Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 41

And welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. What a week! You might be able to tell, a little bit tired, a little bit sleepy, absolutely shattered, I really am, uh, but I'm here to answer your questions, talk about bees, and to tell you what I have been up to. So interesting to see that there are a lot of questions already on there, so I'm gonna have to do my best to get through the questions as quickly as I possibly can. Uh, but welcome, welcome everyone. Hopefully it's not too, not too rainy, not too cold. Tempted to put the log burner on, absolutely freezing. It is like a, a mild November day as opposed to supposedly like peak bee season. It's definitely not peak bee season, but hey ho, let's get on with it. I've been very busy this week with newborn baby, 3-week-old baby, uh, doing the bees, feeding the bees, dead colonies, doing videos. everything. Absolutely bonkers, but I do, I do like it. So let's get on, answer some questions. First question is from Nicholas James. He says, Lawrence, love your programs. 2 questions. I have one colony with a queen I bought from yourself, beautifully placid and lovely to work with. However, today super angry. Is it the weather? So easy answer is yeah, definitely the weather, not the bees. Uh, but it, in all honesty, it kind of probably is the weather as well. But I think even most calm, most passive bees that you have, they can still have an off day. You can definitely get an off day with a colony, and the weather is one of those triggers and one of those stressors for the bees that will make probably the biggest difference. The other one is like intruders, if they're being hassled, or, you know, I had a colony before, it was getting attacked by badgers overnight, and you could see like the badger scratch marks, and they were just, they just turned vicious. and then I moved them away from that apiary and they're just pretty chilled out again. But the weather, I would say, is the worst one, but combined with like a lack of a flow. So the weather could just be, oh, it's a bit drizzly outside, but the bees might be inside like 3 supers on, stacks of nectar in the brood box. I don't think the weather would have too much of an impact on it. But if you have poor weather, cold weather, rainy weather combined with significant lack of flow, and the bees are thinking, we've not got much for you to come in here and start stealing our honey. And then you go in poor weather, they can attack you and they can sting you. And I see you put on there, you've got 25 stings today, your record. In all honesty, my hive has been ruined by the wind. Weather is a nightmare. What's your record? Or am I on my own? So again, wind, weather, water, it can all impact the colony. And you might go in there tomorrow and it's 20 degrees and the bees are flying and they're just back to their normal chilled self. But I would say even the calmest colony of bees can be a little bit touchy on their day. Bee Enthusiast Peter, channel member, says, had to feed my bees as stores were very low, never had to do this before. Are they likely just to consume the syrup or try to convert it to honey? So they won't convert it to honey, but they might store it. And that all comes down to— doesn't really— you might think it comes down to concentration of the syrup, whether it's 1:1 or 2:1, it doesn't really. All it comes down to is that if you're feeding them lots, so if you feed them like loads and loads of 1:1, they'll just take it all down, start fanning it down, dehydrating it, and then store it once it gets to the right concentration for them to store. And I would argue that it's probably not the end of the world them storing a little bit at the moment. You don't want to be just teetering on the edge I had another colony that died, and it's, it's the same queen. I, I can't believe I didn't pick it up as I was doing the video, but the colony that actually died this time around was the colony that tried to kill itself a few weeks back, or a few, kind of like 6 weeks back. So I've come to the conclusion now that that colony, that was an artificially inseminated queen that was potentially being looked at as a breeder, and it's just nowhere near the quality for a breeder queen because it's so far at the other end of the spectrum. People talk about local dark bees being frugal And sometimes you can get like Buckfast or Italian queens that will just— all they care about is just going for brood and to the detriment of the colony, and that it kills the colony. That is the absolute extreme of that example there, which is it's done it twice in one season. It's tried to kill itself. And obviously it's not, it's not purposely trying to kill itself, but it is just rearing brood without any, um, kind of cognizance of what's actually going on, what's going on with the weather, what's going on in the amount of stores. And the queen just has no ability, or the colony has no ability to tell the queen, whoa, whoa, just cut that egg laying, we can't cope. Um, so I do still have that queen and I will keep an eye on her, but they're not going to rear any queens from her, definitely not. But going back to your question, Peter, I would try and keep it just over the threshold so they're storing maybe like a frame, a couple of frames max, just enough to get them through until the next inspection. And if you can get them through until the next inspection, you know they're not going to die in that time. But I think Don't feel alone in that. Everybody is feeding their colonies at the moment, and if they're not feeding their colonies now, they definitely fed their colonies at some point earlier on in the year. I don't care whether it's Italian queens, Buckfast queens, any of the queens that we've got, local mongrels, AMM— people will be feeding this year just to keep their bees alive because this is one of those seasons that it's just an anomaly. It's a completely strange anomaly, and I don't think it's going to happen again where it's going to be so cold and then so wet and then so windy, and it's just really, really bad. Um, I'm just scrolling down because I realized last week I started off, um, and the mic wasn't on, and then I've not been looking at the bottom, so I could have just been talking there for 5 minutes and the mic wasn't on. But luckily this time it is, and I can see that it's green, so we're all good. So hopefully that answers your question, Peter. Next question is from . He says, hi Lawrence, I've attempted to naturally requeen a colony on 2 attempts, but the queen cells created always appear short and virgins runty. Neither appear to have mated well and not laid eggs. Are small queen cells okay? So not a massive fan of emergency queens anyway because I don't like that impulse, and I always find that they're just not fed as well. But you can get a really nice emergency queen cell. I've been going through channel members. I'm uploading a video as we speak doing some exclusive channel member content now. So if you're wondering why am I talking about videos that aren't on YouTube. I have started uploading some exclusive channel member videos on there, but I was doing one today going through like 10 nucs that I've got that are requeening. So they are on day 8, and I was going through taking down the emergency queen cells. And some of them, you know, really big chunky emergency queen cells, absolutely full to the brim with jelly. I'd be relatively happy to give some of them a go just based on the right larva being in there at the right time and then the right feeding going on if you've got a nice big strong colony. But then if you've if you're getting little runty cells made under the emergency impulse, I wouldn't be fancying those queens anyway. But then also, if this is like recent, the weather's so bad. Like, our success rate with the UK-mated queens is way below 50%, and we're normally up kind of in like the 70-75% in terms of successful mating. And it's only gonna— it's only gonna go downhill if this— if this weather doesn't pick up soon. We will We'll have maybe 2 weeks or 3 weeks left of the UK queen rearing season, and I'll just— I'll call it quits because the bees aren't in the position that they need to be, and the drones are rapidly declining. So unless we get a new round of drones coming through, they're just not going to— regardless of whether we get the weather to rear the queens, there's not going to be enough drones around to get them mated. And I think I saw someone else was talking about that in one of the comments, so I'll jump down to that in a little bit. But again, in response to your question, no. don't think small queen cells are okay, and I prefer not to use emergency impulse queens. But then even if you had perfect queen cells, big fat chunky ones reared under the Super Seizure or the Swarming Impulse, the weather's not been there to get perfect matings anyway. So I wouldn't worry, I wouldn't worry too much about that, Graham. And again, we're all in the same situation. I need an extractor for August time, but they're just so expensive. So definitely sit on your hands for the time being until you've actually got some honey to extract. you'll be able to pick up an extractor last minute. Don't buy one for a speculative crop because I don't think anyone got a spring crop, and if the weather stays like it is, no one's getting a summer crop either, which I know some bee farmers are saying like, oh, hallelujah, finally we're going to have a year where nobody gets any honey and we can finally get rid of the surplus. But that's a, that's a sticking plaster. That's not gonna, that's not gonna beat the Chinese honey. That, that just gives you the ability to shift some of the honey that's stored up in buckets or barrels in your shed. So I don't think it's the best thing in the world. And I don't know, it's depressing, isn't it? British weather is depressing. And, and the absolute irony of it all is that I'm trying to watch the T20 cricket, which I thought would be finished by now, and England are playing in Antigua and Barbados, and it's pouring down out there as well. So you can take the Englishman out of England, eh? Right, says, hi Lawrence, I received the 2 queens yesterday, all safe and well. I was going to put them into 2 hives that I checked last week that have no eggs or queen. Checked yesterday and one has a virgin. So I said this last week, this happens all the time. People ring up, oh, can I buy a mated queen? I've got a colony that's queenless. And you talk to them and say, well, are they definitely like hopelessly queenless? Yep, they're hopelessly queenless. There's no eggs, there's no brood, there's no queen, and they've been like it for a couple of weeks. And then I always dig a little bit deep and say, well, what's, what's the backstory? And they say, oh well, they were absolutely fine, big strong colony, they swarmed and then fast forward 2 weeks, there's no brood, there's no queen, so they're queenless. And I would say 99% of the time there is a virgin knocking around in there. So the best way to do it is test frame of eggs. Put a test frame of eggs in. If they draw out the emergency cells, they're queenless. If they don't draw out the emergency cells, there is a queen in there. Could be a drone-laying queen, could be a virgin queen, could be a mated queen, but it gives you the ability to kind of diagnose it. However, if you find a virgin after amount of time, just kill the virgin and don't try and put the frame down. The virgin will just fly off. Kill the virgin and then you can introduce the queen straight away. Next question from Graham Thomas says, do virgin queens mate with drones from the same colony? So no, they definitely don't, and the whole idea for them is to get genetic diversity, is that they fly off and go and mate somewhere else. I would say I like— and I'm speculating here, I don't know this— I would say very, very occasionally you might get them mating with drones from the same apiary. But I guess if I'm saying that, you might very, very occasionally get them mating with drones from the same colony, but I think the chances are ridiculously low. They try and fly off miles away, the queens, to mate with other drones that are elsewhere. Hi Lawrence, newbie beekeeper question. Why not put a queen excluder underneath the brood box to stop the queen swarming? I'm sure there are good reasons not to imprison her, but would to understand. So when you do that— so you can do that, you put queen excluder underneath the brood box with the idea that the queen can't get out, so she is imprisoned. So what will happen is the queen can't get out, so they try and swarm anyway. And when they try and swarm, they realize that the queen can't go, so all they do is they wait for the first virgin to emerge, and then the virgin just nips through the queen excluder because they can get through when they're young, and that just takes the prime swarm with them. So it doesn't, it doesn't really do anything, you end up losing, um, you end up losing the prime swarm anyway. I guess you could argue if you had like a really expensive queen, you might, you might want to do that, but then the easier way is just clipping the queen's wing as opposed to putting the queen excluder there. But that's the reason people don't do it, is because it doesn't, it doesn't stop them swarming. They still swarm. Going back to the virgin question, he says, so moved her into another hive and then put the new queen from you into the hive I took her out of, but left the tabs closed until I spoke to you tonight. Will this work? And if so, how long until I pop the tab? So if I was doing that, 24 hours. 24 hours would be fine. You can go back and pop the tab. It should be fine. Second question from Robert Orr says, and a second question, I'm assuming I'm farming for honey, not bees. Should I just kill all drone cells as drones just eat my honey? Wow! No, definitely, definitely, definitely not. That's no. Don't do that. And the reason I say don't do that is. like getting matings, like the drones are such a crucial part of that jigsaw which is colony success. And it's not just— don't think of it as like your single isolated colony, think of it as like everyone's colonies. The drones are really, really important. They do a lot more actually in terms of like heat regulation as well, which the apiarist told me when I said they just sit around and do nothing, kind of tongue-in-cheek, but they do. They thermally regulate the hive, which for weather like this is really, really important. They'll eat food, but they, they give back with heat, which the colony needs in order to rear more brood. Really dead against killing drones for the sake of it, whether it's for you just don't like them in there because they're eating your honey, or you want to use it as a varroa treatment, or like culling them to reduce the number of varroa that are in the hive. I'm really, really against it. I think drones, drones are good, and I do everything to kind of promote drones in my colonies. Another question from Robert says, can I create a nucleus with a Black Mountain Honey Queen, a couple of frames of brood in all stages including nurse bees, but taking the nurse bees and brood in all stages from 2 different colonies, or will they all fight each other? So the text— I've done that, 2 colonies, and they're fine. 2 colonies. The textbook answer is 2 colonies will fight, 3 colonies just get on and just all pretty chilled out. But, you know, I've not seen them fight when I do that, and I think when you take them to a new apiary site I never have any problems with that, but textbook answer is just take it from 3 separate colonies. If you don't have 3 separate colonies, just take it from 2 separate colonies and I'm sure they will be fine. So these are all questions that were answered or asked prior to me starting. Um, there's another one here. So Robert said, would a queen excluder underneath the brood box also exclude wasps, mice, and hornets? If so, could I use that in winter or whilst my nucleus colony is weak but growing. So it wouldn't exclude wasps, it might exclude hornets, but the hornets, if they're Asian hornets, are just going to hawk in front of the entrance anyway. European hornets really don't do a huge amount of damage to honeybees, and they rarely get inside the colonies. They're kind of picking them off on the outside. It probably would stop mice getting in, but no, you know, Mouse Guard will do the same job. And you're dead keen today to put a queen excluder underneath, Robert, aren't you? I can sense this. But I wouldn't. I don't think there's real any real reason to put a quinna scudo underneath. It's a nice idea. Uh, Ed Walton says, hi Lawrence, do you think you may be able to get Peter Stevens on for a live? So, so firstly, I'm not sure who Peter Stevens is, um, but secondly, I've stopped inviting people on. You may have noticed I've stopped inviting people on because Griff is kind of going down the route of inviting people on, and every time I invite someone on, I don't get anywhere near as many views or people kind of on asking questions than if it's just me talking. And it's way easier for me just to do it on my own. So it's not a case of sense of I don't want to get people on, but every time I have done that in the past, it doesn't do as well. And then people maybe get annoyed that I don't answer the questions. So I think I'll just— I'll stick to this format, which is just a Q&A, and let people come and just ask the questions, and I'll answer every single one unless I miss them. Hello Lawrence, I hope you're well. I have a question. Why are my bees pulling the drones out and killing them? Thank you in advance. Because they think it's October. Because if you look outside and you're a bee, you think, yeah, it's October, definitely. It's raining, it's cold, there's no flow on, so it must be October. And I know they're going to be looking at the sun and they're thinking, like, the length of the day is telling me that it is the middle of June because it's pretty long the day. But the colony just literally cannot survive in, in its current format, which is not being able to get outside and forage, nothing coming in. and all of those drones that are there. So they're saying, we don't need you drones. And I'm hoping, I really am hoping, that they're going to do another round of drones. And I do think they will if someone flicks a switch and it's just 6 weeks of summer. They will lay up more drones. But if they don't, I said the queen, the queen rearing will be finished for the year because you can already see that in the colonies there isn't quite enough drones, and there's definitely a, a massive reduction compared to where it was like 2 or 3 weeks ago. And it should just be going up and up and up at this point in the year, and as you get to the solstice, then you start to see it slowly ramping down. And it's not until, you know, normally it's not until like September that you start seeing drones being evicted, not the middle of June. But that is the reason, the bees are well and truly confused. Right, next question. I'm just filtering through. Jon's doing a fine job of answering all of these questions on the chat. Good stuff, John. Uh, right, let's find the next one. Right, again says, hi, I've seen you recommend using a national double brood box for my Buckfast queens as they are prolific egg layers. When and how would you put on a second brood box and checkerboard frames to speed it up? So it's difficult. This advice is difficult because every other year I would give the advice, which is, we'll just get it on as soon as possible. Get it on as soon as possible. And I would start off early on in the year. If you've got cold nights, get it on underneath. and just let them start building up, and then when they start using the bottom box, you can flip it round and, you know, build them up nicely there. If you've got bees now on a single brood box, definitely don't double brood them now for 2 reasons. One is probably like a little bit too late, and I would just err on the side of— you get to the solstice and swarming does subside a little bit anyway. But also because the weather's so, so bad, you're kind of thinking, well, to get them to the point where they're going to fill a double brood, you're talking at least 4 or 5 weeks away, like a good, probably good 2 rounds of brood rearing, so maybe 6 weeks away, which takes us into— what does that take us to, like August? Which for me is like, you're only a couple of weeks away from the end of the honey season. So I would just hedge my bets and get the queen excluder on and put the supers on and say then I don't think they're going to swarm. And I think talking to people and looking around on Facebook and stuff, swarming this year has been incredibly low, really has. The bees have looked outside again and just said, not swarming, not swarming, because we probably won't make it because it's wet and cold anyway. But it's— I don't know, it's been the strangest year. I really don't know how to get my head around what's going on. with the weather. It definitely wasn't as bad as this when I was growing up as a lad. I could start saying that now, getting old. Uh, right, Thomas says, hi Lawrence, between AMM bees and Buckfast bees, which ones tend to swarm the most? So I've got to be careful what I say about this one now. I, I do think local mongrel bees left to their own devices will swarm more than Buckfast bees because Buckfast bees by their very nature are being bred. You don't— they're not a naturally occurring bee, they're a hybridized bee, so they have to have some input from a breeder in order to actually create them. And any decent Buckfast breeder is going to be specifically breeding them to not swarm. So if they're getting their breeder queens and selecting the daughters from the breeder queens, and they've got one breeder queen that's got lots of F1 daughters that are trying to swarm, they're going to say, well, no, That's not