Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 71
In this episode of Black Mountain Honey, host Laurence Edwards discusses a wide range of beekeeping topics, from practical hive management techniques to industry‑level disputes. He explains why performing splits at a separate apiary prevents robbing and drift, and advocates a "melt‑down" policy for failed colonies to conserve resources and avoid throwing good money after bad. Edwards addresses legal action against defamatory statements targeting his business, and shares his stance on defending reputation. The conversation moves into specific colony health issues, such as diagnosing pollen‑bound hives and quickly remedying them by removing excess pollen. He outlines his approach to queen cell handling, including incubator storage parameters, and offers guidance on the optimal timing for transferring nucs based on regional climate cues. A novel "checkerboard" frame arrangement is presented to reduce swarm‑inducing foundation walls. Edwards also covers varroa control in Kenyan top‑bar hives, recommending oxalic acid sublimation over ineffective fogging methods. He warns about the risks of aggressive late‑season splits that rely on old bees, and discusses the broader debate over Tropilaelaps‑free queen imports, BBKA politics, and the potential for black‑market trade. Finally, he evaluates the efficacy of varroa‑stripping devices and provides insight into monitoring drone brood as a swarming indicator. Throughout, the tone is conversational and instructional, with a mix of enthusiastic advocacy for best practices and cautious criticism of misinformation.
Chapters
Good morning everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. Now we've received a little bit of bad news, quite a big bit of bad news this week that I will update people on later on this week, but what it's meant is that this week has been so difficult for me in terms of everything, but in terms of the bees and trying to get them ready, what it means is that I'm not going to be able to look into my colonies very much for the next 3 or 4 weeks, and normally over the next 3 or 4 weeks what I'm doing is I'm going up there, I'm hefting, I'm adding fondant if they need fondant, I'm giving them feed if they need feed. If I'm looking at them and I'm thinking they are huge, I'm underbrooding, giving them space. And you can't do all of that at once, although this week I did all of that at once because I know I'm not going to be able to get in to see them. And my fears are— and my fears were kind of confirmed this week as well in terms of colonies starving. I'm thinking March, I know colonies are going to starve in March. I know colonies are going to struggle. I know they're going to burn through their brood really, really quickly. So I need to be there to make sure that doesn't happen. Now normally I would go up every week, I would heft, uh, any that I felt were a little bit light, I would say, okay, well, what's the weather? Is the weather good? Are they flying? Can I give them syrup? Can I give them invert? Prefer to feed invert at this time of the year and really prefer to feed invert with the temperatures going up and down the way they are at the moment. You get lots of mouldy syrup if you don't do that. Or it might be much colder and I might think, well, I'm probably better off just putting fondant directly on the top there and then I can take it back away. And then I'm always trying to weigh that up against the overfeeding. And you'll see that a lot. I've done that loads of times in the past, but I see people doing it now, which is pumping full of syrup, 12-kilogram fondant slab on the top, and then they wonder why the colony isn't expanding as they get into spring because they're just being restricted down. So March is a very, very busy month, um, and you'll see the channel member videos starting to ramp up a little bit now. And it would have been me more going and assessing those colonies and maybe taking them apart when I shouldn't have taken them apart so I could show people who are watching on the videos. Found myself doing more and more of that recently, but I think it does go down quite well, which is doing something that people wouldn't necessarily want to do on their bees. But I didn't, or I'm not able to do that over the next 3 or 4 weeks. It's going to be a real difficult time, and I've gone out and preemptively striked. That doesn't make any sense. I've gone and done a preemptive strike, which I appreciate is probably a terrible use of words at the moment, but I've gone out and done what I can now try and protect my bees over the next 3 or 4 weeks. Now the 2 biggest risks that you have at this time of the year, and it's kind of like one follows the other, but you never get 2 of these in the same colony. So the biggest risk in March is starving. The brood rearing really does ramp up at this point in the year, and the brood rearing means it's much more energy intensive, and if the bees have not got enough stores there, plus the amount of food coming in, then they can starve. That's what happened this week. I had a mini mating nuc, the Abello mini mating nuc that I went into in December, and I checked 2 weeks ago and lifted it and thought, yeah, that's, that's good. It's starved and they're not completely dead, but they are like mostly dead. And it really— oh, I hate it when it's kind of my fault like that. But it goes to show how important it is to get used to calibrating different sizes of hives, because that one there, I'm not quite used to calibrating that. It felt very heavy to me and then went in and I just missed it. I only missed it by about a day, so the bees were 50 or 60% still alive but shaking. the frame, everything else gone and dead, which is very, very frustrating. So the risk is real of starvation at this point in the year. I would say just err on the side of caution, but only ever so slightly. You don't want to go down the route of feeding too much as well, because that creates an equal amount of problems, but a little bit later on. And then if the colonies don't die in March due to starvation, which is obviously what we don't want— any colonies dying in March— and with good management, it is quite easy to keep them alive. then quite soon after that, the risk is swarming. They come flying out, and if you don't put enough space on them and give them enough space in the brood box, or give them probably more regularly spaced up in the supers in the spring, then you'll lose your bees due to swarming as well. So 2 big risks, kind of like your March risk and your April risk. And I'm not going to be able to manage my bees— like, I'm only talking about my production colonies here, this doesn't affect kind of any of the nucs or the queens going on— but my production colonies that I have that I that I play around with for YouTube videos. I'm not gonna be able to get to them, so I've had to go and do this work to try and give them the best chance of not dying through starvation and then not swarming as well. So I've done pretty much the same thing on all of them. I have changed them up. What's nice is I really didn't want to film that day. I wasn't in the best mood, and I was a bit stressed out, and I thought, well, I need to do a full day here to go around all of these apiary sites. I need to double brood where I can, I need to get new boxes on, I need to tidy up anything that's a mess I need to get syrup into them because if I'm going ahead and underbrooding, definitely want to get a lot of good invert syrup in. It was 15 degrees and I said it went down to -2, so I'm glad I fed invert syrup. I, I know I'm jumping around a little bit. People say feed 1:1 in the spring and it really is true. 1:1 in the spring is brilliant, stimulates the colony, gets them going, stimulates the flow. But it is very much not spring yet, it is so winter. So for the first couple of feeds, invert just on its own, no additives, no Hive Alive, is brilliant because even when I fed it in October, November last year, going back in, if the bees haven't cleaned it out, so that's like 4 or 5 months later, still not gone mouldy. Whereas 1:1, with temperature drops like that and condensation sitting on it, you'll come back in, it'll just be covered in blue mould, which is very, very bad for your bees. So, uh, you don't want to go, you don't want to go down that route. But I fed them both. If you're underbrooding, do feed them as well. Stick some invert in there as well because they will take it. And the underbrooding, the theory behind the underbrooding is very, very good in terms of what it does. It's very effective. So instead of double brooding in the standard way where you'd have your floor, your normal brood box, and then you'd put another brood box on top and then have your feeder there, if you do that in the winter, you, especially when it gets cold again in the evening, the bees cluster down where all the bees are, where all the brood is, and then you've got an empty box above of nothing where all the heat rises up into. creating difficult conditions for the colony, and then you've got a feeder at the top that the bees generally can't find anymore, so it's just, you don't have a feeder, you have nowhere feeding them. Whereas if you do it the other way, where you have the floor, the original brood box which you lift up, and then put the new brood box down there, the top brood box, the original one, is still in contact with the feeder, and then all of the space is underneath. Now people say that bees only move up, it's not true, bees move down if they can't move up. They move down a lot in the wild as well, so Generally, you do see it over the season, the bees move up and it's an easy way to manage them. But I know through personal experience and seen tons of people do this as well, in terms of people that I've recommended it to and they've come back and said, that was an awesome technique. It gives you a massive buffer. So if you're, if you're like going down honey production route and you want to maximize the amount of honey that you're going to produce from a single colony in the season, do not do that. Not a good thing to do. If you're going down the route of saying, well, I've got one colony that I'm definitely going to split at some point this year, And you're worried about them starving, and you're worried about them swarming. Best technique in the world, because that's that's where I was, which is I I know I'm going to split the hives that I've got there because I need to kind of fill up some gaps up here anyway. I know I'm worried about starvation, so I'm going to give them some feed. I'm going to give them space. I'm not going to remove them from the top of that feeder. So when it goes down to minus two overnight, they cluster up exactly where they were, and the feeder is directly above them, which keeps them nice and warm. So there we go. That's that's the week that I did, and I filmed it all. So we filmed the entire day just as one long. Video. I don't know how long it will end up being in the end. It'll be, it'll be done nicely by Zane, but it'll be quite interesting. You get to see inside pretty much all of my colonies. Uh, there's a lot. I lost one, one or two, I think two. One in the forest apiary, one in the other apiary, and then the other one, um, I didn't lose any of them, which is quite nice. But I'll show you the ones that I lost as well. It shows you the starvation colony. There's loads in there, loads, loads coming out in terms of videos. So let me answer some questions. I went on there, that was an 8-minute preamble. Wow. Okay, I'm gonna have a sip of coffee. Okay, got a few people saying good morning. Oh, remember to not click the comments on here so I can cut them up and say stuff like clip, do a clip there, and then I can repurpose all my content. Um, so says morning from Morecambe, hope you're well. Good to hear from you, Jim. Uh, Rob says good morning from Dulles, Somerset. Got a few people saying good morning. Got Aaron there, hi Aaron. Uh, John says my Black Mountain honey Carniolan colony is booming, as was on double brood with tons of stores. I have to say, when I was going around and doing these manipulations earlier on this week, and I might add not pulling out any frames, it's a very safe manipulation to do, but I come across some colonies where, for whatever reason, I double brooded them going into winter, and I love coming to a spring double brooded colony that's just got tons of space, got tons of food, don't have to worry about it. It's a really nice safe technique, especially if you're going through your first season and you're kind of getting towards the end of it and you take the honey off and you do what I say, which is put your Apivar strips in middle of August after you've taken all of your honey off, Compress them down into a single brood. A lot of people at that point say, well, I'm not, I'm not entirely comfortable at single brood at that point, I think they might swarm. And I say to them, well, just if you're really worried about them swarming, just double brood at that point because it does make your life a lot easier. You might have to re-compress them or combine them back down at a later point, but double brood at that point of the season really does help you both in the late season but then in the spring as well. So good to hear, good to hear your one's doing well, John. A few people saying good morning. Was it good morning from Somerset? Got Jim from California. Hello. Right, first question. Nessa says good morning. We've had a warm few days here in Cambridgeshire. The bees have been