Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 42
Laurence Edwards answers rapid-fire beekeeping questions on apiary sites, ventilation, re-queening with Buckfast genetics, and disease management. He explains washing suits at 60°C kills EFB and AFB spores, outlines a three-week timeline for queen-cell splits, and discusses his shift to selling nucs and special-genetic queens.
Chapters
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. Now I am trying to go live on Instagram at the same time, and I think that may have worked. So now we should be live on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch— yes, Twitch— Twitter, and Instagram. 1080p resolution. Fingers crossed it works this time, and we're just going to talk about bees. So for anybody who's never listened to one of these before, it is just me talking about bees in my living room, but I've got a really cool brand new special feature today. So the normal way that we run is that I just answer as many questions as I possibly can, give you the best advice that I can give you. I'll do my best, but you know, I can't answer every single thing. I don't know everything about bees, but I will do my very best. But what I have today is something that is mega cool, I have the ability to add another screen, and there we go. I've got 2 hands on the go here. So I've been able to write some things down on here to talk to you about with the hope that I won't forget everything that I'm doing. So it— what would be really helpful is that someone can give me the thumbs up, tell me that the audio is better than the live streams that are going on, because those live streams for the inspections have been shocking. That is number 4 on my list of things to talk about. But what would also be really helpful is that if someone with a good internet connection. What do you think of the stream quality today? Because I paid quite a lot of money to upgrade it to 1080p. I know at home I've got good internet connection, so hopefully should work okay. 4 things, 4 or 5 things, I can't even count, 5 things I want to talk about before we get into the questions. And I can see that there's lots of questions on there already. If you are watching on most of those platforms, your chat comments will come up within StreamYard. If they're not showing up, you can jump over to one of the other platforms, but like I said, we are on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram Live, I think, today. So hopefully that's good. We will run the live inspections. I'm going to start at the bottom down here. The live apiary inspections— I have fixed it. No more 480p, no more terrible resolution, no more shocking audio. I have fixed it, and it is going to be pure resolution and lots of beekeeping, and it's going to be live, and it's going to be weekly, and it's going to be probably Tuesday or Wednesday each week. So live inspections we have fixed. Special genetic queens— if you are looking to buy queens, so Carniolan, Carpathian, Caucasian, Ligustica, Elgon, Primorsky, any of those queens, the deadline is like 6 PM this Thursday. You've not got long left, and that is for the rest of the year. There might be odds and sods and a few kind of available queens if the breeder says I've got a few extra, but that is it, we are done. It will just be Buckfast after that. If you are interested in Buckfast queens, we've got an offer on for dispatch on the 4th of July, £35 Buckfast queens. And then we've got an offer for 5 Buckfast Queens for £32 each on the 11th of July. So both of those are ones going on. Overwintered nucs— I, I just can't believe how quickly they are selling. If you are interested in overwintered nucs, get your, get your name down on the list soon because they are selling super, super quick, especially the Langstroth. We're not putting that many Langstroth into winter. They will sell out before Christmas, guaranteed. And then channel memberships— we do a few different levels of channel memberships. So we've got The channel supporter, early access videos and exclusive content, loads of stuff going on on there if you want to get involved in the channel memberships. So I love this, look, I can rub stuff out. What I was thinking would be the really, really cool reason to have this whiteboard here, and hopefully it's all working nicely, is it gives me the ability to answer questions by drawing stuff out, which I always thought was pretty cool. So when I'm talking about doing like a demeray split and moving boxes, and it's quite confusing So I just thought, well, if I, if I just draw like a Demeray split, what it would normally look like, you'd have your 3 supers at the top and you'd have like a brood box down there. So that's— excuse my drawing, I draw like a 6-year-old— but you've got kind of brood plus queen down there. That's a standard setup: brood box, 3 supers like that. And then to do a Demeray split, super easy, the supers just stay Exactly as they are. This box comes round to the top up there, but the the queen comes down into a brand new box—one single frame with the queen—and that's it. Like for me, that's loads easier to work out in my head in terms of what a demeray split is, and there's loads like beekeeping is all about drawing little diagrams and stuff like that. So I thought. be pretty cool. And I did pay extra to get an extra camera like that, and I, I am worried about stuff breaking. But there we go, I have a whiteboard. It's not going to stay on the whole time, I'll remove it like that, and I can just add it whenever I want to add it on there. So there we go, I've got my cup of water, I've got my cup of tea. I got myself a brand new insulated cup from Yeti. It's, it's the best cup I've ever bought in my life, and I'm an old man. I am an old man. I get excited about really silly things like old cups to put my herbal tea in, but it is, it's a good cup. So I'll have a sip of my tea and let's answer some questions. So what would be good is if people are watching from the different platforms, stick it in the comments. That would be cool. I'm going to drop down to the bottom and see what people are saying. Stream quality good on YouTube. Um, there we go, looking good. So I'll start from the top and I'll just go through the questions. I'm going to try and keep it under 2 hours, but I will just carry on going until everyone lets me go, and I will answer the questions as quick as I can. So first one is from Frollies Bees. He says, hey Lawrence, Wales had some nice weather this week, Bees have been busy. Did an inspection today, and in one week I have gone from four full supers to nine. Hopefully good weather will stay for a bit. It's amazing, isn't it? That's what beekeeping is all about: making sure you've got the bees in position when you get that week of good weather. It's not a case of eight weeks of average weather to get a good crop. Get the bees for one week of good weather, and you can get four supers full. And as you've seen there, you've gone from four to nine in a week. Follies Bees also says, "Also, I was working up in North Wales this week, and oddly enough, Pastoral Place, lovely area up there with you." Thank you very much. Should have, should have popped your head in and said hi. Uh, Stealth's channel member says, hi Lawrence, received my 2 queens from you today. I'm on day 7 since making queenless, pop them in tabs intact, going in properly tomorrow to take down all the queen cells. Excellent. Well, I hope, I hope it goes well. I hope there's no surprises with the queen introduction. Stealth also says, my brood box I'd say was full of honey in just one week and the bees haven't been drawing out the supers wax foundation. So what you will find is that as soon as you get a queen in there And the queen says, well, I need the space to lay. As long as you've got space up above them— I could use my pen for this bit, I guess— but as long as you've got space up above them, they will go up into the supers and they'll clear out the space for the queen to lay and put the honey upstairs. And you just put that— any way to convince them to post the honey upstairs, as I'm worried I might end up honey bound when I release the queens and she'll have nowhere to lay. So the bees will do that for you. As soon as the queen is there and she wants to lay, as long as you give them the space upstairs, they will fix all of that for you and just move it up naturally. Hello, no one has told my bees the solstice has passed and many are making swarm preps. I don't really want to make splits. How would you deal with a swarm prep at this time of the year? So the summer solstice is like the indicator for the queen to stop laying as much, but it is— you get a little bit of flexibility on it in terms of like what's happened so far in the year. But if you can imagine the brood cycle, if when the queen— if the solstice triggers the queen to stop laying, laying, then you're going to get a peak of bees kind of like 3 weeks, 3 or 4 weeks after the solstice. So we're already— we're in that period where even if the queen has ramped down laying a little bit, you're still going to see this uptick in the amount of bees that are there. So you're in— still in like prime swarming period. It should start ramping down maybe 3 or 4 weeks after the solstice, but even then, because the year's been so bad and the bees do want to swarm anyway and they've not been able to swarm, I think it will— it will continue kind of later into July than it normally would had the bees had a busy swarming period in say April, May, and June. There's not really a huge amount that you can do. You can demerese, so if you get there before— I'll draw my picture again— if you get there before the bees have swarmed and they started swarm preps, then demerese is the perfect option for that, and you just do the standard manipulation. I won't draw it again, but if you're doing it once they've got swarm cells, you go in and you're finding swarm cells, it's not really a huge amount that you can do other than just to knock them all back to one and make a split. But you can You can make kind of— I've seen people do quite, I say, ingenious but different ways of managing. I see some people just like an Apidea on the top, and they'll just knock all of the queen cells down to one queen cell and then take the queen out, shake some bees in the Apidea, and just leave the queen in the Apidea for a couple of weeks and then see if the new queen gets mated. If she doesn't, they just squish her. Or even if she does, you can just swap the queens over and then just shake them all back in. And then that way you're kind of making a split, but you're doing like a, a 1% versus a 99% split, as opposed to like a 60/40 split where you are actually going to reduce the honey capacity of that colony. But you need, you need to do something before they create swarm cells, ideally. Hi Lawrence, I have a mated queen coming this Wednesday. Do I still have enough time to make up a nuc with her, and what do I need to put in the nuc? So yes, perfect time really to be making them up. You wouldn't want to leave it much longer than this. You can still get away at this point in the year, 2 frames of brood, One frame of stores, good shake of bees, like shake the bees off maybe 2 frames, and then ideally go to a new apiary. If you can't go to a new apiary, do it late at night, close them in overnight, and then stuff loads of grass in the entrance in the morning. But just be aware that if you do that, a lot, quite a lot of the bees will go back to the original site. And do not feed straight away, because if you feed straight away, then they're just going to rob it all out, and you don't want to rob it all out. Thomas also says, is the reason you can't send your nucs, queens over to Ireland because of Brexit or another reason? I wish I could buy your queens, nucs because I know I would be getting good calm bees. So it is, and it's due to kind of red tape and paperwork. You can send it to Northern Ireland, but you need export certificates, and it's a lot of work to get individual export certificates for queens and nucs. And plus, there's a lot of bad press about sending bees that aren't Irish bees into Ireland. So what is kind of one of those things, um, I don't necessarily buy into all of that, but I, I'm going to bite my lip because I don't want to annoy anyone. Hopefully going to inspect my beehive tomorrow, however a bit nervous as I didn't see the queen last time I inspected a week ago. I hope it goes well. Ben, don't worry about seeing the queen. If you see eggs, everything's all good. That's all you need to see. Hi, we've had 2 weeks of nice weather and the bees are actually starting to fill supers. Now it's gone rainy again, would you recommend taking off supers, extracting, and going back to feeding? Brilliant question, that one, and one that I was basically the topic of a channel exclusive member video that I am partway through filming. Yes, I definitely would. You look at the forecast and it's shocking, and today, like, I'm looking outside now, it's drizzle. It was 13 or 14 degrees today and really, really drizzly, and you'll you see the bees get through, they'll build that amount of honey in a week and they'll use that amount of honey in a week. Like maybe not to the same excess, but it's— if you get 3 weeks of that, you'll be back down to nothing again. So I would probably split the difference though, and I would say, well, take— if you've got 3 supers, take a couple of supers off, leave a super on and see what happens. And you know, at least if you've taken a couple of supers off, you've got a couple of supers in the bank, and then if the worst comes and the bees just— the season fizzles out and we don't get any more, you've got your couple of supers. And then if you— if it just picks up, if the weather picks up again and gets really nice, you've left that super on and you've not fed, so you're not really contaminating anything still. So you can still just keep things going. And then if the bees just work through that super, then you can, you can say, right, the weather's rubbish now, so I am just going to go back to feeding. But it's very unusual. Like, for people who have just had a nuc for this first time this year, it's not usual to feed your bees anything after like April, middle of April, end of April at the latest. I can't remember the last year before this year that I've had to feed anything other than small splits at any point after the 1st of May. Very unusual year. Evening, Laurence, loved your apiary chat the other day. Thank you very much. It really annoyed me, the, the quality of the resolution, and it really annoyed me the sound as well. So I fixed the sound. If I can just get my dog here. So I was using the wrong cable, so I bought a new cable. It was the cable that was causing the issues with the audio, and I'm never going to get a good resolution up there, so I've worked out a really good way of doing it. So there will be weekly, maybe bi-weekly, but probably weekly live apiary stream inspections going forward, starting this Wednesday. So stick that in your diary. Getting lots of thumbs up. People saying that they can hear, which is nice. Couldn't couldn't do that kind of earlier on in the week. A lot of people saying hello. Steve says stream quality goon on YouTube. Excellent. Always going for that goon stream quality. I'm only messing. Cheers, Steve. Thanks for that. Ben Wong says he's enjoying the live streams. Thank you. Bellissima Mia. Excellent master twelve-year-old beekeeper. Hello. She says I think one of my 2023 red queens has turned drone laying and they've done one supercedure cell in the middle of the. Frame. I'm just flicking down to see if there's any add-up to that. So if that is the case and it is just one single cell out of all of the frames, one in the center of the frame, I would leave them to it. Supercellia cells— the supercellia impulse is a very good impulse to get a good queen. They put all of their effort into it and you get a very good queen at the end of it. So I would give them a go, see, see what happens. It's— I, I don't find often that you get a queen that turns like fully drone laying, so you go in, it's just drones everywhere. and lots of drone brood with a supersedure cell, I find you often— it'd be interesting to see, Mia, what the makeup is of that colony. I find that you'll start to see just like a little bit of spottiness to the worker brood. That's not the nicest looking worker brood, and then you'll see a supersedure cell. So they do it, the bees tend to supersede quite early in my experience. So have a look at the supersedure cell. If it is one single cell in the middle of loads of drone brood, I'd maybe challenge the viability of it and maybe just— maybe better off just killing the queen and removing the cell and adding a new queen in. And that's not— that's not me trying to sell queens, that's genuine advice. So if it is just 100% drone brood and a supersedure cell, I wouldn't trust that supersedure cell. If it's loads of worker brood still in there and a bit of drone brood, then should be okay. Evening, Lawrence. Could I ask why your queen cages have 2 tabs? I, I See, only one releases the queen. So it's for a slow introduction. So the only one you only really need to open, the one is the big long one, it's the one that queen can get through. The other one, the actual other one is there for— the design of the cage is for a little mini sponge to go in there. That's the original design. So when the queens are going kind of through transit, there's a sponge that goes in with water to give the bees a drink, but no one uses it. But the way that I use the cages is I pop both of them open. And the way that I find is that if you pop both of them open, one, the bees can get in one from the outside and get into the cage, and the queen can only get out one way. But when the bees are going through the one-way system, they can get in and see the queen, but they find it really difficult to sting the queen in there. So I see it as a— it aids in the slow introduction because it means that the first time the bees can get in to see the queen, the queen can't get out. So it means they can't get kind of like good grasp on her, good access to kill her in the cage. That's kind of my argument for it. It's not designed like that, it's designed for a sponge, but you could argue if it's designed for a sponge, why is there even a— why is there a tab on it? Not sure, but it does work. It is a good cage. I know some people are not massive fans of that cage, but in my opinion, it is a good cage, and I think the length of that fondant means that it does— it really slows down the introduction, which is exactly what you want when you're introducing queens. You want a nice slow introduction. If there's going to be very little honey production this year, I'm tempted to concentrate on splits. I'm contemplating double brood box. Would you put the new brood box on top or under the original box? So I'm sorry to like burst your bubble a bit, I think it's a bit late for that, and the solstice does trigger that rapid decline in the amount of brood that's being produced. So I guarantee if you've got a single brood box at the moment full to the brim with bees and you put another brood box on top, or if you put another brood box underneath, come back in 3 weeks' time and it'll just be full of honey. They'll have drawn it all out and it'll just be full of honey and the brood nest kind of like stays the same. When you're double brooding, you need to double brood really early on in the year and I showed a lot of people that technique early this year, which is underbrooding really, really early on and feeding so that the bees are— oh, we can draw this, this is good, right? Let me put my other camera on. It's a perfect, perfect chance to draw something. So if you've got your brood box like this early on in the winter, and you've got your feeder on top like that, and then your roof, and then your stand is kind of here. So what, what the, the normal thing that you would do at this point in the year is like double brood. So if that's your brood box there, you would take the feeder off. So this, this is full of bees here, this is where all your bees are, and you put another brood box on the top like that. And then you put the feeder up there. So if you do that in the winter, you're basically separating the bees from the feed. The bees can't get up to the feed, and then because the heat rises like that, the warmest part of the beehive is there, but all of your bees are downstairs at the bottom like that. So I never like early on in the season putting a brood box over another brood box like that. What I prefer to do is you'll have your brood box like that. and then you've got your feeder on top, and then what I'll do is I'll put a big empty brood box there with all the frames of foundation, and then the heat still rises and the bees are up there. So basically the bees get to live in the warmest part of the hive, and they've still got really close access to be able to go down and get the feed. So you can feed them and they live in the warmest part of the hive, and then as they get bigger, they'll just kind of like grow down and fill that space. Now I know a lot of people who use that technique this year and they were really, really happy with it. It's a great technique and it means that you can double brood super, super early in the season. It means that your bees are not going to swarm due to a lack of space because you've given them that space. It means you can continue feeding them and it means that— what's the final bit? That when they do grow, they're able to grow because you've given them that additional space. If you put it on the top, you cause yourself real issues. You block them from the feed and you're giving them an empty void above their head to heat, so it slows them down, they go backwards. So at this point in the year, it doesn't make a massive difference. The colony's not expanding now, so it doesn't matter where you put it, above or below. But what you can do— what doesn't apply is when you've got very small splits. So what I would do is, if you've got colonies now, Marcus, say you've got like a colony with 8 or 9 frames of brood, just split that out into, into 4 nucs. 4 nucs of 2 frames of brood each, plus some frames of stores. Take them to a new site, add mated queens in, and then feed them and just trickle feed. Just keep on feeding. really light syrup, but just keep on going little and often, trickle feed, and they will build up really, really nice and strong. So