good, that's not what we want, amongst other things as well, but it is quite high up on the list that they don't want to swarm. And I do remember when I had my Mongols, they swarmed a lot more, and it wouldn't be unusual for them to swarm. They build up in the spring, swarm, and then get mated, and then swarm again. So, but that's just my experience with those bees. I do know people who keep local Mongol bees who are like close to AMM who are selecting for themselves, and if they've got colonies that are regularly swarming, then they're eliminating them. So you can do selection with a kind of like a pure species or like a real bee species like Apis mellifera mellifera, but it's, it's quite a long drawn-out process and you have a very small kind of pool of genes. You have your own small pool of genes, whereas Buckfast breeders are sharing genetics and sharing them like with other people in the country but also with other people across Europe to get the best of the best of the best. So I do think that Buckfast bees won't swarm as much as AMMBs, but I do think if you have local AMMBs, you can definitely do something with them yourself, either kind of in your own apiary or as a collective, to stop them swarming quite as much. Good evening, Lawrence. With the awful start of the season, is it likely you will be extending your August harvest into September this year? So that is a really good question, and I can give you a definitive answer, John, and that is no. And I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that beekeepers make, and I would warn everybody against doing it, which is to say, well, I'm looking backwards in the season, it's not been good enough for me, I didn't get a spring crop, so I need to get X amount of honey this year. How am I going to fulfill all of my orders? How am I going to tell the wife that I spent all this money on honey equipment or on beekeeping equipment, I've got no honey, so I'm going to push it further? And then you get to August, and August is rubbish as well, so you say, well, you know what, the Himalayan balsam's looking pretty good. If I keep them going until the back end of September, I might a super's worth of Himalayan balsam honey, and then that turns out to be rubbish as well, and you're pushing it on and on and on. And then before you know it, you think, oh, you know what, it's rubbish. I'm just gonna— I'm gonna get my bee treatments on, my varroa treatments, and I'm gonna call it a day. And then you realize you left it way too late to get your varroa treatments on, and you never realize it. And I say that tongue-in-cheek, John, and I say it from experience because I've done that myself on a number of occasions in a number of years, and You don't really realize that there's a problem until you get to like February or March and you're thinking, why are my bees like so weak? There's just— there's like 2 or 3 frames of bees and they're not looking very good and they're not flying very much and there's dysentery and what's going on? And then you get in, uh, later on in the season and you're thinking the brood is looking really spotty and there's holes in the cappings and The simple answer is you didn't treat for varroa early enough. And that, that period between— for me, I put— you could argue that I take my honey crop off a little bit too early. I know a lot of people say, well, middle of August, that's way too early, because the back end of August and early September is where I get like quite a lot of honey. So you can push it a little bit if you could say like 1st of September, and that might work for some people. But the further south you go, I'd say the earlier This works. But for me, I found middle of August is a really good time to do it, and it gives the bees sufficient time for the varroa treatments to work before the winter bees are created. That's the really important thing. But it also gives the bees loads of time to set themselves up for winter, and it means they're setting themselves up for winter. It's not me setting them up for winter; it's them setting themselves up. So they get the brood in the right place. They get the pollen in the right place. They get you know they're finishing off the bramble flow. They're finishing off like bits of the clover. They get all the Himalayan balsam. For themselves if there is any, and there is a bit around here. They get all of the ivy for themselves, they pack it in nicely, they propolize everything down, and they're just, they're just really content going into winter. And you see, like, if people have watched my videos, when I go in and take the Apivar strips out, big massive booming colonies of bees. And then you go in in February or March, big massive booming colonies of bees. And it, it is all in that timing. So I know it's hard And I know not many people are going to get any honey this year, and if the weather doesn't get any better, nobody's getting any honey this year. But don't make the mistake of not getting any honey, pushing it really hard, and then killing your bees over winter, or risk them limping through, because you will just get— you'll get no honey next year even if the weather's good. And that's what you need to take into account, is if the weather's good next year, I want my bees to be in good condition to take advantage of it. It's a bit, bit negative. Sorry, John. Uh, John Sylvester says, good evening, Lawrence, and to your family all here. Truly sad news today about the legendary Kevin Campbell. It was really sad news. Rest in peace. Hey, he was a legend. Uh, Mark Barrows says, evening, Lawrence. Hope you're well and getting plenty of sleep. I'm not doing too bad during the nights, but the days are the ones that tire me out. Uh, thought you'd like to know, one of the queens I received off you about 7 weeks ago is doing amazing. Last weekend laid up 10 14 by 12 frames. Excellent, very good to hear, Mark. Uh, John Sylvester says, my swarm came back. Is that sometimes usual? I managed to catch them and put in a nuc. They landed on top of the chicken enclosure. I have had to buy one of your F1 queens. It's funny, that is entirely weather-related. The swarm's coming back, it's— they're just like, whoa, we did not realize the weather was so bad. We went to go and swarm, we just come back. Or the queen for some reason just didn't didn't want to fly off. What happens with swarms, they generally come out and like they'll stick somewhere close by, they'll just go on like a tree branch and then they go off. And sometimes the queen's just like, no, no, no, we're not leaving, let's just go back in. I see, I've seen swarms retreat before, it does happen. Uh, John Hayes says, where do you get your ratchet straps from, Lawrence? I'm forever buying cheap from Amazon and regretting it later. I've had loads of cheap ones. So I used to get them from a company called Handy Straps. And it was brilliant because they were so cheap, and you could get like the ones that I like are the the hookless ones. I think what they call it endless maybe. They're basically just a ratchet with a long piece, and they don't have the hooks on the end. And you could get a five meter ratchet strap loaded up to what was it was like an eight hundred kilogram loading. I think a really good strong loading for like a pound, something like that if you bought fifty at once. And then the company went into liquidation, and I was so annoyed. And then I bought some cheap ones, and they were rubbish. And what I always find goes first on the ratchet straps is that the UV gets the kind of material and then just degrades the material. And you can tell when you get good ones because it's a nice thick fabric. But I bought a batch and they were rubbish. But now I just buy them off eBay. Last batch I bought off eBay were brilliant. And you can see the good ones because they sell them in like batches of 10, and I think they work out like £3 each, £3 or £4 each. I'll, um, if you email me, John, I'll find my last listing from eBay and send it to you because they were good. They were really good. I, I wouldn't be surprised if they were from like similar factory in China, wherever they were made, but they were good. I love a ratchet strap. Wouldn't be without a ratchet strap. Uh, Mark, following on from that one, says, had to go back into the apiary with the National box to give her space. Never had a bad queen from you. Keep up the good work. Thank you very much. I have a customer who buys loads of queens from me. I won't obviously say his name, and he was telling me he's probably had, I don't Be interesting to know how many he's had, but maybe a couple of hundred queens over the last 2 or 3 years. And he keeps track of the introduction rate. He's got an introduction rate of 96% on over 200 queens, and he's just got the system for doing it well. And he says the 4% failure rate was kind of— he said basically him making mistakes or him missing virgins or doing something like that. So I hear and see— it's on my list of videos to do, in fact, which is the common reasons for failed queen introductions, because there's a lot of different ways that you can fail with a queen introduction. And I do think that the vast majority of the time, people, customers, will have that scenario that I said before, which is they'll have a colony, it swarms, or they might not even see it swarm. They just go in and say, oh, there's no queen, there's no brood, my colony's queenless, I need to buy a queen, put a queen in, and then Queen's gone. 90% of the time I would say that's how it fails, and it's a quick— it's quite an easy one to fix. And I have to say, with— oh, and then he said his name there— the customer's 96% success rate, I'd say mine's similar. It's not— I don't track it, but it's definitely in the 90%. It's very, very rare for a queen introduction not to work going through like the hopelessly queenless method. And I do— I get a lot of stick from people, from bee farmers in particular, saying that method's ridiculous, that is the most long-winded method in the world, you don't need to do that, all you need to do is just Kill the queen, put the new one in, pop the tabs, and they say it works most of the time. I say, yeah, but most of the time is not really good enough, is it? I want— if people are paying good money for a queen, I want it to work 100% of the time. I was thinking like a Zoolander quote there. I want it to work every single time. You know, if it takes 9 days, then it takes 9 days. It doesn't really make a difference to many people how many days it takes. I think they would prefer for the queen to be successfully introduced. But it's just, it's interesting seeing the different success rates that people get with the queens. A Walker Bee Honey says, hi, good evening, how are you? How depressing is the weather roll on summer? So even in like a standard year, like a normal British summer year, I get fully depressed about the weather. I get depressed about the summer when it's bad weather, and I get depressed in the winter. I say depressed, it's not not proper depression, obviously. I have to have respect for people who have like serious depression, but it like, it frustrates me, the weather. The weather really frustrates me. It does get me down. I get a bit bogged down by the weather because I think I love it when it's sunny. I'm a real— like, I really love the sun. I love sitting in the sun. I love doing stuff in the sun. I love working in the sun. I love the impact that the sun has on people. I love the impact that the sun has on the world, and I just can't stand the rain. I'm really just not a massive fan of the rain. It's not the temperature, like, I could quite— I quite like winter when it's just like a sunny day in winter. And it's not just the warmth that I'm after, it's just that, you know, sun on your face. So it is, it is a bit depressing. Almost forgot that I got my tea. I'll have a sip of that. I'm really tempted to see what's going on with the cricket. If people want to give me updates on the cricket, whether it's been rained off or not. I'm just gonna have a little quick search for the cricket. Has it started yet? Oh, I think it's actually gonna start, isn't it? Oh, I'm so excited. Right, so people can give— I'm gonna have basically loads of people texting me about the cricket if we're doing badly. So if we're doing well, feel free to give me updates on the cricket. I know the majority of people here are going to be very bored or be thinking, it's the Euros, what are you talking about cricket for? But it's kind of a big game tonight. It's England versus Namibia. Which, if you don't know cricket, that is kind of kind of a big thing. But yeah, I'll stop talking about cricket now. Okay, Rufus R8 says hello. Hello, Rufus. Denby Honey says evening everyone. Spring harvest extracted did quite well. Oh, here we go. The the the elephant in the room in terms of someone actually getting some spring crop. How much did you get? Go on. What was your what was your average? Because I guarantee that it's more than my spring average, which is positively zero. Very good to hear. Oh, that's that's made me quite happy that someone's got some spring honey. Aiden says, "Hey Lawrence." Hi Aiden, how you doing? Thomas says, "Thinking of trying out Buckfast bees next year. Which generation is best to go for?" So definitely don't go for a purebred Buckfast queen if you're just thinking of trying it out. A, they're very expensive, and B, like they're not really that different from. an F1, like a first generation. So you have like— not F0, I know I call them F0, and I think F0 is an acceptable terminology, it's not the right terminology. The filials do start at 1, but it's a purebred queen. So purebred queen, and then F1, F2, F3, F4. So if I— F1, definitely get an F1, because the difference in price is, you know, maybe £40 for an F1 versus if you're going to get a good pure one a few hundred pounds. And then the actual difference between those 2 colonies, if you were comparing like a colony for honey production, a pure Buckfast versus an F1, you didn't really— probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. And the pure one might be a little bit calmer, but again, if you've got good drones and it's mated well, the F1, not, not as bad. And you could almost argue you get like a bit of hybrid vigor with the F1 that you don't get bit with the purebred because you've got like that mix of genetics going in with the drones. So if you're thinking of just trying them out, definitely go F1. Um, I wouldn't, I wouldn't go F2 because anyone selling F2 Buckfast, not really, not really a thing. And I would say that's someone just kind of trying it on a little bit, and it's not going to give you the best flavor of Buckfast really. So go, go for an F1. and I'm sure you'll be happy. Good evening, can you advise what would you say is the best Langstroth poly hive is value for money? Thanks. Um, so it's difficult to say that. You've got 2 things there, like what is the best one or what is the best value for money, because the value bit's probably subjective and some people would just say, well, for me the value is just cheapest, I have the cheapest one, which is probably going to be the uh, or Technic sets. If you can get the Technic set one, speak to Tim, Tim Sherlock. He'll get you some Technic sets. Absolutely loves them. And they're, they're basically the same, although Tim wouldn't like me saying that they're basically the same. He thinks they're far more advanced in terms of, uh, accessories and technology, but they're kind of like the same design. But I have to say, I'm not, not a fan. I'm not sold on, um, I, I just don't like the plastic. And that's not in like an environmental— because poly's just as bad. In terms of environmental credentials, but I just don't think they look— they don't look very nice. And I don't know, I've— I'm only saying that from what they look like. In terms of the actual experience with the beehives, I've not had bees in them, so I can't really give that much of an opinion. But yeah, I don't know, the, the Abello Langstroth that I've got, I like, but some people don't like the, the rebated system that you have on that. Um, what an interesting one, and I thought this could be a really good cheap, and I thought this— I'm going to do this, it's going to be great— which is using the Payne's Langstroth nucs. Because the Payne's Langstroth nucs are 8 frames if you take out the feeder, and then the extension boxes are 8 frames as well. So you're only like 1 frame less than a lot of the actual like poly hives that are on the market, poly Langstroth hives, but it's a nuc, so it's like considerably cheaper. But then they put the price up loads, like really, really loads, to the point where it's like, we can— it's kind of like the same price as the hive now. But with even just like one frame less, Langstroth is so much bigger in terms of surface area that one, like an 8-frame Langstroth nuc, is a bigger box than a 10-frame National box, or, or at least equivalent. There's not much in it. I would say the 8-frame Langstroth is probably bigger than a 10-frame Langstroth National. So I thought, oh, this is— this— I'm, I'm on to something here. I'm gonna have a Payne's Langstroth nuc, and then I'm just gonna have like 3 or 4 extension boxes, and that's like loads of space. And then just pop a queen excluder in the middle and call that a beehive. And it, it is a beehive because it's got loads of frames, and you can take the honey off, and you've got the feeders in place. But then they put the price up, so I was a little bit frustrated by that. But I, I am trying, I am trying the Abello ones. I've not put bees in them yet, but they are in, they are on the apiary site, as, as channel members who have seen the exclusive content will attest to. They are there. I know actually you've not seen that yet either. That is, that is literally uploading to YouTube as we speak. Oh no, I, I cancelled the upload so I could do this stream. It will be on tonight or tomorrow morning, but they are in the apiary and they are ready to go. Uh, Countess Bee says, evening all, definitely loving the new vids for channel members. I prefer them definitely. Was wondering if you could do explanations of the different queen types you have. Only heard you talk about Buckfast. So a very valid point and couldn't, couldn't be more apt because the video that I filmed today that is uploading now is talking about me going to my new apiary that is on the channel membership section as well. But that would be probably released in the next couple of weeks to, to subscribers. Um, but what I did today in that video is I introduced every single different queen that I have that's available on Black Mountain Honey. So the Caucasians, the Carpathian wasn't there, but that will go in. The Carniolans, VSH Buckfast, Primorsky, Elgon, all of the different lines. To not only kind of talk to people, be able to talk to people about the different lines and how they've been bred and their background and their benefits and their traits, but also like show you. Because I've seen some awesome like videos of the Melitta bees Caucasian and That's like the number one bestseller behind the Buckfast at the moment. People are loving the Caucasian. I can only expect because they are like jet black, the, the most jet black bees you will ever see. But I've seen some, some videos that the, the breeder in Malta has sent me showing just how much propolis they use. And it's like, some people would definitely see this as a huge negative, but it's— they just coat everything with propolis. And I love the smell of propolis. So I'm really intrigued to see how some of these different genetics do. And I'm even more intrigued to see them kind of like next to each other, how they behave next to each other. I think it'd be really cool. But I do— Buckfast has always been my favorite because I've had the most experience with them. But we will, we will talk more about the different lines, and I'll definitely be showing you them as well. Uh, Jessica Fairfax says, just got out of my hives, one doing great and the other is queenless. Gave them some ready-to-emerge brood and some freshly laid eggs from the strong hive. Fingers crossed to find a a good queen cell. I hope, I hope that goes well for you, and fingers crossed if you get a good queen cell to get some good weather to get it mated as well. Uh, John Hayes again. Hi, John. He says, probably a silly question, but how do you identify when there is a good flow? Can you tell if the bees are coming back with nectar? So yeah, I— some people say that they can tell from like the trajectory that the bees are making in, that they're kind of like coming in like almost fully laden, but For me, it's just the noise. You don't even— I don't even look at the hive. Drive into the apiary and you open the door and you look up and you're like, right, there's a flow on. And you can hear it in the air, and it's that, that like slow air conditioner humming that you get from all of the hives kind of like collectively in the apiary. And then you couple that with the activity at the entrance, which is just in, out, in, out. And like, the bees can't get in quick enough because they've not got to travel far to go and get whatever's in flow. And obviously that's dependent on where— what is in flow. But I find when you have a strong flow on, there's generally a good strong flow on around the place. And it was, it was weird. Like, I went up to the apiary, I think I did a short on it, and it was like raining. I got— I woke up in the morning, 12 degrees, pouring down with rain, and I just had to go and do a couple of things up at the apiary, like tidy up up there. And as I got up there, it like stopped raining. And then half an hour later you looked at the colony, it's like, wow, there is, there is a real flow going on just through the activity at the entrance. And yes, you see like the odd bee coming in, out, you're thinking that's just normal bees going out, maybe checking stuff out or going and foraging for water or something. But