flying. One hive lost due to the wet. Two hives still plenty of stores. Fondant on the other hive. Happy weekend to you. Okay, wasn't the question, but very good update, Nessa. All I would say, one one thing on there. I've seen I have seen a lot of people saying this in that that there are dramatic losses. across the southeast or the southwest, and people are saying they're putting it down to the damp and the cold, because when they open up a colony and it's all mouldy and it's damp and it's cold, so it's the damp and the cold that's killed them. From personal experience, I would say it's not the damp and the cold that's killed them. As soon as you kill any size colony, whether it's the most healthy colony in the world that's packed to the rafters in the beehive, or just these little tiny dwindling drone-laying queen that's gone nowhere, you leave the, the hive on its own and it can't heat itself and it becomes cold and dank and stuff starts to condense on the frames and the rot and the wax moth comes in, then whatever killed it, you open it up and you say, yeah, the damp and the cold definitely got this one. Where really, that's probably not what happened. I would say most of the time it's varroa. The varroa viruses get them, they abscond totally, or they partially abscond, or whatever happens, the colony collapses and they just die there. And then you open it up and it's all mouldy and damp and you say the mould and the damp got them, but it was the varroa that got them. The other one that's a really, really easy one to identify, this one is when they go drone laying. So when the queen looks good in the summer or in the late, like in the autumn, and then you, you kind of open them up in the spring and it's damp and it's cold and it's mouldy everywhere and you think damp and the cold got them, but you look at the brood, you kind of like start pulling out the frames and you say, oh, that's, that's not the right brood. Like they went in with perfectly round worker brood frames and now I'm just seeing like dimpled drone brood there, classic sign of a late supersedure where the queen's gone out, tried to mate, failed to mate, come into the winter as an unsuccessfully mated queen, turned drone laying, tried to lay something, the colony collapsed because all she could lay was drones, and then everything dies and it gets mold and damp in, and people say, oh, it's the mold and damp that got them, but it's not, it's, it's a late season supersedure. I could go on and on and on and on for every different reason that could kill them. it is generally varroa, starvation, or queen issues. Like, it's one of those 3 pretty much every single time, um, apart from disease. Okay, add disease in there as well. There's not many things though, and I wouldn't add damp and cold in there as a reason for them dying. Um, so I just, I see it a lot, and it's only because I went into a colony, the one— which one did I go into? Yeah, I had one that a little bit of dysentery on one of them, a little bit streaky, and you look and think, oh, I don't like the look of that, and you pull it out, you're like, Drone layer. And that's what happens because there's just not enough bees to go around to manage the hive properly. There's not enough kind of warmth in there for them to go out and defecate properly, so they just, they just lose kind of complete control of the colony and themselves. Um, and then I look at that one there and it was moldy, it was damp, and it was really like— it was, it was pretty grim in there. But it's, it's like that because the colony's failed due to a drone-laying queen. There's not enough bees, there's can't keep the temperature correct, so then it goes all mouldy and horrible like that. I answer these questions in great detail. I will be here for an hour, and I think this is the new slot as well. It is a good slot because I can sit here with a coffee. I think for other people watching in the UK, at least, at least if you are going to watch, you can, you can watch and then go out and have the rest of your day. 10 o'clock, um, 10 o'clock did suit me, but 7 o'clock suits me better, you know. I like to get up and just get stuff done. So the new home of Let's Talk Bees will be every other week. 7 AM UK time. All right, a few people coming in now. Let's get some— oh, we've got someone, Kushtrim, there. I got— I gotta not put it up, I forget. Sorry. Hello, Kushtrim. All right, says, good morning, I would like to split my 2 hives and make 2 more. Planning to underbrood next week for a split in May. Should I feed them to help draw out the new box? So yes, really good question, and one where you could get away without feeding them, but at this point in the year, if you're putting on a frame— sorry, if you're putting on a box full of frames of foundation I know from personal experience, most beekeepers will, the amount of energy that needs to go into those frames to get them drawn out, just to get them drawn out, not even to get them full with brood and stuff or stores, then that's a lot of feed going in, and that is feed that will not be accessible at this time in the year. So the bees will start drawing it out if they get the correct conditions, and they'll start breaking down stores in their own hive and kind of like moving things around, but It just speeds everything up. And also, if you're giving them room to expand, you kind of want to increase the, the buffer of the amount of stores that's in there as well. So if you're doubling the space, you kind of, without feeding, you immediately halve the buffer for the volume, which at the beginning doesn't make a difference. But then if they're going through that process of the next few weeks and not getting a lot of incoming nectar in, you'll find that colony near death. It will be near death. In terms of feeding, I would go invert now if you've got it, um, because I like to feed a little bit of invert, get them to take it down, and then regardless of the temperature swings, I don't mind if it's in the feeder, I don't mind if they put it in the frames, they don't need to cap it, um, and it's not going to ferment, which is, which is good for me at this point in the year. But it's not far. Let's fast forward a couple of weeks and it's 16, 17 degrees in the day and 5 or 6 degrees at night. I'm saying, right, would definitely move over to 1:1 now because the, the benefit of 2:1 has now gone out the window, and 1:1 is giving me kind of like better performance, better acceleration if I'm looking to grow those colonies. So I would switch over to 1:1 at that point. Little and often is definitely good. Don't go rimming the feeders, they, they don't like that at this time of the year and they won't work it very well. Um, if you want to simulate a flow, less is more and regular— do it regularly. You, you want to kind of just do like a litre a day. something like that, half a litre a day, and get them to start taking it down, get them to start using the feeder, and you will, you'll find that they move very, very quickly. What I would say, the follow-on bit of advice that I'll give to people later on, a few weeks' time, is if you're underbrooding, don't ever be afraid to switch the boxes around. If you get to a point where you think that they're definitely starting to move into the foundation, but you think they could go a little bit quicker, and the overnight temperatures aren't— I hit my mic there— overnight temperatures aren't anywhere near the freezing and you've got decent daytime temperatures, then you can switch the boxes over and you will get the benefit of the heat rising up through the box of foundation, which makes it much easier to draw out. So it's not a perfect system, but the underbrooding system is designed to take the stress off the beekeeper, and it's designed for really a very kind of unique situation that we have in the UK, which is you get these big temperature swings and you get like, you look at the weather last week, it's been really, really nice. There's going to be brood in all of the colonies now, and what you could get in March is a, a major cold event come in and the bees just go back down and collapse, and they want to be taking their supers back off again. That happened. That was the Beast from the East, was very, very similar to that. And then the, the problem that you have, and the problem that underbrooding solves in that scenario there, is that you have colonies that are packed, like packed full of bees. They're new season bees, they really want to expand, and it's snowing. outside and the bees are just like, ah, we really want to go. So then you get a day of sunshine and the bees swarm due to lack of space, but if you have the brood box underneath, it mitigates that risk nicely. So I am spending way too long answering these questions, but good luck with it, Max. Type of bee breed does play a role on the spring brooding starvation. My Carnolians are very frugal, but I imagine Buckfast or Italians eat more. It's an interesting one that, and I would say it's it's kind of horses for courses. It does— it doesn't really make a massive difference. The biggest argument that I hear people say, like anti-buckfast, is they can't— they just can't survive. You need to feed them all the time. They turn all of the food into brood. And, and the Italians do that kind of even on a bigger scale. And I say, well, that is true, but the, the only reason that they might struggle over winter is because we've taken all of their honey away. They're very, very good at collecting honey. Um, and the reason that they're very, very good at collecting honey is that they create these big workforces that when the nectar flows hit, they can collect more. And then we take all of their honey away, and then we say, oh, they're not very frugal over winter. And they're like, yeah, but you took all— you— we've been out working all year for that honey, you've taken it all away, and now we're not very frugal. If you left us with like the, the 200 pounds of honey that we produced, I reckon we'd be all right getting through the winter. So I shouldn't, I shouldn't move into that mode. It's only because I go on the defensive, but You are 100% right that the type of bee breed does very much dictate the amount of stores that they use over winter. Carniolans are known for that. They're known for being very frugal over winter. They're known for very small clusters, and then they're known for very, very aggressive expansion into the spring. And even, even further than that, not, not even kind of like an early spring expansion. Some people that we know— I know Murray kind of uses the Carniolan lines for, for this very reason, which is that slower growth through spring navigates you through the more difficult swarming season without the is being absolutely jam-packed, and then he tries to get them, or they tried to get the, the Carniolan number of bees, like the maximum number of bees, to coincide with the heather, the heather harvesting or the heather foraging. So it's, you can use the type of bee very much to your advantage when it comes to what you're trying to do. You're trying to get peak number of bees for a honey flow, are you trying to get the absolute maximum number of bees so that you can make aggressive splits, or do you want like a combination of 3 of them. And then you might, you might as well add AMM into the mix in there as well, because AMM, I would say, probably the most frugal out of all of those going through winter. Again, small, small clusters, um, but not known, not known for bumper honey harvests. So I just, I always think it's a bit of an unfair comparison there, which is we, we set these arbitrary targets for the bees, which we say this is the brood box, this is the size of the brood box that you must have, and then here's the queen excluder, and then everything above that's ours. and then everything below it you can keep and we'll give you some more food. And then the different types of bees produce different amounts of stores and honey upstairs and we just take it all away because we've set this arbitrary line which is the queen excluder. And then we blame the bee and say there's not enough honey in that box that we gave you and the bees say, you gave us the box, like it's not— this isn't our fault, we're being— I'm gonna stop, uh, I'll stop going on about it, but you can, you, you can feel my pain for the persecution for Buckfast bees because A lot of the time it's not their fault. There we go. Lawrence, I had 6 queen cells in my hive and I believe that they swarmed already. Did a hive inspection and saw no queen or eggs but brood and a lot of drone brood. What should I do? Oh, the lot of drone brood is throwing me there. Jean is in California, for anyone in the UK worrying about swarming just yet. You will get, you will get some swarms. You'll get people on social media saying first swarm of the year and it's middle of March or something like that, but on the whole I don't, I don't worry too much about swarming until we hit April. I'm going to drink my coffee first, Jean. Um, so if you've got sweet— if you've got swarm cells in your hive, first question is how many? If it's more than 2, I treat it as swarming. So if you had 6, I would say swarming regardless of where they are on the frame. Next thing I look for is, are they capped? Are they all capped? Are they all open? If they're all capped and I don't see eggs, which is what you've said there, did a hive inspection and saw no queen or eggs, um, But brood and a lot of drone brood, what should I do? So I would almost certainly say that they've swarmed there. So damage