early on in the year, I'd say double brood, get them really big, then make the splits later on in the year. Split them early before the issues come about with robbing and wasps, and you'll get some really nice nucs that way. I hope that was useful. Good evening. Good evening, Lynn. Hello to you too. Hello. He says, hi mate, hope all's well. Is it too late to try and produce some queens using mini mating nucs, and what's the latest in the season you would make splits to overwinter some nucs? So it's, it's not, it's not too late to use mini mating nucs, but mini mating nucs get way more difficult to keep the bees in them because of the heat. They like to abscond later on throughout the year, and then it just becomes really, really difficult to keep, uh, the robbing bees and the wasps out. So I would— I wouldn't say it's too late to use them, but it's getting to the point where you wouldn't, you wouldn't really want to use them anymore. Um, latest in the season you make up splits to overwinter some nucs, it's completely down to the amount of bees and the amount of brood that you're going to put in there. You could, you could take a colony, you could take a colony that's on double brood, 12, 14 frames of brood and some frames of stores, end of September, and split them into 2. you could do that and probably just about get away with it. What we do at the moment, you still get away with 2 frames of brood, emerging brood, frame of stores, shake a couple of frames of bees in there as well. That will turn into a really nice overwintered 6-frame nuc. So that's what I'd go with. If letting bees supersede the queen, do you leave them alone for a few weeks? So yeah, definitely. If they're genuinely superseding, and I do see a lot of people confuse what superseding is, but if it's— there is one cell in the whole colony, and it is generally in the middle of the cell, but it's more just there's one cell, maybe 2, but if there's 5 or 6, it's definitely swarming, then just leave them to it. Leave them to it and they will fix it themselves, and you don't need to inspect because you know they're not going to swarm because they're superseding. But don't confuse it with swarming and then just leave them and come back to not that many bees. Bees filling the supers here at an unreal rate given the changing nature of the weather. Is there a need to add the syrup in the Ashforth feeder during the flow? Absolutely not, no. When there's a flow on, it even— like I said before, I've never ever fed my bees anything after the 1st of May. Once they're like able to stand on their own 2 feet, there should be a reasonable amount of stores coming in all the time. And the only time that you'd ever change that up is if you're taking a spring crop and you're not leaving your bees anything, then you might just give them a little something to get them through the June gap. But if they're storing any of it, then you stop. immediately. So I don't feed, and you shouldn't really be feeding at any point throughout the year, but definitely not in a flow. No, no, no, you'll just contaminate all of your honey. You want— you don't want to feed. Do whatever you can to not feed your bees to get them through, but don't let them die. Hi, I watched your apiary chat and loved it. Do you have to use warm water when making up syrup, or does it work with cold water? Trying to do it as bulk and have no way of heating up the water. Love that question. So I see some shocking methods for making sugar syrup, I really do. Some of it's bad and some of it's really bad for the bees. So for 1:1, perfect method for 1:1, which is big pan of water, as best as you can, bring it up to the boil, and then just once it's come up to the boil, just turn it off and then put your sugar in and just stir and stir and stir and stir and stir. You can do that with 1:1, you're just about getting— you're just about getting away with doing that with 2:1 as well. So you can bring it up to a boil. Turn it off and then add your sugar in, and you're just stirring, agitating. Now, to do it without any heat, you'll get away with doing 1:1 without any heat whatsoever. Um, the way that I would do it in, in bulk— the best way to do it in bulk is get like a, uh, a pump, like a big pump, you know, the pump that you'll get like to empty a swimming pool or to empty a pond. Get one of those, like a recirculating pump. Just have, I don't know, a little bit of hose on it like that. Get a big 200-liter steel oil drum, like brand new one, not a used oil one, but the oil-shaped one. And then just pour all your water in. You need to measure out the quantities first. Pour all your water in, stick the pump right down at the bottom, turn the pump on so it's recirculating kind of in itself. So it all sits within the, like, the oil drum. Shouldn't call it an oil drum, the metal clean drum. Don't use an oil drum. And then you just start chucking your sugar in. And because there's so much water to start off, you might start off with like 100 liters of water, and then— so they're 200 liters. So if you feel like— if you fill it up halfway, you've got 100 liters of water, turn the pump on, and then you just put your sugar in, 100 kilograms of sugar, and that gives you 1:1 sugar syrup. Now that works perfectly, and you'll get it completely dissolved at 1:1. I tried doing that at 2:1, and I got like a bit left over, quite, quite a bit left over at the bottom. It wouldn't— I didn't get enough agitation in there to make it work. spoke to Richard about this, who I, you know, he's my mentor. I speak to him about loads of things, and he said, oh well, I've got a system for making 2:1 with cold water. And he does. I've seen it. It's a brilliant system. And I don't know, I don't know where he got it from, but it's basically an IBC that somehow the top comes off, got like a big top that comes off it, and then someone's custom made him this metal paddle that sits inside it. And then all he does— so ultimately it comes down to time. So what he said is, if I left that pump running for long enough and put the sugar in like more slowly, it would eventually get dissolved. He said, what you're doing is putting the sugar in too quickly, and then it's settling at the bottom, and then your pump can't agitate it enough. So, and it's right. So what he does is he fills up his IBC to the level that he knows for his water, sets it going, and it's just these big massive metal blades that are kind of running around. Oh man, I love being able to draw. This is brilliant. So basically, an IBC like that. And then somehow in the roof he's got this thing that goes down. So that's a paddle, and it's like this, like all the way down to the bottom, and then it spins. So it kind of like spins around like that. So he, he just sticks that on in the morning, fills it up with water. Like, he'll probably fill it up with water to, I don't know, like there or something like that, and then sticks the sugar in. And he'll just do, do it over the course of like 24 hours. I'll turn that off now. And, and then it just keeps on spinning around, keeps on spinning, and, and then he comes up with perfectly dissolved 2:1 sugar syrup. So you can do it. So I said to him, we need, we need to do a video on that because that is really good and really useful for some people. So it is possible to dissolve enough sugar in cold water to get a 2:1 sugar concentration. You just need to work out a way to agitate it sufficiently enough and long enough to make sure that it gets dissolved. There we go. That's like 3 uses already for my little drawing board. I'm quite happy with that. I hope, I hope it's working well. I'm looking forward to watching this stream back to see if the resolution is, is as good as I, I hope it is. Part 2, how can I test to know for sure before replacing the queen? So with regards to your superseded queen, so I would just have a look. You can send me— we chat on WhatsApp, or your dad sends me messages on WhatsApp. I should say, you are 12, but just send me some, send me some pictures if you want of the frames I'll take a look and see whether we, we think it's a viable solution. That's the best way of doing it. Says hopes the new addition is doing well. She's doing very well, thanks. She's 6 weeks old on Tuesday. Uh, says, can you talk a little bit about your special genetic queens and the pros and cons of each? So I, I can talk a little bit about— I can't talk about it with, with great confidence because I've not had personal experience of some of the different ones. So the different ones, the reason that people want different genetics is for different kind of reasons. So some of them might be really good at getting pollen and people might want to collect pollen. So if you're in the market for just like trapping pollen, then you might go with a queen that is particularly good at that. And I'm not gonna lie and say I know which one it is, but some of them will be better than others. What I do know, for example though, is the Caucasian queen, I saw this today, is it just gathers so much propolis. Like, for 99% of beekeepers, they would say that is a real disadvantage. Why are they collecting so much propolis? But if you're a beekeeper that wants to collect propolis, that's like your business, then you're going to want to go for a Caucasian queen. We've sold so many Caucasian queens, and I can only think of one reason why— because they are very, very black. They're just like pitch black queens, and the bees come out very black. So people like black bees. That might be a reason that you want to go for them as The standard ones like the Lagustica— Lagustica are excellent at rearing brood. That's— they kind of, again, can be seen as a disadvantage because, like, when there's not good flows on, they'll just continue rearing brood to the point that they might kill themselves. But if you're making loads of splits, like you're in the business of, I don't care about honey, I'm just going to feed my bees and I'm just going to make loads and loads of splits— maybe you're going into pollination, maybe you're making lots of up lots of nucs and you just want brood factories, you'd go with like a Lagustica. If you're looking to kind of create some sort of apiary where you're going chemical-free and you're not going to use any foundation and you're just going to want to eliminate any toxins but you need to have a way of dealing with mites, you'd go for like the VSH queens, the Varroa-sensitive hygiene queens, to try and build some natural immunity from the traits that are there. Elgon and the Pramorsky are similar, just from different regions that have developed the ability to kind of combat varroa in a different way. And that's about it really. Like, there's loads of different lines in there, loads of different actual species of bee, so they're not Apis mellifera mellifera, they're like Apis mellifera lagustica or Apis mellifera carnica. There's tons of different ways. But what I am doing, Ben, is I've got myself set up at an apiary with all of the different genetics there, so I will run them and I will talk to you about what I'm seeing. And it might be that some of them aren't as calm, the Buckfast. And it might be that some of them are incredible at gathering pollen, and it might be that some of them overwinter in very, very small clusters like the Carniolans but have rapid expansion. So they've all got like slightly different traits, and probably quite marked different traits as well, because they're coming from kind of all over the place. So it's a good question and one to watch out. I'll keep, I'll keep a close eye on all of them, and I will show you them in the live streams as well. That would be good fun. Uh, James Knoll, I've got a pink hand. Hi, James. Uh, Aiden, eagle-eyed Aiden. So on the last live stream, the, the apiary one, when I was showing the dropped cell, Aiden the man messaged me and posted on YouTube and said, you missed some queen cells in there. You were taking down all of the emergency queen cells and you actually missed some. And as soon as he said it, I thought, there's like, this, this man knows what he's talking about. So I went back up there and he was right, I missed 3 queen cells. And I can see why I missed them. Don't get me wrong, I make tons of mistakes. I miss queen cells all the time. But in that instance there, it's because I was like talking and trying to show you and taking out like a dropped queen cell, and then when I put it back, I'd missed them on the other side. So it was right, I missed them. But thank— thanks for that. Always welcome, you know, if I make like massive errors in the live streams and you can pick it up in time. Like, you saved that, and we went back up there yesterday in the latest— was it yesterday or the day before? The latest live stream, and the queen had been successfully introduced Thanks to Aiden picking it up. So well done. Good evening, from the cow. I don't know as I butchered your name there. Jay's 200 gram SPS reef tank channel member says best time to requeen for next year to make sure she sets up well for winter. So now is probably the best time to go for it in terms of the best, the very best acceptance. late as possible. So kind of going back end of August, early September, even like towards the back end of September. I will make a note, our last week of the queens is the 4th of September, so come the 2nd week of September, we're not selling any queens, and we do that every year. We need to have a break, and the demand dies, completely dies, 1st, 2nd, 3rd week of September. So we just say, right, we'll do the 1st week and that's it. But where the queens— the colonies are desperate at that point, so they'll just accept anything. But that comes with risk. So if there's, you know, occasionally you do get a duff queen, you get a drone-laying queen, what I would much prefer to do is put the queens in mid-July, end of July the latest, get them introduced, look at the pattern, look at the queens and say, right, I'm happy, happy with that queen, she's a good queen, because you're risking the whole colony on her going through the winter. So you can put them in later, they do well, but it comes with a little bit of risk. Late Night Knits, loving your comments on here, some really good ones. She says, hello, first time I've caught the live stream, uh, and then I'm guessing that's some sort of, uh, like, I don't know, can't remember what they are, like emojis. There we go, got the word out, but it's just written it down, so it didn't, it didn't take the fun off. I got what you meant, but yeah, very good, and I have been enjoying your comments. Stuart Campbell says, evening all. Uh, Harry says, hi Lawrence, good to have a proper live stream again. I like the apiary ones, but I watch the members videos so I know what's going on in those hives. Yes, so tomorrow's one that I'm doing, I'm doing it, I'm doing it in a different apiary, so we will switch it up a little bit and, and do some live streams for some different sites. Uh, Marcus says Yeti mugs are awesome. I, I genuinely cannot get over how good they are, and I've got like another one that's not a Yeti one but like a similar version, and it's, it's pretty good, but it doesn't keep it anywhere near as warm. Like, this is roasting hot still. Not that I get to drink much during my live streams, but It's nice that it keeps it warm. Yeah, roasted, roasting hot still. Cool. Lynette Blackman says, love the idea of you being able to draw stuff to explain. It's cool, isn't it? I just say I write like a 6-year-old, so I genuinely do write just in all caps. And do you know when people write and you think that's illegible? I can't I can't read what you've written. I can't read my own writing. Shocking. So sorry if it does look like a 6-year-old's written it. Paul Lewis, channel member, says, Lawrence, greetings. I've read all the literature and seen all the videos. I'm not satisfied though. I need to tell if the queen in one of my hives is mated or not. I can't wait 2 weeks. Help, please. So there's no, there's no real way to tell. Like, I've seen queens that you would look at and you would say I bet my mortgage that she's mated. Like, she's, you know, we get it right, she's this long, she's like bigger than my thumb, and she's running around, she's like calm, she's looking good, the bees are feeding her, and she just didn't lay any eggs. And 4 or 5 weeks ago, and you just think, duff, duff queen. So the only way to tell if a queen is any good is she's laying eggs, she's laying eggs in a nice pattern, and those eggs turn into capped worker brood. In a nice pattern, and then you give her a thumbs up and you say, right, she is laying well. And that's pretty much all you can tell, because she could turn drone laying after 2 weeks, or she could turn drone laying after 4 years. And without— sounds a bit horrible— kind of cutting her open and having a look inside— not that I'd know what to look for, but some people would— you just can't tell how well she's going to last. You can tell, kind of like, you can give yourself that snapshot in time and you can say, that is a well-mated queen. That queen is laying well, but how long is it going to last? You don't know. So the literature is probably, probably right. And you say you need to tell if one of the queens is mated or not, you can't wait 2 weeks. I'm afraid you've got to wait 2 weeks, and it is, it is about 2 weeks once she started laying eggs. Once she started laying eggs, you know, it's probably in 8 or 9 days after that. Lots of honey coming in, hopefully the weather holds up. Famous last words, because it is 12 degrees and drizzle. Steve says, hi Lawrence, I've ordered 2 Buckfast queens for delivery on 18th of July. Assume that's all okay after hearing you just say the deadline is this week. So, so the deadline is for all of our genetics barring the Buckfast. So the Buckfast will go on all the way through. The only week— I'm looking up here on my schedule— the only week that we won't have queens, well, we won't have a delivery coming in, is week 33. So the 14th of August, but we'll we'll double order for the week before. Um, so we'll have Buckfast queens from now through to the 2nd or 3rd of September, so don't worry about Buckfast queens. Got plenty of Buckfast queens coming in still. If your bees are on double brood, do you always place both boxes above the excluder with a Demaray split? So it's, it's a difficult one. I'm going to draw again. It's a difficult one with a double brood colony, like what do you do with the Demaray? And this is why I've used this technique before where I like to kind of get them to the point where they're back on single brood for winter. Because if you're going to do— if you've got your colony set up like that, so brood, brood, brood, and then 3 supers with your queen excluder kind of there— to do a proper Demarais split, the only thing you can do is the same that you would normally do, which is you always keep your supers in exactly the same place. They never move. And you just take the 2 double broods and you lift them up to the top, and then the queen goes back down into a new box like that. So that, that's the only way. Like, she comes down with it with plus like a frame of brood as well. That's, that's how you do the Demeray. And it doesn't matter whether you've got a double brood on nationals or double brood on 14 by 12 or whatever, you always need to lift up all of the brood up to the top. And then downstairs is just the queen plus a single frame of brood, and then you fill the rest out with foundation. But you could do kind of something different, but it's not, it's not a Demerar. And I've seen, I've seen people do this and try kind of like butchering it and doing slightly different variations. I'm really enjoying having a pen. It makes my life— makes it so much easier to talk about stuff. So if you do that same one again where you've got brood, brood, and then super, super, super with the queen excluder there. So what you could do is keep, keep the supers in place. So 3 supers, and you can already see that my drawing's getting shocking. My hand gets tired. I've got the, the hand stamina of a 6-year-old. So 3 supers, and then leave a brood box there, but take 1 brood box up to the top. and then leave the queen— so that's a queen excluder there— and just leave the queen downstairs in that box. You can do that, but it's not, it's not a Demaray. All you're doing is just taking brood from there and putting it up to the top. The reason that a Demaray works so well is that you take all of the brood and you put all of the brood up at the top where the queen is sitting in a colony. She's got one frame of brood, you've got loads of frames of foundation, so you're relieving the queen, or you're giving the queen so much more space to lay, and that using this configuration here you're not. You've still just got one congested brood box. So what you could do in that instance there— I've rubbed it all out now— but you could on that side there just add in an extra box of foundation. But then my argument would be you could just kind of do that anyway if you want. You could just triple brood, and I think you'd end up with pretty much the same result. So what I like to do at the end of the year— get my pen back out— is, so you start off, let me start off the year like this with a brood box, and you're building your supers up like that. And so you've got 3 supers on. So you do, you do your first demerit split. So you take that brood box up to the top. Sorry, you're gonna get so bored of this exact same thing, but it does prove a bit of a point here. And then you've got your new box down there. So that's, that's your standard demaree like that with the queen excluded there. So then what, what a lot of people do at that point is think, well, you know, this, this brood box up here, ultimately that turns into a super because all of the brood emerges. And then if you've not put Apivar in there, that, that becomes a super. So you're back down to like the same configuration again. So what you can do is you can You can just continue doing that throughout the year. So once you've done a single demeray there, you can just do the same thing again. So you've got your four supers now. Super, super, super, super, and then that brood box comes up to the top up there. Already making mistakes, and then you put your new brood box with the queen there, and the queen excluder just remains like that. But then what I like to do come the end of the year. So let's rub all of that out. Come the end of the year, if, if this top brood box here has been treated with