when there is a flow on, it is just every single bee that doesn't need to be in the hive wants to get out to get forage, and every single bee that's out wants to get back in to kind of reload, get rid of whatever's in their honey stomachs, and just go back out and get it again. So it is just a— I don't know, it's hard to describe. You just kind of know it. But for me, it's more— it's to do with sound and it's to do with activity at the entrance. Just put your question back up again, right? Mark Barrows, channel member, says, going to the apiaries tomorrow to give some fondant I have left. Can I put it straight on, or should I put supers above the crown board? Um, so what I've done with some colonies that I've got at the moment is just— say you've got, say you've got a super on— is to just put the crown board in between the super and then just put, put it back on and just take a couple of frames out and put the fondant in just to make space for the fondant. And it's like a real emergency feed, but I'm thinking as soon as the flow's back, I'm gonna take that fondant off. So I'm not setting them up to kind of use all of that fondant. I don't want to take the supers away and then put them back on and mix and match them for different colonies. What you can do as well A really, a really nice solution that some people do use a lot is you get a frame like a DN4, but you can use a DN1 frame as well. And then you, you get like a bit of board on one side, or you can do it, you can do it with cling film. I've seen people do it with cling film as well. But you basically just like stuff an empty frame with fondant and like secure it in some way. So you can secure it in with board, you can secure it in with Queen Excluder. Is a good way of securing it in. Bit of work with queen excluder, but the quickest way I've seen doing it is just to use, um, just to use cling film. And it's, it's quite a neat solution. So you end up just with a frame of fondant that you can just take out a brood frame, just pop a frame of fondant in, make a little hole in it so the bees can get in and out, and it's done. And it's not, it's not particularly neat, and you're probably gonna have to tidy up a little bit of mess at the end, but it just means that you can just pop it into brood area, the bees have got good access to it, and you could leave your supers on because I don't think they're going to start eating the fondant on that frame and bringing it upwards. So a few, a few ways to do it, and it's— there'll be loads of people doing crazy emergency feeding at the moment. But what, what I wouldn't rule out for people as well is that if you've got, you've got, say, you've got a brood box full of bees and there's no stores in there, and they've got the queen excluder on, you've got a super on, and you've just got a super full of foundation on, I just put the crown board above it and feed through the foundation because the risk of contamination is so minute, because they're probably just going to use the feed to start drawing out the foundation anyway. And you, you can see and you can assess when it's actually getting to the point where it's causing an issue because they're storing loads of the feed. So as long as you're going in regularly and seeing what they're doing, you can just curtail it before it becomes an issue. And then it's the easiest setup in the world, which is you're just dealing with the top of the hive, putting your feeder on. Much, much easier way of doing it. That's, that's what I would consider if I had colonies in that situation. Mine have got drawn supers on, so if you've got drawn frames on, you don't want to do that because all they're going to do is just going to store it, and then you, you will have contamination issues. Uh, Blake HJ says, hi Lawrence, do you have any tips about building a honey extraction room? I want to make sure that it is Compliant with inspectors, etc. Thanks. I love talking about honey extraction rooms. It's never a simple answer or a quick question to answer, but hmm, what would my tips be? It's interesting watching Griff going through this process at the moment and and having watched Richard go through his process because everyone has different different ideas for what makes a honey room good and obviously different budgets to work with. And I think when I did mine, like I retrofitted a log cabin. And I wish I hadn't done that. I wish I built a purpose-built honey extraction room. But then on the other hand, I'm really glad I didn't spend much money doing it because for us, honey is just not like a huge part of the business. And I wouldn't want to be sitting on— I am already sitting on a lot of expensive extraction equipment, but I wouldn't have wanted to put much more money into the room. But I think about that as the first one, which is, do you want to Invest a lot of money into expensive extraction equipment and rooms and stuff like that. In terms of making it compliant with inspectors, that that's pretty easy. You just make sure that absolutely everything is made of either plastic, like food-grade plastic, or metal, stainless steel. Like if you can just ensure that everything's made of one of those two things, you should be good. And when I say that, make sure that the floor is okay. The floor is not going to be made of either those two things. The floor is going to be made of probably like some sort. liner, um, curved up like that and sealed, uh, where they, where they weld the edges. That makes it really, really easy to clean, means you can hose it down as well. You see, uh, Honeybee's giving the tips to Griff about putting like drainage channels in and having like, uh, I think he called it like a, a silt sump. Now I wouldn't obviously put that into like a log cabin, but I think that idea of how do you design the cleanup operation with the floor is a really important factor, and you only get one chance to get that right. So I would have a look at some of the bigger bee farmer setups to see how that would work for you. Like, in my room, it doesn't really make a massive difference because it's small. I don't make a huge amount of mess on the floor, and I can just— I get the wet and dry vacuum in there, just hoover up all the, all the gunk at the end of the extraction session. But the walls is really easy, just clad them in like a food-grade plastic. And it's not, it's not food-grade as in You can eat your food off it, but it's food grade that has been bought for an area like to clad a kitchen, and then that's really easy. Same with the ceiling as well. So everything just needs to be like completely wiped clean. So I think making sure that it's compliant with the inspectors is probably the easy bit. The more important bit for me is making sure that you have like adequate room to be able to extract your honey. in a good flow. So you see honey extraction lines, they like, they start at one end and finish at the other end, and it's very linear and it's very like managed. But if you don't have like a long narrow honey extraction line room like that, then you need to think about the flow in terms of how you're bringing your supers in, how you're gonna uncap them, where they're gonna sit in the meantime, where's your extractor gonna be, how do you deal with the honey that's coming off. Where does it go to the tanks? Does it need to go through a sump? You— I quickly found in the room that I have, which is like 2— it's 2.7 by 4, I think, my room, really small. And I found quickly that the equipment that I'd put in there was just too much, and I couldn't put enough supers in there to kind of— for it to be worthwhile. So I had to get rid of some equipment in order to make it just work a little bit better. I think less is more with honey extraction equipment as well. Like, What I really didn't like using a sump, and I found using a sump was just such a waste of time. People don't know what a sump is. It's just like a thing that sits on the floor with different grades of filter that run through, with the idea being that the coarse honey sits at one end and it just kind of goes through via gravity and comes out like perfectly clear. But it was difficult to clean, and you waste a lot of honey kind of cleaning it off, whereas having a vertical settling tank with a sieve was just like super easy. And it meant that if you left it in there overnight, you could just extract— sorry, you could decant directly into jars straight after, just leaving the top half an inch where all the wax and all the sediment and all the froth was, and it came out perfectly clear. So it's working out what works for your specific operation and just making sure that flow is good. I always talk for ages about honey extraction. I could talk for ages about them. I do enjoy the honey extraction bit. At least talking about it. Uh, Jean says hello from California. How's it going in California? Says it's rain in Nova Scotia, Canada, but it's been a good week and lots of nice weather coming. Very nice. I've hit the mic there. Carniolan bees, are they a good bee for the weather in Cornwall, and are they as placid as they say? So I, I've had limited— I've had a few Carniolan colonies, and I've had— I've run a few Yolanta Carniolan colonies for quite a while. And I think, I think with all of them that I've had super, super calm Carniolans, and I've had some rather spicy Carniolans as well, but predominantly they are pretty calm. What I did find with them that was very true across all of them, they didn't— they weren't as prolific throughout the whole year as the Buckfast, but in the peak of the season they were just as they were just as prolific. I wouldn't say they were more prolific, they were just as prolific. And if you timed that with the flow, they gathered just as much honey. But going through like the winter period, they overwintered much smaller clusters. They didn't take quite as much feeding in the winter as well, which I would see as a positive. Um, swarminess, I would say they're, they're definitely more inclined to swarm, slightly more swarmy. And I think, I'm not sure if that's like as a factor of the beekeeper's input, as opposed to kind of they're just a swarmy gene of bee or a type of bee. But it could just be they've got this like really rapid buildup and it catches beekeepers out, and then if they hit the ceiling, they swarm. So it could be that. But I had good— I had good experience with Carniolans, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the ones that I put in today come along. But it's certainly a bee that I have had experience with and that I was happy with in the past and would use again. Stealth channel member says, hi, did your manipulation to get frames drawn and gone from 6 frames to all 11 drawn in a week? 3 quarters all laid up and thinking of a demarée. Should I wait one more week or just get on with it? So it worked well. I went into that colony the other day, everything completely drawn, double brood. I, I probably missed out the caveat on that video, which is there does need to be at least some sort of flow going on. It can't just be complete nothingness because they won't draw out anything. So regardless, they might have a go at drawing it out, but you might get like poorly drawn out frames. So to get nicely drawn out frames, you do need to do it in a flow. But checkerboarding, I just, I constantly checkerboard colonies, and if you're feeding them, you can just checkerboard as much as you want, especially if the weather is good. But I think for just seeing the word demerare there, I wouldn't be demeraring anything at the moment, and, and I didn't have a single demerar yet this year because of the weather and because the colonies have not been in a position to do it. And my prerequisite is a brood box full of bees, 2 supers full of bees, and like stored honey in there. And you could do lots of damage to a colony if there's not the correct conditions for them to sustain themselves during a demerar. So they'll put all of the effort into drawing up the combs, and you can get starved colonies. bees. But the reason that I do a demerar is to stop the bees swarming. That's the only reason that I do it, is to, to make my life easy, stop my bees swarming without having to make additional splits. And the bee's just not looking to swarm anyway, so just keep them on single brood box. Makes feeding them loads easier as well. So not done, not done a single one. Let's say it right. It says, love your work, sir. Thank you very much. Aaron Paris says Carnies are great bees, and Stealth says thank you for any advice. Thank you very much. David Bisco says, hi Lawrence, I received my beautiful F1 Buckfast queen on Friday. I've just broke the tabs, there is no brood in any stage. Is it worth robbing a frame of brood from our other colony or not? That is a good question, and I get asked that question a lot, which is I've got a queenless colony, I'm going to put your queen in, and I'm going to put in a frame of brood at the same time. And I completely get the logic, which is you know, build the colony up, boost the number of young nurse bees that are in there. And I think it's a good idea, but get the timing right. The timing should be hopelessly queenless, open the tabs, get the queen out onto the frames, get her laying eggs, get that first round of brood capped over as nice capped worker brood, and then add it. And that's the way you should do it, because if you do it at any point before that, the bees can just get a little bit tetchy during the introduction process and they might kill the queen. Or if you do it even earlier before that, they can start thinking, uh, we're not going to introduce that queen because we've got good fresh eggs and larvae that we're just going to raise queen cells from. So get the timing right, but it's, it's fine to boost colonies by doing that, but just wait until she is accepted and laying. Butchering people's names. Sorry, he just become a channel member. Welcome on board. Andrew Rogers says, "If you feed, how much syrup will a frame's worth be? How much will it?" What do they say roughly? Like a national deep is about four pounds. They say national deep frame laid up is about four pounds. But you hear people saying like a national super is thirty pounds of honey. Never thirty pounds of honey. Like in a perfectly drawn out and a perfectly filled one, maybe. 9 frames fat could just about get to 30, but it's more like 20 to 25 in my experience. So a national deep, they say 4 pounds, but it could, could be anywhere from like 3 to 4 pounds. I would say something like that depending on how filled it is. Also, how can you stop bees from drowning in feeders? Every time I go to refill the feeder, I find dead bees at the bottom. So bees do die. I know that sounds like incredibly condescending, I didn't mean it like that, but bees will die. So in a normal day, you know, hundreds if not 1,000 bees will die in a big strong colony because they only live for a few weeks in the summer and then they go and die. And when the weather's so rubbish, they don't just go off to die, they might just be in the colony and dying in the colony. So they might have just gone up to feed syrup and they might have died. So your feeder might be set up perfectly but you're just still getting the odd dead bee in there. So if there's a few dead bees like A handful, I wouldn't worry about it. If there's hundreds of dead bees in there, then there's something wrong set up with the feeder. The one that I pinched off Murray, which is a brilliant technique, is just using straw. I think it's straw. I always call it hay or straw. I forget which one. Like, the coarser one is the best one, and you basically just fill the feeder up with straw and then just put the syrup in, and that's it. Simple as that. And you never, never get any dead bees whatsoever, and you can basically just take off like for a rapid feed, you can just take off the cone. You don't even need the cone there anymore. They just come up and they're like, yep, that's it, straight out onto the, the straw mountains or the straw islands surrounded by syrup, and they just go off. And then you come back and it's just bone dry straw again. So I do that with my polyash forths now. That's really, really good, works a treat. Evening sir, love your content. My son is taking delivery of his first nuc, Our First Bees, from you this Wednesday. Very excited. Are you familiar with Keith Jardine's rolling demeray method on YouTube? So I'm not familiar with Keith's version of it, but I am familiar with the rolling demeray method, and it's good. It's a good method. You can just keep on going at it. The thing, the reason that I don't use a rolling demeray is that I find that a standard demeray done once gets me through the difficult period, and then if I want to repeat it, I just repeat it. So I just do 2 standard demerays. But a rolling demeray is basically the same as a standard demerite, but instead of just taking all of the brood and putting it upstairs and putting the queen downstairs, you just keep on doing it. You just keep on taking the capped frames of brood from downstairs and just keep on putting them upstairs and just keep on going. It's just a lot more work, and that's the reason that I don't do it, but it is very, very effective and it's a good way of doing it. And I think if I just had a couple of colonies in my back garden, I would probably I would probably use a, a version of the rolling demerare. I'm not sure if Keith's one is exactly that, but that, that is effectively what a rolling demerare is— not taking just all of the brood once, but just keep on moving any capped frames of brood up to that top box. And it works very well. I might do it. I might have it. I might pinch it, do a video on it, show you how good and effective it is. Do— I do love a demerare. I know, I know I talk about it. It's the only thing I talk about, but it does work very, very well. Uh, Grant, channel member, says, so many different opinions on what 1:1 and heavy syrup is. What ratio in kilograms and liters do you do for the water to the sugar? So I, I— it's pretty simple for me because if I'm making 1:1, I use 1 kilogram of sugar, just white standard granulated sugar, to 1 liter of water. So nice and simple, nice standard SI units. I forget what the SI stands for, but nice and simple. And then if I'm using winter feed, I might invert so I've not got to mess around with the maths. So I'd like to say that it's 2 kilograms of sugar to 1 liter of water, but I always get it wrong. And I know it's like volumetric, so I won't give the advice because it's probably wrong. But what I do know is that I just use the invert syrup of like the correct specific gravity, and that's how they measure it, as opposed to measuring the, like, the dilution rates. It's just done on the specific gravity of the solids that's in that. And I think off the top of my head, I think it's like 1.58 or 1.6, something like that, that I use, which is like heavy syrup. Um, I, I just, when it comes to feeding late on in the year, like heavy syrup, I just find invert syrup so much better because the bees just don't have any problem taking it down. But also it's like I can buy it in big quantities and I can just feed it regularly, and I've not got to go through the process of mixing it up. And mixing it up is pain. And then the cost difference— this is the big one— the cost difference between buying like a big IBC of invert, or even buying it in jerry cans, versus buying the sugar and making my own syrup is like, it's not negligible, it's more expensive. But once you factor in the amount of time it takes to make that syrup, there's— it's no contest for me. I much prefer Much prefer the invert. So sorry, Grant, that's not, that's not exactly what you asked, but that's, that's my take on it. 1:1 was definitely right. Uh, In the Hive says, I tried grafting for the first time this year, used one of your F1 Buckfast queens. I got 6 good cells from 10 grafts, although only 2 of them have mated well. What weather is needed for good mating? Um, definitely, definitely better than we've got at the moment. So You need a few, you need a few things to get successful matings. You need, you need good quality, well-fed young larvae to turn them into queen cells, so you need good queens to start off with, well-fed queens, big, nice big long cells. You need sufficient amount of sexually mature drones, so drones at the right stage of their life and in sufficient quantity, not only in your apiaries but like across the the board. And the only thing that generates that is good sustained long good weather. And as people are saying at the beginning of this live stream, like, they're seeing the drones being kicked out. And if you're seeing drones being kicked out, you can, you can bet whatever money you've got that other people are seeing their drones being kicked out as well. So that, that density of drones in the air is going to be really, really bad at the moment. So, and if you've not got the density of drones, it doesn't matter what the weather's doing. Because even if you get like a really nice beautiful 20-degree summer day with no wind, then the drones aren't going to be there. So it's almost you need to get the good weather, prolong the good weather, the colonies say okay, we'll start laying drones, or the queen starts laying drones, and then you've got to wait for those drones to mature, which is however many days, I always forget how many days, 24 I think for drones, and then they've got to emerge, and then they've got to become sexually mature. And then you've got to hope after like that 30 days from them laying, being laid, to becoming sexually mature, you've got to hope after those 30 days that you get good weather at that point as well. And obviously the good weather needs to be, you're talking 20 degrees absolute minimum. But they will, I say absolute minimum, you might get matings at 17, 18 degrees, but they want 20 degrees plus. That's the textbook answer. But then the wind is like Equally as important. If you've got 20— if you've