limitation mode when you're confident they've swarmed, and again the triggers for that or the things that I'm looking for are multiple queen cells regardless of where they are, anything more than 2, and I'm making— and I'm looking to see that they're all capped, and then I want to see— I don't want to see, but if I'm seeing no eggs as well, I add all 3 of those up and say, right, the bees have swarmed here. Then what I do is I take down all of the cells but one, and the best way to do that is to go through the cells first, find the one that you want to keep and say, right, I'm going to keep that one, put it somewhere, and then go through all of the rest of the frames, shake off the bees, take down every single cell that you see. You might find the 7th cell in there, there's always one tucked away somewhere, but shake off every single frame and take them down except the one with the cell that you want to keep. If you've got a frame, if the frame with the cell that you want to keep has got multiple cells on, you just need to brush the bees off and just take down any additional cells. Don't shake the cell of the one you want to keep. Put it all back together again, come back in 4 weeks, hopefully everything is fixed. Removing all of the additional cells and putting it down to one capped cell reduces the chance of caste swarms. So if you just leave it with 6 cells, they might chuck out a couple of caste swarms depending on how big they are. Much easier just to find the best cell and choose that. If you're going in and you see open cells, I always choose an open cell as the cell that I want to keep if possible. And the reason I do that is that it means I can get an eye on the larva. I can see how much royal jelly is in there. I can see that it's a good larva as opposed to kind of guessing on a cell that's capped. But that is it, that's damage limitation mode. It does sound like they swarmed. I hope you, I hope you managed to get it back on track. Right, Brian says, successfully overwintered 6 colonies on double brood, all up in the top box. What's the best way of filling the bottom box before early splitting with double screen board? Thanks in advance. I like this because it is, this is what's so fun about beekeeping, yeah, is that everybody has slightly different agenda, they have a slightly different thing that they want to do, but the manipulations are relatively similar. So we're talking double brood again here. I'm just going to get that question back up, make sure I'm talking about the right one. I've missed it, where is it? Who asked that question? I think it was here, right, it was Brian. So what a lot of people do in this situation is they double brood over winter. And it's funny because somebody messaged me the other day saying they are well and truly still in the bottom box and the top box is full to the brim with stores. And I said, end of March, see where they are, because generally, and it will depend on where you are, the bees start at the bottom. This is how bees like to set themselves up for winter. Beehive, like colony, brood nest here, and then all of the stores above because it's very easy to defend. So on a double brood, that's what you get. You get the brood at the bottom, all of the stores above, if you give the bees enough time to set themselves up like that for winter. What they then do is the brood kind of emerges and they'll backfill that bottom nest probably with a bit of stores as well, but then they start at the bottom and they just move up and they're just working through the stores like that. So once they hit the top box, you know the bottom box is empty. What you will never ever find, unless there's been some foul play somewhere, is going in, in the spring and finding all of the bees in the top box and a big box of honey underneath. Never happens. So what I like to do on double brood is use that kind of knowledge that the bees are going to end up in the top box and the bottom box is going to be empty for me to reset, to get any double brood colonies back onto single brood, because I find single brood in the spring is way easier to manage. For me, as someone who wants to get some honey in my supers, it sets me up nicely for my Demerace split. So I use that manipulation on my double brood to get me back to a single brood. Brian wants to do something different here. So Brian says he successfully overwintered 6 colonies on double brood, all of the bees are up in the top box, the bottom box is empty, but what Brian's asking is what's the best way to get them filling the bottom box before early splitting with a double screen board? So it's, I would say, the easiest thing to do, the least risky thing to do, is just to start feeding them now. If you, if you went into your colony now, that double brood, and you've got a polyaxial feeder on top or whatever feeder you've got, give them a couple of litres of— I would invert at this point, but in a couple of weeks move over to 1:1, little and often. That's the exact setup that I've got on most of my colonies at the moment in, in that damage limitation mode. And it's given me the ability to feed them so they're not going to starve. It's giving them unlimited space, albeit not in the best place for rapid spring expansion. So I would, I would start off like that. I would wait to see them starting to move down into the bottom box, and as soon as you see them move to the bottom box, I would switch them over. Um, then continue feeding until both boxes are full. Thank you very much, Sally, very kind. Right, Jean, follow-up question says, how long does it take a virgin queen to mate after hatching from her cell? So it takes her a few days to become sexually mature and then she will go out on mating flights as and when the mating flight weather is suitable. It needs to be in the first couple of weeks after, maybe 3 weeks after emergence, so 4 weeks. 4 weeks is always my one, which is take down all of the cells, leave a cell, put it back in, wait 4 weeks, and then that covers all of those periods, which is any time for the queen to kind of actually come out of the cell, the actual emergence itself, all that time for her to become sexually mature, and for then like a couple of weeks kind of grace period for her to find a nice, nice bit of mating weather. She probably only needs to go out for a few hours if you get really, really nice mating weather. and then time for her to come back in, and for her, she doesn't— she comes back in and then there's another little delay before she starts laying eggs, only a few days again. So not that long, but you just need to keep on top of it. 4 weeks is my number after doing swarms, though it's a nice one because it's just a month. Right, a few people saying hello, hello, hello, hello. If I demerare this year with just foundation, I have no drawn comb, will it affect the honey production? So the demerare, embrace it, Richard. You'll look back at it in a few years' time here and you think, oh, I didn't embrace the demerare with foundation as much as I probably should. And I do this now early on. Yeah, everyone says drawn comb is gold, you protect it with your life, and it will make everything better and you'll get more honey. It is true, it really is that true. Yeah, drawn comb is brilliant like that, but what it also does is that it compresses things down and it makes things a lot quicker. So if you're not experienced— and I get caught out by putting drone comb onto colonies all the time, just how quickly they react to it and use it when, when there's a good flow on and when they're expanding— but in the demerare it's particularly useful for me. I use the Demaray a lot, yeah, not as a, I'm gonna get loads and loads of honey out of this colony here. I use it more as a, I don't want to come back, like after the June gap or something like that, later on in the season and my bees have swarmed. That's always what I'm trying to limit because I know if I keep my bees there for the entire season that the honey takes care of itself. But what I never want to get into the position of doing again is just this crazy— I shouldn't say, shouldn't say the word crazy, but like this poorly planned May period, swarm period, where you're just running around reacting to swarms coming out everywhere and making up new boxes and putting them in, aggressive expansion for all of the numbers. Where clipping queens and doing demarays using foundation slows it all down and it gives you a backstop, and it means that you can just turn up preemptively and almost fix an apiary from not swarming for 3 weeks. It doesn't sound like that much, but if you know the really bad 3 weeks of the year, going there with the boxes of foundation for me is always the nice bit, which is, oh, they're gonna, they're gonna take to that well. Like, there's good bees, there's good flows, they've got supers on. I'm gonna do it with foundation because it's gonna slow things right down. And it really does slow things down. I remember going back in— there is a Demeray video coming out that I did back end of last year, and I will try and do another one this year as well, spring version. But It always does surprise people how slow they build down in the bottom brood box, because at first all of the bees are up with the brood and the queen will just keep a tiny little bit of— well, there's a bit of brood down there anyway, but there's not that many bees downstairs. And then you go back in and it's just this really slow expansion of the brood nest downstairs through foundation, whereas if you do it with drawn comb, you go back down after a week and it's just 8 frames of brood every time. You think it's good, like if we hit the nectar tsunami in, in 6 weeks' time or whenever it is, we're going to get a lot of honey. But if, if any of my colonies that I've done the Demaray on are going to swarm, it's going to be that one. So yes, it will have an impact on honey production. The reason I do the Demaray isn't for necessarily for honey production. I would say though, Richard, if you, if you get your nuc through that period and they don't swarm and you do the Demaray all the way through the season, with foundation, you'll still get loads of honey, like absolutely loads. You'll be very happy indeed. Okay, so Jean says, hi Lawrence, I have a double brood box and they are filling the honey in both brood boxes but not in my super. Any ideas? So this is the biggest negative of double brood. This is great, by the way, in terms of all relating to double brood and what's going on at this point in the year, but yeah, double brood will do that, and as I said before, when we were— or when I was discussing the different type of bees and the arbitrary line that we give them to say, right, anything below this line is mine or yours, anything above the line is mine. It's a bit mean saying it like that to bees, but we do. We set these arbitrary lines, and double brood and losing honey to the double brood configuration of that brood hive is a perfect illustration of that, because we set those parameters ourselves. You could say, okay, Gene, I can fix this for you really, really easy, which is just find the queen, put her in the bottom box, put the queen excluder in the middle, and that top brood box is now super. And there we go, I fixed the problem instantly. But I might have added in an additional problem, which is right now I don't have enough space for my bees in the single brood box that is underneath. So this is why— and I do— I've done a video on this on 14 Day Beekeeper, which is a very, very useful video. Um, and again, we've had tons of really nice feedback from that course. If you are interested, 14daybeekeeper.com, go over there. You will, uh, you will enjoy the videos that are on this. 300, or very nearly 300 videos on there. But the double brood system for me is very useful at certain points in the year, and then it becomes very unuseful. Is unuseful a word? I say a lot of the wrong words at the moment. It's very— it's not very useful, let's put it that way. Because the problem that Gene's got here, which is he wants the honey to go in the supers, they're putting all in the brood box. So going back to, I think it was Brian's point, where he said he's on double brood configuration at the moment, all of the bees are up in that top box, the bottom box is empty, What do I do? So for standard honey configuration, if Jean was having that problem there, what I would say to Jean is, it's the spring, likelihood of swarming is still relatively low. Like, if you want to push your bees and you don't want to go for a kind of risk-averse approach, what I would be doing in that scenario is taking away the bottom brood box and just putting the supers on the top. Because again, that would fix your problem, which is the bees are putting the honey in the brood box, not in the super. all you need to do is just reduce down the size of the brood box and force them up into it, which introduces the risk of swarming. So it's just, it's this ongoing balance of these 2 forces. You don't want your bees to swarm, you don't want your bees to starve, you want them to have enough space to put the supers in, or to put honey in the supers. So that, that will fix that one for you, Jean. You reduce the size of the brood box, go down to single brood, move the queen excluder if you want as well. And then the only other thing I would say is that over time You will eventually get to a point where that arbitrary line is reached and the bees start putting honey up in the supers, and you won't get quite as much, but it will, it will get there. The only problem with double