Apivar, come September, something like that, I'll take that down and put that one down there. Yeah, but at the same time, I'll add another super up there. So what the bees will do in that instance there is that you've got— this is brood and that's honey, and the bees hate that. They absolutely hate that at the end of the year. It should be the other way around, should be brood at the bottom and honey at the top. So what the bees do is they take that honey and they go and store it where there's space up above, and then you end up with— you take all your honey off and you end up going into winter on double brood like that. And they do, they do. If you've got Buckfast bees, you will end up with that over winter, which is just brood. And, and you'll get brood, you might, you might get a little bit of honey kind of there, but you'll end up with double brood. But the clever bit, and the bit that you need to make sure that you do, is come, um, like March, what you will find is you'll come back and you'll have brood And bees in that box, and you will have nothing in that box. That box is empty. And take the opportunity at that point to just remove it. And that's how you start the year again. And then you start the year, you put your queen excluder back on, and then you start building your supers back up again. And then you say, right, I'm going to demarray, and then moving the box back around, and it just— it starts again. And it's a really nice neat system. for one, one box, one stand, and you're just constantly managing the bees in that fashion. So not, not quite what you asked, Chris, sorry, I went off on a slight tangent because I'm just going crazy with my new pen. But I hope, I hope that was useful. That was like, the question was, if your bees are on double brood, do you always place both boxes above the queen, the excluder, with a Demaray split? No, I, I try and never get myself into a position where I'm actually on double brood if I'm doing like Demarays constantly. I'll always just leave them like that, except for the very end of the year when I put the honey one underneath. So there we go. Sorry, long way around of saying it. Channel member, says, hi Lawrence, we found a virgin queen today and in our haste marked her, probably before she has been on her mating flight. Is she likely to survive? So it's not— it's not— I say it's not ideal. I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference. The only thing that I would say is that she's got to go out, she's got to fly, she's got to mate. And what can happen when they go out is that they are they get eaten by birds, and if she's got a nice shiny pink dot on her back or whatever color it is, she's probably a little bit more visible as prey. I don't think the drones would care. I've definitely marked virgins before and they've come back mated, but it's not something that I would do, and I'd only mark them once I know that they're fully mated and laying well. That's kind of the process that I use, but I don't— I wouldn't worry about it. I'm sure she'll come back. Evening all, bees going for it in East Devon, just hope the weather holds. Wow, everyone is properly putting the mockers on the weather. It's, uh, it's, it's weird because I'm a sucker for looking at the weather, and I'm always interested in like the weather across the UK because we sell queens. And if it's rainy, if it's like always there's loads of rain, we don't sell anywhere near as many queens. And if it's really good weather, we sell a lot of queens. So I'm interested in the weather everywhere, and I do, I look at the weather in London a lot. And I know the weather in London today was really nice, wasn't it? It was like 25, 24, 25 degrees, sunny, nice sunny all day. It's barely been above 14 degrees here today, and it's just been drizzle, proper like November drizzle, and it doesn't look much better for the rest of the week. Ben Wong says, sorry, loving the live inspections too. I cannot wait to get the live inspections going properly. People will be very, very happy with my plan I have for them, I am sure. Good evening, John Mark Sylvester. How's it going? We have 170 people on across Facebook, YouTube, Twitch. Twitter and Instagram Live. I'm quite excited about that. I, I think there is a cutoff on Instagram Live, so in 15 minutes I think I've only got like an hour and then it cuts you off. So if you're watching on Instagram and you are— you want to watch a little bit more, you probably bored out your minds, but if you want to watch a bit more, you just jump across to one of the other platforms. If you're watching on Facebook and you're thinking, what's he talking about, the resolution's rubbish, the resolution's loads better on YouTube apparently, and Twitch. If you're watching on Twitch, how on earth is anyone watching on Twitch? Because I just signed up today and it's basically all like 13-year-olds watching World of Warcraft. I'm like, that shows how old I am. It's definitely not World of Warcraft, is it? But some shooting game or something cool like that on there. So you're probably not watching me, but I thought, you know what, I just— I got a new— I got a new upgraded subscription to let me just go to all of these different platforms all at once. So why not? Let's, let's spread the love. Um, Terrell's Honey says, hey Lawrence, can you share any details on how much do you spend on marketing like Google Ads, another third party, without any numbers? And if this is paying off with Nuke queen sales. So no, I can't, I'm afraid, because that would really be giving away what, what we do with Google Ads. And we do, we do spend on Google Ads, but we have, we have a kind of a slight, a unique marketing strategy, I would say, with our queens. And I'll let, I'll let you in on what our marketing strategy is with our queens and our nucs. It is— I'll do my absolute very best to help everybody and add value as best as I possibly can and give you really good customer service at every single point along the way. If I've got knowledge, I will share the knowledge with you. I won't hoard it. I'll try things out, I'll break stuff, I'll show you what's going on, I'll show you what works well. I'll try and give you advice to get the very best out of your bees and That's for everyone. That's not just for customers. That is just for anybody who wants to come and listen to me talk. I'll share that with you and I'll do my very best for you. But then we back it up with the best queens on the market. And you know, I say the best queens, as good of queens as anybody else is selling on the market, with live arrival guarantees. The fact that you pick up the phone, you can speak to me, get through to someone straight away. I'll answer all of my emails on the same day that they come in. I never let my emails sit. More than 24 hours long. I answer all the WhatsApps that's going on, and as I said, it's not just for customers, that is for absolutely everyone. And I try and add value in any way that I possibly can, and hopefully some people would like to reward that by being loyal and, and sticking around and maybe buying some queens from me at the same time, maybe buying some nucs. With the nucs, I went through the process of having horrible Angry bees, and I hated it. And I very nearly quit beekeeping because I just thought I can't handle these horrible bees. And then stumbled across really nice Buckfast bees and thought, well, this is transformational. Like this has really improved my beekeeping. So what we do with the nucs now is we show people that on the YouTube and give them nice close-ups and say, you know, it's not—it doesn't have to have horrible bees. Like I've got a horrible colony of bees here. We're going to requeen them. And now look, they're nice and they're friendly and they're calm. So we do spend money on Google Ads, and we spend some other money kind of advertising in other places. But the Biggest marketing strategy for us is, like I said, YouTube, showing the videos on YouTube and just showing what we can actually offer. And I hope that's a suitable answer. You can understand why I wouldn't want to give away kind of what we're spending, because all that someone else would need to do is just like add a little bit more on and then they'd be good to go. It's a bit more complex than that, but you know. Here we go, right, next queen. What do you— next question: What do you use to mark the queens as the markers from Payne's got worn out in a few weeks? So we use Toma. Oil-based pens. There's no perfect queen marking system unless you're going to put the discs on and glue them on, and it's very, very time-consuming putting the discs on. So we just like to mark with the pens, oil-based pens though, so they shouldn't rub off, but they can. Like, if bees really go for them and they're balling them and like trying to get on them, they will polish and take some of that marker off as well. But I find oil-based pens do— they're good for a couple of years at least. Says purchased 5 queens from you a couple of weeks ago. 4 accepted no problem and are laying, which is good to see. One hive can't see new queen but have eggs, suspect virgin. So yeah, you'll get, get a lot of that at this time of the year, which is good. I know it's not ideal because you've, you paid for a queen. Ultimately you want, you want eggs and you want a, a mated queen. You've probably got a mated queen, not the one you paid for, the virgin that was in the hive, but as long as she's mated, all is good. Uh, Ed Lenny says, trying out a Flow Hive and suddenly finding that the hive at the crown board full of condensation. Any experience of this? Um, so yeah, you will, you will get a bit of condensation. You'll get a bit more condensation in Flow Hives than you would in kind of other hives due to the way that they are, they're kind of fabricated and the materials that are there. And you've got a lot of plastic up there, so the plastic will hold the condensation, or it will, it provides a cold surface for the, the moisture in the air to condense on. So then the top, the top box, the super, has got a lot of moisture up there, which will naturally then form condensation on the board, crown board. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Condensation in the beehive is really not the end of the world, so I wouldn't worry. What's the best way to find a virgin before putting in a new queen? So the best way is to make sure that no virgins ever emerge, and it is the number one conversation that I have with people throughout the week, which is, I've got a queenless hive, so I'm going to buy a queen. And we talk and we go through the conversation, and what's happened is the bees have swarmed, and then like 2 or 3 weeks now, they've not had eggs for 2 or 3 weeks, so they're queenless. And 99% of the time, you know, it's swarmed, colony swarmed, mated queen's gone, left behind queen cells, queen cells have emerged, and they've not gone and got mated, and then it looks like, you know, you're picking up the frames, you're thinking, well, there's no eggs, there's no larvae, they're backfilling with honey, there can't be a queen. But there is, there's a virgin queen running around in there. So the best way to find that virgin queen is just to make sure she never emerges in the first place. That's going to be the best way of doing it. So if your bees have swarmed, easiest way to do it is just take down all of the swarm cells, take down every single one, go back in every 2 or 3 days, keep on taking down all of the swarm cells until they stop making them, and then you're hopelessly queenless. You can add in a new queen, or you can, you can just leave one queen cell and let her emerge, see if she mates. But if she doesn't mate, you have to find her and you have to kill her. And it is— I, I will spend 45 minutes, 50 minutes going through a big colony, a double brood colony with supers, trying to find a virgin queen and give up, and then go back the next day and spend an hour looking through the colony because I think I need to find that queen, there's a duff virgin in there. And you might do like 2 or 3 inspections like that and you go like you're spending an hour looking for a virgin and then you finally find her and you kill her. The tip that I will give you though, yeah, here's the tip: when you're looking for a virgin queen, always have a hand free to kill her and have a quick hand to kill her. Don't do what I've done a million times in the past, which is Oh right, I found the virgin. I spent an hour looking for her, I found the virgin, put the frame down and she just flies off. And they do, they're so flighty, virgins. They're not like normal queens, they just fly off and then— oh, really annoying. If that happens to you, give it 5 minutes and go and look underneath the mesh floor. That's a top tip. They're often underneath the mesh floor. But best way to find virgins, don't let them emerge in the first place. He says, I have 2 full supers on most hives now. When adding a 3rd, where should it go? Top, top, middle, or bottom? I genuinely don't think it makes a massive difference. I'd stick it on the top. Some people stick it on the bottom. Not many people put it in the middle, but I think it's— I honestly don't think it makes a huge amount of difference, that one, John. I would stick it wherever. Hi Lawrence, I hear Americans saying queen excluders are honey excluders. What are your thoughts? I couldn't disagree with that statement more. I really couldn't. Have they seen the pictures that I've been posting from customers that have been sending me pictures in this week? It's been brilliant. Um, somebody sent me a picture saying they, they had a colony that swarmed like back end of April, so they, they took down all of the queen cells and put in a Black Mountain Honey Queen, and it's now on double brood. So this, this is the end of, end of April they put a Black Mountain Honey Queen in. Now what, we're now end of June, so 2 months, and it's gone from being just kind of a single brood colony with a super on, it's now double brooded with 7 supers full of honey, and it's got a queen excluder in the middle. I've had a few of those this week, people sending me pictures saying, wow, and people sending me pictures saying, I only wanted one colony of bees and your bees are like way, way too prolific. So I'll hold my hands up, if you— they can be too prolific for some people, but there's nothing in my books that's too prolific. Like, it's like prolific is good, means you get nice big strong colonies of bees and you get bumper crops of honey. So I don't buy into that at all. I've had colonies where I've left the queen excluders off and you know what they do? I'm going to draw what they do. I'm going to get my second pen. I love being able to draw. So if you've got like a double brood colony like that, so you've got 2 brood boxes— actually, well, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to draw in the middle there, I want to draw in there in a sec. So that's a brood box, And that's a brood box there, and you put a queen excluder there, and then you get your honey supers above. So that's kind of like standard configuration. So super, super, super. And what do the bees do? Yeah, they kind of fill— they fill this box up with bees, and then they fill that box up with bees and brood, and then they kind of go like this, don't they? They fill that box up with bees and brood, and that one there, and then that one there. Sorry, with honey once you get above the queen excluder. If you just have that same double brood configuration like that, so brood and brood, and then you just stack loads of additional boxes on there, and that, you know, they're not supers anymore if you're not putting a queen excluder on it. What the bees do, they, they continue with that fashion there, and then they do a really annoying thing. So if you imagine like these scribbles here is brood, they go like this. They don't do it all the time, but they do it a lot. They kind of like chimney through, which is really annoying. So all of that squiggle there is brood, and then like they'll just put the honey either side. So you don't get this really nice neat configuration where you just got a box of honey, a box of honey, a box of honey, box of brood. Everything is just, it's just all over the place. And you might get a bit of brood here, and then they might say, well, actually no, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna put some honey, I'm gonna put some honey down there as well. So we're just gonna have brood in the middle. Like that. We're just going to put honey here. So when it comes to extracting, it is a real pain, absolute nightmare. And then the biggest problem— I'll take that camera off now— the biggest problem though is that all of your brood boxes, all of your boxes, and all of your supers— they're not supers if they're not above a queen excluder— all of your boxes, your honey collection boxes, have now got brood in them. So the frames are not going to last anywhere near as long. Like brood frames will last maximum 3 years. You should be cycling out all of your brood frames, dark and manky old black brood frames, and putting nice new ones in. But super frames pretty much go on forever because they've not got cocoons going in them. It's just honey going in, and then you're uncapping it and they just fill it back up again. So it doesn't really matter how dark they are, and they don't go that dark very quickly at all because there's no, there's no brood going in them. So you can— they last forever. But if you've not put a queen excluder in and the bees are going up there and laying brood, then you're going to have wax moth all the way through all of your boxes. I just, I can't see any good reason for it. And that one there, queen excluders or honey excluders, I just, I know from my own personal experience and pretty much every other bee farmer in the whole of the UK's experience that it doesn't block honey. It just— don't buy into that one at all. It's not— you've not hit a nerve, not hit a nerve there at all, Neil. Right, Aiden says, I inspected my bees today and I had to split 2 colonies as they made 10 frames of brood. I came through winter with 2 colonies and now I have 8 colonies. Very good to hear, taking over the world. When would you say is the latest you can make a split if you want them to raise their own queen? Um, so, so definitely good to go now. It's a difficult one and it does change each year, like you're dependent on having sufficient amount of good drones, and I think in like an average year we'll stop rearing, kind of like grafting, early August. And then the ones that will go through after that, you do see a deterioration kind of, I think, after the 1st of August. And it's not, it's not like firm dates, that's just roughly like when we do ours in North Wales. The further south you go, the earlier that will be. The further north you are, it's different because the further north you go, the, the season's further pushed further to the right, but the weather's not as good. So you can't really, you can't really judge it that way. I would say you've got a good few weeks left Maybe four or five weeks left for them to raise their own queens, but I wouldn't I wouldn't push it any longer than that at all. Let's have some tea. Right, Bert says, "Hi Lawrence, found swarm cells in a hive earlier this week. Tried to split yesterday, couldn't find the queen. Set up traps and they moved in today. Added three frames from parent colony. Was this okay?" So you found swarm cells in a hive earlier this week. Tried to split yesterday, couldn't find the queen. Sounds like they swarmed. Set up traps and they moved in today. Added 3 frames from parent colony, was this okay? So you can do that. So it sounds like the swarm's moved in. Just in terms of like swarm etiquette, what you should always do with swarms is you should— you need to put them in a quarantine apiary. If you can't put them in a quarantine apiary, the one thing you definitely, definitely need to do is you need to not feed them immediately and you need to not give them any drawn comb. I know you've done that, so it's not saying what you've done is wrong, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't do it, and good advice for the future is to not do that. So just put swarms directly on just foundation, brand new frames, brand new boxes, just foundation, and let them do what swarms do best, which is draw out that comb, empty out their stomachs, which means that if they've got any bacteria like EFB bacteria in their stomachs, it purges them, and hopefully they're not bringing any EFB with them. Because if you've got a colony or you've got a wild swarm that comes in Like those bees that have swarmed, they come with full honey stomach. They've been gorging themselves on honey, and if that colony had EFB, they've got infected bacteria, EFB-infected bacteria in their stomach. And if you give them comb, they just empty their stomach into the comb as a store. But if you give them foundation, they use that as energy source to create wax to draw out the foundation. So it does, it purges them. Similarly, don't feed them, because if you feed them, Then they've got no requirement to purge their stomachs. So it's a good, good habit to get into, making sure you're starving them for at least 3 days. And you almost get to the point where they're like, they're shaking a bit, they're saying, seriously, we need some feed. And then you can feed them, and they'll recover perfectly from that. So keep an eye on them. And it might be, you know, like 2 and a half days before you need to feed them. But don't give them used equipment, don't give them drawn comb, don't feed them for 3 days. That's best tips for swarms. Uh, Ben Davis says he saw eggs, so should be good. Good stuff. Harry says, have you found this year is good for splits? Some people say that they haven't been able to split much this year. I've gone from 8 full hives to 45 colonies this year, your queens and my own bred. So I do think like split— splitting, they need to have the food coming in, they need to have the carbohydrates coming in, they need to have the protein coming in in the form of pollen. They need— you don't really need the weather, but you need the warmth So where you are, you're getting good warmth, getting good nighttime temperatures, but then the biggest one is like you hit the nail on the head, is genetics. Some bees build up to 6 frames and swarm, and then build up again to 6 frames and swarm. Buckfast bees, well-bred Buckfast bees don't, they just, they'll do triple brood