got 25 degrees, perfect temperature, with like a 22 mile an hour wind, absolutely no chance of queens getting mated. You want 20 degrees plus Celsius and like really low wind, like 3, 4, 5 mile an hour winds, nice calm gentle winds. It's like optimum queen conditions for mating. So you need quite a lot of things. to go right to get good, good numbers of queens being mated. So I would say 10 grafts, 6 takes, 2 mated, it's not that bad. Some people will be getting a lot less than that, so don't be too, too hard on yourself. The, the conditions and basically everything is against you this year. I've collected a big swarm but really don't want any more hives. If I remove the Swarm queen, could I combine it with an existing hive using newspaper or shook swarm them? Definitely. A lot of people do that. Just use the swarms. But like the only thing be be like super super careful is that if that swarm has got EFB, which could easily have EFB, you've just taken a massive disease risk and introduced it into your apiary. So I would highly advise against doing that without first putting it onto clean. clean equipment, clean foundation, and then assessing at least 2 rounds of brood. Which I know for you, you're kind of thinking, well, might as well just keep them as a colony then. But what, what you suggested is doable, very, very risky. Not something that I would do for the benefit of a few extra bees. I just don't think it's worth it. My hive has been doing well, it has 2 full supers of honey. Do you think this won't last long because of the June and the weather. Do you think I will have to feed because of this? So, so really good to hear that you've got 2 full supers of honey. And normally I would say, you know, if it's, if it's sunny for the rest of the year, you could get 5 full supers of honey, like in a normal season if you get good flows around there. I, I don't think we're in the June gap anymore. I think, I think the June gap was long, a long time ago. I just think we're in like the main beekeeping flow season and the weather's just shocking So it appears, it appears like it's the never-ending June gap, but I do think the June gap was a couple of weeks ago and it just merged into a period of shocking weather. So I can safely say if it continues, you won't have 2 supers of honey for long, but it can't, it can't continue indefinitely. Surely it's going to brighten up and perk up a little bit at some point. So you've got, you've got a kind of A bit of a challenge there. You could, you could take the honey off, you could take both supers off, extract it, and then double brood and feed your bees, and then hope in a couple of weeks the weather picks up and you've got 2 supers in the bank. Or you could just risk it and say, I don't want to take the honey off and leave it for the bees, and then 2 or 3 weeks later there's no honey in those supers and then you don't get any more for the rest of the year. Or, or somewhere in the middle. Um, what would I be doing if I, if I just had a couple of hives in the garden? I'd maybe split the difference Ben, take one of the supers off and extract it and leave the other one for the bees and just be on guard if you need to, if you need to feed them at some point. Good that you've got a couple of supers though, it's good to hear. I'm enjoying these positive stories of people actually having honey. Neil, sorry for butchering your name, so he says, hi Lawrence, found you via Just Alex. I'm from the Netherlands and don't think I can get my hands on any of your nucs next year because I'm not living in the UK, can I? Also, I love your content. So unfortunately, no, it is UK only for our nucs. I'm sorry about that. I'm glad. I'm glad you found me via Just Alex, and thanks for coming becoming a channel member. Glad to have you on board. Tim Pearson says, "Hi Ben, total noob here. Is there still time to start beekeeping this season? I have been following you for over a year, and my only research is from your content uploaded." I don't know Ben is. Are you talking? Are you talking to like? Ben Davis, I don't know. I'm assuming it's me. I'm Lawrence, by the way. Hello. Hi, Tim. Is it— is there still time to start beekeeping this season? So yes, and you could argue that you've not missed much. You know, we sent the first batch of nucs out on the 17th of March, which is— is that 3 months ago? April, May, yeah, 3 months ago, and it's just rained really, isn't it? We had a little bit of good weather, but I don't think you've missed a huge amount. front, and the good weather could be still to come. So for the people, a lot of people getting nucs this week, Wednesday the 19th of June— orders are now closed, by the way. I've had a few people trying to get nucs this week, but we are, we're at full capacity. Um, it won't take long for a 6-frame nuc at this point in the year with the long days, if you feed them a bit, to get up to a full box, and then you could easily get a couple of supers of honey off them. So no, I don't think it's too late. And the, the big benefit— I did a blog post about this— the big benefit of starting at this the year versus starting early on is that you've not really got to deal with swarming, because by the time you've got your 6-frame nuc embedded and fed and up to size, you're probably through to the middle of July, and then the chance of swarming, it doesn't go away, but it's way reduced compared to like April, May, and June. So you get the benefit of like a full or half a season of beekeeping under your belt without having to worry About the swarming. I'm just, I'm just having a quick look at the cricket. Um, oh, 77 for 3. Be good. I really hope, I really hope we beat Namibia. It's just, oh, I'm distracted. I'm not gonna lie, I'm distracted by the cricket. I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave it on there, but people feel free to give me, to give me updates. What I do not want to hear is that it has started raining again. That is not good news. Uh, Ed says, hi Lawrence, do you think you may be able to get Richard Stevens on for a live? So what I would definitely do with Richard Uh, and I talked to Richard today. Richard came up to, to get some queens, um, which, which might sound strange. Get some, get some breeder queens. In fact, I just had a batch of breeder queens come in, another batch, fresh batch, and Richard had some. So what we will do with Richard is that he will, he'll come up for like an in-person live. Even better. So we'll get Richard, he can just sit on the couch behind me and have a chat. I think that would be cool. We'll definitely do more stuff with Richard, just chatting. and I think I'll go down because there's quite— there's a lot of work that goes into, but like, producing the nucs in the winter period. So just like getting the boxes ready, getting the frames ready, like thousands of frames that need to be done. And I say to Richard, I'll just come down, I'll come down and we'll just do some frames and we'll just have a chat. So it might not be a live, but we'll do, uh, we'll do a lot more of Richard talking. Uh, right, Maverick1298 says, how long does it usually take An accepted and mated queen to start laying? 7 days out of the cage and she's walking around but no eggs. So we say to people it could take up to 3 weeks, but it entirely depends on the condition. You, you, it could— if you've got a colony that's like a couple of frames of bees and all of those bees are really, really old and there's no food in the colony and there's no incoming flow and it's rainy outside, she's probably never going to lay. And then if you've got a colony that is just jam-packed full of nurse bees and the queen comes in optimum condition and there's a really nice flow on and there's loads of pollen, she's probably going to lay very, very quickly. And then anywhere in between is, is gonna— it's kind of like valid as well. So it's not just the queen that determines when that queen is going to lay, loads of external factors that apply as well. So I'm not naive enough to think that like all of the queens that we supply are absolutely perfect, so we will replace queens if they don't lay within 3 weeks and they're in an acceptably, like, a suitable colony, like they're being well fed, there's enough bees in there. We'll replace them after 3 weeks if people send them back, but I think I can count on one hand over the past 4 or 5 years how many we've had to replace through them not laying. It's just like a temporary thing, and it's generally the weather. So at the moment, they're kicking out drones. They're thinking the season's over. So the queens are thinking, "Whoa, no, no, no, we don't know." I've got so many colonies that are just taking a complete brood break at the moment. Perfectly good queens in there, and I know once the weather gets better again, they'll get going again. So seven days, I would say, is is normal. If you want to try and kickstart it. Feed them syrup. If that's not working, pollen patties as well. I'm not a massive fan of pollen patties, but when when it's so bad this year, that can help kickstart them as well. Best thing to kickstart them is just really nice weather, and if the weather comes, say you fast forward two weeks and it's beautiful weather for two weeks and she's still not laying, then there is something wrong with the queen. If it's one of our queens, we would replace it after three weeks. So a few people saying hello. Good evening everyone. Uh, JK as well. Heard a theory that drones sit in front of capped brood and sing to them, maybe imparting some deep information. I like this idea. I really like that idea as well. Uh, When colonies go laying worker, how many of the bees turn into laying worker and can you split them, or do they still look like normal bees? So that's a good question. That is quite, quite a few of them, but nobody knows because you can't really track them. Um, but definitely cannot tell. You can't look at them and say, right, that is a laying worker. Laying workers are a real pain, real pain. The only thing you can do with laying workers is you just shake them out. You see, some people say you can, you can like wean them off being laying workers by adding frames of capped brood. So you add a frame of capped brood, let it emerge, add another frame of capped brood, let it emerge, add another frame, and then at some point they stop becoming laying workers, and then you can add in a mated queen. But I think that's loads of work. I'd much prefer just to like shake them all out and then just make a split. Shake them all out, leave it a couple of days, make a fresh split, add a queen back in, and then you're back to the same number of colonies and you're back to the same number of bees. And it's only the laying workers that don't really get back in, so you lost like maybe a handful of bees, not that many. That's what I would do. Robert Orsis, thank you very much for answering all my questions. No problem. Thank you very much for asking so many questions. Much appreciated. When you insult there, Adam? I've literally had an inch of tea, and it's pretty cold, but it's nice tea. It is like an all an organic nighttime blend. Steve's Honeybee says received five queens last Friday. Brilliant service. Thank you. They went into the hives last. Weekend. It's been so cold and wet this week I ain't had the chance to get back in to check they have been released. Fingers crossed, I'm sure it'll be fine. And if they haven't been released, as long as they're hopelessly queenless, then they will be fed through the cage. I've gone back to colonies where I'd assumed that they'd been released and the queen was just like, no, I'm not, I'm not leaving the cage. And I know I've done a few videos showing like the queens can definitely get out through those cages, but I've had instances where they've just said not leaving. Um, and I've had it one where I left one in for like 4 weeks, 4 weeks in the cage, and went back and obviously all the attendants were dead and this big fat chubby queen was in there just pretty chilled out. And, uh, just took her out, put her in the colony, like completely accepted, and went back and she like 10 frames of brood in about a week. It was, it was something pretty special, but she'd been caged for 3 weeks. So as long as they are Um, hopelessly queenless, they'll last kind of almost indefinitely in the cages. Steve also says, absolutely love your members-only videos, they are brilliant. Thank you very much, great advert for them, Steve. I am, I am really enjoying doing them. There's some mega long videos on there for people who haven't, haven't seen them yet. It is just me like driving around doing like my beekeeping inspections, but it's not very polished and it's not raw. So it is raw and it's uncut and unedited with tons of mistakes in there, like spilling syrup all over the place today and releasing queens from cages into thin air that don't ever come back, and tripping over like logs and stuff. But it's, um, it's, it's good fun. I, I am really enjoying doing them, and, and it's me just talking non-stop for 2 hours about what I'm doing during my inspections and, and other stuff that's going on as well. So it's good fun. So obviously, if you're not already a channel member, which most of you are I think already on here, you can go onto the home page, hit the join button, and you can join the channel membership page. Question, does altitude affect your bees? Definitely, it's so noticeable. That way, as they go like that way, it's like 1,000 feet. I've got an apiary at 1,000 feet, and then that way I've got an apiary that's like 120 feet, and the difference is incredible. Like, it really is a massive, massive difference. I forget which way now. That way, the queens— that's the only way I would make queens. Makes a massive difference to queen matings because higher temperatures and less wind, and that's exactly what you need for rearing good queens. And the amount of honey is considerably higher down at the lower end. The only anomaly to that is that if you've kind of got a site that's near heather, and if you've got a site like one of my sites that's quite high up, it's about 900 feet, it's on the edge of heather moorland, but because it's on the edge, it does quite well. It's like spring and summer as well. So then you get spring crop, you get a summer crop, and you get a heather crop. So when you add them all together, you get kind of like more than just the spring and the summer crops lower down. But the build-up, I would say, is the, the most noticeable thing. So you can see the different flowers, like when they come out. And like dandelions is always the one that— it's like my barometer, I think, of where the season is, the dandelions. And you go down to the, the lower one And like the dandelions are in full bloom, and you go up to the top one and they're not even like— they're kind of barely sprouted. And then obviously in between it's, it's pretty linear, like kind of halfway up. But I, I kind of thought at some point it was just this, well, it starts earlier the lower you are, and then the, the higher you are, the later it starts and the kind of like more prolonged it is throughout the season. But I don't think it is that. I think the lower ones have a longer season and the higher ones have a shorter season. And I do think that that ultimately ends up meaning that the ones that are lower down get more honey. And I think that the, the lower down you are, the more honey you get. But then I think the closer you are to the sea, I think it starts to impact your honey crop the closer you get to the sea. So when you start getting down to like real sea level, if you're— if you've got like coastal breezes coming in I think that can be bad for the bees as well, especially if it's like really windy down there, because there's nothing more annoying. And it's happened so many times already this year, which is, oh, you look out, all right, finally it's 22 degrees outside, brilliant, and then it's like 40 mile an hour winds and you just think, that's really annoying. Like, that's just someone swearing, I shouldn't do it, but it's, it's very, very frustrating. So yes, Does altitude affect your bees? Definitely, in a number of different ways. Hi Terry. He says, hi Lawrence, my new queen arrived yesterday. Thanks again for sending her. I did my weekly inspection today and found a load of swarm cells. I took them all down. Should I make splits from these hives? So it's a difficult one that. So my view with swarm cells, so if I go into a colony and I find swarm cells, this what I do. And I think there's only really one thing that you can do here and make a split when the swarm cells are there. That's what I do. So I take down all of the swarm cells except one, and then I'll take the split out. So I take a nuc out with the existing queen, and I leave the colony with one ripe open queen cell, and I'll give them a chance to mate. And then if the queen doesn't— if the queen mates, then great, I've got my split, I've got my nuc, everything's good. If the queen doesn't mate, then I add in a mated queen So I'll always give them a chance to kind of raise their own queen. And I know you could argue you're breeding in a bit of swarming into that, but I'm never using those colonies again for rearing, so it doesn't make a massive difference. They're just production colonies. But what I like to do, Terry, and what you should do next year, is use the Demaray split and use a vertical Demaray before you get to the point where you're finding swarm cells. Swarm cells are good. Like, a good colony, a big strong colony, will swarm. If you've got a colony that's limping through and it's not getting to the point of swarming, you're not getting much honey from it, there's something wrong. So I wouldn't— having swarm cells isn't the worst thing in the world, but 2 things that you can't do is just ignore it and just say let the bees sort it out, because what they do is they just, they swarm once and then they swarm again and cast and cast and you just get left with nothing and it's really difficult to build it back up again. And then the other thing that you shouldn't do is just take them all down and then do nothing, because then they just swarm anyway, and they generally swarm before they cap over the next cell. So what— so, so now that you've taken all of those down, I'd make a split. Oh, you've got all of the nucs, you bought those, you bought Langstroth nucs, so you've got the nuc boxes there. I would go into that colony, I would take out a 2-frame split, 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, with the queen that we sent you and just pop that off into a nuc, and then they'll probably make more swarm cells. If they don't, they'll make emergency cells. Knock them all down and just leave one cell, and hopefully they'll requeen themselves. Or you could just take down all the cells and add in a mated queen, whatever you fancy. Either way, but just know that they will try and swarm again, so taking down all of the cells won't, won't have fixed the problem. You do need to make a split now. But you, you mentioned that you wanted to get some more nucs anyway, some more colonies, so just take the splits out, make the splits yourself. I think it's a good time to do it. Got stung just under the end of the nose today. Boy, is that painful. That is the worst place to get stung. It makes you cry. It makes you cry like lots and lots and lots. Really, really bad place to get stung. How do virgin queens manage in wild colonies with this winter? And cold weather, do they just give up? So yeah, they do, they do just give up. And do you know what, what's annoying with them is they don't give up, they just kind of like strut around like they're Billy Big Boots. Virgin queen, don't you know? It's just like, you're not mated, you're not actually doing anything, you're not adding anything to the mix here, you're just holding back the colony. You might as well just go off and die. But when a colony gets into that state, there's no— they are hopelessly queenless. I know they— okay, they're not hopelessly queenless, but they're effectively hopelessly queenless. They've got no capacity to create any new queens, no eggs, no larva, and they've got a queen that will and can never mate. So it's even worse than like hopelessly queenless because they kind of think that everything's okay and it's not. But in the wild, they would— they'll just dwindle. They'll dwindle away to nothing, and then they'll probably have sconed due to varroa or something in the end. And but bees are prolific at recovery on like a wider scale because there's so many colonies of bees, and their ability to swarm and to swarm multiple times is that if you have a colony and it— in the wild, this is the thing, this is why local mongrels I've never been a fan of, because I do find that that swarmy gene that they breeding themselves, the trait that they are preserving is the trait of survival. That's all it is. They just want to survive. They don't need to produce— they don't need to produce a honey crop for anyone. They don't need to be calm. They don't need to have too much of a, like, a defense against chalkbrood or sacbrood or disease or anything like that. They just need to be able to not die. That's all they care about. And they're really, really good at that. And swarming Coincidentally just fixes a lot of those things for them, which is it gives them the brood break, it gives them relief from any like viral load being kept in the combs. So they're not, not on black combs anymore because they've gone and created like new combs. And it's interesting because when you have like shook swarms, you do— like I'm seeing it this year, the colony is looking such good health because I shook swarmed them last year. I gave them that break from varroa, I gave them that break from the dirty old that they were on and give them like a fresh version of life. And that's what swarm— that's what swarming does. So they're breeding that in. So if you have a colony and it, it splits itself into— it