brood that I find, yeah, if they're starting the year putting brood in— sorry, if they're starting the year putting honey in the brood box, they can become a bit blocked down there when it comes to brood production as well. So it might be worth going in and taking out some frames. and making some splits, taking out some stores, easing the congestion down there because it can, it can cause some problems. I like to have, I like my colonies, production colonies, set up in the spring like this ideally. I wouldn't normally underbrood, I never, I never underbrood, I push it with a single brood normally, but circumstances this year. This is what I normally like in spring, I like to see a brood box full of bees, maybe the outer frames are stores, everything else is brood, queen excluder, and then we just go up. I go for 2 supers full, then I go in and do my preemptive Demerest split. Generally, I can get to a couple of supers full, maybe 1.5 supers full, before you start to see the swarming going out. It is a good system, it's a good trigger, it's something that everyone needs to work on to identify roughly the timings for you when you need to start paying attention for starvation, swarming, and speaking to beekeepers in your area does kind of help narrow down that timeline. I missed out I missed out Denby Honey Pools there. He said, we bought the Abello Creamer Liquifier last week. Wow, what a game changer! Thank you for your YouTube review. It's taken our soft set to a different level. It's very nice, isn't it? That you're gonna, you're gonna get the bottling machine add-on, no doubt, so then you can jar directly out of the soft set machine. That is the way forward. Done Fiddling says, morning from Mid Wales. We really enjoyed, uh, 14-Day Beekeeper, getting ready for one of your overwintered nucs. I love this, and it brings me on to a very relevant point. So if you live kind of South Manchester, anywhere around there, even a little bit further south than that, I am looking for people who would be willing for me to send Zane over to do some filming. That's it really, because I'm not going to be available for filming as much as I thought I would this year, and we have Zane who is keen to do as much filming as possible. And I want to— the plan was for me to come out and meet some people who are doing 14-Day Beekeeper and have bought the nucs and do some case studies and stuff like that and see the bees in action. I'm gonna still try my best to come out and do that, but what I thought is that we could just send Zane out to go and meet some people. So if you're, if you're interested and you've got my contact details because you're a customer of mine, then get in contact because we might be able to sort something out. I thought that would be very, very fun. Um, but for everybody who is getting overwintered nucs, we are, we are very, very close to sending out the emails now. So it's the 7th of March, it will be It will be by this time next weekend we would have started allocating them, and we allocate them on a rolling basis. So we'll give you 2 weeks in advance. So if you've if you paid everything, you've had the email come through saying you are all on track for your order. You'll get another email coming through saying like this is the week that we propose to send you a nuke, and then we just ask for you to come back and say yeah, that's fine. And then the following week after that, we'll send another batch of emails out. So you will you will eventually get an email coming through saying when your nukes are. are coming out to you, but they're all on track. They're all looking very, very good. This colony, going back to the wet hive, this colony was definitely the wet that wiped them out. The hive was leaking, a huge crack in the wood. A new queen from you in September, a late bit of requeening. Lesson learned regarding budget hives. Well, I take it, I take it completely back, Nessie, if that is the case and it was like water actually coming through the roof. That is, that's not great, is it? No. Send me a picture of that. That's I've never, I've never heard of a crack letting the wood in, letting water in like that. But I do, I'll eat my humble pie, so sorry about that. Right, James says, Lawrence, I adopted 2 colonies on double brood that are in Zander hives. I need to get them into National Brood Boxes. How would you go about it? Oh, who was I speaking to about Zander hives the other day and what they were, other names for them? I, I'm not gonna— I won't, I won't bullshit my way through it. I can't remember what they look like, um, but any hive Any frame type, you can butcher it to get it into a national relatively easy. Look on the video that I did on that cutout where it was just, you know, it's just big loose combs up against the wall, and all I do is you just, you cut them out best possible shape to fit the national, and then you can either zip tie them in, or I find if you get— you need to get elastic bands that are just the exact right size and strength, but if you get the right ones, you can like elastic band stuff in like that. I wouldn't, I wouldn't start sticking wax in. It's not— it doesn't work very well trying to beeswax them in. You need to do something really, really stiff. I taped them in as well. Taping them in works, but it does, uh, you have to take all of the tape off at some point. But any of the hives like that, you, you can do it. The other one though, I would say probably shook swarm. Shook swarm's the easier one because you've adopted 2 colonies, you don't know what the disease status is like, you don't know what the varroa status is like, you've got all of these unknowns, and then if you were to cut the brood up and put it into anything like that, you've still got a lot of the unknowns. You don't know if there's EFB or AFB. I would be doing full inspections on them first and probably asking the Bee Inspector, National Bee Unit, to come and have a look at them and give them the thumbs up before you invest any money on the changeover. They may even help you do the shook swarm if you say, I'm going to shook swarm that to prevent any disease spread. They might say, yeah, we'll come and help. And especially if you say, can you come out and check it, and then can you help me shook swarm it as well? But I would— shook swarm, easiest thing in the world. So you're just going to get a brand new hive, National Hive, brand new frames, foundation, everything that you need, shake all of the bees in, lock the queen in position. Do that at the right time of year, don't do that now, they will die. And don't do it first or second week of April. I would wait until— you want to wait ideally kind of like 2 or 3 weeks before they're going to naturally go and swarm. So I would say for me, back end of April, Early May is a good time to do a shook swarm, and then all you're going to do is just shake every single bee into the new box, cage the queen in there, leave it for 3 days, see if you can get away without feeding. If they need feeding after 3 days, then you feed, and then build them back up, and then destroy everything else, or scorch and sterilize it. That is what I would recommend. That's definitely what I would do there. Fixes all the problems. A little bit more work, but it's, um, you'll end up with better, better bees at the end of it. Thank you for your help and info over the last year. Had 5 hives going into winter and still have 5 now. Very happy in North Devon. Excellent, that's good news. It's interesting, one of the things that I get a little bit of abuse about is saying your bees are not local, they cannot handle the local conditions, and it's funny because Melitta Bees sent a lot of queens to Canada last year and apparently the bees are thriving in Canada in like -40. But they cannot handle the 2-degree damp, apparently, is what's wiping out all of the bees. But I don't think it— I don't think it is that. The, the Buckfast bee, with proper management and correct arbitrary lines drawn in, will survive anywhere. It really, really will. The conditions in the UK are not challenging conditions at all. You would look around the rest of the world for intense heat and mega minus freezes down to -40 or whatever it is, and then the UK, it's just It's a little bit damp, a little bit squishy. Right, here we go. Julie, I think, says it's quarter after 2 in the morning here in Northeast Ohio. First pollen today, girls were happy. It's good to hear the first pollen's coming in. I know it is rubbish time for, I think, for some people in America. I guess for people who work late nights in America, it could be, it could be quite good. I do love looking at the analytics though. It's a little bit scary looking at the analytics sometimes on the Instagram. On the Instagram— sound like, sound like a 60-year-old— on Instagram, uh, the biggest demographic was Bangladesh for a long time. So you can look on there, like, a lot of people watching in Bangladesh, which is brilliant. Hello, anyone watching from Bangladesh! But then last week, 3% of my views on Instagram came from Iran. And I just think, oh, like, it— I kind of think a little bit inside, I just— yeah, might be— it's difficult for everyone, isn't it? Conflict like that. I'm, I'm not one for kind of conflicts at all, but I understand the reasons and stuff going on. But I'm just, from a personal level, thinking that my videos are being watched in Iran, it's just like we live, we live very different lives, don't we? Oh, Luda says, when will you start treatments for varroa? How are you getting ready for a possible Tropilaelaps invasion in the UK? Oh, we're definitely talking about Tropilaelaps now, right? Let's get into it. So let me give you a scenario here that not many people give you. There's a lot of talk at the moment which is if you want to accelerate Tropilaelaps coming into the UK, then they're going to come in via imported queens. So we need to ban imported queens to stop Tropilaelaps coming in here. Now let's, let's go through that scenario. Let's say the UK bans Tropilaelaps coming in, um, because— sorry, bans imported queens coming in to stop Tropilaelaps. So the first thing that's going to happen there is that someone's going to end up with some, some major egg On their face yet, because if they ban queen imports, when tropical laylapse does get here, even without queen imports being legitimate, they're going to say, wonder how that happened. And I'll tell you the way that it will happen. At the moment, they've banned all exiting queens from Ukraine, and they're probably going to do Georgia as well. And I think almost certainly going to do a perimeter around that as well. I strongly support that. Yeah, I am. I do not want tropical laylapse to get here, and I want it to be the longest possible period before Tropilaelaps gets here. However, look at Varroa. It will eventually get here, and it can be transferred. Yeah, it can be transferred through queen imports going in. But at the moment, what we have is an incredibly well-regulated system for us at Black Mountain Honey. We've got it easier than everyone. Our queens come from Malta. Like, there's no Tropilaelaps in Malta, and there's about 3 seas and countries and land masses in the way of where they actually are. Yeah, so for us We've not got a problem. Our queens come from Malta on a Maltese certificate in a completely legal way through into the UK, inspected by the National Bee Unit, signed off as yes, they are perfectly legitimate queens, they are fine, they've gone through all of our testing, no problem whatsoever. If you ban that route, yeah, what's going to happen? All of these countries— Ukraine, Georgia, all of the countries where they say you can't sell your queens anymore— what do you think is going to happen to those queens? Like, it's the most straightforward thing in the world. No one's thought of this. I've been offered queens from Ukraine. We need to sell our queens, we need to, we need to sell our queens to make our money. I said, you've got like— no, you're crazy, you're crazy people, there's no way. Like, we get our queens from Malta, we've got a good relationship there, we're anti-tropilaelaps. Yeah, but people are pushing these queens through and they're coming in via the black market and they're being sold to unsuspecting customers as UK-mated queens. There's no certification, there's no regulation, there's no assurance, there's no guarantee they're coming from a safe place like Malta. And the customer thinks they're coming from the UK, they think they're buying the safe one, but they're not. They're going to buy queens that are coming from Ukraine because the conditions that are trying to be set up here enforcing that regime— look what happened when they banned drugs. Like, what happens? It's not banning something like that does not stop it coming in, it accelerates it coming in. So if you want Tropilaelaps as fast as possible to come to the UK, you should support the ban. I'm going to start saying a lot of this stuff because I've always thought that let's live a nice professional life and have our opinions, and we can have a difference of opinion. And but when people try and smear the business and put false, like, lies and accusations out there, I will stand up and I will defend them now. So banning imports of queens to stop dropper layups coming into the UK is absolute nonsense. If anybody says that to you, say, how would you stop the quite clear black market importation of the legal queens from the areas where tropper lay lapse is known if you did go down the banning the queens route, because no one's got an answer