without swarming, and then you've got so many frames of brood just to mess around with and make up splits. So it is all in the quality of the queens. Heaven Chip says, hi Lawrence, got my queen this afternoon, thanks. No problem. Ben Davis says, do you think the beekeeping season is nearly over with the upcoming weather forecast being so terrible? So it is difficult to tar the whole of the United Kingdom with the same brush, but for— I would say for North Wales, no. North Wales, the honey season really does go on late. So it's all right. My technique, you know, I'll go in middle of August, take off the honey crop, Apivar strips go in and I feed them. And so many people around here say, that's what you're doing? That's way too early. Like, there's still another 4, 5, 6 weeks of good incoming flow. There's the rest of the bramble, there's still some clover, there's Himalayan balsam coming out. Like, you, you're missing a lot of the flow. So in Wales, you could realistically, you could say like first or second week of September is when the flow generally stops dead. And it is like, what's it now? It's June. So you've got July, August, and a couple of weeks of September, so you've got 10 weeks. So if you've got a couple of supers on at the moment, you take a couple of supers off, feed the bees, keep them going, keep the numbers strong. I know the next couple of weeks look bad, but fast forward after that for like North Wales is pretty good. The further south you go, the earlier the season finishes, and it really does. Like, I see bee farmers— Chris Manson is a good one to follow on Twitter because he gives you— he doesn't fuss about or mess his words, mince his words, and it's true, come middle of July, There's just not that much left unless you're near arable crops, and a lot of the arable crops are not even looking particularly good this year either. I think there's some— it is— there's so much variation in the UK, so many pockets where it doesn't matter if it doesn't rain, and there's so many pockets where they get by with mediocre temperatures because of the, the flowers and the forage that they've got there. You don't need 25, 26 degrees to get mega flows. You're just kind of— as long as it's not raining. bees will just keep on going and keep on collecting small amounts of honey. So I don't think it's over. I think stick at it, and I think there'll definitely be another warm spell. I don't think it's going to be 13 degrees, 14 degrees for the rest of summer. We'll get another couple of weeks, and you never know, you might get a nice heather crop, heather season. Although I see some reports that some of the heather got frozen, so it's like dead, which Bit, bit rubbish. I reckon, I reckon the heather can be all right in North Wales this year, I have to say. Everything is going nuts, double broods are heaving and looking to swarm. How do we manage this without splitting? Demaray splits, definitely demaray splits. If they're not, if they've not created swarm cells yet, just demaray them. Stick both of the— and, and especially if you've not treated them with Apivar, just stick everything up at the top and put a new brood box at the bottom. I'm not going to draw it again, but it does work really, really well. Aidan says it was warm here, nice for inspecting bees, 21 degrees in West Sussex. Sounds very nice. Good evening, Walker Bee Ranch. I'm not sure what time it is over there. Good to see you. Uh, Harry says love the daughter queens off the stock and breeder queen, so calm and massive slabs of brood. I do like hives that have some honey though, they do gather the honey well. They do, very good for gathering the honey. Bert says following on from my swarm today, found queen in swarm and she slimmed right down. Foundation on one of Empty frames is folded over. I need to remove it. Worried queen might fly off. How long do I wait? Um, it's annoying when it folds over the foundation like that. I, I would— I wouldn't fix it. Just, just let the bees mess around and fix it, and you'll have to probably like chisel a bit out and, and sort it out. But as long as they've got some other good frames, I'll just leave them to it. Get the queen. The problem with swarms is they can abscond, so they can just get up and say No, happy. I'm not happy that I'm going. So if you go in and start interfering, you lose all of your bees. That's not a good place to be. Um, but if you, if you, if you just leave them to it, it's probably quite an easy fix to go in and fix folded over foundation at a later point. So that's what I would do. If you have not already done it, please do give this stream the thumbs up. I've been on for an hour and 5 minutes and I've only had 2 sips of tea, so I'm gonna have a sip of my tea now. Jessica Fairfax says, mid-90s in VA today. You'll have to— I'm rubbish with my American states, I'm not sure what that is. Thank goodness for ventilated suits. I do, I do like my ventilated suit when it gets warm. Frollies B says, Lawrence, I'm up to 9 hives this year so far, started with 3. I want the end— I want to end the year with 15 hives, nucs. When would you, when would you do your split so they can be ready for winter? So I would get in there and do them now. And the reason I say that is that it's going to have a smaller impact on any potential honey crop making small splits now than bigger splits later, but also like with the solstice, the amount of available brood is going to be going down, so it makes that a little bit more difficult. But also the biggest one is— my dog just sorting himself out over there— the biggest one is that wasps and robbing bees do become a much bigger problem later on in the year. So smaller splits now will build up to the point where they'll be able to defend themselves, and it makes it loads easier. Oh, I'm out of breath. Right, I often find a lot of attendant bees often die. Why do you think this is? So attendant bees, as in the bees that come in the cages with the queens, so they're just rejected by the colony. The colony's not interested in them at all. All they're interested in is the queen. So when you put the cages in the colony the attendant bees really haven't got anything to eat. I know they'll try and eat a bit of the fondant, but that fondant only sustains them so much. They need water to go with that fondant, and if the bees don't give them water, they just dehydrate. It's quite warm in a beehive, you know, it's like 36, 37 degrees, so they just dehydrate and die really quickly, whereas the queen is being fed, you know, she's being kept the right temperature and fed copious amounts of royal jelly, so she is very well. I would say neutralized, but not neutralized. She's getting— she is receiving good nutrition from the bees. That is it. There we go. I have some hives with 10 frames of brood and 2 supers full of honey. How many frames of SN4 super frames will that brood become? Um, so it— the, the, uh, average they say is 3 frames of brood per 1 frame of brood. I can't even talk. You get 3 frames of bees for 1 frame of brood. But I got corrected on this last time, and it was a very good challenge and a good correction as well. That is not taking into account the attrition rate in the colony. So the attrition rate in the colony is obviously the bees— bees die, don't they? Bees dying every day, hundreds if not thousands, or 1,000 bees dying each day. So the, the 1 frame of brood into 3 frames of bees doesn't take into account the attrition rate. So they were saying it's going to be closer to 1.5 to 2 frames of bees once you've taken into account the attrition rate. So I think a safe bet is to say 2 frames of bees per frame of brood once it's emerged roughly takes into account the attrition rate. So you can, you can kind of add them up there. In terms of SN4 super frames, I'm not sure how, what the, what the conversion would be. How many frames of SN4 super frames will that brood become? Yeah, it's, it's, it's probably not far off like 60% of the area a super frame versus a DN4 frame. So you could you could work that out roughly. So if you say if you've got 10 frames of brood, it's going to be 20 frames of national deep bees, and then if you just times that by, you know, you're going to want to times it by like 1.6, aren't you? So maybe, maybe like 30 frames, 30 frames of F10-4 or something like that. Hi Lawrence, your Italian queen has started laying after giving some syrup. Yes, I love it, love it when that happens. Glad, glad to hear she started laying, but keep an eye on it. Rowan Tree and Honey says, hey bud, made up 5 splits with black muns and honey queens laying great about 4 weeks ago, building up well. Is it best to build them up and put them into hives or overwinter in nucs? What's the best? So it's definitely in hives, I would say. The bigger the better. The bigger they go into winter, the bigger they come out of winter. That is like the most straightforward formula in the world. So, you know, the bigger they are in spring, the more honey you're going to get from your bees. So if they can cope with it, get them into the biggest hive possible. And if you want to overwinter on double brood, you can, but just bear in mind that whenever you overwinter in double brood, you get to March and they're in the same configuration. Go on, I'll draw it. I'm gonna get my pen out again. You overwinter in double brood, this is always what happens. Overwinter like that, you just have brood and brood, so brood and bees, brood and bees, go into winter, and then you just end up with empty. And they're just all upstairs. And then you just got these, and they go a bit moldy, the frames down there, a bit black, and get a bit condensation. You think, are they, are they ripe for using again? And they are, they're fine, but you do get a bit of mold on them. So I'm not— I don't like to overwinter in double brood for that reason, because if you just condense them right down into a single brood, you get a bit of bearding, but they do ultimately fit in there in the end. And then I can get my boxes, I can clean my boxes, and I can keep my frames in top condition. So that's, that's the way that I would do it. But definitely, if they say they want 6-frame nucs now, you know, or even like 3 or 4-frame nucs now, they are to be hived up, without a doubt. I see people overwinter on double extensions as well. I do quite a bit of that, double panes or like nuc extension boxes, and that's not so much for me as I think that's the ideal way to overwinter them. I do think the bees quite like that configuration, but the same thing does end up happening, and the bees will just end up in the top box at the end of the year. But the reason that I do that is I've got a lot of the extension boxes, and it's just easy when you're making up nucs to do, just to stick an extension box on it. It buys you time without having to go and get another full hive to go and put them in. So that's the reason, reason that I do that. Steve's Honeybee says, I think I damaged one of my queens when marking her last weekend. She's a 2023 queen. If she's damaged and not laying properly, I assume the hive will supersede her naturally. So generally, yeah, if you, if you splodge them too much, um, or you damage a leg or something like that, they will They will supersede her. But it's interesting because if she's still laying okay, they'll supersede her at the time that suits them the best. And you find a lot, a lot of natural supersedure does tend to happen kind of like towards the end of the season. They'll go for July, August, something like that, when they know the weather's still good. It's like their last chance of doing it. And then they'll take a punt on the queen. So they'll say, well, we supersede now. And you often get supersedures, you often get colonies going into winter with 2 queens. So that the original queen that might be damaged and then the supersedure queen, and they live like in tandem over winter, and then if one is superior, then it's in spring when the colony will turf out the other one. I've had that happen a good few times. You go in in spring and there's 2 queens there. Come on everyone, let's thumbs up the streams. It would be very much appreciated if you could. Thank you very much. Another problem I have is a newly hatched queen has started laying but very sparsely. Haven't been able to find her. One queen cell appeared which I knocked down. Could she be a bad queen? Sounds like it. If she started laying and then they're producing more queen cells, even one or two, probably a duff queen. She's got to find her though. Uh, Mr. Garth Nielsen says, hi Lawrence, charged queen cell in double brood, bottom of top brood frames is the supersedure. So It's— need to— people need to get it out of their minds, and you need to cleanse your minds of this certain types of cells are in certain locations. So generally, swarming on a double brood box will be on the bottom bar of the top frame. Generally, supersedure will generally be in the middle of, um, the frame of— middle of the frame of brood, but it's not Hard and fast rules at all. Like I had a colony this year where they superseded an artificially inseminated queen with three cells on the edge of the brood nest, on the bottom of the bar. Like it was the complete bottom of the bar. I draw it again. I love this. So it was this. This was the frame. Sort of frame like that. And it was the outer frame. Sorry, I just. drawn like a 6-year-old, but it was like that. I had one— looked like something else in it there— 1, 2, uh, 1, 2, 3. It genuinely was like that, and that was it. So I had a little cluster of 3, and I remember looking in saying, that's, that's not suprasagittal because there's 3 of them. And it's like, you know, it's not just one cell in the middle like that. We'll all have a good— we'll all have a good laugh at my drawings. I know, I know what they look like. So that's kind of classic suprasagittal, but that's— this is what I saw over here was 3 So it— my rule though is if it's 1, it's supersedure. Doesn't matter where it is, it's 1, it's supersedure. If it's just 2, probably still going to be supersedure. For me, before this year, I would have always said if it's 3 or more, it's swarming. And I had one where it was 3 and it was supersedure, but it was on the bottom of the frame. So normally though, if you're finding— if you've got like a double brood configuration I'll just take this, rewind this bit a bit. So if you've got your frame, you've got a frame like that, that's your top frame, and then you've got double brood, so you've got another frame underneath. You will generally find the swarm cells, if they're going to swarm, they're like there, anywhere along that bottom bar generally. But they could be up here, they could be down here, they could be in the middle, they can be anywhere. The only reason, the only way that you're going to be able to tell that is that due to the number, you're like, well, there's 1, 2, 3, there's 6 cells, right? They're swarming. So it is a difficult one, and the textbook answers are what generally happens, but for me, what's more important is the number of cells that are there. So you say charged queen cell in a double brood, bottom of the top brood frame, is this a supersedure? So you're talking about one that's like kind of here, single cell there, Supersedure cell, because there's just one cell in the colony. If there was 10 there, swarming. So whenever there is a single cell, does not matter where it is, it is a supersedure cell. That is— that's an easy way to remember it. There we go. I like drawing, I like drawing. Sorry if it looked a bit phallic. All right, where have we got to? Right, Mia again. I checked it last week and again today, only drone now. It's my Black Mountain Honey Jolanta queen in my national long hive. It was 20 frames of brood. Should I do a split and see if she's still, uh, doing only drones? So how old, how old is she? Can't be this year's Jolanta. Is it last year's Jolanta? A couple, couple of Jolantas go droney in a year. The thing is, it's Scotland, so you're never going to get like the best, the best mating conditions. Don't perceive that in any way that your Lancer queens aren't good. Your Lancer queens are brilliant queens. Got our first batch coming in this week, um, and in hot demand as well. Um, no, I wouldn't make a split, Mia. It sounds very much like that is a failing queen, so I would just do the, do the right thing and just kill the queen. You, you can, you can put too much effort into trying to prove something or trying to make something kind of like better and giving it a chance, and really it's just, you're just wasting time. So if it's— but do send me a picture, send me a picture of some of the frames and I'll take a look, and if it is— if it is a duff queen, I will let you know. And I assume it is going to be a duff queen, and I would say just kill her and put in a new one before she wrecks all of your frames and turns them all droney. Hi, is it too late to requeen? I think my hive only had one swarm and the queen failed. Lots of activity but no eggs. There's a queen cell in there but doesn't look great. So definitely not too late to requeen. Sounds very much like the colony has swarmed, like you said, and the queen's gone out and failed. But I would suspect that there's probably going to be a virgin in there unless you knocked down all of the queen cells bar one and then that one never emerged, then they would be hopelessly queenless. But that rarely is the case, so I would say there probably is a virgin in there. I know you've only got one colony, but if you had another colony, you could take a test frame of eggs, put the test frame of eggs in there, and if they drew out emergency cells, then you'd know that there was no queen in there. And if they didn't draw out emergency cells, then you would be able to safely say that Is a queen in there? My dog's, my dog's putting me off. He's walking around the room. Jazz, no, he's not having it. He's not having it at all. Oh, annoyed him there. Uh, Mark Sutherland says evening all. Hi Mark. Uh, Chunky says hi, L. Lawrence, my Black Mountain honey nuc is doing incredibly well. I love hearing from people with their nucs. I, I've had some incredible feedback this year from the nucs. I'm over the moon. I had a guy today, I went— I won't say his name, but he'd He'd rung me up before just saying basically his granddad or his partner's granddad was really into beekeeping. And if I'm butchering the story, sorry, a little bit of artistic license maybe, but this is the way that I understood it. His partner's granddad was really into beekeeping, basically too ill to do the beekeeping anymore. So this guy bought a nuc and he said, I'm going to document it because my granddad or my partner's granddad's really interested, but he can't do it, but he wants to, you know, he's going to be my mentor and I'm just going to show him the videos. and stuff. So I'm going to document kind of what's going on with your nuc. Like, are you happy with that? And I was like, yeah, yeah, sounds great. Let me know, let me know how it goes. And he, he rung me up yesterday or day before yesterday. I was out in the garden playing foot volleyball with my daughter, brilliant fun. And he said, oh yeah, I just, um, just wanted to give you some feedback on that nuc that we bought. And I'm always thinking, oh damn, what's, what's gone wrong? A natural pessimist. And he basically told me the story of what, what had happened. And he thought, you know, I'm going to get this nuc I'm going to build it up, get it to a point where it's good for winter, because it got delivered on the 19th of June. So it's only like 19th of June, yeah, Wednesday the 19th of June, so it's 11 days ago. So he did, he said, I've got the nuc, I put it into its colony, I checkerboarded it. And I'm thinking, oh, I wouldn't have checkerboarded it so early, but anyway, checkerboarded it. And he said he came back a week later and he started off with 3 frames of brood, And he said they have filled the entire brood box full, and he said he's got a queen excluder on there now and a super, and they're already upstairs drawing out the super. It was only 11 days ago he got the nuc. So I was, I was very happy, but there's been lots of instances like that where people have rung up or kind of messaged me or posted on social media, really, really happy with the nucs. So it's good. Richard does a brilliant job. Like, it is a combined effort for me and Richard, but he he does the majority of the work on the nucs, and he is very, very good at it. It is good. He's building a good reputation for himself as the breeder of prolific but incredibly calm bees. It's great. Lawrence, one of my hives has a yellow dot queen. Would you change her this year or next, or would you wait for her to burn out? I've got a couple of colonies that have still got yellow dot queens in there, so they're 2022 queens— no, 2021 queens, aren't they? Yellow dot, I always forget which one. Pretty sure the 2020, because it was red last year. Yeah, I think it's 2022 was the yellow one, wasn't it? Um, I, I would let, I would let them burn out as long as they're looking good, as long as they're doing the business, loads of frames of brood, good laying pattern. The worst thing that would happen if they're going to burn out is that they'll just supersede late on in the year, but I'd definitely replace it next year. So it's either do it at the end of this year or do it early next year. The thing is, do you want the whole— the destiny of your colony to ride on whether that queen is going to fail over winter? And she's yellow, so she could fail. That's it, she's getting on a bit. I've got my daughter screaming in the background there. Hope nobody heard that. How many beehives do you currently have? So it depends, you know, with the nucs and stuff, it's quite a lot. Between between me and Richard, like we're well over a thousand when you add in the nucs now because the nucs we sell a lot of nucs. Peter Goss says got hives with two brood boxes after the supers have been removed. Sorry, we do. So got hives with two brood boxes after the supers have been removed. Is it best to treat the whole brood boxes times two with Apivar first, then do splits after, or do splits then treatment? So if you're using Apivar, Apivar is The way Apivar works is you have— I'm not going to draw it— you have a strip, you know, you have a strip of Apivar that's coated in or like impregnated with amitraz, which is a really effective miticide. And the way that it works is that the bees walk over it with their little feet and they