could probably split itself into 30 colonies over the course of a season because you get one colony that swarms and chucks out, let's say, 5 swarms. one big one and then a few casts. And if like 2 or 3 of them get mated and then build up their own colonies, and then they also chuck out a number of swarms, you know, you can do that multiple times throughout the season. And you only need a few of them to, to get mated and to, to limp through to be able to actually like continually build those numbers up. So they do, they'll just, they'll just kind of the ones that don't get mated will just die, and the ones that do get mated preserve that swarmy trait and carry on doing it. I came out of winter with 2 hives and they're bringing in nectar, and I've had to split them due to them wanting to swarm as they had 8 to 9 frames of brood. I currently have 2 nucs and 4 hives. Sounds like you're doing a good job. Quick checkup on the cricket score: 101 for 3. Happy with that. I might, I might just stop the stream early and just go and watch the cricket. I won't do that. Oh, I'm tempted. Wow, yeah, 6 more days and the days start drawing in. I get a little bit depressed at that time of year as well, I have to say. I really, really like the long days. You get a lot done. Um, but it's, it's weird, you know, I used to have serious mental withdrawal from the end of summer, but I, I do since I've become a beekeeper, I do quite like getting into September and just being like, oh, you can breathe, you can actually breathe again, because it's, it's, it's intense. Beekeeping season is intense, but I love it. Hey Lawrence, thank you so much for all your help and advice over emails. Big relief when to know that what looked like the naked eye was mold was actually beautiful pollen. The bees have it back and they are happy. So just to fill people in, Chrissie thought there was some mold in her hive and sent me some close-up pics, and it does, it looks like, what is that? It's like a moldy frame, and it was a beautiful frame of lots of different pollen, but it did look like mold. But to someone with like the untrained eye, without seeing that, it does look like a bit weird and a bit dodgy and a bit like something's wrong. I had another person last year actually, they rung me up and they said, Bought a nuke from you and really don't like the look of the lava in it. And I'm obviously thinking, oh, this is this isn't good news, blimey. So I said, send me some pictures. But they they said, you know, like the lava are like brown and black, and there's something wrong with them. And I was thinking, this this doesn't this doesn't sound right. But like send send me some pictures, and they sent me the pictures. And basically what it was is there was a whole frame of brood. owned like that. And it had been laid up so full, like the whole frame had been laid up all from the middle all the way out to the edges. And I don't know what had happened to the colony, I don't know what they'd done with it, but it had been completely— every single cell had been neglected, like just neglected. And it was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen. Imagine you're looking into a frame and you've got like a big chubby white larva, you know, when they get big as they can be. It looked like that, and it was black. And I said to them, I said, what's happened here? I said, have they absconded? I said, are there any bees left in the hive? And they said, no, they've absconded. And I thought, yeah, it looks like they've absconded. I said, what's happened then? He said, I don't know. And then it turns out that what we think had happened— I never had like a definitive answer— but I think there'd been some sort of like insecticide poisoning gone on because he said that they just like— there were loads of dead bees in the colony, loads of dead bees at the front of the colony, but he said there wasn't as many bees— like there were loads of bees in the colony and there was probably only like 20% bees left, but they were all dead. And then all the brood was just— looked like that. And so they just completely absconded and left them, and everything had died and it was black. But obviously a bit of a, bit of a scare. But I do, I do get sent lots of weird and wonderful and issues, which is good. I, I enjoy it. Uh, Andrew Rogers— wow, this is how far I am behind. So he says, yep, endless straps. So that was the one talking about that a while ago. Um, Happy Hounds in Ireland says, it's a shame I can't buy your bees in Ireland. I saw on one of your videos how calm they can be. It's a shame about that. Sorry. John Begry— evening all. He's back. Chrissy says, I do think though, when I inspected the hive, the queen with her little yellow dot flew past my face. Should I be worried? Hmm, it's a little bit worrying. Um, is it a yellow dot? Is it a yellow dot? That would have been the 2022 queen, I think, so that shouldn't be unless you've remarked her. Hmm, maybe it's a bit of pollen, a bit of pollen. Let's put it down to that. Damien O'Hare, good evening, channel member. California Beekeeper, he says hello, my friend. Uh, hello from Northern California. Everyone, Lawrence, how many times do you normally treat for varroa each year? Do you treat on a schedule or do you treat depending on your mite counts? So hi, hi Jose, good to see you. Um, I loved your video today with the hand. For anyone who doesn't know, Jose just always gets loads of views on Instagram for like cool hand video, but he did a video which was like his hand in a glove, just— it's pretty cool in it with my camera, like, oh, a bit of a bit of cool stuff like that. Got a competitor now, Jose, but it was covered in bees. It was a Well, cool video. I love that. So no, I don't do any mite counts whatsoever because it's just—I'll find that if I ever do mite counts, the range is always between yeah, that colony, the mite load is relatively low, but I'm going to treat anyway. To yeah, that colony needs treating. So I just—it was always a bit of wasted effort for me. So I treat all of the colonies, whatever happens every single year, and my. My cycle is I treat very early in the season, so I cut my honey off quite early, which for me, I go middle of August, 15th of August. I go in, take all of the honey off, put the Apivar strips in, like using Amitraz. It's the same brand name in America. Put my feeders on and feed, and then take them out 8 weeks later. And then I go for— try and time a natural brood break, which we get in the North Wales somewhere between like mid-November to early December, around that, and they'll go in with oxalic acid and do a single blast. And we don't get like much noticeable viral disease as a result of varroa. You start to see a little bit of deformed wing virus coming into kind of back end of July, early August, but that, that's like you, you'll Everybody will be seeing that unless you're doing treatments in the middle of the season, which there is no real treatment for at the moment with supers on. So I think, I think we're good. I'm quite happy with our mite treatment schedule. I think it works well, and the fact that it works well I think negates the requirement to do the testing, especially as we're not really looking for like breeding any of those tendencies ourselves. So if we were, we would definitely try and treat and— sorry, try and test the number of mites and see what we were doing, but we're not into that business, so we just treat everything and try and keep the bees as clean as possible. Lawrence, with July and August around the corner, thinking ahead, I'm going to cage my queen and vape after 24 days. Could you suggest a pre-winter feeding regime to fatten the hive for winter, please? So yes, I can do, Paul, and thank you for the prompt. We did speak earlier on the phone, but I appreciate the additional prompt. So with July and August around the corner, thinking ahead, gonna cage my queen and vape after 24 days. So, so it's— I would just go with similar kind of comments to what I said before, which is just don't leave it too late. So going through the process that you're going to go through there, which is, uh, using like an organic compound like oxalic acid to try and vape all of the bees, so sublimate the oxalic acid, bring it into the, the colony with the idea of knocking down all of the phoretic mites. So your idea, as Richard Nowell uses, is to cage the queen for 24 days, means that she can't lay any eggs. So you're forcing like an unnatural brood break in the colony. You're saying to the colony, when they normally would be brood, right, you can't have brood now. And then after 24 days, you're going to vape them to knock down the entire phoretic mite population. So it's very effective, and they talk about kind of upwards of 90% knockdowns if you do that at the right time. Once you've done that though, and you're talking about doing it in— you're going to cage your queen now and do it. It's, it's a difficult one. Like, I see Richard does it like a little bit earlier during like a natural— like, for me, if I was going to do that I would do it and time it with the June gap. That would be my advice. I'd forgo any spring crop. And the thing is, is you're not even forgoing any spring crop. You're not sacrificing it because you'll probably get a bit of a bump in crop by caging a queen because all of the young nurse bees have not got to tend to any brood. So they get like promoted up through the ranks a little bit quicker and they'll just be out foraging. So all of the bees can just go out and forage. So you probably get a little bit bit more honey. But that's the way— that would be my timing if I was going to be doing caging of queens. I'd try and get the sublimation at the point of the June gap. And the reason that that would work very well is that it gives you an opportunity to take the supers off. So you cannot sublimate with the supers on. So if you started off with a single brood box, uh, queen excluder, supers, got your spring honey, and then come probably like 10th of May, depending on where you are, maybe 1st of May, something like that, depending on where your June gap is. Cage the queen, let your honey supers continue building up at that point, and then once 24 days has elapsed, I would take all of the honey off and extract my honey at that point, at the same time as adding on an additional brood box and at the same time as feeding. Then I would vape, and you could do you know, you could do that over a couple of days, like over— you could do a 5-day period, and that's just like an arbitrary amount of time. But you could vape them, carry on feeding, and then keep the queen caged and vape them again, give them like multiple vapes to try and bump down that mite load as much as possible. And then take the feeder off, re-release the queen, and then put your supers on and get a summer crop. That's— that would be like the, the least impact, I think, on the honey season. As opposed to doing it like towards the end of the season. And then once you've done that, I would say you could just use your normal winter treatment to get your bees up to where you want them to be. It would give you the benefit doing that, that you wouldn't have to curtail your season. So like, I go in early to use Amitraz, which is a miticide, and I do cut short the honey season to make sure that the mite load is low. But if you trapped the queen early on in the year, you wouldn't have to. You could extend that further out, and then you could use a natural brood break later on in the year. So it is, it is an interesting— there's a lot of work involved in doing it, a lot more work than using Apivar. But I'm interested to hear how you get on with it, Paul. I hope it works well. In terms of fattening the hive for winter, I just think the easiest, the easiest way to do that is just trickle feed, but trickle feed early enough and leave the bees enough of the natural forage, just take the honey off early and get the bees ready for winter early, definitely pays dividends and definitely keeps the colonies really, really nice and strong coming into the, into the winter. If anybody caught me, I was just looking at the cricket score as I was talking. I definitely can't do 2 things at once, but it's looking pretty good. 121 for 4. Very nice, and it's not raining. So next up, When's the latest you can do a shook swarm? I want to move 2 colonies from 14 by 12 to Langstroth but don't really want to do it yet. You can do it pretty late on in the year, you know, you really can, because all you, all you really need is the colony to put in a round of brood and it should get through. I, I did some last year. When did I do them? It wasn't that late, but it was definitely like mid to back end of July. And what you'll notice if you do shook swarms late on in the season, you will notice like a real drop in the colony sizes going over winter. But as long as you get all of the frames drawn out, give them sufficient time and sufficient feed to get all of the frames drawn out in the brood box with enough stores and enough bees, it doesn't matter if they overwinter in a smaller cluster because they'll come through and they come through really, really nicely. So I would mid to back end of July, I'd say, the latest that I've had experience of, and it worked really well. Evening, Lawrence. The 2 queens arrived last week happy and healthy. Looking forward to checking in on them on Wednesday next week when the Black Mountain Honey nucleus arrives. Excellent. Yeah, well, that's— that is coming. Lots of people getting their nucs this week. Very exciting. And I'm interested to see your critique of it as well, Joshua. Came at me like a missile when I took the veil down. We'll be replacing with one of your Buckfast queens as guard bees from that hyper-aggressive, slowly moving over to all Blackman's and Honey Buckfast queens. Excellent to hear that, Jim. Hi Lawrence, bought an Italian queen from you last week, lovely looking queen, she's been accepted well. How long does it take for her to start laying? So as I said before, it can take kind of up to 3 weeks really, depending on the conditions in the colony, depending on the conditions with the weather. If you haven't already, I'd give them a light feed of syrup, that generally kicks them into gear. But just, if the colony is not set up for the queen to lay, then it will take kind of quite a bit longer for her to get back into lay. She's not laying after 3 weeks and the setup is correct, then we will replace her. But like I say, they generally do turn around within a couple of weeks max. Awful year for bees and for us beehive manufacturers. Lots of winter losses on lots of cheap imported hives on Amazon, Temu, etc. Not good to hear. Sorry about that, Chris. Seemed busy at the, uh, at the, the Bee Show. Hopefully things pick up for you. Uh, Tony and Liz says hi everyone. Hi Tony and Liz. Oh, getting cricket updates now. So England is batting first. Did we finish on— right, so we finished on 100 and— oh no, there we go. I've got to stop looking at the cricket, sorry. Uh, seasonal disorder syndrome. Yeah, is it seasonal disorder syndrome? I thought it was SAD. was the acronym for it? What's, what's the— where does the A come from? Is it like season— like seasonal acute? I don't know, making up stuff now. I'm very tired. Uh, oh, getting— I'm getting cricket updates. This is brilliant. We could just sit here and you could just give me cricket updates and I'll just talk nonsense and drink tea. One run from the first over? No way. They've, they've picked it up since then. Uh, says, been a weird spring. I have 20 full-sized colonies and most are just treading water. Some have needed a feed, but 5 of them have produced 8 full supers between them, and that's me leaving them plenty. Well, that's good. I'm— I am genuinely pleased that some people have got some honey. It's not like the worst season in the world for everyone. Brian says, I am the bee god, you understand. Here in my head is the master plan. Swarm Kid Rock. Love, love a good song. Peter Nadine, channel member, says the sun has got his hat on, his wellies and his Mac, and buggered off to Tenerife because the British weather's crap. Never a truer song has been sung. Um, Ben Wong says 150 watching and 48 likes, get lighting— liking people please. Thank you, Ben, very, very helpful. Butler out 2 for 1. Oh man, I, I really want to watch The Rum Chase. What do we finish on? It's— I've just got it finished. Oh no. Is it saying that there is like rain? What's going on? Oh no, 122 for 5. Sorry for people, you've come here to listen to me answer questions and I'm just watching the cricket. Uh, right, here we go. Uh, Wes Granger, who's watching on Facebook— not many people I don't think watch on Facebook, most people on YouTube— but Wes is watching on Facebook and he says, hi Lawrence, really struggling finding the queen from my split. Any tips on spotting the queen? Eggs are there, so I know she is there. So I do have a few tips for spotting the queen, and the first one is going to be the most unhelpful tip that I'm ever going to give anyone, which is mark your queens. Mark the queens with a good oil-based pen. And not only mark your queens, but mark them early in the season, like really, really early in the season, because trying to sift through like 22 frames of bees when they're all congested and find an unmarked queen very, very difficult, but trying to sift through like 6 frames when they're quite small is pretty easy. So get in there early, mark the queen, oil-based pen like a Toma pen is the one I use, or the Amazon ones, any oil-based pen is good, or you can use like nail varnish is good as well, as long as you let it dry, or a colored disc. So I know, incredibly unhelpful, sorry Wes. The tips that I do have though, so we— I spend a lot of time looking for queens and you get pretty good at it. But what I found— sorry, I've got an itchy nose— is look, get your, get your frame at like arm's length so you can, you can focus on like the whole frame at once. Don't just look for like a little section. Don't look at like a 50p piece size and try and focus in, uh, because it's, it's really difficult. It's really time-consuming looking at a small part of the frame. And I do, I see a lot of people People like this, like, and this is the frame, my calendar here, and you're looking at it like that. All you're seeing is like one of these small squares, whereas if you look at it— how am I going to do this? If you look at it like that far back and do it back here, like there, like almost at full arm's length, your field of vision is almost like for the whole frame. And that might seem like you're not going to be able to see the queen because your field of vision is so much broader. But what you're looking for is the behavior of the bees across the whole frame. And I do— I think it's a really good tip. And I think the person— I can't remember who it was who gave me that tip, but it pretty much transformed my ability to find queens a lot quicker. Because what you're looking out for is you're looking out for respect. You're looking out for other bees getting out of the way of one queen. Because if you've got 2 worker bees, they kind of like have mutual respect for each other. They're not going to run into each other, but they're almost like going, trying to get past each other. But where the queen is there, she has free rein, and basically everyone just gets out of her way. And it's that, it's that movement that you're looking for. You're looking at this kind of like parting of worker bees and drones to let the queen through. So I think that's a good tip. The other one is you need to like cleanse your mind, and you go into this like hip Hypnotic state of you're looking for a queen, and again I know that sounds like really patronizing. It's not meant in that way, but it's so easy to be like, right, I'm looking for a queen. Oh, look at that lava there! Oh wow, look at the pollen coming on with a nice bit of honey there. Oh, look at that drone! Isn't he cute? You can really get sidetracked, and you need to get yourself in this like zen-like state of I'm looking for the queen and just. You're not looking at anything else. You're not checking for eggs, you're not checking for stores, you're not checking for anything. You're looking for the queen. And it does, it does get easier, but do mark your queens and it is like 100 times easier once you find them. So once they're marked, looking for them. I was, uh, I was speaking to someone the other day about like plastic discs that you put on the back of queens, and they were saying that you can get metal ones, and to put the metal ones on, and then you can use like a metal detector thing. And they're saying they're going to like trial it to see if it works. And I have to say, I thought of this a couple of years ago, and I didn't pitch it to someone, but I said, oh, this feels like a cool idea, this is. You could almost just like scan it over the top and see where the queen is. But then I thought, it's not really going to work, is it, because there's so much metal in the frames anyway. But then it made me think, well, on plastic would work on plastic frames, and it would be— it would be if you had a sensitive enough metal detector. And he showed me, like, he showed me the one which is like— it's like a thin strip. I love the way the camera does that when you take the eyes out. Um, a thin strip metal detector, so it's not like a big disc or anything, and you can kind of just like put it over the frames and strong enough to detect it. But I, you know, would it— would it work, and would it really be That useful when you can just find the queens. I thought it was cool. I did think it was a cool idea. Right, Richard Atkins says, "Hello, Lawrence. I've done two frame splits around three weeks ago. Considering the recent weather, should I leave for another week before inspecting for newly mated queens?" I'm not going to lie there, Richard. I was just thinking the whole time during reading that I hope Namibia get five overs in