for that, and that is what will happen. Um, we're well diversified at Black Mountain Honey. It doesn't make a massive difference for us if they went and banned the UK— so if they went and banned the imports queens, we've got a UK queen business, got nuc queen business. It's not, it's not a case of me pushing for it for any other reason other than it supports an incredible economy of beekeepers. Like the nuc market, if you bought a nuc from me this year, like that wouldn't be able to be built up in the same way with the overwintered ones, because you, you're putting all of your investment into the queens, getting them mated, putting it into the nucs. If that colony fails over winter, it becomes very, very difficult. So a lot of the summer nucs as well, there's no way that you could sell that many summer nucs at the right time of the year for customers to be able to get a crop in the, in the current season. And then when you look at the economic impact of that in terms of the surge in popularity of beekeeping and the ability to be able to provide these nucs to all of the customers, you look at the— all of the companies are sold out already. Beekeeping is incredibly popular, and it's these queens that give people the traits that they want. They don't want angry bees in their back garden, they want nice calm bees, they want a nice honey crop at the end of the year. So it I just think the whole beekeeping economy is kind of built on a lot of queens coming in like that. So going back to the question, definitely hit a nerve there. How am I getting ready for a possible Tropilaelaps invasion into the UK? I think the best way to do it is to be as transparent as possible. Restrict the countries where Tropilaelaps is known, put in a border across that where additional checks need to be done, increase the, the surveillance from whatever levels that the NBU wants it up to 100%, inspect every single batch. Every single batch has to get notified for inspection. So maybe they should put that in there. Possibly if the NBU say they can't afford that, then maybe they should increase the taxes on that and say, well, if you want to import queens, then there's going to be a cost for bringing them in, and it's this and this and this, and these are the things that we need to do, and that's going to fall on you as the importer. I would support that. I'm very much anti-Trophallolaps, and I would do everything that I possibly can to avoid or delay that coming into the UK. And my argument is as simple as this: the best way to do that is through regulation and transparency. The second you ban queen imports, you do not ban the demand. The demand for those queens at that time of the year is there, and if you cannot get them legally, which is what we do at Black Mountain Honey, then some unscrupulous people in the UK will import them illegally. And you know where to get the best, cheapest queens from at the moment is from the areas that that the EU have banned the queens coming from. Do you know how easy it is to move through Europe? Someone will just pick them up in a truck in Ukraine, drive them to Calais, someone collects them from Calais, that's it, they're UK-mated queens and you will not know. We've got the certificates to back ours up, they will not have the certificates to back them up. So if you want to, if you want to support the UK bee industry, I would say go down the, the regulation route for import. imported queens. And don't believe all the nonsense that people tell you with their poorly thought-out strategies about how to control something that probably cannot be controlled. So there we go, you've got the longest one, Luda, there. Is it 9 days waiting to introduce a queen? So 8 days for me. What I like to do is I'll take down the existing queen or kill the existing queen, um, and then I wait 8 days, come back in, knock down all of the emergency cells, and you will then be queenless, hopefully. witness. Mark says, good morning, had to relocate 3 of my colonies last week to make room for my new apitherapy pod. It was a day when they were all flying, about 13 degrees. I was waiting until the late evening. I'm very excited to see the apitherapy pod in situ. Uh, Niamh— I know, I nearly, I nearly read it out and just read it kind of as it's written. Niamh, I've got that right though. She says, sorry if this is a silly question, do bees always swarm? So no, bees do not always swarm. in a season, but generally they will eventually swarm. You do hear stories of colonies that go 3 or 4 years without swarming and then supersede at the end, some sort of breeder queens, and that's the dream. If you get a colony that just doesn't swarm with normal management for 3 or 4 years and then they supersede themselves at the end, that's a very, very good genetic line. Most bees will swarm either in the season that they're in, and if not that one, the following one. I would say the vast majority of bees will swarm in that position there, so keep an eye on them, do the management, do your best to try and stop them swarming. I only managed to move them 2 miles, they were doing orientation flights the following day, will this be okay? So I guess it will be okay, you've got to move them at some point. For anyone next year, it's so much easier moving bees in the winter when it gets nice and cold and frosty, and you just pick them up, plop them down wherever you want. Flying does kind of confuse things somewhat, The Arctic Beekeeper says, I'm thinking about switching to a more broody breed due to my short season. You need to come and visit me in the Arctic, seeing my marginal but sustainable operation. Well, that one's going up on the screen because that was cool. I would love to come to the Arctic and see your beekeeping. We'll definitely do that at some point in the future. I know, I know Zane will be all over that one. It's interesting, in Canada, this is what they do. They have a very, very short season, so you've probably got similar conditions to some of the people you will similar conditions to people in Canada, and they rely on that prolific nature of the bee for them to artificially stimulate the colony by adding food and by adding pollen, by adding warmth maybe, to a point where they're a sufficient size that they can make the most of the short season. And then some of the best, biggest crops in the world in Canada by doing that at the right time, maybe a little bit further south, but Yeah, I think a broody bee is good, and then you just need to make sure that you give them sufficient food over winter. But if you're on single brood at the moment, then switching to double brood over winter gives them more than enough space and more than enough food, so you should be good. So you cover swarming and how to prevent it on your 14-Day Beekeeper? So yes, we go in, we go into great detail on swarming and what it is and how to manage it and what to do if your bees swarm, what to do if you go in and your bees are swarming and the queen's there, What to do if your bees are swarming and the queen isn't there, but then we tackle loads of ways. The main way is the demo way, but a couple of different ways in there as well as to how to set your bees up to not swarm and identify the highest risk period for when they are going to swarm. So it's quite comprehensive, it gives you all of the details, and then it's up to you to work out the strategy and fine-tuning for your own area. But it's— there's a huge amount of information when it comes to swarming, and it's so easy for a beginner to manage it well. If they understand it. Because a lot of beginners find themselves in this situation, which is, I bought a beehive and I want some more. That's generally where they are. They're like, oh yeah, I've got one, so I want to get up from 1 to 4. And it's just by sitting down and saying to them, okay, well, on your first beehive here, don't let them swarm, because if you let them swarm, you lose the first split. So they say, oh, okay, well, how can I do that? And I say, well, the easiest thing to do, easiest one way of doing it, is get your first colony, 6-frame nuc, let it build up onto 8 frames, and at that point, normally you'd put your queen excluder on, put the super and go up. At that point, just split it into 2. So take 4 frames from one, uh, 3 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, knock— don't have a queen on it, take it to a new apiary, leave it 8 days, knock down all the emergency cells, add in a new queen, and then at that point you've got 2 equal colonies. Like, it's as simple as that, but they're just on 4 frames, so they're much smaller. So then once you build them back up again through maybe a little bit of trickle feeding, 1:1 sugar syrup, and giving them space and they're drawing out the frames and the foundation. Then you get to a point where they're filling that box and you, you set your arbitrary line with the queen excluder and start putting your supers on. But the big benefit— this is the one where it's really handy just to think, think it through and plan through the season— normally you'd reach that point with an overwintered nuc middle of April, back end of April, something like that, maybe first week of May. When you're doing it and splitting it into 2 sets of 4 like that, you're not going to hit that until the back end of June, maybe first week of July. So you've missed the swarming season. The days are now getting shorter. The bees are preparing for winter. The bees are in honey collection mode. They're not in splitting and trying to set up a new colony mode. So it's a really simple, kind of quite nuanced tweak to the split, doing it at a different time, but it's meant that you're able to navigate that season well. So it's not a case of do the bees swarm? It's like, well, yeah, they can. It's a case of Knowing what you want to do, doing it at the right time to do what you want, but then to mitigate the difficult parts as well. So it's just combining those things up. I think that's what 14 Day Beekeeper does very, very well. It gives you the ability to piece those different parts of the jigsaw together to get you where you want to go in the easiest way possible. Uh, right, let's go. So Simon says, currently on fondant in my colonies. When would you start feeding syrup? So first thing I would say is only feed if they need feeding. If you've got fondant on, I would just leave them with fondant on. If they're taking the fondant down, I would just leave them with fondant on. I would only move over to feeding syrup if you're looking at turbocharging that colony into like a double split or doing something quite aggressive with the brood. If you're, if you're looking to turn that colony into just a production honey colony, I would say I wouldn't switch to syrup at any point. And I would probably look at taking the fondant off sooner rather than later, but you need to go in and heft it. It is difficult, it is difficult, it's probably the most difficult part of beekeeping, this one, and I'm trying to do stuff with the HiveWatch scale at the moment to give people the ability to weigh a hive or lift a hive and try and understand what's inside it. So I had a hive that— the hive that's on my HiveWatch scale has gone down to just below 30 kilograms now, so I'm doing a video showing different points throughout the season and I wanted to go in and show what was inside a hive that weighed 30 kilograms. So then for people at home, they can weigh a hive and say, okay, well, my hive's the same as Laurence's hive and it's still weighing 30 kilograms, maybe I've got an idea of what's inside. It's not always going to be a perfect comparison, but this 30-kilogram hive, when I went in and I went through and pulled out the frames, even though I tell people not to, but I think people will be glad that I do that because you don't want to go through and kill your queens doing it, you might as well let me do it and you get the information out of it. But I went through and there were 5 full frames, brood frames, of capped stores in a hive that weighed 30 kilograms, and then there were a few frames of brood and like most of the frames were just empty with nothing but lots of bees on. So a 30-kilogram hive weighs that much at the moment, like you could probably weigh yours. If yours is weighing more than 30 kilograms, I would say maybe take the fondant off. Because what bees do— this is, this is the frustrating thing with fondant— is that if you've got a colony that's, say, you've got a brood box that's 10 frames full of stores, you've overwintered them, so you've got them to a point where they're, they're going into winter and you're getting them ready for winter, and there's loads and loads of bees in there, and they've just got to the point where they got to like a brooders period, but the box is completely full of stores. If you give them fondant at that point, put it on the top, generally what they do is go up and eat the fondant. They don't store it. The bees will store fondant, but they don't, they don't do that if the boxes are full. They'll just go up and eat the fondant, and then the beekeeper looks at that and says, they needed feeding, and then they put more fondant on like that. So it does— it works a bit like that with fondant, and you can uncover quite a big issue at the end of the season when you take the fondant off. You think, okay, the bees have finished all that fondant, right, great, and you start pulling out the frames and you're just like, every frame is full, and there's this little dwindling colony in the corner where they've not been able to raise the brood. So it's, it's that balance between feeding them to keep them alive, giving them enough space. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't move over to syrup if you didn't need to. If you want to move over to syrup to do something more stimulative and aggressive, I would wait until you do your first inspection and make sure that you've got enough space, or if you're going to double brood, get the double brood box on and do it at the same time, and then at least they've got somewhere to kind of go and draw out the wax. Good morning, I have 5 hives on single broods, fed heavy syrup in the autumn, then added 12.5 kilograms of fondant. I know it was overkill, but they have started eating it now. Do I leave it on or remove it. So I would remove it. Sounds like a lot of feed, but 30 kilograms is a good weight. Yeah, so what— how about this? Take the fondant off, put it all back together again, weigh it, see roughly what it weighs. If it's 32, 33 kilograms, I would say yeah, you don't need an extra 12.5 kilogram slab of fondant on there. They're probably moving it to try and get it out of the way. It is a bit of a cold— like a warm a heat sink. That's what I was going for there, a heat sink. It's sucking the heat away from the colonies, it's making it more difficult for them. If they can do without it, do without it, but what I would say is take— I would take it away and then if you're looking at them and thinking, right, they're light, I would just start feeding them a bit of invert again. They'll take the invert down and they'll probably prefer that. Oh, here he is, Ben! Hi, favourite YouTuber, I bought a panel hive, all of the bees are on national frames, what's the best way to get someone to Langstroth frames? So Ben is the young lad who I meet every single year at the expo, and every year, yeah, he kind of stands there and we talk a little bit. Well, I have great, I have great chat with Ben, but I always, I always ask him, so who's your favorite YouTuber? And I remember the first year he looked me kind of like stone dead in the eyes and just said Stuart from the Norfolk Honey Company. And I was like, okay, fair enough, Stuart from the Norfolk Honey Company, I can, I can take that. Um, who next after that? And I'm not sure, I might be, I might be kind of paraphrasing a bit, but it was definitely Griff next after that as well. So it's gone on for a few years now where he comes up for a great chat and we have good fun, don't we? And then I'm not the favourite. So this year we had our annual chat, which is brilliant, and then I asked him, as normal, who his favourite YouTuber was, and yes, Laurence Edwards has made it to the top of the list. It was probably the highlight of my year so far then. I should probably answer your question as well though, shouldn't I? So you bought a Panell hive, I'm guessing we can take the P off that, Like PG-13. All of our bees are on national frames. What's the best way to get someone to Langstroth frames? Easiest way that I have found to get them onto Langstroth frames is by zip tying them to the Langstroth top bar. So I had to think because there's a couple of different ways of doing it. I do think that's probably my favorite way. You can cut the lugs off and fit it in inside as well, but it is a little bit more work. So what I would say is just you take the Langstroth top bar and then you just put that. on top of the Langstroth— sorry, on the national frame— and then zip tie them up together. The other way of doing it is you can put 2 screws in the NL hive and then you balance the national frames on there. That's the way, that's the way that I did it. I think I did a video showing that actually. It's quite a good, it's quite a good technique. And then I remember that one because then people kept on coming back with, oh, this is a much better technique for that, and I was thinking, make a good point, your technique is better. But it did work, my one, so you can, you can just bodge it. You open. Any way you can get it in really will work. You only need one frame of brood to go in there, and then you just shake loads of extra bees in there as well. But I would strap it, if you're just going down that route, strap it on, little zip tie, it'll work very, very well. Hope you have a good day. I can't believe— I don't know why I've called you Ben there, Tom. I missed it. It's the other guy who's Ben, isn't it? Hello, Tom. I'm generally quite bad when it comes to names, you know who I meant, Tom. There we go, we're good. Right, so hi from sunny but minus two Pembrokeshire. Yeah, it's a bit crunchy this morning, isn't it? Sebastian is here, wet in Southampton. I wonder how early season wetness is going to impact on your world record growing fruit this year. What you growing this year? We did that last week, didn't we? Sebastian grew the world record for the world's largest cucumber, I think. Right, Lude is coming back with some more questions. He says a question I get very often is do the bees choose the egg to make a queen, or does the queen? Do we have scientific confirmation on this topic? Is it the only effect of royal jelly at the end? I love this question, yeah, and I obviously can't ever answer it with great certainty or any sort of scientific confirmation, but it boils down to this: do bees move eggs? And some people swear that they do, and some people swear that they don't. I reckon a bee could move an egg. They're not that big. You look at the amount of pollen that they bring in, bees are pretty strong. I reckon they can move an egg. And then it comes down to how, like, soft is an egg and how easily damaged is an egg. I reckon they can move them. So then, so then I think it's, I think it's probably the bees. I, if I was the queen and they were saying, right, go and lay an egg in there, in that swarm, that swarm cell, because in a few days we're going to basically kick you out, I'd just be like, no, I'm not doing it, can't force me, I'm not laying an egg in there. And then I think the bees would have worked that out and said, okay, We're just we're going to put an egg in there for you then. But it would be good, wouldn't it? That that's that's one of those things, like an age-old question that's not really been answered in beekeeping, which is do bees move eggs? And surely there must be a way that we can get that on camera somehow if if it does go on. The sober I've realised I'm over time now, but my wife is still in bed, so I'll carry on for a bit. The sober carper says I'm getting two nucs from you in May. I want to build the best, so. Uh, sorry, I want to build the best I can, so we'd use the Egger queens over the Buckfast when making splits. So I'm going to put a lot of information doing this at the moment on the video in terms of the different lines that we sell. Every single queen that we sell kind of comes with the Black Mountain Honey guarantee. You're going to get nice calm queens, they're going to be prolific, uh, disease-free, low swarm, like low swarm impulse. And then all of the other different lines, there may adding small amounts on. So the VSH lines, you're getting all of the things that you'd get from the F1 Buckfast. You're getting the calmness, you're getting the prolific nature, you're getting the honey production, you're getting the anti-swarming. But those ones have that tendency to be able to kind of keep things a little bit cleaner, to detect the mites that are in the cells and remove the reproductive ones, and, and not eliminate the varroa, or not even eliminate the need for any treatments for varroa, but just gives them a much better chance of battling the Varroa that are there. They're proven for it, they're bred for it. Um, and then the same with the, the Lutz lines that we're adding on there as well. So we're moving into a partnership with Lutz to kind of develop some, some different lines, some exclusive lines, and that's where the lines that we've got at the moment are coming in. But if you were to compare them, and I appreciate that there's price differences between all of them, if you were to compare them, I would say the differences are minimal. Um, the difference between the standard queens and the premium queens are they're going to better genetic lines, they're going to be in more isolated apiaries, so you've got more influence from that paternal line coming in. And that's what it's all about, it's about creating kind of the— we're moving away from doing all of the different queens, so we've gone down from say 14 queens I think this year to 6, and we're just trying to work out what we can offer on a very repeatable basis that we can work on and actually develop at the same time. So there's not as much variety that's going to be available going forward, but there's going to hopefully be more collaboration between me and the breeders and then from you, so people who are actually buying the queens as well, to do some sort of iterative improvement. So if you're thinking about stuff like that, getting 2 nucs from you and man, I want to do the best that I can, so would you use the Egger queens over the Buckfast ones when making splits? If you want the very best that you can possibly get, then the more expensive queens will be marginally better. But I say this with complete honesty, would you notice the difference as a beginner beekeeper? Definitely not, so get the cheapest ones. That's where I always come from. If anyone asks me which one should I get, like honest opinion, I say, well, just, it depends, it depends where you are on your beekeeping journey, but if you're a few years in, the F1 Buckfasts are like very, very good and you should be happy with them, so you can save the money. I'm putting colonies on OSR, which is oilseed rape. Is it best to use drawn comb foundation or a mix on double brood. So I don't think it, I don't think it makes a massive difference on there. What, no, what I would say is use, use the oilseed rape to your advantage. The risk with oilseed rape is that it's going to start setting in the comb. If you're adding drawn comb, you're increasing that risk because it means that the honey is going to be going in, or the nectar is going to be going in earlier, um, when it's likely going to be colder, which means that it might granulate a little bit quicker. So I'd be going down foundation for that route there, but then look at the benefits of oilseed rape. It's an incredibly good crop in terms of nectar yield, good crop in terms of pollen, really boosts colonies. It's the right time of the year when you're getting this aggressive expansion, perfect conditions, like you couldn't get better conditions for drawing foundation. So I think, well, okay, drawn comb is probably not the best because it's going to crystallize early. I can use the advantage of the oilseed rape flow to draw my foundation, so I'm not even going to mix it up, I'm just going to go straight in and get all of the frames of foundation drawn out. then use them later on in the year. I think a lot of people do use oilseed rape for something like that. Got a question here, says, good morning, why is it a bad idea to double brood if you're looking for maximum honey production, please? So it can be counterintuitive, yeah, so what you need in order to produce a lot of honey is a huge amount of bees. The more bees you have, the more honey you will produce, going back to my NABI presentation, but Creating the conditions to produce a large amount of bees isn't as straightforward as people might think. So what people sometimes think is that double brood will increase the amount of bees that are there, but it doesn't really do that. It just gives them more of a buffer against space, and then that buffer against space kind of— if they produce a lot of honey and it all gets bogged down into the bottom brood nest— sorry, into the double brood nest— then you end up with the worst of both worlds, that you're losing all your honey into the brood nest and then you don't get the benefit of being able to produce lots of bees to get lots of honey in the first place. So it's this balancing again, which is making sure the bees have got everything that they need to thrive and then making sure that they've got enough space that they don't swarm. And if you give them too much space in the double brood, you just lose a huge amount of honey down there. But conversely, if you don't give them the space and you don't manage them properly and then they do swarm, Then you, you lose the honey anyway. So you need to fall somewhere in the middle. I found the best way for me to fall somewhere in the middle is to, whatever happens, reset everything in spring onto a single brood, which with my— the system that I use, or the, the various different systems that I use, are very easy, easy to get back to single brood in the spring. Single brood in the spring means that I can build up the first couple of supers and get a couple of supers whilst the bees are just in that minimal single brood box, so they're not— I'm not losing all of the honey, that first couple of supers of honey, into the brood box. And then I appreciate with my bees that single brood throughout the whole season is probably going to be not anywhere near enough space, so at that point I add an additional brood box on. But if I just took that brood box at that point in the year and put it above the brood box or below the brood box or anywhere underneath the queen excluder, like, it's just not doing anything at all. It's giving the bees extra space where they don't need it, it's making it difficult for them, and all will happen is they'll just end up filling it with honey. So the