transfer it all over the brood. So the more condensed and the more compressed you can keep your bees— sorry, I just hit the mic— the more effective Apivar becomes. because you've got more little feet walking over stuff. So the bees walk over the Apivar, they put it over the brood, and then more bees walk over the brood that had the Apivar and they spread it all around. So you get this really good spread of this active, potent miticide, Amitraz. Whereas if you do it on double brood, you've got fewer bees per kind of volume of, of beehive, so you're not getting the spread. The same way. So I would always do the treatment with the highest density of bees, and it's exactly what I do. Like, we have kind of almost designed the method that we use to take advantage of that. So I'll have a colony— get my pen out, get my pen out— end of the season, this is typically what we end up with. Yeah, 4 supers-ish, something like that, single brood box. Queen excluder there. So what I do, I come along, I say, right, supers, you're gone, you're in the back of the truck, thanks very much. And then I take the queen excluder off as well, so I'm just left with a brood box. But I've got like 4 supers worth of bees and a brood box. I put my polyashworth feeder on and I put my Apivar strip in like that. Wait, Dog. And then I feed. So that's polyashworth feeder. So I put loads of feed in there. I've got one syrup. But what happens is you end up with all of these bees bearding out the front like that, and it— get it for like a day or two. So I make sure I'll always move that. For me, that's the 15th of August, around then. But I wouldn't— if it was 15th of August and it was just like thunderstorms, I wouldn't do this. You need to do it in good weather. So you compress down, you had, you started off with 4 supers of bees and they're generally like full of bees and a brood box, so you're starting off with that much bees and you're ending up putting them all in that box there and they do, there's not enough space for them, they beard outside the front like that. But it's interesting because I'd love to see some analysis into this. Is my— Pain, pain that dog. Analysis into this to see the age of the different bees here. So I think you get all of the good young bees there and all the older bees that are going to die there. And if they didn't set themselves up like that, I think they'd be a little bit stupid, because what happens is over the next few days you don't get that bearding anymore, and they somehow miraculously manage to fit inside the box. And you will get like a bit of compression. They'll work out that there is more space in that box than they initially thought there was, so you'll end up getting more bees in there. But I think you will, at that point in the year, just get some bees that die, the older bees that die, and they manage to all fit in the box. But going back to the point that I was making, once you get the bees in that such high density in that box and you've put your Apivar strip in there and you've put it in really early, 15th of August, really, really early, it means that you nip it in the bud and you get them to a point where They're— you're knocking down all of the varroa really, really early so that the bees, when they produce their winter bees, they're not heavily laden with viruses that are spread from varroa. And that is without a doubt the reason— sorry, I'm mumbling because my dog's running around, I'm gonna have to let him out— that is the reason that I get much better overwintering success than I would have done, say, kind of like 2 or 3 years ago. What are you doing? Right, let him out. One second. So sorry about that. You know, gotta let the dog outside. Probably wanted to go for a wee. Uh, right, next question. Chunky. He says, um, my Blackmanii honey nuc is doing well. I did a demerary 2 weeks ago and it seems successful. They are now storing honey in the top box. How do I get them to move it to a super? Is it possible? Thank you. I'm going to draw my picture again. This is a question that a lot of people ask. So you've got a brood box with all of your bees in, queen excluder, super, and all your supers above like that. So you say, let's say you had 3 supers. My dog is barking in the background. So you've done your Demeray split, your supers have stayed where they are, and you've taken that brood box round to the top. That's lived up there, and you've given it a new brood box there. Queen excluder remains in the same place, and you've taken the queen with a frame of brood, placed it down there with foundation. So that's a brilliant setup, but what does happen, like you've pointed out, that Soon doesn't be brood anymore. All of the brood emerges, the brood goes downstairs. That is honey and that is brood there. So the manipulation from this point to get it back, to get your honey out of it, is really, really simple. And this manipulation works even if that top box up there has previously been used with Apivar. Super, super simple method. So all you do is you leave your supers. The supers never move. Really good way for remembering that. In a demo. Super's in exactly the same position, but you take this honey box here and you just place the honey box down at the bottom. You can do this any point throughout the year, but it works best at the end. So you've got your brood box there, your honey box there. Try and not make it too ugly. And then all the bees do— so the queen excluder is still there. When you put the honey box there, you have to add more space. above, at least one super, preferably 2 supers at that point. And all the bees do is they say, right, brood, honey— no, sorry, Mr. Beekeeper, you have set us up completely wrong there. That's not right. We're going to take that honey, that honey's going and being stored up there, and we're going to put the brood at the bottom. And you end up basically with double brood, or you might end up with kind of like brood and then honey like that. But basically what you've done, even if that bottom box there was Apivar-tainted, you've taken it back out of there, you put it up to the top, and then you've got it back out. So what you can't do is you can't just— if that's an Apivar-tainted box, you can't just take the honey there and extract it because it's tainted. If it's not tainted, you can just extract out of that box there if you've got an extractor that takes that size of frame. So these are going to be shallow, and these are going to be likely deep. So you can just extract it if it's if it's the correct size frame, and you've got an extractor that takes those frames. But you can't if it's tainted. But that that manipulation there will get you back to exactly where you need to be. I really like having I really like having the pens right. My dogs are back outside again, just barking. It's a bit annoying. He we went we went out to Chester Zoo today, left him on his own, so he's not he's not had. a huge amount of walks, and he likes to be out just doing stuff generally. And now he's just outside barking, so I'll leave it, I'll leave it for a little bit. You know, he's a dog, he needs to do some dog stuff. I managed to kill my bees last year, food starvation I believe. I used icing sugar from Tesco, but the bees didn't touch it. Any tips? Really disappointed. So yeah, definitely not icing sugar, Abdul. It's not the best feed for bees. It's got a lot of like caking agents and stuff in it. What you want is just pure, straightforward, cheapest granulated sugar that you can get, and then just mix it up. 1:1 is fine, so 1 liter of cold water to 1 kilogram of sugar, and just like put it in a bottle, shake it all up, and then feed that— give that to the bees, and that will work very, very well. Terry Endersby says, hi Lawrence, my new queens arrived yesterday, looking great as always. One of my hives has queen cells, no eggs, and haven't seen the queen for 2 weeks. Do I need to get another I'm just gonna, just gonna sort out my dog. Jess, come on. On there, on there. Bye. He should be okay now that he's had a little bit of a wander outside. So one of my hives has queen cells, no eggs, and haven't seen the queen for 2 weeks. So yeah, I wouldn't say you need to get another queen yet, but I would keep an eye on it because it sounds like they've, they've swarmed and the queen maybe hasn't mated yet. But you can give it up to 3 weeks, I would say, from the date that they've swarmed to the point that you see eggs. Anything after that, I would get in there and kill the virgin. But I think you're, I think you're good to go. Hi Lawrence, I caught my hive going to swarm, which was a big colony, and put them in a 6-frame nuc. The nuc is full now. Would it be okay to put them in a national hive now? Many thanks, Jim. So yes, absolutely fine. But all I would say is my tips for swarms again are make sure the hive is clean. If it's not been cleaned previously, sterilize it by scorching it. Brand new frames, foundation, starve them for 3 days. But it sounds like you're probably past that point anyway. But also just be aware that swarms do like to abscond. So if you're doing any kind of like messing around with them, they, they can just go. So I'd get them— the, the best thing to attract a swarm— not, not attract a swarm, but to keep a swarm from absconding is brood. So once you get them to the point where the queen is laying eggs, once you get them to the point where there is nice slabs of brood, then they're likely to stay put. So once you get them to that point, transfer them over, shouldn't be any issues whatsoever. I've got a lot of questions still to get through, I'm gonna have to speed up and Jasper's gonna have to start behaving himself. DIY Pest Control says, I just transferred 2 nucs into hives and given them 1:1 feed, shall I remove it as I can see the bees are already bringing in stores? So yeah, I would say this point in the year, don't feed them unless they need kind of like emergency feeding. They're probably just getting enough from the natural forage. Hello Chrissie, how you doing? We've been speaking a lot this week. She says, just want to say a huge thank you to you for all your support this week with my swarming bees and my millions of questions. Never thought I would have to climb up a 30-foot tree to cut down thousands of bees. Well, you've done a brilliant job, so well done. You've got 2 colonies of bees now, which I know wasn't part of the plan. But glad I could help. Glad we got the bees off your neighbour's lawn as well. I was wondering, Edward, do you travel around with your bees or do they all stay put in one apiary throughout the season? Greetings from sunny Holland. I'll let you off with the Edward, loads of people at work call me Ed or Edward, but yeah, it's fine, I'm not even going to say it's wrong. No, so I do generally stay put, even with the heather apiary, it's a static heather apiary, so we're not geared up for for moving them around. And because we're in North Wales, there isn't really anything to move them to. The only thing that you would move them to up here is, is the heather, and then everything else is, it's just like there's loads of flowers and loads of trees everywhere, so there's nowhere to really go. So no, we keep them, keep them all on static apiaries. Uh, Harry says, my Ligustica queen from you reared loads of brood and I have made loads of nucs from her. Good to hear. Says, happy to share this tip with everyone. Having been painting poly with Vasp by Mason paint. We found topping those sample pots up with water to the top allows them to be sprayed using a 1.8mm gun. Very nice, good to hear. Did you find that you needed like extra coats watering it down? I do like Valspar paint, it's good. I've been, I've been doing another painting video this week using a completely different style of paint, not, not on poly, so don't worry, I'm not changing the paint that I'm using for poly. It is definitely Valspar, but I've got a cool, a cool video coming out and a slightly cool— not an idea, but just something a bit fun and a bit different. It's pretty good. Oh, so I've missed a question. I'll jump back to Steve in a sec. Ben Wong says, very excited about watching your special genetic queens in your new apiary. Me too. And then Steve's Honeybee says, when do you start to increase the days between your inspections? So as I said before, they've got the summer solstice is like the trigger for the queen to stop. 3 or 4 weeks later, you should start to see like A really gradual decline, and it is gradual. It doesn't start off being extreme, it's very gradual. So definitely not 6— definitely not before 6 weeks after the solstice. So I would say at that point, kind of like middle of July, back end of July, definitely once you get into August, no, I don't even bother any inspections at all. And once I do that manipulation where my bees are fed and they've got the Apivar strips in, I don't touch them again. the whole year, and I might lose one to swarming. I might have one that fails. You might, you might miss something like that. But the time taken to go and go through all those colonies— and you can, you know, you can damage queens when you're lifting out colonies when they're really like full of syrup like that and the frames are a bit kind of like mushed out. You can roll queens. So I think overall the, the laid-back approach at that point is probably safest for everyone. But middle of July, I would, I would just stop inspecting. And don't, don't come back and say, you said to stop inspecting in the middle of July, my bees swarmed. I'm talking about like a general numbers approach. If you've got 100 colonies, you might lose a couple of swarms out of 100 through not inspecting. So you could be in the 2%, but hopefully it won't happen to you. But that's just, that's just what I do with quite a lot of bees. Says, we have 25 hives, want to double for next year. Stick with Nat or go Langstroth? Harder to have different kit, but Lang has more suitable brood size plus growing market also cheaper, what would you do? It's an interesting one because I think anywhere else in the world it's just Langstroth is loads, loads better. But Langstroth in the UK is, is quite a lot more expensive, I think, still. I know, I know, like the Annell hives bring the price of it down a little bit, but the cost of frames for Langstroth is more expensive. The cost of foundation for Langstroth is more expensive. When you're selling nucs you know, you end up giving people a lot more bees for Langstroth. A 6-frame Langstroth nuc is probably 25%, 30% bigger than a 6-frame National nuc, just in terms of like the amount of bees, the amount of brood that you're giving them. So it is, it's different, difficult to weigh up the kind of economics of it. I think if you are able to make your own kit, Langstroth wins hands down because it's so much more simple, really simple to make your own kit. And if you've got access to cheap timber, then you can, you can really build up a good strong apiary, a very nice looking kit if you can make it all yourself. And it's really easy to make. What I definitely wouldn't do is do 50/50. I know, I know we do, we do do that, but to try and take advantage of the growing Langstroth market— and there is a growing Langstroth market which is definitely driven by the Flow Hive, nothing more. Driven by the Flow Hive, and a lot, a lot of people are doing that. You, you'll see the odd bee farmer moving over to Langstroth. I think a lot of bee farmers do just use Langstroth, but oh, it's a difficult one to do. What I would say is stick with one type, stick with one type, and maybe make, maybe like manage some nucs, have some Langstroth nucs, and just keep the Langstroth nucs to make up more Langstroth nucs to sell. If you just want to sell some Langstroth nucs, that'd be a good way to do it. That's probably what I would do. I definitely wouldn't have 25 National hives and 25 Langstroth hives. I'd pick a hive, pick a type for my production, and then work out how I'm gonna sell some nucs from it as well. Um, I could give you an awesome tip for making up Langstroth nucs, and I will give you an awesome tip because that's this— I told you that's our marketing strategy, it's not to hold information. What Richard has started doing with making up the Langstroth Nukes now, yeah, is he won't need to do it so much going forward because he's got a good stock of Langstroth nucs. But what he did is he would take a frame of national brood— I'm gonna go draw it again and it's brilliant. So you've got a Langstroth nuc like that, yeah. So imagine that's just the box, that's a Langstroth nuc. And if you took a national frame— national frame only kind of comes to like there, so you can't put A national frame into a Langstroth box because it doesn't fit, the, the top bars aren't long enough. So Richard came up with an ingenious solution, which is putting a nail or like a screw in there. So he just puts a screw in either side, 5 frames of Langstroth foundation, and then 1 frame of national brood. And it takes a little bit of time, but you're basically shaking like tons of bees. But it's better than just a shook swarm because you're giving them a frame of brood at the same time, so you're able to kind of like transfer over some of the, the brood that comes with it. And by hanging them on the screws like that, what it means is that when it's time to, you know, once the colony is nice and strong, you just take out— you just take it all out and then just fill it with like a Langstroth frame that will sit on the top bars like that. We don't hoard information here, you know. If we come up with a nice neat way of doing something, then we will share it with you. So there you go, that's how you can make Langstroth nucs but run them from national kit, and it works really well. Do you insulate your hives over winter? So no, we don't, because the hives are already like insulated because we use polyhives and we use polyashphalt feeders, which are very, very good at insulating. And the important thing with insulating I'm gonna draw, use my pen again. The important thing with insulating, this is a really, really good point, and this is where being able to draw is brilliant. Yeah, so this is the configuration that we have over winter. So you've got brood box like that, poly Ashworth feeder there. That's the brood box, and then the roof, it's kind of like a— it's not like a fully telescopic roof, but it kind of goes around like that. So the roof is made of polystyrene. The polyash forth feeder is made of polystyrene, and then it doesn't really matter what the walls of the brood box are made of because that's where you want the, um, the most insulation to be, up there. And the reason it doesn't matter is because we have like an open mesh floor. So that's mesh. So what happens is you have all of this moisture building up kind of in this box here, and because This bit up here is the most insulated. The least insulated bit is the walls here. So what happens is that condensation forms on the walls because it's the least insulated place, and then gravity just takes it downwards. So it tracks downwards, and then because you've got an open mesh floor, it just drops out the bottom. So you don't get pools of condensation because of the way that the colony is set up. But if you did it the wrong way, if you didn't have a poly Ashworth feeder and you had like an unventilated roof and then you had poly walls like that, what you would have is the complete opposite there and you'd have a really bad situation for your bees. And you might not even think about how that sets up. So say that's just, you've not got poly Ashworth feeder and that's just like a standard roof and then you've got your brood box like that, but you've got poly brood box, so that's the most insulated part. And then up here's not insulated, regardless of whether you've got an open mesh floor or not. You might not have an open mesh floor. The condensation is still forming on there, but these bits are insulated. So it says, right, well, that's the least insulated bit, so I'm going to form condensation up here. And this is where your bees are, so it forms up there and it just drips on the bees. And the bees are like, great, nice one, call yourself a beekeeper. So don't set it up like that. So insulation is important, but it's much more important to get the insulation in the right place, which is directly above where the bees are. Think about it like a house. Where's all the insulation? The insulation is in the roof. So there we go. I am absolutely loving being able to draw stuff. Sorry if everyone else is finding it rather crude. Andrew Rogers says, you've been doing a lot of checkerboarding recently. Is this something you can still do with drawn frames, say if the bees are ignoring the outer frames if drawn? So yeah, definitely get it, get it into the middle. It might look on those checkerboarding videos that I'm like forcing the bees beyond their, like, what they could naturally do, and there is a natural limit to what the bees can do, and the bees will tell you and they will show you that. So I always start with a checkerboard and start off slow, start off, and a drawn frame is even better, like, in terms of a gradual introduction into that. Start off with one drawn frame empty and put it into the middle, See if the queen lays it up with eggs. If she does, great, and then maybe start off with one frame of foundation, put it in between 2 frames of brood, go back a couple of days later, and if they've started drawing that out, say, right, that's great, they're taking this on board, they're doing it. If they do nothing, then don't add more frames in there. Take that as a no, you're pushing that colony too far, there's not enough warmth, and that's the big thing that's going to stop them there. There's not enough warmth to get enough bees on there to draw out the Properly. It's as simple as that. Don't be afraid, kind of like tail between your legs, to say, "I shouldn't have done that," and take the frame back out and put it to the edge and condense the brood back down again. You can you can get that wrong. I got asked this the other day, and it is it's really really easy to show you this now. Checkerboarding is so simple. So if you have frames like that, these are frames of brood. And that's naturally how the bees will— the bees will kind of be set like that. And on the outer side here, you'll just have frames of foundation, maybe. So if these are kind of brood, brood, brood, brood, and then if you've just got lines for foundation, say, so foundation, foundation, foundation, foundation, all