in order to make it an actual game. So I'm I'm really getting sidetracked by this. So I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna fast track. the rest of the questions and see how quickly I can get them done, but I'll reread your question because I wasn't paying attention. I've done 2 frame splits around 3 weeks ago. Considering the recent weather, should I leave for another week before inspecting for newly mated queens? So there's no need to leave it for another week in, in terms of kind of thinking that they're not remated. You can go in and check, but considering the recent weather, I would say highly unlikely that you're going to have great success with the matings depending on where you are. And it's, uh, so Thomas Carter has just said, Richard, leave for a month but feed. And, and you, you can't— you can do that, like leave for a month and feed. The problem with pushing it so far out like that is that if they don't get mated, you're almost like you're bordering on just shaking them out and letting them go back into the hives and make a fresh splits. because there is like a shelf life to a split. Probably get away with adding a mated queen in at that point, but I'd give it, I'd give it another week, another week at least, maybe another 2. Good evening, Laurence. What is the easiest way to change from a National hive to a Langstroth hive? Thanks in advance. So, um, you can shook swarm. Shook swarms are pretty easy and very effective way of doing it. The other way is you can cable tie the National frames into the Langstroth But where you have the bottom bars on the Langstroth, don't put the bottom bars in. So you'll effectively have a top bar, 2 side bars, and then nothing underneath. And then you can just strap in the National and it fits like perfectly if you don't put the bottom bar in. I saw someone do this the other day, really nice idea on No Nonsense Beekeeping Facebook group, which was you get a plastic, like fully molded plastic Langstroth frame, and then with like a Dremel He'd cut out the shape of a national and then just put that in, and I thought, that is, that's clever, really nice and neat. And you could almost get to the point where— and I did this with the layon's hives where I had them in at an angle— like, once the bees have actually drawn it all out, you could just leave it embedded in there. You've not got to, like, take it out at any point. You see some people talking about, like, chopping out the brood and bungeeing it in But I wouldn't do that when the zip tie works so well from that transfer. The other way of doing it, and probably the neatest way of doing it, is to— you've got a National brood box and you've got a Langstroth brood box, basically just cut a piece of ply so that it's bigger than both the length and the width of both of the boxes, and then just have a hole in the middle, and then you just put the Langstroth box on the bottom, National box on the top, hole in the middle, and just let the bees fill both of the boxes. And then once they fill both of the boxes, to take the queen, put her down in the Langstroth and queen excluder in between the two, and then the National just turns into a honey super. That's, that's the, that's the cleanest way without like cutting or messing around with any frames or anything like that. Um, might have just got caught looking at the cricket score there. Has it started? Has it started again? No, it's not started again. So I'm so, I'm so far behind on the comments that I can't see people's updates. I'm getting their updates I'm still on. I'm still on Butler out two for one, but I know that England got 120 odd, which was pretty good score in 11 overs. Right, Joel Good Goodins. Joel Goodinson says, "Hi, do you have to requeen every year with Buckfast bees? I've heard that they get more aggressive every year." It's good. Some of the things you hear about Buckfast bees, it generally from people who have never kept Buckfast bees say stuff like that. So. No, you don't have to requeen every year. So what, what can happen if you've got like an F1 Buckfast queen is that it swarms and then the next generation F2 take over. And depending on the local drones in the area— nothing to do with Buckfast— depending on the local drones in the area, they might turn grumpy. But that can happen with just local mongrel bees as well. It's all dependent on the local drones in the area which aren't Buckfast drones. I love how Buckfast gets the blame for that, but that's F2, so it— I don't know, I have to be careful what I say. But if you've just got an F1 and they don't swarm, and then the following year you've still got just an F1, then they'll be just as calm as the same time as the previous year. So you don't have to requeen every year, and, and you should get a good 2 or 3 years out of each queen anyway. and depending on where you are, you might get to F2, F3, F4, and they'll be absolutely fine, depending on how nice the drones are in your area and how many other Buckfast beekeepers you've got nearby. So it is— I wouldn't say it's a myth because there is some truth in the fact that further down the line of generations of Buckfast bees— I say Buckfast bees— they can get angry. But, you know, they're kind of at 25%. F2 is 25% Buckfast. F3 is 12.5% Buckfast, so it's not really Buckfast, then it's just local mongrel bees are angry, but Buckfast get the blame. And they're only getting the blame because they go from really nice and calm to angry, and it's like we almost having a go at them because they started off really nice and calm. If we just kept loads of angry bees, no one would, no one would have said anything. But no, you don't have to requeen Buckfast every year. Steve's Honeybees channel member says, I need to move some hives and set up a new apiary. I've seen a good site. What do you think is the best way to approach the farmer? Love this question, done this question before. Wear your bee suit, take a jar of honey, nice printed labels, take some information on there as well. Don't go like completely psycho and like take Google Earth shots with you, but know where you want to be placed. So you say to them, I've found a nice little place on your farm. Go there with a plan, Say to him, I'm gonna— this is what I'm gonna do. This is where I need access. This is how I need to come in here. This is how many times I'm going to come in here. I'm responsible. I'm a proper beekeeper. I know how to look after my bees. I'm not going to be any trouble for you. I'm going to close the gates. I know etiquette. I'm going to give you this much honey each year. The bees are going to give you this much benefit. I'm going to do social media posts for you, and I'm going to promote the fact that you're boosting biodiversity on your farm, even if that is a little bit of greenwashing or bee washing going on there. But go there with a plan, go with— go there with all of that written down, and I've never had a farmer say no, no thanks. They're always like, yeah, whatever, yeah, good there, yeah, it's fine. It's— farmers are pretty chilled out, I would say, uh, but as long, as long as they, you, they need to take you seriously So don't, don't just, don't say like, oh, would you mind me keeping bees on your land? And then they say, they start asking questions and you're a bit like, I don't really know, because they'll sense that in my life. You need to be confident, you need to go in and, uh, have a really, have a really good plan. But I like, I like that. Good luck with it. Uh, Richard slightly disagrees what I said. Yes, inferior queens and emerge, emerge Emerging queens or emergency queens need to be replaced every year for top performance. I disagree with that, Richard. Maybe for very top performers you do get benefits from having younger queens in terms of they're slightly more prolific or they're slightly less likely to swarm. But like, for people I'm selling F1 Buckfast queens to this year, like, their prime year is next year. That's the year that they're going to produce the most honey because they're going into colonies that aren't that, that, that genetics at the moment, so need to have time to like take over that. But the second year I find is like the sweet spot for Buckfast. So good, good 2 or 3 years out of each one, I would say. Hi Lawrence, did your demo 4 weeks ago, substantially less varroa on this hive. Screen bottom board, valid method for varroa control? Um, probably not. No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say so. Because you, if anything, you're kind of increasing, like substantially increasing the amount of brood that's in there. So you're increasing the opportunities for varroa to reproduce. I can see, I can see, I can see what you mean. You're not really— you're kind of changing the location of it a little bit as well. I don't think, I don't think that would work to reduce it. Hmm. Unless I've missed something there, not sure. Jean Jean is asking if Jessica's doing well. I hope Jessica's doing well as well. Where's I guess you're talking about a the honey extraction room, Cap and Co flooring. That's the one. Aiden says I'm thinking about selling honey at my local fate. Do I need a food hygiene certificate? I'm pretty sure if you're selling honey, you do need a local food hygiene certificate, or you at least need to offer yourself. Up to see whether they want to give you one. I hear a lot of people at the moment saying, I want you to come and inspect, and they're like, no, we don't inspect honey producers anymore as long as you're a primary producer, which is interesting. But I would say it's a good thing to have, and if you get a 5-star food hygiene certificate, it's a good selling point for a local fete, and it's not pretty easy to get. quite a lot of work that goes into it, but it's— I think it's a good seal of approval. Good evening, Laurence. What is the best treatment for mites? So the treatment that I use, the one that I find the most effective at the moment, is Apivar or Apitraz, which is like brand name for Amitraz, which is a miticide. Whether that's going to be the case forever, I'm not entirely sure, but I think at the moment it's good. I, I like sublimation of apimioxal as well. If you're in a country that you can use pure oxalic acid, that's even better, I would say. But the combination of those 2, pretty good, I would say. Happy with that. Cricket updates coming in slowly. I am so far behind. Wow. Right, I, I'm done an hour and 53 minutes. I'm gonna do 7 more minutes, but I've got loads of questions left to go, so I'm going to go I'm gonna go quickfire. Right, Mem says, hi Lawrence, I've done 5 splits with queen cells in the same site using one of your queens I bought from you last year. Is the 3-mile rule when doing a split a myth? Uh, no, I don't think so. I think the 3-mile rule definitely applies even when doing a split, like especially when doing a split. I, I've made this mistake when I started off. Take it, take a colony, and I used to do it when they Swarmed, and you'd got big colony full of bees. Twenty twenty swarm cells spread across all the frames, and I just think, ha ha, ka-ching! I'm gonna gonna take those ten frames, and I'm gonna make ten one-frame splits, and I'm gonna do it all in the same apiary, and they've all got queen cells on. So da da da da da, and then come back, and you've just got all of the bees have gone back to the hive, and all of the frames have just been abandoned and I just think, oh, it's annoying. Chilled brood and you just— yeah, so I didn't make that mistake again. But I do, I do find, yeah, the 3-mile rule is, is pretty relevant and, and quite applicable. Uh, Toby Dickinson says, always watching on Facebook as well, says, hi Lawrence, I'm struggling with a hive accepting a queen. They have killed 2 so far. Sorry about that. They are and have been hopelessly queenless for about 4 weeks now. I've been through this hive so many times making sure there was Queen inside, virgin. I've shaken all the bees through excluder 2 times now and there's definitely no queen. I know they have not accepted her as I found her dead outside the hive both times. The colony overall are not overly aggressive. I'm just at my wit's end with them now. So frame of eggs, definitely got to do a frame of eggs to actually test for queenlessness. It's the only foolproof method. So put a frame of eggs in, beg and borrow one from someone if you've not got one, and, and see if they draw out queen cells. I will wager that they will not draw out queen cells, and there'll be a failed virgin knocking around there somewhere, strutting her stuff, thinking she's it. But she is most certainly not it, and that's what will be killing the queens. There's no there's no other explanation. Tyrell's Honey says, "Evening Lawrence. Not sure if it's me, but noticed a higher mating failure this this year, even with grafting. At what point do you add another cell larva? Soul hives turn." drone layers just in under 4 weeks. So definitely it's been really, really bad so far this year. And I've noticed the takes on the cells are lower. I've noticed obviously that the matings are substantially lower. It's just, it's just the weather is absolutely shocking. Uh, we've got like constant cycles of, of grafts going in and constant cycles of emerging cells and virgins. So for us, it's, it's 2 weeks 2 weeks is the cutoff. If they're not laying eggs after 2 weeks, they get killed and get another cell put in, because the quicker you can put another cell in, the longer that kind of unit will last. And then for us, if it fails twice, it gets thrown out and they just fly back in and you create a new nuc with new young nurse bees. You've got to have a system. That's just our system. Baking soda works great in the garden for pests and beetles, But will it repel ants or hurt bees? I have to say I've never I've never heard of that one, Richard, so I can't answer that one. Tyrrell's Honey says hit the like button all let's support the channel. Thank you very much. Ben Wong says I have a queenless hive with two supers. What are your thoughts on combining it with another hive? So like a demeray to try and get a monster honey crop or just add a queen and see how it goes. I think Ben just add a queen. It's the safest bet. There's nothing worse than having like a problem hive and then combining it with a decent hive and creating like a monster problem hive. It can happen. So I just think add a queen in and see, see how they're doing well. I see how they're going on. Good evening, queens are doing well. Big up Black Mountain and Melitta Queens. Thank you very much. Lots— you buy lots of queens, so that's, that's high praise indeed. Thank you. Hi Lawrence, is there a market for queens queens that do not have the F1/F2 category? For instance, could I just sell queens that are proven to be high quality and successful in my own apiary? I see no reason why not, as long as, as long as they are good. Um, a lot, a lot of people sell that, and that's their, their USP, is that they're not F1 or F2 and Buckfast or anything. They're just local bees and local mongrel bees or AMM bees. I, I don't, I don't mean when I say like local bees or mongrel bees, I don't mean it in Oratory way at all. I mean it in that that's that's what it is. They're not pure AMM. They're not Buckfast. They're not Caucasian. They are a mongrel bee with a mixture of genetics. But for some people, that's that's what they like, and they like a mongrel. They like as close to AMM as it can possibly be. What I always say, I've said this to so many people. You know what the biggest gap in the the queen market in the UK is? No one's doing it, and I never know why anyone doesn't do it, because all I ever hear is that AMM queens, local mongrel queens, are the absolute best queens going. But no one's just selling loads of them as like mated queens, make a killing, because surely there's a gap in the market for that. And the only reason I can think of that there isn't anyone doing it is it's very, very, very difficult to do. Even like tried and tested UK queen breeders are struggling with this shocking weather that we're getting at the moment. And, and the demand for queens— the demand for queens is from like April to September, but the real demand for queens from, in terms of numbers, is from bee farmers in April and May. And you can't get AMM queens in April and May because you can't even get them started getting mated until the back end of May. So the only way of doing it is to overwinter them, and then it's not really commercially viable to overwinter them in any way and sell them in the spring. Like, you'll get a few people doing that, but not en masse. When the imported queens— you think, you think where the UK would be this year without imported queens? And some people will be watching this and thinking, yeah, way better, we hate imported queens. But Like, the bee farmers do a really important job of pollination, and that's the main reason why bees are so important in this country. And you look at the bee farmers, they get paid to go and pollinate crops, and without the bees, there wouldn't be a lot of like the soft fruit that you get and the apples and like the orchards and stuff. And without imported queens, you can't get those numbers. You'd really, really struggle to get those numbers up. And I don't believe otherwise. So I just, yeah, someone hit a nerve somewhere and I just went off on one. Sorry about that. Oh no, it's John Pearce. So I do think there's a market, yeah. USP, local AMMBs, and I think you would sell a lot of queens. Lee Allison says, do you have any experience of a forced or induced supersedure, adding a ripe queen cell to a queen-right colony? So I've done that a couple of times. times, just when I've had like spare ones over, and it does appear to work. Like, when I did it, they just— 2 queens lived in tandem, and then I can't even remember what happened because it was so close towards the end of the year, but then the colony got through the year. I should have remarked one of them, should I? Shouldn't I? But it— I see a lot of people doing stuff like that and talking about it, but I kind of think, why Why would you want to induce a superseder? Because the only reason you'd want to induce a superseder is if you knew the queen needed to be superseded. And if the queen needs to be superseded, kill the queen, adding a new— adding— then add a cell in. But it's— it'd be interesting to see, is there like another reason why you'd want to induce or force a superseder, like if there wasn't something wrong with the queen? And maybe, I don't know, like, it is a valid train of thought actually. You might just have a queen that's like 2 years old, and you could say, right, after 2 years of every queen, I'll force a supersedure and let the bees pick. And it might be they're like, no, no, that, that queen's fine. Or the cell that you add in gets mated and the queens say, okay, well, we'll go with a new one because it's a nice younger healthier queen. Or it might be that it fails, the new one fails, seals, and they say, well, we've got, we've got the backup, so it could be quite a safe way to requeen. It is interesting. I don't know anyone who does it religiously like that, but I do know it, it works. I have tried it, it does work. I'll have to do a video. Channel member says, hi, getting one of your nucs on Wednesday. I only have foundation. Would you recommend checkerboarding it when it goes in the hive? So no. So I— it's on my, on my whiteboard up there, it's on my list to send out detailed instructions for So my recommendation is you put your nuc on a stand, let it sit, open the disc, let the bees orientate 24 hours, place it into your hive either on one side or on the middle with the foundation on the outside, get the feeder on, get the bees working the feed, get them bringing it down, get them drawing out the foundation, and then I would, at that point, I would do some very minor checkerboarding. So once they've drawn out like the first frames of foundation on the outer side, I would take the frames of foundation outside of those 2 frames and bring them in just one in between the fresh frame of foundation that's been drawn out and the outside frame of the nuc. Very minor checkerboarding. And then if they respond well to that, I would go like one step further and add a frame in between 2 frames of brood. Don't go over the top with it. Checkerboarding works really well once the colony gets up A little bit of a head of steam, but don't do it too early or you can set them right back. Right, cricket update. Why are they yet to bat? Am I— this is not auto-updating for me on here. Oh wow, they're on 40 for nothing after 10 overs. Right, so England have— we have a match. England can't be rained out of the World Cup. Oh yes, brilliant. Okay, that's really good news. So now it is well and truly over to Australia lose deliberately to let Scotland through. Do you know what, if we'd have gone out to the rain, at least we could have said, oh yes, the weather, what a farce. But now that we've not gone out to the rain, it would just have to get eliminated because we're rubbish. It's like, what's the lesser of the two evils there? Well, anyway, I've not got any excuse to finish the stream now, so I might as well answer some more questions. I have a dead-out colony that died over winter. I want to clean the the hive, what boiler do you recommend? So I wouldn't, I wouldn't use a boiler. I would, if it was me, I'd just burn the frames. Burn the frames, just, it's cheaper. Stick them in the log burner, burn them, or dig a pit, burn the frames, bury them. And then if it's a wooden hive, scrape it down with a hive tool. Obviously all of the gunk that comes off on it, stick it in a bag, biosecure, get that in the bin, and then scorch it with a burner Every single surface. Get it so it's— you basically want to get it so it's turning black, and then like one stage back from turning black. So not burnt, but gently charred, I think is a good description of it. And if it is poly, then you want to dip it. I'm