Demaray split comes in, and that's where you put the new brood box up at the top— sorry, that's where you put the original brood box up at the top and then replace the— onto the floor with your new brood box. There, there we go, I've got it right. So it turns it into a double brood system, and then you go through the process of recombining it back down again, and then you make a decision at the end of the year. Are you going to compress them back down to single brood, or you're going to overwinter on double brood? And then you come back to the spring and you do your hard reset again. So it's a repeatable system which is at some points in the year you're better off being on single brood. At some points in the year, you're much better off being on double brood, depending on kind of where you sit and the easy— how easy you want your life to be. So this is why beekeeping is brilliant. It's just not straightforward. It's not a case of, well, if you want this, go with single brood. If you want this, go with double brood. There's all these competing things that people want. They want an easy life. They don't want swarming. They want loads of honey. They don't want that much honey. Everyone's got a slightly different agenda. And then it's about using the techniques to work out how you can make that as good as possible for the bees and then as easy as possible for you. Question coming up there saying, is it possible to demerit WBC hives? So yes, you can demerit them. It just becomes expensive with all the additional lifts, but it is, it's the exact same format as the national kind of on the inside. So just make it look like the demerit split on the inside and then put the lifts up and it should look all good. Max says, caught a cast swarm last year, it's done really, really well. What are the pros and cons of a prime versus a cast swarm? So I wouldn't even say it's pros versus cons. The only one that I would want is a prime swarm. Prime swarm does confuse some people though. So what people sometimes think a prime swarm is, is that a prime swarm is a queen— sorry, a prime swarm is a swarm that has a mated queen in it, and that's not actually the case. The prime swarm is the first swarm that leaves the colony in the year. And that colony— sorry, and that swarm can leave with a virgin. So people say, that's not right, how can it leave with a virgin? It can. If you clip your queen, um, the first swarm of the year will almost inevitably leave with a virgin if left unmanaged. So the colony might swarm naturally. They say to the queen with the clipped wing, you're off, go on, you've got to swarm. And she looks out and she says, nope, not got any wings, or my wings are clipped, so I'm not going. you get that little bit of extra time where the beekeeper comes back and says, they should be swarming here, there's capped swarm cells, there's no eggs, but my queen is there, what's going on? If you clip to a queen, that's what will happen. But then if you leave it and do nothing, as soon as the first cell starts to emerge, that first virgin comes out, instead of the original colony being headed by that queen, she leaves and takes the first swarm of the season with her. So the The big prime swarm goes with a virgin, can go with multiple virgins. Um, and then a caste swarm is every subsequent swarm that leaves after that. So remember we said at the beginning about taking down all of the cells barring one to stop caste swarms? If you leave all of the cells up, that first one in that scenario there will leave as the prime swarm, and then as further virgins emerge, they can send out caste swarms that are considerably smaller. So for me, it's not a case of pros and cons, like I would never take cast swarm. Cast swarm for me is just not worth it. Not in a harsh way on the bees, like if they were there I'd collect them and I just, I kind of bump them into another colony. I'm not going out and collecting random cast swarms. If there was a little cast swarm on the side of a hive, I just pick it up, chuck it back in. I wouldn't be giving it its own box. A big prime swarm though is a very usable tool. Comes with its risks, doesn't it, in terms of disease, so obviously put it in a very safe hygienic apiary, quarantine apiary, and then get it inspected by the bee unit before doing anything with it. But brilliant expansion, brilliant at drawing out comb, loads of things that you can do with swarms. Right, Sebastian says swarm management and checkerboarding, this one works really, really well for me. Okay, I think that might be one of the videos on there as well. I think a lot of people do like the checkerboarding. I'm going to do more checkerboarding this year, it is good fun. Good morning, I'm putting colonies on OSR. Are you done? I've done that one. Uh, yeah, okay, sorry, jumping through. Uh, says, what is the best way to get the most splits from the hive, and how many can you get from one hive in a season? Oh, we did this video once. We did— I did the video once and I got to 20. I'm not even sure if we got— I think it was a series that I did in the world. In the end, one colony, I split it into 20, but I finished it in June because I just, I, I couldn't continue it with— it was so difficult trying to do, do all the manipulations. Just a lot of work to capture it all. But I got— I went from 1 to 20 by June, and I know from kind of like our own manipulations that I could have doubled and doubled again, so it would have gone from 20 to 40 to 80. So that is with underpinning of like unlimited queens, unlimited drawn comb, unlimited food. So that would be, I would say, the absolute maximum. I saw a PDF once of someone saying you can go from 1 to 1,000 in a year, but I It's just ridiculous, never going to do that. But I would say on a realistic— for, for someone at home, I would say realistically you can take one big strong double-brewed colony and turn it into 10 nucs easily in a year. And the likelihood is you'll probably have to split those nucs again to get it up to 20. And the trick, the trick to doing it is as simple as this: early season queens. Um, going back to the beginning of the conversation, if you, if you take away the imported queens, you can't do that anymore. So you're gonna, you're gonna collapse a lot of people's businesses there because a lot of people have based their businesses on buying the queens early from us. And I will give you the, the urgent queen warning at the end of this video as well, at the end of this bit here. But they'll place an order for 50 queens, they get their colonies through the winter, they make up the splits, and then they sell the nucs the following year. That's, that's a big part of their business. If you take away queen imports, that's not going to happen anymore. Um, I will put a big word of caution on there. It's funny because on the one hand people are saying we need to ban imports and, um, there's a risk of them coming in and there's no demand for these imported queens, and it is just not true. I've never ever ever seen orders coming through like it, like I'm almost— we're almost going to be sold out for April and May before we get to April and May. It's— I've never seen anything like that. If you want queens, whether it's 1 queen, 10 queens, or 100 queens, do get the orders in early. We have no capacity to increase this year. All of our bees coming from Melitta Bees, that's the only supplier that we use, same queens as always. On the island of Malta, couldn't be anywhere safer than that. Come with the health certificate, get your orders in as soon as you possibly can. But going back to the question, if you're, if you're going down that route, the simplest thing is get, get the order in early for the queens. That's number one. But then number two is do it at the right time of the year. If you, if you get double brood, so say you've got 20 frames of bees, let's say you've got 10 frames of brood, 10 frames of stores, and you're in the middle of April, back end of April, and the weather's nice and you're in the south of coast, you can easily do this. You take one frame of stores, one frame of brood, good shake of bees, add in a mated queen, take it to a new apiary, go through the full process like that, add in the foundation, give them a good feed, and just build them up, and you will easily turn that one colony of 20 brood frames, or 20 frames of bees, into 10 splits. It's just a one brood frame split with a frame of stores, and then you're feeding as well. Doing it at a different apiary eliminates the risk of robbing, Doing it at a different apiary completely eliminates the risk of drifting between the hives as well, which is a big risk when you're doing mini splits like that. You'll end up with most of them in like 2 or 3 of them, and then the rest of them, the brood gets chilled. But taking them away to a different site and locking them in overnight means that every single bee that you put in stays in, which means that you can balance it perfectly. The bigger benefit of obviously using the mated queens is that they will just get going straight away, especially that time of the year. You give them the feed, all All they want to do is go and get going. Got nice young queens, so very prolific nucs that are going to grow well. But the biggest benefit taking them to a new apiary is to eliminate any robbing. But even at that point in the year, the robbing is very, very low. And then at that point in the year, there's no wasps either, so you can just go full pelt into making those splits. And we make a lot of our splits like that. And I know from personal experience, you'll come back kind of back end of June, early July, and you'll think, yeah, we're splitting these again. They're on double And they're, they're going very, very quickly. So it's not a case of just like from 1 to 10. You can go from 1 to 10 to 20 to 40. It's, um, it is very, very scalable. Nick the Nuke says, hey, 2 of my hives collapsed over winter. Weak, not disease. I left one of the hives on double brood. The top box is full of honey. What should I do with them? Oh, it's a difficult one, this, because it looks like a huge amount of resource that's going to go to waste, but I have zero kind of tolerance for this anymore, which is I melt everything down and start again and just assume that it was the worst possible case scenario, which it never is. But it's just good mindset because you know when you come across something that you shouldn't come across, you're not going to use it. You just have a nice system. Any failed colonies, everything gets melted down and you start again. And I'll tell you what, the learning that you get from it, yeah, is that you, you start, you stop throwing good money after bad. So you stop putting Apivar strips into colonies that you know are failing. You stop kind of saying, I think that if the brood pattern's not great, but I think I'll give her a chance. You just say no, just kill the queen, shake the bees out, melt it all down at that point, and then you save, you save the feed. So you wouldn't have fed them in the first place. And it's, it feels really weird. It's not nice doing it in, in the autumn. I go around with Richard and we look at the ones. And, and then you, you see this shrinking, you're like, we've got this many nucs and now we've only got this many nucs. And, and, and I'm thinking like, Richard, we're going the wrong direction here. And he's like, no, no, don't worry, it pays for itself in the spring. So then when you go around in the spring and you see people now reporting catastrophic losses, they won't have done that in the winter, which is going through and identifying the ones that were clearly going to fail, the ones where there were supersedure issues, the ones where there were queen mating issues, the ones where maybe like it's just not looking that good, and taking them out and shaking them down and doing what needs to be done at that point in the year and compressing them down gives you the very, very good overwintering success rate here. So what should you do with them? I would, I would melt them all down. I'm on an hour and 17 minutes, my wife's still not up, so we will, we will carry on going. I've just realized I got a, I got a notification coming through. Shots fired indeed. Uh, right, let's go. I, on that note, let's though. Yeah, I, I'm not willing to stand up and listen to anybody say anything that is, uh, defamatory when it's not true. You can't do stuff like that. It's not fair. And I've done it for too long, which is, look, let me manage my business and we'll do things— we do things professionally and we're honest and we have integrity. But when people start to lie and people try to start to smear your company because they know that they cannot compete And I won't tolerate that anymore. So we have, we've issued statements coming out to local beekeeping associations, we've had apologies coming through, we've got legal teams on board, and we will not stand for any shit. So there we go, shots fired. Jason Bees Tree says, I feel one of our colonies got pollen bound and the queen stopped laying early August. Have you heard of this? Is there a suggestion for monitoring the amount of pollen that they have? What's too much? So you can, you can get pollen bound. I would say in early August It would be incredibly unlucky in the UK to get pollen bound at any point in the year. I would say the biggest risk is maybe OSR, all seed rate, can bring in a lot of pollen, but at least with that you're bringing in— if they're getting lots of pollen, they're getting lots of nectar in as well, so the colony will just expand at a