checkerboarding is, is you're just taking out a frame of brood Replacing it with a frame foundation, and you like you replace the frame of brood to the outer edge like that. So that's that's all the setup is you're just kind of moving stuff around. Do it as much as the colony can cope with is is my advice, and it does it gets them going turbocharges them. Have some water. Sitka Tree Services says pleasure to watch the live stream. Thanks, my pleasure. Hi Lawrence, love your live streams. As a new keeper, I have spent today trying to capture my first swarm that was 8 to 10 meters in height in an ash tree. After getting most of them, they are now bearding. So, so that's good. A bit like bearding just means they've probably not got quite enough space in the box, so you could add, you could add more space in there. But glad, glad you got them. You said, what would you do if that— if you've got a swarm and you've taken a swarm and put it in a box and they're bearding? You need to work out whether they are properly bearding, as in all of the bees are on the outside, or they're filling the box and there's not enough space in the box and there's a bit of bearding coming out. One of the tips that I would give, and this is probably what it is, is that swarms absolutely hate open mesh floors, can't stand them, and they will not stay in a hive that has an open mesh floor until they get brood in there. So if there's an open mesh floor, Just close it off. What they could also be doing is that it could be like, like quite, quite warm, so they'd just be out and then they'll go back in when it gets a little bit colder. But there's a few, there's a few different variations. But I would, I would check to see if the open mesh floor is there. I would close it up and potentially add another brood box on as well to make sure they've got enough space. And if you can get them all in there, don't be afraid to like close them in there for 24 hours. Give them a spray with some water first to make sure they're not too hot. you can, you can melt a swarm quite quickly. Said my Black Mountain Honey Nuc did a full super last week and checked today and another full cap super, 3rd one fitted. Wow, excellent, love it. Another good news story, good to hear. I've always thought a demerite are 2 supers. All of your picks today have 3. Any reason why? So a demerite is a minimum of 2 supers for me anyway. I just— minimum of 2 supers, but it could be 3, it could be 4, it could be 6, it could be, it could be any number. And you can do it on any number of supers. There's no, there's no upper limit really to the number of supers that you can use, but 2 for me is the minimum because I like that separation between the upstairs brood and the downstairs brood with the downstairs queen. Hi Lawrence, do you ever have any issues with honey fermenting? I had a large portion of last year's spring honey measuring 17.8% fermenting in buckets. That is very, very strange. The, the only time I've ever had an issue with it fermenting at such low water content is if you leave like a huge amount of air in the buckets and you're keeping them at like quite a warm temperature. But if you've not got any air in the buckets and you're keeping the honey stored in a warm temperature and it's like brand new clean buckets, that is very, very strange. I've not, I've not seen fermentation kind of that, that low before. That is, that is odd because that is, that is pretty low. Hmm, so you say, do you have any advice to prevent fermentation and any suggestions on what to do with fermented honey, please? So fermented honey, there's not a huge amount that you can do with it. I wouldn't be feeding it back to bees. Make some mead because it's kind of like partially fermented anyway. Mead's probably going to be the way to go with it. Hopefully it's not loads and loads, but mead's nice. Any advice to prevent fermentation? A really, really good tip for honey supers and for getting them down. How did I do it before? I'm just trying to think how I did it because I had a problem with some honey that was high moisture content and I used the dehumidifier, but I'm just trying to think how I got it to the point where— I'm pretty sure what I did was stacked the supers up in the room and just run the dehumidifier in the room and just kept on taking out all the moisture. But I'm just trying to think, was that what I did? Because I'm thinking if it's not uncapped it wouldn't be taking out the moisture. But I'm pretty sure that is all that I did. It's just I've got these like metal stainless steel trays that I sit all of the honey on in the honey extraction room. So I just stacked them on, turned them at 45-degree angles all the way up to the ceiling, and just left them in there for a couple of days with the dehumidifier on. And it got it really, really low. Like, it got it down to like 16, 15, 16%, which is like about as low as you can possibly get honey. So that does work. But if you, if for me, if I saw a bucket of honey at 17.8%, I'd be thinking absolutely fine. If a queen has— a queen with good genetics does not lay lots of brood and just likely poorly mated, is it okay to raise her eggs into queens in the hope that they mate well and carry on her good traits? So, so yes, theoretically, but it also does come down to like the quality of the eggs. I'm not sure who it was who did the study on this, but Richard is really, really on this. And talks a lot about the size of the eggs and how well kind of the, the queen, the nutrition that the queen is getting corresponds to the size and the quality of the eggs that she's laying. So if you've got a queen with good genetics, the genetics is only kind of like part of it. If she's not laying lots of brood, poorly mated, are the bees keeping her well fed? Is she in tip-top condition? I would say probably not, but give it a go, you never know, might be okay. By the way, your new camera and pics are brilliant. Excellent, I'm glad to hear that, thanks Ben. I wasn't sure whether to crack out the drawing board, whether it would like take the flow of answering away, but it's been really, really helpful tonight, so I'm hoping people like that. So Ben Wong says, do you double brood over winter? I thought you tried to overwinter on a single brood. So I try and overwinter on a single brood. If they're in double brood configuration as the result of a demerale late on, I'll leave them like that and then I'll take it off later on in the year. But if I can, I'll condense them down to double brood before kind of September, October. Thanks, Laurence, great explanation regarding the demerale, and the whiteboard makes it so much clearer. Excellent, nice. Uh, sorry, mate. I can't say it. Shores, Falls, I don't know. Verbeek says, I, I didn't mean to be offensive there, so I genuinely don't know how to pronounce your first name there, so I do apologize. Your question is, how is your experience with the Apisolis? Do the bees get calmer? So experience with the Apisolis is it works. It does calm the bees down a little bit, but trying it on like a big, strong, aggressive, angry colony, I always go back to like the Big Smoker because I don't think it has quite as much oomph to get really angry bees calmed right down. But I do like it, I do, it has its place. I don't think the UK is the place for it, but across the world it definitely has its own place. Denby Honey said, I've had a great season so far, but we have expanded in hives, way too many. Please can you give some advice about reuniting colonies? So reuniting colonies is a completely underused technique to manage colony numbers. You don't see nowhere near enough people combining colonies, and it's a, it's a great way. The best thing for me about combining colonies is you get like great natural selection. Because say you've got 10 colonies in your apiary and you want to go into winter with 6, choose, kill, kill the worst 4 queens. Simple as that. Go around, say, right, sorry, you're in the bottom 4 and you're getting killed. And then you've naturally selected the best 6. So then next year when you make splits, you split from the best 6. So I really like it, and the only downside with splitting— sorry, combining colonies is that it comes with risk that, you know, you've got 2 colonies, you kill one of the queens, you combine them together, and you've got a risk that the dead queen colony kills the queen from the good colony. So that's the only risk that comes with it, but it is, it's a pretty simple technique. I did a video on it, like newspaper combine. That's the one that I would be going with. Newspaper combine is definitely the easiest way of doing But the the failsafe way of doing it. Let's get the pad. Let's get the pad out. Let's get the pad out. Right, so you've got two colonies of bees like that. Let's say they've not got any supers on, so just brood and brood like that. So you kill the queen over on this one here. So now she's not got a queen. So that's brood. That's queenless. And then this one has got the queen. So what what I would do here? So this is the one that you want to keep. I'd take the queen out. Yeah, get your queen, put it in a cage somewhere, and then just queen excluder like that and newspaper, and then just put that box on top. Let them get to know each other, but then put the cage back in the same box that it was in, but in the cage. Queen doesn't mind being in the cage for a few weeks if needs be. But it's only going to take them 3 or 4 days to merge successfully there. And then once they've merged, and you can see that all the— the way that you know is that come the entrance down here, they start spitting out bits of newspaper. You know, you know it's working because all the newspaper's coming out. So kind of like, I don't know, a week after you see all the bits of newspaper coming out, just pop the tabs on the fondant cage for the queen and just let them eat back through. And you know it's going to work. And like, they're almost hopefully sequinas again if you leave it over 8 days. and because you put the queen back in there, they're not going to start drawing emergency cells. So you're kind of reintroducing your queen back in, but you're just caging your queen for that really like dangerous bit, that first few hours of when you put them back together, the first few bees that break through the loose paper seal, and then that's pretty much it. And you might, you might get a few bees flying back to kind of the original spot there, but I would just rearrange your apiary to try and collect as many of the straggler bees as you possibly can. They'll work it out, they'll just find somewhere to go in. But definitely condensing them down is a good, good way of doing it. And you end up with— I think if you've got 10 colonies going into winter and you take 10 colonies into winter, you might lose like 1 or 2 colonies. But if you condense them— I've found this— if you condense them down to 6, probably get 6 through because you've chosen the best queens and you've made them like super, super big and strong to get through winter. So you end up with a much better overwintering success rate Blue Lab says, hi Lauren, sat in a pub in Calgary, Canada watching you with a nice beer. Just had a call from home telling me one of my hives swarmed today. Brilliant. It's like good news followed by bad news. I'm hoping, I'm hoping it's nice in Canada. Is it too late to demerare? Definitely not. No, demerare would work really well now. I think it's a great shout, especially with your scenario before. I would get, get going with the demerares. Really good. You'll love the demerare. If you time the demeray with good flows, you just get so much honey. It really is good. Cub Rider says the best thing about beekeeping is everyone wants to help and share more than any other hobby. It's very good, isn't it? Um, Steve Andrew is watching on Facebook, says hungry for your business to succeed means commitment, commitment, commitment. Certainly does. Got a lot of that. Prediction for the England match tomorrow? Probably not going to score. Rubbish, isn't it? Out of the, out of the cricket as well. Should be going. Uh, Mr. Garth Nielsen says, I can confirm that Lawrence is brilliant to his customers and will provide advice. Thank you very much. Daryl Clement says, when will we see a honey room tour? Would love a review of that 30-frame extractor you bought. Have you used it yet? So no, I've not, I've not used it yet. Um, but I will, I will be doing that this, this year. We'll get some honey in there. There is some honey on some frames, and I'll be using my I got a new stainless steel hydro press for heather honey from Vigo as well, which is like my baby. And then didn't get any honey, didn't get any heather honey last year, so I didn't get to use it. Hollow Oak Stores joined as a channel member again. Thank you very much, Joshua. Joshua's gonna love it. I was talking about Joshua before. I won't tell you which bit. Hi, Josh. Bob Bob says, I bought a queen not from you. I went— it went in a split that was huge in a 6-frame nuc. Um, a swarm I had rehomed went into the split hive. It was giant. Very nice. Do you think instead of adding another brood box after the first demerare, could you swap the old brood frames at the top, which most likely would be full of honey, with brood frames from the bottom brood box? I've got to read it again, so do you— I can do it on there. Do you think instead of adding another brood box after the first demerare, you could swap the old brood frames at the top, which would most likely be full of honey, with brood frames from the bottom brood box. So, so you, you could, but I'm not sure what the, what the game would be for doing it. I, I see what you mean in terms of getting the honey and the brood in the right place. Yeah, you could. It might— it confused me, might confuse them. You need your own drawing board to show me exactly what you mean next time, but I think, I think I get what you mean. So you're saying, thinking, is the hive will move the honey upwards and the queen will have space to lay? Hopefully not a silly question. It's never, never a silly question. I think I love thinking outside the box— horrible term, but relevant to beehive boxes. I'm going to think, I'm going to think about that. We can maybe try that, try that on a colony and see what happens. It could be good. Nice idea. Neil has gifted another Black Mountain Honey membership. Excellent! Who got that? Was it, was it Hollow Oak Stores? I don't, I don't get to see this because I'm on the StreamYard platform. Someone will have to write who, who got that one, but that was very kind. Nice of you to gift another one, Neil. Thank you very much. JK Photography channel member says, hi Lawrence, situation is queenless hive, 3-week waiting for queen. Bees have totally filled both brood boxes with honey due to a lack of queen, I think. How do I encourage the bees to move the nectar up? So just put loads of space above them and get the queen laying, and they will do it for you. They'll definitely do it for you because bees aren't stupid. They want the queen to be able to lay as many eggs as the queen needs to be able to lay, but Um, when she's not laying, they're just lazy. They're just like, yeah, we get into the hive, just stick, stick the nectar wherever is the closest. And they do that naturally anyway. They will put it in the brood box and then move it up overnight because they clear it out for the queen to lay. If the queen's not laying, they won't do it. So a laying queen will fix your problem there. Oh, and it went to, it went to JK Photography, a very, a very good person for it to go to. Really nice. Thanks, Neil. Thanks, JK. It's a pleasure. I love it. Brilliant. Love that. Do you send nucs to Scotland? We do indeed, we do. We send them all across mainland UK. Regarding finding virgin queens that you need to kill, just shake them all through a queen excluder? Yes, virgin queens are flighty, so not a foolproof method. I personally just look for fast movement on the frames. Found 2 today. I think, yeah, fast movement on the frames is the one for me. You do, you do get the hang of it, like You get your knack in. I just— finding virgins, easiest one, don't let them hatch. Second one is just make sure that they're only hatching into like small nucs. They're in little 6-frame nucs, they're pretty easy to find. The other one, the other good, like the absolute last method that I will use is just pick up the colony, or if it's in a nuc, pick up the colony, pick up the nuc, and just go and take it 10 meters away. and then set up a new hive or a new nuc on the stand with a queen excluder over the entrance and just shake all the bees out into the air. The virgin can't get back in. That works really well as well, but it's like carnage and you don't really want to be shaking your bees everywhere, but that does work. One blogger added to the queen excluders are honey excluders. Apparently queens will not go above a full honey Yeah, that's just not true. That is just not true at all. Look at, look at what the bees did in my checkerboarded colony. They had colonies that were fully just like a full honey super, and there's just a queen going up and just scattering brood at the top. So it's not to say that it's not always not true. And this is the thing with— this is the thing with beekeeping, and this is the thing with like the varroa treatment one's a big one— that people feel vindicated in their decision to do something and they feel like, well, I did this and this happened, so therefore what I did must be right. And this is what happens with varroa. People say, I'm not going to treat my colony for varroa because I want natural selection to take place. So they don't treat their colony for varroa and the bees don't die, and they say, that's it, I got, I got treatment-free bees, absolutely fine, I've picked some good stock here. And then the next year they don't treat and the bees don't die. And they're like, brilliant, this is great, absolutely fascinating. And then the third year, all their bees are dead and they wonder why. And they, they say it's because there was too much moisture in the hive. You know, there's always— it's never, it's never varroa, it's always some other reason why all of their bees died at once. And it's, it's not, it's varroa. And that's not to say that you won't get pockets of varroa-resistant bees But just on like the wider scale. Evolution doesn't happen that fast. It would be nice if it did. Bob Bob says, I put that one, done that one already. John Hayes says, what course did you do about disease prevention identification? So it's a bee farmer's course called Disease Accreditation Scheme for Honeybees. Good course, but you need to be a bee farmer. Ben Davis says, I have 2 supers of honey and the third is getting there. How much more honey crop do you think I could get by the end of the season? So that's $64,000 question, isn't it? If it carries on raining, none. You'll go backwards. If it carries on with beautiful sunshine, you could have 6 supers. So anywhere in between there. I'd like to think that you could get it in an average year like double what you've got. Uh, Late Night Knit says, I watch a quilt program on Twitch and the woman on it loves the functionality. So yeah, I, I do. I running it just on StreamYard, so I'm kind of like streaming to Twitch. First ever stream on Twitch. So if you're watching on Twitch, it's amazing. I don't think anyone is. No one's commenting on Twitch because they're all busy either watching a quilt program or playing World of Warcraft. But I just thought, you know, there might be some random people out there who are interested in talking about bees. And I think when I do my live apiary inspections, that could be pretty cool. And I promise you the audio is going to be good, and I promise you the visuals are going to be good as well. Uh, Ben Wong says, why haven't you been wearing your ventilated suit much in your recent videos? So A, it's not been very hot, but B, and more like importantly, it's messing up the exposure in my videos because I, because I film myself. I can't be the other side of the camera like messing around with white balance and messing around with exposure and making sure that like every cut that I get is correctly exposed. And the white suit where the whole suit is white the camera doesn't know what's going on, so it blows everything out. So you end up— you look on some of the videos, you'll see it where like everything's really bright and then it goes like really dark, and it's just that the camera doesn't know what's going on. So the normal like sage bee suit, I don't have the same problem with at all. And because it's not hot, I've just not been using it. But it was simple as that. Oh, good question. Where would you say is the best part of the country to keep bees? So couldn't get a more objective question or answer, like whatever I say is going to be wrong, um, but I— do you know where I think, for me personally, for me, where I think the best place would be is like in the middle of nowhere up in Scotland. Sorry everyone else, but you know where it's just heather and like you— I look at Murray McGregor's Twitter feed and some of his locations are are absolutely stunning. And I sent some bees up to Colin at Foxes Afloat, got a YouTube channel. They go— they used to have like a narrowboat. They've got like 150,000 subscribers, and he keeps bees now, does some cool things with bees. But we sent him up 12 nucs, and his— he's got like, I think it's called a Highland— I want to call it a Highland crotch. It's not a Highland crotch, is it? What's it called? Someone will put it in the thing. It's a Highland something, not crotch. He'll laugh if he heard call it a Highland crotch. But, um, but up there it was beautiful as well. So you've got like a nice loch and then it's just like covered in heather, basically somewhere where there isn't anyone, any people. And it's not that I don't like people, but I just like quite— live quite a fast-paced— I don't live— I don't live a fast-paced life, I'm lying. I drink tea and I sit at home in front of a computer, but it's quite intense. So like being outside and just like being in nature, I really enjoy. Wales is brilliant for honey because you get something that not many other places in the UK offer, which is just such wild nature and so many different plants. But you don't get much honey. So Wales is terrible for honey. You don't get good honey crops in Wales. Down south where you have like arable crops and you can move them around and you can go oilseed rape, field beans, kind of borage, and then take them up to the heather somewhere. That's where you're going to get bumper crops, but that does— that knackers the bees as well. So it is— what part of the country is best for bees is a difficult question, because do you want to get the best honey, or do you want to get the most honey, or do you want kind of just somewhere to be peaceful and nice and just be out in the open? So, and I think that is what's beautiful about beekeeping. That's what makes beekeeping so nice, is that Every different apiary is different. So another guy messaging me about a nuc that I sent him, and he's been sending me some really cool videos. I've been loving it. But he's on like a rooftop in Bristol. So that's as much information as not going to be. There'll be a lot of rooftops in Bristol. Um, but he's been sending me some pictures of like the background and up in the city and like the river. And I was like, that's a really cool apiary. Like, that is a cool apiary. It's not Highlands of Scotland, but it's something you know, it's something different. And if you're in a city and then you've got like a lovely little tranquil place on a rooftop, that's pretty cool as well. So I like all apiaries. There you go, that's my, that's my answer. Just wanted to shout out Laurence on amazing customer service. 