scorch the boxes. Loads easier. You're the 4th final question, right? Rob says, my bees aren't capping off the Any tips on helping them to cap it? They just keep loading up the frames. So that's what they're supposed to do. Don't worry about it. They will cap it when they, when they got time to cap it. At the moment they're thinking, you know, make hay while the sun is shining. They're out getting all of that nectar in, and they will cap it when they come to cap it. So don't rush them. I've not got any tips to help them rush it or to speed it up, but they're doing the right thing. Just leave them to it. Peter says, just say a big thank you as I watch your videos for 2 years before I got my first nuc last year. Thank you, Peter. Right, that's it. Oh no, he's— I've missed out this one. There you go, Thomas. Sorry, nearly. But what's the most common honey I get? So we get bramble and clover is the most common up here. Alan's off to like 1,200 vids, right? When you've done it, let me know. We'll meet up. Andrew, AFB needs higher temperature to kill the spores, so probably not. So yeah, that's a good point in terms of actually like sterilization. You— the only way to do it is, uh, actually I should, I should go back to the dash here. Let's have a think. Yeah, is it blowtorch? So you do need to blowtorch it for that. But just in terms of cleaning the boxes, you can caustic soda them, that's fine. But good shout, always happy to be corrected there. Like that. Oh, here we go. More questions. Larry, have you had a problem losing queens when you transport hive in the car? So no, I've never had that problem. Are you UK? I've not had that problem, not at all. Right, sorry, no more questions. I am done. 1 hour and 50 minutes. I really enjoyed it. I will not leave it this long again. Uh, I'll be back in another maybe 2 weeks and we'll do another live stream. If you have got this far, do hit the like button and definitely check out the channel membership options because then you get a very natty little badge. But thank you all, good luck with the beekeeping season, and I'll see you all soon.