really, really quick rate and likely swarm. I don't think they just, yeah, completely backfill everything with pollen, but it is a pretty easy one if you go in and you 8 frames of pollen in the brood box, then yeah, it's quite clearly too much. What's nice with that one though is it is super, super easy to fix, which is just take it out, shake it off, stick it in the freezer. It's a very, very useful commodity when it comes to doing things in beekeeping. Great for making splits, great for making queens. Yeah, it's all good. Oh, I'm gonna put this one up here. We've got Mr. Zane Paul himself. Hi, Zane. He won't be on anymore. Loving the new backdrop, Laurence. There we go. It's not, it's not finished yet. We had to pause things But it is getting there. We're gonna get some tiles up around here, and I'm gonna get a light over there in that corner there. But it is looking good, isn't it? And if I come in nice and close like that, it gets blurry as well. Oh, I love it that Zane's dialed in early. What is the best way to bank queen cells? Thank you. Um, so we don't, we don't bank queen cells. If you're gonna, if you're gonna let the queen cells emerge kind of in an incubator, then you can do that. just normal incubator. Get the temperature right, about 30, 33, 34. Get the humidity right depending on what time, like the— where you are in that period. Um, it's on— I've done a video on that recently. I think I've literally got a video about how to store cells in the incubator, so I will post that one and it will give you all of the detail in terms of humidity because I've not got it off the top of my head. Hi Lawrence, is it too early to transfer a nuc to a hive? So For me, yes. Did I do some of that earlier this week? Also yes. Did I do it for a reason because I knew I wasn't going to be able to do anything for the next few weeks? Also yes. Um, it does depend where you are in the UK. Like, we're North Wales, it's going to be so different for us compared to the Kent coast, but we're not far off. I always think first week of April is— first week of April is the, is the line in the sand, which is inspections start around now. So I would say from the first week of April onwards, if you're south of North Wales, then you are good to go. But I would also say the further south you go, that 1st of April date gets earlier and earlier and earlier. So if you're, if you're Kent coast now, and what is it, 7th of March, and it's 17, 18 degrees every day, then it's probably okay to start transferring it either this week or next week. Um, but just, just keep an eye on it. Be really, really— it's devastating because I have done it myself, and the most difficult manipulation and inspection of the year is the first one. Everything's stuck together, everything's really, really tight. Like, if you're going to roll the queen in 2026, that is the inspection that you're going to roll it on. But you're coming to the point now where if you did— if you rolled a queen now and you were on our first week of queens, which is nearly sold out, then, then you'd get the queen almost— you'd basically get it a week after they become— 2 weeks after they become hopelessly queenless, which wouldn't be the end of world at all. So you've got a, you've got a kind of backup option now, which is good. You can get queens to go in there, just be really, really careful when you do it. Don't, don't roll the queen, um, and, and when you do put it in, definitely give them a feed, because if they're going into foundation, it can be an issue. Also one to watch out with, I'm going to put something out on this as well. The only reason that I would delay it, what I've started doing now, every single time that I add in a nuc, instead of adding the 6 frames into the nuc like that and then putting the foundation on the edge or putting the 6 frames here and then foundation on this side here. I always checkerboard it now. So I'll take the— I have my 6 frames of the nuke here, and imagine this is frame 1 and frame 6, and imagine they're both stores, which they're likely to be. I move them out 1, and then I bring the frames of foundation in 1 like that. So you effectively have— Do it this way. You have frame 1 of the nuke, foundation, frame 2, frame 3, frame 4, frame 5, Foundation, frame 6, and then feed on top of it like that. And it just breaks this illusion of a foundation wall. Sometimes the bees will perceive poor quality foundation to not be foundation. They see it as a wall and they swarm on the back of it. Doing that little manipulation with the checkerboard and putting the feed on at the same time speeds things up, gets things going a little bit quicker. It means that they, they're like forced to work that foundation, and then when they get to the next ones, they say, yep, No problem, it's not a war. Ah, there we go, right. After I sell off 2 of my own reared queens, I still have 1 AMM queen from a local breeder, my current Carniolan, and the Buckfast queen arriving from Black Mountain Honey, so I look forward to comparing them. We look forward to sending them as well, John. Good morning. Good morning to you too. Well, you need to put the super on soon. A few, few more weeks for us before the supers go on. We have 2 Kenyan top bar hives and we have varroa mite for the first time in Australia. We're sorry, we're having a lot of trouble finding info and advice regarding safe control measures for KTB, for Kenya Top Bar hives. So I would say it's just, it's going to be exactly the same as all of the other hives. The treatments will be the same whether you're using chemical treatments or oxalic treatments or organic treatments. One of the ones that I did, I have seen a lot of people doing this in Australia at the moment, is fogging, fogging of oxalic acid. And it definitely got proven to not work like quite a long time ago. So it was the mixing of oxalic acid with glycerin, and it goes through the fogger like that. They, they, yeah, they proved that it's completely ineffective against varroa. If you're, if you're using oxalic acid in any way, it needs to be sublimation, so the kind of instantaneous change from solid into a gas, and then that's going to be really, really good. I would say that's, that's the method if I was in Australia at the moment and I had limited options for use. oxalic acid was available and legal to use, then that would be the option that I would be going down, especially for kind of a top bar hive or something like that, because it's very easy just to find the queen, cage the queen, let all of the brood emerge, force a brood break, zap them, and you're going to get 95% of those mites. When I add treatments in August after my honey is taking off, is it too late to take 3 or 4 frame, or even 4 frame splits, and either, well, add in or buy a queen? Absolutely no problem whatsoever. It's a very, very good time to do it, and people— it's quite a sustainable system that, which is run a colony as a production colony throughout the whole season, and then once you've got hopefully 5 or 6 supers on it and a single brood box, when you go to compress all of those bees down, like make the most of the bees— my only caveat that I would say there is just look what happens when you have that colony. So you've got a single brood box, 6 supers full of bees, and you take all of the supers off, compress everything back down, and then what happens over the next few weeks is you see this rapid reduction in the amount of bees that are there. I remember, it's got to be like 10 years ago now, doing these aggressive splits at the end of the year and trying to do them as one-frame splits and do them in the same apiary and And just watching all of those bees, it looked like millions of bees, just watching them all die. And not through doing anything wrong, but just through— like, I hadn't realized that they were old bees that were, that were kind of knackered from the end of summer and they were going to die at some point. But I'd been using them to make up splits, and then they hadn't been able to produce enough brood by the time the bees had all died. So it will, it will be the same scenario there, but that's, that's me being stupid and being very, very aggressive and doing it from 1 hive to 10 on something silly like that. Going from one, going from one colony to 2 at that point of the year is fine. I would even say splitting the full colony into 3 nucs would also be fine as well. Um, oh, Aaron says, is banning for Tropilaelaps just noise because some want to protect the local bee? Yeah, absolutely, because this is the challenge that I would say to them, and challenge it when people say you need to ban queen imports because it's going to bring Tropilaelaps in here. Challenge them and say, what happens if you ban queen imports? What happens to the demand for the early season queens? Because the local bee, they've not been able to compete for years because they can't produce the queens at that time in the year. So it's a different— they can't fill the void. It's an impossible— it's a different time of the year. It's that the queens are required in March and April and May because that's when people want to make up the splits, and that's when people want to make up the colonies to go and like pollinate all the plants and produce, produce our fruit. Um, so they'll go underground and they'll just go underground into the black market. And, and this is, this is the really sad thing about it, is there's going to be UK beekeepers who want to support the UK queen rearing market who are buying queens from, they suspect, to be a UK queen rearer, and they're just getting Tropilaelaps queens from Ukraine. That is the future. And this is why I said I'm not, I'm not really standing for it anymore because because there's a lot of spin coming out and there's a lot of lies coming out and there's a lot of opinions that are not being challenged by anyone. And I've decided to start challenging the opinions because it's not fair to give people this completely skewed view. My other point as well I would like to add in there as well is, is the view that imports should be banned the view of the BBKA as a, as a diplomatic process? Does everyone in the BBKA agree with Or has it been put to a vote? Because I tell you what, we sell queens and we sell imported queens and nucleus colonies to hundreds of BBKA members. And how do I know that? Because they put their BBKA email on the orders that come through. So I know that it's not indicative of the BBKA. I just think it's splinter group has taken over the BBKA and is trying to force their agenda. So it'd be interesting. I think you should go back and challenge that if you're hearing stuff at your local BBKA BKA, things that you don't necessarily agree with, things that you know aren't true, then feel free to send me the emails because any smearing that's going on, we will take it up with our legal teams and we will try and fight any of these defamatory statements. And I'd just like to thank the people, the numerous people, yeah, who send me the correspondence from your local beekeeping associations when they're kind of reeling out a lot of this rubbish, because we will, we will defend it kind of to the best of our ability. So there we go. It's quite easy to trigger me, isn't it, on trop? Aaron's got me again there. Right, we are an hour and 28 minutes in. I feel like I've got to do some penance if I'm— if I go down the tropolylapse route or the imported queens route. I've got to answer some more questions. Right, DNA says, would like advice after strips— sorry, would like advice after strips including those bee gyms that strip the varroa off the bees. Are they effective? So no. they're not effective in any great numbers or any kind of like proven efficacy other than the bees might occasionally knock a mite off using them. I would say, I would say that's it. It's nice logic, but I don't think, I don't think they're strong enough to be able to cope with kind of what varroa has to throw at it. Bedford, UK. I already have capped drone brood on Bergholm in 2 of the 6 colonies. Is this normal for this time of the year? Normal brood patterns elsewhere? So I, I would say it's not necessarily normal for this time of the year, but it would just show that it's probably— I always go the wrong way— an earlier spring than normal. So drone brood building up. Um, yeah, so only, only in Bergham, so that's fine. So when you get to the point of the season where you start to see like 1 or 2 frames fully of drone brood, that's, that's going to be close to when they're swarming. When they're just doing it on the bottom like that I wouldn't worry too much about it at all. Uh, Niamh says, thank you, I'm signing up for 14-Day Beekeeper next week. It's great, every time I do a live stream we do get a few follow-ups on there as well. But as I said previously with 14-Day Beekeeper, few changes coming in, a few very, very positive changes for people, bringing in some additional features and functionality, and yeah, making it a lot better all around. So watch this space. Uh, Michael Menino, hello Michael, he says good morning from New Hampshire, USA. It was great seeing you again at the North can only be exposed. Same to you, Michael. I enjoyed watching the video back the other day with my girls. It's like their favorite thing in the world, watching, watching the Na'vi video. They do love it. Right, Jean says good night, Laurence, have a great day. Oh, I think I'm pretty sure that is game over. I'm sorry, my camera has officially broken, so we are half an hour over the time, so we'll have to close it for today. Sorry about that.