6 Queens in April have been absolutely great after service. Thank you so much, 100% recommend. Thank you very much, Ben, kind of you to say. Um, my screen just gone off there. Richard R. Bryner says honey equals money. Yeah, very true. John Hayes, so introduced caged queen, the bees propolised every hole in the cage, attendants and queen still fine, broke tab and cleaned holes, but is that normal? It's weird when they do that. I, I always take propolised cages as a sign that they really don't like the queen and they're trying to kill her, but they can't be that clever, can they? They can't be like, if we propolise these holes, she's not going to be able to breathe. So But I've never found them doing it on a straightforward introduction. It is a weird one. I think it's just like ultra bees that really like to propolize stuff, so maybe it is just that, I don't know. But it's— whenever I see it, I always clean the holes off and then keep an eye on the colony. Are you going to do more videos with Just Alex soon? So I'd like to do more videos with Alex, but you know, he's a YouTube superstar. doesn't want to spend loads of time doing bees with me, but we might do another video next year. We will see. What is an extension box? Basically just another box to put on top of your bees. So if you've got a nuc, it's just another box that goes on top. As simple as that. Well, I'm gonna have a sip of my tea. It's still roasting hot. So I've been doing this stream non-stop for 2 hours and 7 minutes, and I made my tea maybe like 15-20 minutes before. And it's like still burning my lips, so I'm going to take my lid off because it's a bit hot. That tea bag's still in and brewing for 2 hours, but it is a Pukka— where are we going to get the screen? There you go. It is a Pukka Relax tea. It's nice. I like my herbal teas, keeps me hydrated. Right, uh, David McDowell says, how long will sugar syrup keep in a sealed container? So not that long. 1 to 1. like a few days if you're lucky. 2:1, a bit longer. But even a sealed container, it's— there'll be a little bit of air in there and there will be like mold spores in there anyway. Um, that if you're going to keep, just add a bit of Hyvalife. Add a bit of Hyvalife and it will last for weeks and weeks and weeks. It might— if you've got 2:1 and you add Hyvalife to it, it might even last over winter. But I wouldn't be I wouldn't be making up syrup to keep it any length of time. Interestingly though, invert just basically lasts forever, and that's why I like using invert now, because it's always just readily at hand for emergency situations when I need it. Right, let's go drink some more tea. Now Peter says, how do you store your spare brood boxes and brood frames over winter to prevent wax moth damage? So I used to do something different, but you know what I do now? I burn them all at the end of the year. Or I send them down to Richard, and Richard dips them in caustic soda and then reuses the frames. So I don't store any of them, and we're lucky in the sense that we get a huge churn of brood frames. So we— like, next year's nucs that are going out, or every single one of the frames in next year's nucs that are going out, was made this year. So none of them are ever going to be older than 12 months again. But, um, If you are looking to keep brood frames, the best way of doing it is trying to find somewhere where you get regular frosts. Best way of doing it. Definitely going to get my little drawer out again, do this. The way that I like to do it was you start off with like a sealed crown board at the bottom like this, and then you put your box with all of your frames in, and then You, depending on how many you want to do, you need to put something in between here. So you could use like a piece of Correx, something like that. Piece of Correx would be good. Some people use like a piece of plastic, some like plasticky stuff. You basically need some something to block the boxes. The idea behind that is that if one of the boxes gets wax moth, you don't want it spread into the next box. So Correx works really well, and Correx is pretty cheap. So then you get your next box over like that. Frames in it, piece of Correx. And I like to go in stacks of 4 because I can lift stacks of 4 just about, but do however many you can lift like that. And then another crown board on the top. And then you get a big ratchet strap and you just ratchet it all up together really like super, super, super, super tight, as tight as you can possibly get it. And then— that's supposed to be an eye— check for holes. Make sure there's no holes, any holes whatsoever. And if there's a hole, just get a bit of tape, stick a bit of tape over it. And that's a pretty good way of doing it. And then, and then get those and then store them outside somewhere undercover. So you don't want them getting wet, but you want them outside so that if you do get a frost, it will kill all of the stages of wax moth, so the larvae and the eggs and everything. And then that way you will You might get the odd box that's completely infested with wax moth, but they can't travel to any of the other ones. But if you get like a good early frost, you shouldn't get any issues with that whatsoever. It's a shame that they stopped the, the treatments. So there was a Certan B402 that was a treatment that you could just spray on the frames, and then it had like spores in it that killed the wax moth stages. And that was brilliant, that worked really, really well. There is like an unlicensed version of that that you're allowed to use, and I don't, I don't use it because you'll get in loads of trouble with the VMD if you do use that. But some people do use that. I won't— I'm not going to give the name of it away because that would be irresponsible, but I genuinely don't use that and I wouldn't recommend anyone using it. If you get your honey sampled by the VMD, that would, that will show up in that and you'll be in loads of trouble. So don't do that. Hi Adam, he says, good evening. When you double box the pain nucs, do you leave the feeder in the bottom box or move it Up, so I generally leave it in the bottom because that's where they know it is. But you could move it up. I've been finding at the moment it's a bit annoying it being there in the Payne's Langstroth one, so I'm tempted just to take it out once once I get them to the point where I know they're not going to need any more feeding, which this this year doesn't seem like ever. Robert Orr, channel member, says, "Hi Lawrence, my Black Mountain Honey Buckfast F1 is laying like bonkers. Thank you. Considering." 2-box configuration for winter, 8 frames in each brood box using polystyrene to insulate thaws. So I think if you've got 8 frames in each brood box, I think double brood box over winter is sensible for our queens. I think that'll work really well. And then like I said, insulate the top as much as you possibly can. Um, David McDowell says, you're going to get the new hive tool from Hive Alive? No excuses for losing it now with that great color scheme. Don't think it's available to the UK yet. Richard Nowell's got his already. Yeah, I, I'm a big guy that Richard Nowell got his before mine. You know, they did, they did send me a massive big tub of Hive Alive earlier on this year, but I'm a big guy, then I've got a t-shirt and I've got a hive tool, so I might have to, might have to get myself one. They did look nice, they do look nice, the hive tools, I have to say. Hello, how you doing? There's a question as well. I'd be interested to hear your views on Buckfast versus Yolanta queens. What are the pros and cons of each? So it's definitely worth saying at the beginning, Yolanta queens isn't like a species of bee, isn't a type of bee. A Yolanta queen is just queens that have been reared by Jolanta. Simple as that. They, they rear a lot of Buckfast queens, so there's a lot of Buckfast Jolanta queens out there. So it's Buckfast versus Buckfast in that case. They used to— their split used to be, they said, 65% Carnica, so like Carniolans, 30% Buckfast, 5% AMM. So that's what they said the mix was, and that's not like 1B with the split of those genetics. That is, out of 100 queens, we do like 65 Carniolans, 30 Buckfast, and 5 AMM. That's our split. And then they phased out the AMMs, so they just stopped doing them. And, and the reason they stopped doing it was, was simple. They just weren't happy with the quality they were getting. They were selecting from hundreds and hundreds of colonies, and they were saying, just not for us. It's not— there's a market for this, and we're trying to exploit the market because people say we want locally bred AMM queens, but they weren't happy to put their name to the queens because of temperament, chalk brood, swarminess, all of the things that they weren't happy with. And it's not to say that that's just AMM queens that are having those traits, but what they were working on, that was the issues they were finding. So now it's like 65% Carniolan, 35% Buckfast, if my maths is right. And so, so the question more is, do the comparison between Buckfast queens and Carniolan queens, and they're different, you know. Carniolan queens are a race, like a species of bee, so they're Apis mellifera carniolan— no, carnica. I always get that wrong. Apis mellifera carnica. So it's like, it's, it's its own species of bee, the same way that AMM is its own species of bee, species of bee, whereas Buckfast is a hybrid. Hybridized Bee, which is a cross between AMM and— so Apis mellifera mellifera and Apis mellifera ligustica, with various different connotations and mixtures and lines going to keep it going, keeping it true to the Buckfast name. Uh, in terms of like characteristics of each, the biggest difference I would say, you can get, you can get really, really calm Carniolan queens, you get really, really calm fast greens. The biggest difference I would say though is in terms of the size of the overwintering cluster. So Buckfast is typically a very, very strong overwintering cluster, needs to be fed well going through the winter and would consume quite a lot of stores going through the winter, whereas the Carniolan doesn't overwinter in anywhere near as big a cluster. The buildup of the Buckfast is far greater than the buildup of the carniolan for spring in terms of early spring buildup. So you've got— draw a graph in it, I love a graph. Gonna get butchered on this, probably not right. But in terms of spring buildup, let's have, let's have pink is the buckfast. So the buckfast is kind of like this, builds up like really, really strong and then maybe like tapers off. That's the buckfast. And then the carniolan it kind of like builds up slower, but then you get this massive peak. So I think like at the peak of when the bees need to be at their peak, I don't think there's a huge amount of difference between the two. But out of the starting gates early on in the spring, the Buckfast definitely go a lot quicker. The other one is the Carniolans are way more likely to swarm. A lot of people love Carniolan bees, and they say, I love everything about them, I love The color of them. I love the wax that they produce. I love the fact that they get loads of honey. I love that there's loads of bees there. I love their temperament, but I just cannot control the swarming. And I think that's the big, the big difference between the two for me. And that's the reason that we don't use Carniolan bees. I've tried Carniolan bees before and struggled a little bit with the swarming. But the reason that the, the Atlanta ones work so well for them, I think, is that they're using it for a very specific crop. So they're going for like that late season heather crop. So they build up their colonies in a different way, they combine colonies. And like the Atlanta queens, the best way of describing them is that they are designed specifically for Murray's unit. They are designed for Murray's bees and Murray's locations and Murray's apiaries, nobody else. And just as an aside, other people want to buy the queens because they've got good genetics in them as well. So hopefully that was useful. Hopefully I didn't say anything to annoy you, Lancer, there. I recently joined my local beekeepers association and received a lot of criticism for wanting to use Buckfast bees instead of native honeybees. I feel a little confused in what to do at the moment. So I don't like to get dragged in— into the argument too much. All I would say in response to that is that the people who don't like Buckfast bees generally haven't tried them, so I'm not sure how they can have an opinion on something that they've not tried. Also, the, like, the word native honeybees, they're not native, are they? Because all the native bees got killed in the 1900s with Isle of Wight disease, and then they restocked them with AMMBs from Holland. So they're kind of, you know, they're native but they're Dutch. I hear of people importing AMMBs at the moment, which I think is quite ironic, but I've tried local native mongrel honeybees, and I didn't get on with them, and I tried them for years, and I found them to be aggressive and bad-tempered and didn't produce much honey and swarmed and had lots of chalk brood. I know other people who really, really do like them, and other people who, they swear by them, and I've seen their bees and their bees look calm and they produce lots of honey. So I think it's, it's locational as well. But what I don't like, and why I genuinely won't stand for this, it really annoys me, is that People use like the Buckfast bees as a way of saying, well, they're causing aggression in my colonies and it's the Buckfast bees' fault. And I think, oh, hang on, have you seen the Buckfast bees? Like, they're pretty chilled out. Have you seen your bees? They're vicious. But then the second generation of Buckfast being vicious is the Buckfast bees' fault, whereas it's the local AMM genes drones that are in the air. I just come on. If we're going to have a sensible argument about it, let's have a sensible argument about it. It's the AMM. It's the AMM drones that are causing the aggression. It's not nothing to do with the buckfast bees. If you take buckfast bees into a completely isolated environment and then take them down to F two, F three, F four, they remain like well chilled out the whole way down because they're mating with more buckfast drones. So I used to properly sit on the fence and try not to. Kick up a fuss with that one, but I do, I do get annoyed about people having an opinion on something that they've never really tried themselves. So I like to give people an option. For people who want to keep local bees, it's great, keep local bees. What I always find interesting though, and, and this year is the perfect example of that, no one's selling local AMM queens because it's been rubbish weather and the queens haven't been going out and mating very well. And no one's been kind of taking advantage of it. So if they were that great, surely, you know, there's a market. People want to buy native queens, but they're not available in any numbers because they kind of often just get to like 6 or 7 frames of bees and swarm, which isn't ideal. So please don't take that the wrong way anyway. I'm saying like, I have respect for anyone who wants to keep local native bees and It's completely up to you. I've seen people, I've seen good examples of it as well. I'm not saying all local native bees are bad, but I don't like the hate that I get for keeping Buckfast bees or selling Buckfast bees because we get good feedback from people about keeping Buckfast bees. And I think Buckfast bees are good. I think Buckfast bees do a lot of good stuff and keep bees in the air, which means that the fruits get pollinated. And, you know, probably winding people up further, so I'll just stop talking about it now. Uh, Nicholas James says, hi Lawrence, I did an inspection today following putting in a frame of eggs. No queen cells drawn but loads of drones. No eggs either. Just can't find a queen. What do I do? So it— if they don't draw queen cells, there is a queen in there. If you can't find her, the only, the only one to do is just to shake them all out and put up a queen excluder at the entrance and let them all go back in, and the virgin would just be stuck out the front. You can kill her. But there will be a queen in there, definitely. Mia says, Dad has WhatsApp pictures, it is a 2023 queen. Excellent, if you send them over, I'll have a look after this stream. Uh, Patrick's Pets says, do you ship bee nucs to the US and can he have a nuc for free? Um, so unfortunately we don't, we don't send them for free, and unfortunately we don't send them to the US. It'd be good, I'd like to send them to the US, that'd be cool. Paul says, want to treat for varroa in September. Can I only use oxalic acid vaping instead of Apivar strips? So just just bear in mind as you move through September, like early September, yep, probably a little a little bit late for me, but okay. End of September, way too late. Like it really is way too late to be doing your mite treatments then. You can use oxalic acid only in like vaping in September instead of Apivar strips, but you can't just use one single treatment, so you need to do it every five days. Because the oxalic acid will only get the mites, the phoretic mites, the mites that are on the kind of back or the body of the bees, as opposed to the ones that are sealed in the brood, and it's where the ones that are sealed in the brood is where the majority of them are. So you can do it, but you need to do numerous cycles. Robert Orr says, what do you think of formic acid as a varroa treatment? Because it kills varroa in capped cells as well as the bees themselves, but there is a risk factor to the bees and queen in particular. I can't stand formic acid. Hate it. Horrible stuff. I used to use it, so it used to be— it's called Formic Pro now, used to be called Max in the UK. It was like Mite Away Quick Strips, and it was good— it wasn't good, but it had a real selling point when it was Mite Away Quick Strips. It was licensed to be used with the honey supers on, so you could take a colony of bees with 5 supers of honey on and take these strips of formic acid horrible stuff, put it in the brood box and leave all of the supers on, take the strips away after a week, and then extract the honey and sell the honey. Perfectly legitimate, didn't taint it, absolutely fine. So then they changed the formulation and it's not called Max anymore, it's called Formic Pro, and you've got to take the supers off. So it's just become— it's become no better than Apivar. There's no benefit to using it over Apivar or any of the other treatments. But it comes with loads of horrible bad side effects, which is it kills queens. It's a queen killer. It really is. If you've got an old queen, you put Formic Pro in there, you're writing her, uh, like a funeral slip or whatever you want to call it. You'll kill the queen. And also it's known to badly damage brood. So it kills, it kills the varroa capped in the brood, kills a lot of the brood as well because it's so potent. And also it's just, it's horrible. I've got to wear goggles and stuff with this. Horrible, horrible, horrible stuff. Do not like formic acid for a varroa treatment. Just moved my swarm into new site in the apiary. Now it's dark. At any one time there are several bees running out frantically across the landing board and dropping off dead. What could this be? Hmm, overheating maybe? Starvation? Doubt it. Not sure. I've not, I've not seen that before. Could just when you get bees that die, but doesn't— yeah, frantically, and then running across. No, I've not seen that. Take a video, it's interesting. I have a lot of honey in my brood boxes. Should I swap the frames for new as they have drawn massive oversized comb and the frames are hard to inspect? Oh, drink some tea, right? I'll take, take that first bit of advice. Um, so no, I wouldn't. So if they've drawn loads of honey in your brood boxes, I would just Put supers above and just bruise bruise the frames. So just get your hive tool, bruise the frames, put it in the middle of the brood nest, give them space above. They'll move it all up, and then once they've done that, then you just trim the frames down, get them back to size. It's annoying when they do oversized comb. Lynette says I need a rag for my board next time. It's good. Yeah, we do need a rag as opposed to me doing my little. These are cool, these little rubbers, but yeah, need a rag. Good point. Uh, that was the same question. Um, Mia says, in happy news, my Black Mountain Honey 2024 Langstroth nuc has done 20 frames of full brood. It's the best laying queen I've ever had. I've left it as a nuc and take 3 frames out at a time. Best bees ever. Amazing, that's good to hear. Good stuff. Uh, Chunky says, thanks for a great chat. How can I stop the bees storing pollen in my cup comb? So just remove the cup comb. Further away from the brood nest. Go on, I'll get— go on, I'll get the pen out again. So you will get this. So you get like a brood box, that's where the brood box is, and then you've got like your supers up there. So bees will store, you know, you've got like brood, this would be kind of like brood area here, but then you'll