doing some dipping at the moment in sodium hypochlorite at the right, uh, dilution rate. You want to dip it first. Get your poly box if you've got poly, scrape it all down with a hive tool, get rid of all of the gunk. Dip it in, uh, cost— not caustic soda, just soda crystals. You can use caustic soda, but I don't recommend caustic soda. Just standard washing soda crystals overnight or for a couple of days, and that gets all the gunk off. And you can scrape it again if you want, and then dip it in sodium hypochlorite, which is like a bleach solution at the correct dilution rate, which is on the NBU website, and it's as good as new. So that's what I would recommend doing. Blue Lab said, how's your season going? All the big boys seem to be saying the season is all but over. Can't believe this season is so bad. So for honey, absolutely shocking, really, really bad. Uh, for, for nucs, going pretty well. Uh, but for, for queen rearing, is definitely below average. I— we had, we had a good first round of UK-mated queens, and I've still got enough to do probably another couple of weeks, but I do for like into July unless the weather gets better. I'm gonna have to start scrubbing dates off because we'll, we'll run out of queens before then, but I think the weather will get better. I do think it will. There might be a blip, but I think it will get better. But it is the worst season I've known by far. Hello from Colorado. Hello. Blowtorch Man, very good. Not boasting, but I'm in Middlesex and a load of my hives have lots of honey. I have four supers on one, two with two supers capped. Go Ben! Awesome. Jamie Miller says, "I Lawrence." I'm guessing you've corrected that further down. Let's have some tea. Blue Lab says, "My bees are full on beans and I have nearly thirty supers of bean honey. I never had a drip of spring honey, but the bean crop is turning things around. I have ten colonies on two hundred acres of field beans." Nice. Good to hear. I do. I do genuinely. Um, I like to hear other people having success. It makes me feel better about like the UK climate as a whole. Uh, Andrew McCain says, yep, it's raining in Antigua. Oh no, has it started to rain again? Oh well, the match is in now. I'm just going to quickly look back. It must be finished by now. Oh, we've got a wicket as well. Very, very odd evening. I waited for that. I was watching it from like 6 o'clock, that cricket, and then it basically started just as I started the live stream. How annoying is that? Uh, Hear, hear for the Richard live! We'll definitely do that. Uh, Hi Lawrence, with the weather the way it is, would you stop making splits at the moment? Difficult, that one, because it's— do you, do you make use of the time where it is now with it? Like, making splits is easy because you just make up small splits and you can feed them, you can get them going and you can build them up. And as long as there's a bit of pollen coming in, you can supplement it. Uh, you can supplement the kind of the carbohydrate, the sugar element, by feeding, so you can build up colonies. And if you'd have started doing that like 4 or 5 weeks ago, you'd have twice as many colonies at the same strength that you did 4 or 5 weeks ago now, in anticipation of some good weather coming in. But it's, it's almost like, it's like doubling down in blackjack, and it's— if it goes wrong, you lose twice as much. But if it goes good, you win twice as much. So it's, it's kind of like your appetite for risk. But I, I wouldn't stop making splits at the moment. I would, I would continue to make splits because making splits later on in the year is very difficult, especially making small splits later on in the year becomes a real challenge when the, when the wasps and the hornets start taking over and the robbing gets out of hand. I've been wrong before, but a jar of honey in hand is better than 2 in the box. Very true. Channel member. Hi, Fran. He says, hi Lawrence, could I put a crown board on top of my queen excluder with fondant on, then put my super on top? So you could, you could do that. Um, when you say your super on top, you just mean like an empty super? If you mean an empty super, then yeah, that works fine. Could definitely do that. You're just effectively turning your super into an eke. It's just like an additional box to put stuff in. So that would work well. I've got 100 kilograms from 11 hives on the oilseed rape in Cumbria. It was nice, wasn't it? There was like, there was a decent bit of weather around back end— was it back end of April, early May? There was a week of it, a nice week. And this is the interesting thing I think with bees, is that some people think you need 8 weeks of sun to get a good crop. You don't. You just need big strong colonies of bees to be there for the flow. And like the flow might be a week and you could get 3 supers in a week. That's not unheard of. I've had that numerous times. I'd say that's more, more what happens is they just go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like 3 supers full in a week, and then it's just like you get like a trickle. Definitely get that with the heather. I find the first 2 weeks of the heather on the good years, they go crazy and they produce so much honey, and then you just get this like prolonged 4 or 5 week trickle flow. which is like half a super a week, but half a super every week. And sometimes you get one, or sometimes you get the other, and sometimes you get both. Nice when you get both. But you don't need like prolonged weather for that long to get a decent honey crop. In relation to varroa treatment, it's advised to alternate each year because different types to prevent resistance. How many rotations do you advise before going back to the start? I've— I, I understand the logic and the science behind that, but I've never really experienced it myself. I've tried every single different varroa treatment on the market, literally every one, because I went through a process of just doing, doing every single video that I could possibly do. So I, I've tried ApiLife VAR, which is just like— sorry, just like herbal stuff, isn't it? Different oils. I've tried ThymoVAR, I've tried ApiGuard, I've tried all of the different thymol-based products. I've tried Apitraz, I've tried Apivar, which are Amitraz-based miticides. I've tried oxalic acid as a drizzle. I've tried apibioxal as a supplement. So I've tried them all, but for the last like 5 years I've just used Apivar. So like Amitraz, which is the chemical that they could build resistance to, but in my experience they haven't built like total resistance to like for me, it's as close to a silver bullet as you're likely to get in terms of like a medical treatment. And that's not to say that it will be forever, and you could argue like extensive use of something like that is bad for the greater good, but I've not found any resistance at all to that. But then when I did alternate using that advice there, I found like my bees really suffered. And the year that I used Apiguard, Like the following year and the following winter, I had terrible winter losses, and I just put it down to it wasn't an effective treatment, and I used it too late in the year maybe as well, incorrect use. But like thymol-based treatments, you need really good accurate temperatures for that, and it needs to be warm for it to kind of like sublimate correctly and, and actually be moved around the hive. I think it's upwards of 20, like 20 to 25°C for it to work well, which at the back end of the winter, of the beekeeping season, is— it's not going to work and didn't work. So I do think that there's only a few treatments on the market that actually do work well. If it was a case that you had like 5 or 6 different versions of Apivar, not like different versions of Amitraz, but different versions of an effective mite treatment, So one that was some sort of oils and one that was a chemical and one that was like oxalic acid, which is like a physical way, so it's like burns the mite's feet, then you could argue that it would be good to alternate. But I also think something like oxalic acid, there's no way that the mites can build resistance in any short time frame. It's not like they're going to evolve to be able to cope with their feet being dissolved. That's— that would take a pretty significant evolutionary leap to create non-dissolvable mite feet. I know it's like tongue-in-cheek a little bit, but it is true. There's no— I don't think mites can evolve to stop their feet being burnt off. So it's not— you can use it every year safe in the knowledge that it will kill all of the phoretic mites and it won't kill any of the mites that are capped under brood. So I understand the science and I understand the logic, and I think in principle it's a good idea, but I think in practice what I've done shows, like, at least for me, that it's not really something that you do actually need to do. Find the treatment that works and stick with it, which I'm not sure is good advice. I know, even listening to myself say it doesn't sound like good advice. Go with the different treatments, and hopefully all the different treatments work for you. But what I do is, is working for me at the moment. Hi Lawrence, I had EFB last year. When you had EFB, did it come back? Other than cleaning, what would you recommend to remain EFB-free? So sorry that you had EFB. EFB is horrible. Uh, so no, it never came back for us, and we've had 3 years now where we've not had like so much as a single cell of, of EFB. Like, I'm confident that we've completely eliminated it, but I went, I went way over the top with like what I did when, when we had a colony that had EFB. Like, I killed— we, we had one colony at one apiary that had EFB, so I found EFB at this colony, called in the bee inspector, they confirmed it. I killed the entire apiary. I killed 8 colonies on that site and only one of them positive for EFB. And what the bee inspector— what the law said I had to do was that I had to shook swarm the colony that had EFB, and the rest of them I didn't have to do anything with. But what I chose to do was kill them all, every single one. And then another apiary, a similar thing, which was there was one colony that was a very, very mild case of EFB It's a really thin line on the lateral flow. So in that apiary, I didn't kill all of the colonies, but I killed 20 colonies in that apiary because there was one colony that tested positive, and then the inspector said they're gonna— they're gonna go through and they're gonna tell me all the ones that they've— they didn't like the look of, and they're gonna put a tick or a cross on. So there was one that had a tick, and then they had all of the ones that they didn't like the look of, they had a cross off. I killed them all. And they said, that's— that is a little bit over the top. But I said, you get one chance. I, I feel you get one chance for something like this to take it seriously. And I still feel sick every time. I feel like nervous talking about it. I feel sick every single time I smell bleach because the thought of the amount of bees that I killed that I potentially didn't have to kill. But dumping nucs full of petrol-killed bees on the fire and watching it all burn up in smoke, like thousands of pounds of equipment and thousands of pounds worth of bees. But I knew in the back of my mind that I've got to take it seriously, and you've got to do that cleanse to make sure that everything else that you do after that, you're going giving yourself the absolute best chance to remain free of EFB. Because I thought, what's the other option here? That I just— I killed the 2 colonies that have got EFB, and they weren't, they weren't bad cases of EFB. They were very like— what, one was a bit worse than the other, but one was incredibly mild. And both colonies could have recovered with a shook swarm, a shook swarm and not feeding them, and they would have, in my view, probably both recovered, and that would have eliminated it from those colonies. colonies. But in my mind, there was no possible way that they were the only colonies that had EFB. Like, EFB can sit there asymptomatic. So all of those ones that they said not the best brood pattern but is testing negative, I took that as like, that's got EFB. And it's definitely paid dividends. So what we did, so we killed all of those colonies, and then every single, every single other colony that I had got shook swarmed either that year or the following season, every single one. So there wasn't a single colony that didn't get shook swarmed, and every single box, every single brood box that I owned that I had in storage, all of the frames got burnt. Didn't recover any wax, didn't recover anything, they just went on the fire, and every single box got either put like scraped and put through like a treatment or dipped. And, and, and this— and the supers were quarantined per site, so I was able to, to do different things with the supers. So the supers that were on sites that didn't have EFB just remained on the sites that didn't have EFB, and the supers on the sites that, that did have EFB all got burnt in the same fashion. So it was, it was quite a high-level cleanse, and that was 3 years ago, and we've not had— we've not had a single bad-looking cell since. And obviously the MBU will look at that after and they'll say, right, we, we're going around Lawrence's bees and we're having a look. And they came in and did— they did— they've done 3 since, since the shook swarms. They've done 3 full inspections of every single colony, so every single frame, every single colony that I've had. And they said, we didn't— like, you've, you've not got EFB. They didn't, they didn't do a single lateral flow test on a single colony on a single cell that they weren't happy with. And for anybody that knows the NBU, they, they do like— maybe not this year, they're not using the lateral flows anymore. I think they, I think they might have got sued by someone. I, I don't know that, but I think they might have done. Um, but they, they like to use the lateral flow test even when there's a cell you're like, that's not EFB. And they're like, oh, we'll just test it. But they didn't use a single— they didn't use a single test on any of it. And, and that's the key. So when you get it, which I'm sorry to hear that you did have it, Jamie, you've got to take it seriously and you've got to go pretty serious at the beginning, um, kill the colony, shook swarm everything. But then look at all of those methods of transmission. Look at how clean your car is, look at the back of the car, how often do you clean and disinfect inside your car, inside the boot? How do you transfer your supers? How do you clean your hive tool between inspections, between between sites? Do you take the same smoker between sites? Do you keep the same hive tools? Do you transmit it on your wellies? Like when we went and did our DASH training, which was like the year or 18 months after maybe, they gave you loads of really good useful advice on how to kind of retrofit hygiene management into your system. And what works for one bee farmer is not going to work for another bee farmer, so you need to find something that's that's suitable for you? And do you treat kind of each hive, like try to keep each hive separate from one another in terms of disease transmission, or do you say, right, I'm going to treat the whole apiary as a single site and I'm going to ensure that if there's disease on one site I don't take it to the other site, and if there is disease on one site I'll treat everything on that site the same, so if there's one colony I'll swarm everything. And that's the route that I've gone down now, which is I'm not so much worried about transmitting disease. If I had EFB in one hive on one site, I'm not so much worried about transmitting it to different colonies on that site. I obviously do my best to not do that by keeping hive tools clean and gloves as clean as possible, but I, I even don't, I even don't really do that as much as I probably should. But if I did find it on one of those sites, I would shook swarm the entire site and I would quarantine that entire site, and that's the decision that I've made. I think for bee farmers, that's probably the way that's going to be the easiest way of doing it. I had someone ring me up earlier on this week to cancel an order for a couple of queens, and they said that they've got 50 colonies and they've been diagnosed with AFB, and they said they've got loads of AFB, and it's the worst thing in the world. EFB and AFB, finding out that like your bees have got disease and you've got to kill them with petrol and then burn everything. Like, it's, it's pretty heartbreaking. Your hard work's gone into it. But, but worse than that, like, you have to kill the bees, you have to kill your, your pets. I know they're not your pets, but it's hard. Anyway, I feel for you, Jamie. I hope, I hope that was helpful. I've gone into quite a lot of detail there, but it's a serious subject and I hope you take it seriously. says hello. Hello to you too. Hello from Central, uh, WA. Where's WA? Someone will correct me. Sorry, my geography's shocking. Uh, Rufus says thanks, Lawrence. Uh, Jean says, Lawrence, when do you place— when you, when you place supers on, do you stop feeding 1:1? So yeah, and I'll probably give it a few days in between. I, I like to stop feeding when the brood box is 80% full. And then I queen excluder on and then give it a few days and then put the super on. That would be what I would do. Evening, Ian. Lawrence, quick one. Is it normal or just my bees? They stay in the bottom boxes all day foraging but only got to the super around 3 in the afternoon. Probably just lazy. Um, I think that's maybe just due to like density in the hive. I don't know, I know really I've never really thought about that one. Uh, Hi Lawrence, did you ever find the green queen you lost in your members video? I through every single colony today. The video will be out tomorrow, and I won't spoil it for you, but I have checked. If the bees have stored syrup in the brood box, what stops them moving that up to a super when you add one, or do they have to have eaten it all before you can add a super? So yeah, nothing stops them moving it up, and they will just move it up when you add a super. The only— if you're adding a super foundation, you've got to think they've got to draw the foundation out first, so they'll use a lot of that stores drawing out the foundation. But if not, you need to delay it somehow or take those stores out, otherwise they will just move it up. Hey everyone. I'm looking for a honey extractor. How many supers would you have before getting an electric extractor? I'm not a fan of manual extractors. I would, I would just go all in on an electric one, but I've never, I've never really kind of looked at it like that in terms of like how many supers versus how the method of an extractor. But maybe, you know, if you've got like 10 supers, you could probably do it manually. The, the one that not, not a lot of people look at this as a method, it's a way cheaper method and a much easier method, but it is like a hydro press. Hydro press is brilliant. I love my hydro press, and they're so much cheaper than honey extractors. And the only— some people look at this as like a disbenefit, a disadvantage, in that you will lose honey by doing this. But the method that I use, that I will use this year if we get any heather honey, which again is looking pretty unlikely— plastic frames or plastic foundation, and then you, you get the honey stored on the plastic foundation, and you get like a plastic scraper, scrape the honey off the frames into the hydropress, and then you extract it out. And it's brilliant. It's just ready for jarring straight away, super quick, really efficient, very, very easy. And you can do it anywhere. You don't even need electricity. All you need is a hose with like water pressure, so like 3 bar of water pressure. That's it, you're good to go. And then you just— every year you just put the plastic frames back on, and they've already got like a bit of wax on them, and the bees just draw them back out. So they have to draw it out each time, but they're like pre-waxed. So it's not— you don't lose that much honey versus having drawn comb. You will lose a bit, but not a huge amount. But it's dead easy, and extraction is so quick, like the quickest extraction in the world. It's really good. I'll have to do— I'll have to do a video on that one as well. So what size honey extractor? Always go for the biggest one you can possibly get in your room, minimum 12-frame, I would say. But if you can get 20-frame, Go 20 frames. Uh, says any extractor should be electric, he's lazy. I'm with you there. Uh, Richard says, see that recent video with the queen emerging with a mite on her back? She looked like she was having a bad hair day. I don't remember that video. Uh, says, uh, my first proper year of beekeeping and so stressed. Bees swarmed possibly more than once and I caught a tiny little swarm, set it up in another hive and currently feeding them. The other one has no It is a stressful, stressful year. It is a difficult year. Kodiak Farm Bees Lee says, "Good evening, everyone." Good evening, Lee. Jean says, "Laurence, thank you so much for." There we go. Thank you so very much for answering all of the questions. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Aiden says, "If I want to replace my dark peas with Buckfast, they reject. They rejected the Buckfast last time. What would be the would the best way be to take a frame of brood from my F1 Buckfast hive and then rear?" a queen from that frame and then introduce an F1 Buckfast a couple of, uh, after a couple of rounds of brood. I've still got a tea bag in that and it nearly fell in my mouth. It was pretty grim. That would be a good way to do it. That would be a good way to do it. The way that I would recommend doing it though, and you can see I'm getting a bit tired now, is, is just go in every 3 or 4 days. As long as they're hopelessly queenless, they will accept her. They'll probably try and supersede her though, but going in every 3 or 4 days just so you can take down the cells before they cap them over is a good way of doing it. The other way of doing it is with the, like, Abello queen excluder cages— not the Abello queen introduction cages, the queen excluder cages— and take a— when you do the introduction, take a frame of capped brood and put it in there and manually introduce the queen So basically normal queen introduction, but once the queen is out on the frames, pick her up with a frame of capped brood from your Buckfast colony and put that into the queen excluder cage. The queen excluder cage is the one that no bees can get through, so basically in that cage is going to be a frame of emerging brood and your queen, and then they can just live in harmony for a while, and then hopefully after a few, like after 10 days or so, you should be good to let them all out. But that's a good way of doing it. Hey bud, queens arrived safe and sound. Looking forward to seeing how the Caucasian performs. How do you cycle out old brood frames? Best technique? So you can use Bailey comb exchange, but for me it's just, it's just too tedious. Bailey comb exchange, I like a shook swarm. That's, that's the only way that I do it now, shook swarm. Or, or you just constantly turn up to your sites with just fresh frames, and every single time you just take out the worst one. That's a good way of doing it. But is what I don't like about that is you're constantly taking away like good stuff, and then you've got to deal with the recycling every single time, as opposed to just saying like one big hit, everything gets burnt, and you get all of the benefits of doing that. Bailey comb exchange, for me, you don't get the 2 big benefits of a shook swarm. One, that you, you'll get like asymptomatic EFB if you've got it. You will get a break from that. with a shook swarm. If you shook swarm them, don't feed them for 2 or 3 days and then feed. Like, there's basically nothing's transferred over and they can cleanse their stomach so the bacteria can't get transferred over. Huge benefit. And then the second huge benefit is that you're forcing a brood break, so you're getting like a natural brood break in there, which reduces the varroa load. Whereas a Bailey comb exchange, you don't get any of that benefit and it takes a lot longer. So like So shook swarm for me is clear winner. That was a cool video by Jose. It was a cool video. I'm jealous of his cool videos. Please date your frames and try to rotate out before 4 years due to toxins. Good advice. Hi Lawrence, if I've double brooded on commercial brood but all the bees are doing the filling in the second frame with honey no matter if I put it above or below the original, what else could I do? the colony is just not prolific enough for double commercial brood. If that's the case, I would say just get the queen excluder in between them and turn one of them into a, um, a super. Very generous £5 tip. He says, my partner went into her colony last week and found capped brood in her super. Is this possible she has 2 queens? So yes, it's possible. Probably like a bent wire or something, or a gap somewhere, and the queen's just nipped up and gone up there. Definitely possible. 2 queens is possible as well. I've had colonies that have had 2 queens, supersedure queens, living side by side for a long, long time, so it is possible. Hi Lawrence, what's your opinion on leaving varroa inspection boards, pest inspection trays in your open mesh floor hive all year round? Nothing wrong with it. I know a lot of bee farmers that just use solid floors the whole time, so there's nothing wrong with leaving the mesh floors in. Click the like button, it doesn't cost anything. Very, very true, David. Um, I've done 2 and a half hours of non-stop talking and I've still got loads of comments left, but I really don't like leaving it without, um, answering everyone's questions. So I will, I will carry on, but I, um, I'm going to start answering them even more quickly than I have been for the last half an hour. Uh, Nix B says, also made my split and looking forward to the F1 delivery next Friday. Queens are selling very, very quickly. Very good. The UK Honey Marketing Board says any sign of the dearth ending? Oh, rubbish, isn't it? Seasonal adjustment syndrome, that's the one. It was definitely sad, wasn't it? Another quick question, do I need public liability insurance if I put bees on someone's land? I have some on farmer's land and they said they have liability. Does my other location need insurance? So Public liability insurance is like the cheapest insurance in the world to get. If you're in the UK, just sign up to the BBKA, and I think you get signed up. I think if you've got under 40 colonies and you're a member of the BBKA, you get up to 10 million on the public liability insurance, which is public liability insurance has always got a silly number like that on it. But it's 28 quid a year, and then you're covered. So for 28 quid a year, I wouldn't risk it, and I wouldn't even I wouldn't even answer the question to say no, you don't need it because then you. Sue me. So yeah, I reckon you do need it and get it through the BBKA. Oh, there you go. John always knows seasonal affective disorder. That's the one. Sad. And Aiden got it as well. Good stuff. And figs and beeswax. Everyone knew that. I definitely didn't know the acronym. I'm sweet. Spoke about that hours ago. I'm so far behind. David has got one full cap super and one full super but not capped. Very good. Anyone else's stream keep freezing? I hope that's not me. Jim says dearth appears to have ended in Canterbury. Hybrid Demeray has three full supers and two full brood boxes. Nice, that's the winner so far. Another one saying the stream's freezing. Hopefully not, and I'm only just getting round to it. Rusty Shackelford says looking forward to my Black Mountain Honey Nook delivery on Wednesday. Will I be able to make a split from it this season? Do you think? So if you sack sacrifice all honey and feed them up nice and the weather plays ball, then yes, you could split that into 2, definitely. Uh, Jim says others in April all have at least one full super, most with 2. Nice, way better than us. Uh, the UK Honey Marketing Board said micro radio frequency ID tag would do it. Nice, I like that idea. I'm guessing that's for queen identification. David says Happy Father's Day for tomorrow. Brilliant, thanks very much, David. Looking forward to Good-looking drone. Robert Orr says, Lawrence, your genuine approach, your fascinating channel, and your informative videos are inspirational and a huge part of giving me the confidence to keep bees. Thank you, and please continue. Oh, that's very nice. Thanks very much, Robert. Um, the UK Honey Marketing Board says, get ChatGPT to write you a letter, then drop it at the farmer's door with a jar of honey. Really nice idea. Um, also says you're fine if you're selling direct to the public. You can't sell through third parties without hygiene rating. I'm glad the UK Honey Marketing Board is here to answer these technical questions. I've got that slightly wrong, so thank you for clearing that up. But check with your local council. Good shout. Honey Company says, I do splits in the same apiary. You need to keep bees split locked in their hive for 24 hours. By this time they lose the queen pheromone and reorientate. So I've, I've done that. I've blocked them in 24 hours, do it overnight, sticks in the entrance, grass in the entrance, and you do keep some in And I think if you've got a decent amount of young nurse bees on capped brood, or brood in all stages even, any kind of brood, they'll stick around with the brood, but you definitely get the older bees going back. So it's— I find it hard to balance like multiple splits from a single colony in the same apiary, whereas if you take it to a new apiary, basically every single bee that you put in there will stay in that box. You do whatever works for you, I just find it much easier to go to a new apiary But I appreciate not everyone has new apiaries to go to. Lorna Marnie says, I also— or Mahoney, depending on how you say it— I also did a split in the same hive with 2 queen cells in each hive. All came good today. Found sealed brood and larvae in each hive. Spotted one queen but not the other, but hey, capped brood is a good sign. Definitely very happy when you see capped worker brood in your queen colonies. Uh, Mark Sutherland, Leeds United fan, says, hi Lawrence, I've been thinking of becoming a beekeeper I watched hours of videos, but none really mentioned how much money you— oh, sorry, how much honey you leave for bees to overwinter with. Does it just depend on size? So it depends on how you're willing to keep your bees. We leave them with no honey, zero honey, take all their honey off, but we do it early on in the year and then give them loads of feed and then let them build their honey back up. And I find that's— that the bees kind of regulate, regulate it a little bit better. I see other people that leave loads of supers of honey on And don't take any honey off, and it's not to say that's not the right thing to do, but I prefer to take the honey off. And I find, strangely, I find the bees overwinter better with like sugar syrup, invert sugar syrup, than they do sometimes with their own honey. And I also don't like leaving the supers on because it means you have to take the queen excluder out, and then it means the brood goes up into the supers, and it makes the supers really, really difficult to manage. Oh, my throat's going, it really is going. But each to their own. David says, "Thanks for your time, Lawrence. Go relax and watch the cricket." I've missed that now, but I'm definitely gonna watch the highlights. Do you know what? I might I might finish in time for the Australia Scotland game, which starts at half one in the morning. Paul Williams says, "Do swallows take a lot of bees? I see them fly above my hive." So yeah, a few birds will will go for the bees, but I don't I don't think they're that much of a menace. It's it's funny because in In Malta, I obviously speak to like the owner of Melita Bees a lot. We chat on WhatsApp, and they have a bird out there called the bee eater. And I thought he was winding me up. I thought it was like an April Fools', but he said no. They're like, we had to turn off the special genetics on the website. So like the Caucasians and all these ones for a good few weeks because of the bee eaters. And he sent me videos, and these massive flocks of these birds come in. And they basically just sit outside the hives just taking out, taking out all these bees, like tons and tons of bees. And then they poo, and the poos are just like husks of all of the indigestible parts of the bees. And he said normally they come in, he said they're like ridiculously protected so you can't kill them. I'm not suggesting or condoning killing them anyway, but you can't kill them. And he said normally it's like 10 to 15 days they come in Blitz the bees, and then they move off through Europe. And this month they were there for 30 days, and he said it was just carnage, absolute carnage. And the reason they had to turn the orders off is they just want any drones. And then they'd go in and try and do their inspections, got to inspect the bees, make sure they don't swarm, and the bees would just be sitting there waiting. And as soon as they opened up the hives, just flying all around. And he sent me some videos. I didn't, I didn't post them on there because I don't know why I didn't post them. Maybe I think the quality of the videos wasn't the best, but it was amazing the amount of birds that were taking these bees. Uh, Robert Orr says, a highly experienced honey farmer friend of mine does a version of a Demeray split by letting the upper brood box create a new queen so that 2 colonies are working on the same supers. Views. So yeah, you can do that. It's, it's, it's kind of like a regular version of the Demeray. You put an additional entrance up there and then you let the virgins go out. The only— I, I started doing it like that. But I found if you left the emergency cells up there, you can sometimes trigger swarming. And then I didn't— I like doing Demeray splits to stop swarming. So I found it worked by not trying to kind of gamble on a double queen split like that. But it does work. The Abello boxes are particularly good for that because they've got the entrance in it. Um, you follow up by saying he puts queen excluders between both brood boxes and about 4 supers in the sandwich and turns the top hive entrance 90 20 degrees. So that, that was the original reason for me putting the queen excluder above the top box, but you do get the issue of, um, drones getting stuck in it unless you put that top entrance in. But it does, it does work. Maybe, maybe I'll have a go at doing another video on that. Evening, buddy. Evening, Carl. Hello, how's the bee season in the UK so far? Categorically the worst bee season I've ever been a part of over the last 12 years. Shocking. Aidan says, thank you for answering my questions. I'll burn the frames and I'll put the brood frames on my list, on my list for my next purchase. Good shout. What's the main nectar source for your honey? So for us in North Wales, it's bramble and clover, pretty even bramble and clover where we are. But what's unique about us in North Wales is when we do that, we do the honey sampling. Like, a lot of people send off a honey sampling now. The last one that we had sampled sample had 71 different pollens in. And you will get a bit like this, like pollen coefficients and pollen contamination and stuff like that. So you get some pollens that come up that aren't like nectar-yielding, um, plants. But 71. So in North Wales, we don't, we don't get massive honey crops, we get very diverse honey crops. But it was bramble and clover, white clover for us, that were the biggest ones though. UK Honey Marketing Board say brood breaks make a big difference to varroa counts. Very true. Alex says, who designed your logo? Just seeing if I've got another one here. Uh, no, I've not. Um, it was the people— oh, that's how tired I am, is there, there's the logo. Okay, cool. It was the company that did my website rebrand. They said, we can't, we can't be using your old logo, we need to, we need to redesign it. And I have to say, I didn't like it, and I, I I didn't not like it at first, but I wasn't like sold on it, but it really is growing on me. I do, I do like my logo now. It's quite cool. The thing with insects and mites is that they breed so fast they become immune to treatment, like head lice and fleas in humans and pets. So I do, I do think it's true that the breeding— maybe I didn't think of that, that they breed so fast that it's kind of very iterative, isn't it? As opposed to like a human, it, you know, it takes 30 years for one generation, whereas a mite could be— I wonder how many times they could reproduce in 30 years. Probably hundreds of times. So you're right, it would be much quicker. But even, even in 30 generations of humans, I don't think we could evolve non-dissolvable feet. That's just— yeah, mechanical treatments like that are very, very difficult to build a resistance to. to. I must be near the bottom now, right? Made some splits today. I've been feeding bees for the last few weeks. Hopefully next week will improve. I'm with you on that one. I've got— I have 3 of my colonies insured as I'm with my local beekeeping association. How would I get my other 3 colonies insured? So my understanding is if you're insured with the BBKA, all of your colonies are insured up to a maximum of 40, in my understanding. I would double-check with them. Um, Ben Wong says, very sad to hear about your EFB issue again. Didn't realize you then shook swarmed everything over a season. How did you make so many frames, or did you buy them in ready-made and assembled? Bought them in ready-made and assembled. It's too much work to do it any other way around. And, and luckily I had enough kit to kind of like preemptively clean all of the kit and just burn all of the frames in it, and then just dip and clean and scorch and have all of the kit there ready to do the shook swarms. It was a mammoth operation to do it, but well worth it. Don't buy secondhand kit. 100%, do not buy secondhand kit. I see some shocking things being sold on Facebook. Like, I, I hold my hands up, I used to sell swarm traps with old black manky frames because they're pretty good for catching swarms, and it was highly irresponsible. But I see stuff like that for sale. That's really, really irresponsible. And like I say, I did it, so I can't pot and kettle a little bit. But I, I saw that, that what I was doing was wrong and stopped doing it quite quickly. Um, but some of the stuff I see in terms of like drawn-out frames being sold and old manky colonies and manky boxes being sold for cheap is not good. Uh, Jelly Fox says, hi Lawrence, have you finished selling nucs this year? So unfortunately yes, cutoff was on Wednesday and we are A bit oversubscribed, so yeah, we are we are done for the year. Vegan activist says 22 hives and still no honey. I know it's been a bad year for everyone, but not even a single frame of a super out of 22 hives. Yeah, that's that's pretty much where I am. So sorry about that. Aiden says last year I had two experienced beekeepers check my colonies, and I haven't seen any diseases this year. I'm on the National Bee Unit. Should I ask the NBU inspector? To come in and check my colonies? You can ask them, but I don't think they would come and check unless there was like a risk-based reason for them to come and check, like disease close to you, because there's loads of disease around and they're out looking at the colonies and looking at the sites where there is a huge amount of disease already there. Pat the 14th channel member says, hi Lawrence, for Wales, what date is important for queens to lay eggs up until to get some honey? Are the bees laid up until the end of June too late to make an effect on the crop? It's a difficult one because like late season crop for us is mainly based on heather, but I think I never really see it as like looking at dates like that. I just get the flavor of how big and strong the colony is and how many bees are in it, because the bees will last for a good few weeks to be able to make up the honey. But I just think like at the moment I see people saying, well, you know, if if, if the weather's nice over the next couple of weeks, then we'll get a decent honey crop. If the next 2 weeks up here were like 26 degrees and no wind, we wouldn't get any honey still because the bees are just not in the condition to do it. They need a good 3 weeks to get a good through— a good brood cycle through, and then hopefully after that they might be okay. But it's just shocking weather. Evening, buddy, just joined. Uh, is it SCBKA? Can't wait to get— oh, you've just joined South Clwyd Beekeepers Association? Probably not, but I can't wait to get some ladies. Uh, Jean says good night, Lawrence, thank you for your time. Thank you, Jean. WA, Washington State, I should probably remember that one. Uh, Jelly Fox says we have bee-eaters here in England. Interesting, I didn't know we had— like, they're a kind of migratory bird, but I'm guessing they're not in England for very long, but they are cool. They were cool-looking birds. David says you really need to go on TV to raise awareness of the importance of beekeeping. Would love to do that, David. David wants one of the caps as well. I do know one of my favorite caps I've been wearing at the moment is this cap here. Give him a shout out, Cowan. There we go, look, you have a right up close-up shout out. It's a cool cap, that. Ah, it's out of focus now. There we go. Cowen Manufacturing. There we go. I'll wear that cap to the end. How cool is that? I got that as a freebie at the B-Expo. I thought that was a really cool cap. They gave me loads of free gear. I won't wear it because I— it kind of hurts my head a bit, but that's probably more because I've been talking for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Robert Orr says, excellent evening, Lawrence. Thank you so much for getting through all the questions. My pleasure. David says, Lawrence, you're a star for answering everyone's questions. Others only answer super chats. No, no, no. We will answer every single question, although yours was yours was like a super chat as well because you you gave me a tip. So thank you, David. Much appreciated. South Cheshire, we've come to the bottom. We've come to the end. I've answered everyone's questions. So before anybody else answers any more questions, I'm going to watch the highlights of the cricket, and I'm probably going to stay up and watch the England versus no the Scotland versus Australia match as well. For anybody who hadn't noticed, I deliberately avoided England in the Euros on Sunday, and I also deliberately avoided Scotland versus Germany last night, and I will continue to do that. So I'll move it around. Live streams will be every other week, um, either on a Friday, a Saturday, or a Sunday, but I won't do it when England are playing or Scotland are playing. Unfortunately, Wales are not in the Euros this year, so I can do it whenever Wales aren't playing. Um, Aiden says hit the like button. Joshua says good night. Ian says hi, you can get insurance up to 39 hives. There is a scale of cost that rises slowly the more hives you have. Talk to your club membership admin to increase the number of hives you cover. Thank you very much for clearing that one up. If you're not already a channel member and you want to get access to some of those super long, uh, exclusive content videos, go to the home page, hit the join button. There is a video on there that is 2 and a half hours long with me doing loads of inspections. It is a pretty cool video, but I am going to bed. I hope you enjoyed all of that. I'll see you all in 2 weeks' time. Good night.