get like this pollen ring. And you see how the pollen ring— I know it's going outside there, it shouldn't really go outside. We'll go like that. So this is kind of like the ring of pollen. So if you've got— that's your first super there, you'll start to see it at the bottom there. So we'll just move it up one and then keep it away from the brood nest, and that will keep it away from where they're storing pollen. And if you, if you find they keep on storing it, just keep on moving it up and up and up away from the brood area. That should work really well. Chester says, hi Lawrence, when should I stop feeding the bees after installing a nuc? 8 of 10 frames drawn so far, thanks. So that's my— that is coincidentally my rule. So I always say 80— once 80% of the frames in the brood box are drawn, stop feeding. And it gives you that buffer so that you never feed too much and then the bees swarm as a result of you feeding too much. Nuc transferred 2 weeks ago, so that's good, good strong, good strong nuc getting on. But definitely do it now. And at the same time I say Stop feeding when they've done 80% of the bees, queen excluder on, first super on, and then that's, that's a good rule of thumb. Uh, Thomas says, I will probably buy the BB Wear Ultra Suit for next year. What veil is the best to go with it, and is it easy to clean? So dead easy to clean. I like the fencing veil, and I would go with the non, the non-plastic one, because although the plastic one is good for some people, I find I'll gravitate more towards just the standard one. But I don't like the Um, I don't even know what the other valve is called, the non-fencing valve. I just, I can't get on with it. Uh, Aiden says, where do you buy your sugar from? So various different places. Um, where do I get most of my sugar from? What's it called? Baco. It's like a big wholesaler's. They do it and sell it in big, big bags. Uh, says, hi Lawrence, can I just split a hive and take the old queen and put it in a new hive and let the old hive make a new queen. So yep, definitely do that. It's called a walkaway split, and it is the simplest way of splitting one hive into 2. Any tips on who you buy your jars and labels off for your honey? So we buy— I buy my jars. I bought loads of jars when, when the, the mass jar, uh, price hike of 2021 was taking place. I was stockpiling jars, so I bought 40,000 jars back then, and I still work my way through them. Um, but I bought— we get them through the BFA, the Bee Farmers Association, and they, uh, they have deals with different suppliers. But I think it used to be that like that was the best price through the BFA, but now I think you can get the BFA price kind of basically from the wholesalers directly. But they got them from— I'm not even sure who they got them from. I used to get them from Seawind Jones. It's not that far down the road from me. They're really good, cheap. But I think Freeman and Harding, probably the cheapest national one. Um, but we got us through the BFA. I was just thinking who the other, who the other big company is. I can't remember because we don't really deal with it. And then labels, I use Printed Easy for my labels. I've had a couple of issues with them, but they, they fix the problems whenever there are problems. But they're more geared up for, you know, 10,000, 20,000 labels at a time, not, not like a few hundred. But they are, they are good. Alex Ward says, regarding the early timing of your APIC Guard, so it's Apivar. But yeah, Apiguard treatments and the benefits of increasing healthy winter bees. Is that a tip someone told you or you discovered from experimenting with various timings? So just, I don't, I don't mean to sound pedantic. I really don't like Apiguard. It's a Apiguard like a thymol-based treatment with like a gel and do anything absolutely useless. Most overpriced rubbish ever. So sorry if anyone's got Apiguard, they're going to use it. It is rubbish though. No, it's Richard. So Richard told me that and I didn't believe him and I just said, what are you talking about? He said, do you want healthier bees and more bees going through winter and loads more honey? And I said, yeah, sounds good. And he said, do this. And I said, what, cut the season short by 6 weeks? And he said, yeah, cut the season short by 6 weeks. And he said, in the long run it pays dividends. And it did. And it really does work. And it's quite nice because it's— you, you, you let the bees set themselves up for winter. You kind of say, well, you, you, you sort yourselves out. I've taken some honey off you, but now there's loads of the season left to go. I've sorted you out for mites, I've given you enough food, but you go, go for it. Go for the bramble, go for the Himalayan balsam, go for the ivy. Set yourself up as you need to. I'm not going to come in and start messing around and changing stuff. Propolize down all the boxes, get everything nice and set, and then get yourself ready for winter. And they do. It is a really best— probably the best thing I've done with beekeeping apart from clipping queens. They're my 2 like favorite things that I've done. Thomas says also, aren't AMM bees imported as well? So I don't get what the fuss about importing Buckfast bees. So, so you can get AMM imported bees, but look, there are naturally occurring mongrels. They are just mongrels. There's no pure, 100% pure AMM bees in mainland UK. I, I can't speak for Ireland. I don't know the facts too much about Ireland and what is there and what isn't there. But I know in the UK there's no mate— there's no 100% AMMBs. And this is always my kind of argument about it as well, in that, you know, if there was 100% pure AMMBs like there is in— is it Colonsay? So on the Isle of Man around there— then you can kind of say, well, that's like something worth protecting, maybe. That's like a pure species. It's a, it's like a French Bulldog, 100% pure French Bulldog. But if you've just got a mongrel, if you've got like Jasper who's gone out and he's a lurcher, Jasper, so he's not a pure, he's not pure greyhound, he's like whatever, a bit of a mix. You're going to try and say, sorry mate, I'm not talking about you like I'm not going to save you. We're not going to try and just protect this mongrel breed because it's just mongrel breed. And what we're going to do, we're just going to breed more mongrels, and you can't go back from a mongrel to a pure breed without starting again, clean slate. And the only way you can get a clean slate is by importing, because it doesn't exist internally. So it's just a bit of a— I don't know, it's a bit of a losing battle. And I'm not the first person to import Buckfast queens, but going on for decades. And the fact that it's been going on for decades, surely like the horse has bolted, you're not going to save the local bee. The local back bees, but is people they kind of they go to the beekeeping associations like the chap who said before and said about Buckfast bees. They go there and it's just like no, you do not keep Buckfast bees. We keep local bees here, and that that mantra just gets passed on and passed on and passed on. And like, is it ever going to change? I'm not I'm not sure it is, but all I know is that I kept mungo bees. Bees, didn't like them. Kept Buckfast bees, loved them. I see tens if not hundreds of people each year who say, I've got mongrel bees and they are nasty, what, what can you do for me? And I say, well, I've got some Buckfast queens, we can, we can do this. And then they ring back up the next year and they say, that was the best decision I ever made. I cannot believe I went 30 years with mongrel bees who used to sting me through my bee suit, and now I go to the bee suit just with a veil on and a t-shirt and shorts and just really enjoy my beekeeping again. I think we'll— Buckfast Bees. Uh, Late Night Knit says, hmm, am I going to wake everyone up if I start constructing supers in the kitchen? I think, I think you probably will. It's getting on, it's 11 o'clock. Wow. Right, I'm not going to go for much longer, but I will finish all the comments. I don't like leaving any comments unanswered. Thomas says— oh, sorry, yeah, you're answering. DJ Keep there, I think. Hi Lawrence, at 22:08 you spoke about insulating a hive. Is there a smart way to insulate walls and roof but also ensure condensation is controlled? I'm trying to go into winter with a 2-box configuration. I just think it's dead simple. Just make sure that the top box is the most insulated, and you can do that. Polyashworth feeder is just— it's insulation, air gap insulation, and then an insulated roof. You can't insulate much more than that really. And that's going to be the most insulated parts. And it doesn't— whatever you put on the walls isn't going to be as insulated as that. So if, as long as you've got an open mesh floor, you should be good to go. Uh, Alex Ward says, seeing as you strive to be the best quality queens, nucs, honey, and live streams, will you be considering taking an art course? Definitely. I might. I'm shocking. I, I genuinely like— my hands get tired. And yeah, so I accept the poor quality, and I will. Do you know what I probably need? I need like a straight edge. I do it like this, look, but it will take longer. I thought I did it quite quickly. I get like a straight edge and be like, oh, here we go, build everything with nice straight lines now. Here we go. Is that better? Bit neater, isn't it? But I agree, I do, I do. I say I did say at the beginning I draw like a six-year-old, so sorry about that. If it if it is not clear, then I will have to slow it down a little bit. But I see you're just messing as well. But I do. I take on the feedback. Happy Hounds in Ireland. Evening, Lawrence. As a newbie to the beekeeping, can you turn runny honey into creamy honey? So yes, very easily. But you the easiest way to do it is to get your runny honey, heat it up to I think it's like 47, 48 degrees C, which I know. Most people don't want to do because it kills all the good stuff in it, but you need to do that to reset the crystalline structure, crystalline structure. And then you want to add 10% of seed honey. So find a nice creamy honey that you know you like. You basically mix the 2 together and try not to incorporate much air, and then put it into 14°C storage. And then the crystal structure from the seed honey takes over the reset crystal structure from the runny honey. And you end up with really nice creamed honey. That does work. The other way of doing it, if you just want like a quick way of doing it, is just put it in a KitchenAid and blend it. And it doesn't, it doesn't quite do the same, but it gives you like more of a mouthfeel, more of a texture that's pretty good. Um, Bay Bees Jim says, hi Lawrence, really enjoyed your vlogs on other beekeepers' apiaries. Will there be any more this season? So, so maybe I'd— it's going to sound like 100% selfish, this one, but I just, I thought with the car I kind of like retracted my advice from Carl's queens anyway. But why am I giving other people visibility when I'm putting in the hard work? That sounds— you probably didn't see like a selfish, cutthroat part of me, but it's true. Like, I put in a huge amount of work to promote our queens. Why shouldn't I go down to someone else's queens and promote their queens? It's not— so there's a lot of people selling queens. Um, so that's— it's got a little bit to do with that. But I've said to people, I'm up I've said to a lot of people, if you're just selling honey or bee farm, I'll come down and do like some filming with you, that's fine. And not many people are up for it, not many people are up for it, and I'm not up for traveling that far. So it's quite like to find someone who— I could draw, I could draw a Venn diagram here, but I'm not gonna— to find someone who is in that sweet spot of commutable distance to me but also happy to show stuff and also not selling queens and nucs is challenging. Oh, Mark, Mark sent me a super sticker for £4.99. Thank you very much, sir. Uh, Patrick's Pets says, what type of suit do you wear? So I've got a BB Wear ultra ventilated suit, but I've got a BB Wear premium, just a standard beekeeping suit that I like as well. Andrew Rogers has corrected me, so it wasn't a Highland crotch, it was a Highland croft. But I was close, but it was, it was quite relevant, um, with, with Colin as well calling it a crotch. So happy with that. Tyler and Joe's Bee says, I can agree with that, and I can agree with that. I'm— I think I'm missing something out on that bit. Oh, in terms of what method do you use for storing your frames when not in use? Excellent. Oh yeah, Aiden, you're the first man on Twitch ever, so that's— that is the first comment ever on Twitch from anyone ever. And you've probably given me a shout out and tell me how many people are watching on Twitch, and it's just you, isn't it? It's just you, me and you at the moment. Uh, Tyler and Jo's Bees on Facebook says, we keep bees in the garden. They, uh, the they, they be— see to attack a single dog, don't bother us or the other dog. Do you have any insight? Maybe the, maybe the dog that they're attacking is like a certain color, they don't like the color, or there's a certain smell, they don't like the smell, or that certain dog has been like pestering the bees when you're not looking, so they're getting their revenge. But that's an interesting one. Hey Lawrence, from New York. Should I leave the ventilation on my lids or no ventilation during honey airflow. So it's a strange one this year. So in America, you often get— and I'm no expert on American climate, and I'm not saying that this is right or wrong, this is just from what I see. So in the UK, no one ever recommends ventilation at the top, and none of the hives have any ventilation at the top. It just doesn't exist. But in America, you have all this ventilation at the top and then ventilation at the bottom, and from what I understand, you get like this chimney effect that maybe isn't very good for the bees. So I've never been a fan of any ventilation at the top. I've always been a fan of lots of insulation at the top, ventilation at the bottom to let that condensation track out. So the question is, should I leave the ventilation on my lids or no ventilation during honey flow? I would just seal it all off permanently and ventilate at the bottom. But like I say, I'm not an expert on the climate out there or what is going on there, and it might be very different from what we experience over here. So I would maybe like take that to your local beekeeping association and see. kind of like what the general consensus is, right? How many more questions have I got? Right, quite a lot. Okay, and where do we get to? I, I will finish all the questions. I'm not— everyone's in bed now, so we're good. I got one problematic hive. Black bees won't accept Buckfast queen. Going to try Caucasian, which I've had success before. That failing, that, what would you do? Let them requeen themselves? No more black bees? It's, it's, it's a difficult one. What you could potentially do is combine them. That's the only way that you can get around it. If they keep on superseding, they won't introduce them, then do what, do what I did before with that combine and combine them. Just take half black bees, half Buckfast bees with a Buckfast queen, merge them together, and then just let the queen go. And the fact that there's going to be tons, like you're gonna have 50/50 black bees versus Buckfast, they probably won't kill They won't do the same as if you're trying to introduce a single Buckfast queen into a completely 100% black bee colony. So that's what I would go for. Uh, the guy on La Session Obel does whiteboard drawings too, really useful to have visuals. Sorry for butchering the French there. BBB, evening, jumped in late I see. Hope you're all doing well, good to see you. Dan Fogarty says, have you tried the Paradise Smart Beehive? I have. I'll be doing a video on that. I'm going there tomorrow. I've got 2, and they basically nearly filled all of their honey supers. Brilliant. After a split using queen cells, how long do you wait for the first inspection, etc.? Finding that one tricky. Hope you and your family are doing well. All doing very, very well, thank you. So after split using queen cells, so basically from the day that the queen emerged, 3 weeks minimum. I wouldn't be— I wouldn't bother going in and looking because if you, from the day that she emerges, maybe, maybe 3 and a half weeks, if you count, so it's like 5 days for her to become sexually mature, and then if she's not mated within 3 weeks, she's a goner. So I just go back in after 3 and a half weeks, and if she's there with eggs and brood and capped brood, all good. If there's nothing and she's there, I kill her. And then that's just a very efficient way of not doing multiple visits. I'm in my second year of beekeeping in Loch Lomond area. I got a swarm last year. They were the most Easy Bees and Good Natured. Lost my queen this year but raised 2 cells— sorry, raised 2 from queen cells. All good, excellent to hear. We've secured a few nice sites. I'd like to boost the Black Mountain Honey Bucky genetics here, a double brood national. How many drone frames would you run? So I wouldn't— I'd say— so you're saying like to boost the genetics, so no more than 2. No more than 2. It's just a waste doing any more than 2, putting actual drone frames in, but you, you should get 2 fully drawn out, that's what I would go for. Do you need to be more careful about feeding end of season, especially if there's a strong ivy flow late on? So not really, I don't, I don't think. Like, you know, to get a huge amount of honey from the ivy, especially where you are, it's going to be so rare. Like, you'd never get more than a super. You're probably going to get like half a super at best. And I know it's not like half a super's worth of honey in your brood box, but for me, that the ivy is more important for the pollen that comes in. So I just, just forget that the IV even yields that much and just feed them to weight, and if they get a little bit more, they'll burn it off somewhere. As an autistic beekeeper, I say I love a diagram. Excellent, I'm the same. I do love a diagram. I'm very much a kinesthetic learner, but I do like my kind of like visual as well, and then it's audio, and then these weird people that read books. Oh my God, so I probably offended all the other beekeepers there, but I just I read a book, yeah, I'll pick up a book, I'd like— I'm going to read this book, yeah, and I can't read fiction, so this has to be like a fact book, like a non-fiction, but I'll read it, get to the first page or second page, and I'm like, right, I'm going to read this page fully, take it seriously, and I get halfway down the page and I'm like, well, I've just forgotten it all, all gone. So I go to the top and do it again, do it about 6 times, and then give up and then don't read anymore. I can't read books. Uh, BBB says you can put it all in the washing machine. James said ask them, they've got amazing support regarding the Ultra Suit. So yeah, you can, you can. And they did test on that as well. Yeah, so one of the tests they did was they originally said you couldn't wash the suit over 40 degrees. So they said you can only wash it at 40 degrees. And then the NBU said, well, come on, don't be washing your suits at 40 degrees. If you're going to wash them, you need to wash them at least 60 to kill the bacteria, the EFB bacteria. if you've got EFB on them. So they did some tests. So they said they gave— BBWare gave the NBU a few suits and said, there you go, test them. So they got EFB and AFB spores, or like bacteria and spores depending on which one it was, put them on the suit, like smeared them in, washed them, and then tested them. And they said there were no remnants on after they washed them at 60 degrees. And the suits managed to do 60 degrees. So if you are going to wash them, wash them at 60 degrees C. Oh, nice tea. My Little Oasis says, hi Lawrence. Hello, nice picture. Um, Chester says, cheers for answering that, Lawrence. I will stop feeding and then stick a soup on. Thanks again. My pleasure. Uh, BBB says, except the Carl— I always get that wrong— Carl Kerr Spelling Foundation, his buckfast line. Can one even get pure buckfast? So this is the thing, buckfast can just mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, and there was never a true pure formula. There was only the lines that he worked with, and some people have kept those lines going, and they say, well, they're the same lines. But I think it's more— it's not a case of they're the lines, it's a case of this is the philosophy, this is what he was looking to do. So you never— beekeeping, you don't reach— you don't reach the end. You never say, right, that's it, I've completed it. Beekeeping, we've reached the end. We've reached the end of Buckfast, we've perfected Buckfast. So we, we're going to stop improving that queen now. It's all about kind of what can I do to try and improve that queen, and what can I do to improve her daughters. And so you could argue that that moves you away from what Buckfast essentially is, but I think it's— it still does— it still does the same, same kind of thing. And yeah, just being clear, Karl being Brother Adam. So yeah, he's German, wasn't he? Um, oh, Joshua joined as a channel member! Hi Joshua, thanks very much. David says, people from Ireland are obsessed with black bees. Mental. I bet they're probably buying Caucasian or the dark queens from Northumberland Honey Company. Tut tut. You laugh, but I, I have, I have heard a number of stories of Carniolan queens being passed off as the darkest, purest, AMM going. Um, Reaper says, how do I treat signs of foulbrood? So I think if you've got any inkling that you've got foulbrood, you don't treat foulbrood. You get the National Bee Unit in if you're in the UK, and you get them to send off some samples and confirm whether it is foulbrood and then take it from there. In America, a lot of people in America just like— EFB is treated like sacbrood over here. We don't even do anything with sacbrood, but it's treated in a— it's not really a big deal. Yeah, you're going to find EFB, just treat it with antibiotics. So they use a lot of antibiotics on their bees in America and in Canada. Is that right? Is that wrong? I don't know. It's not necessarily something— the thing that I always think with it is that I think it masks it. And you do see people saying, well, it doesn't mask it, but if— why would you do it if it doesn't mask it? It doesn't stop the disease and kill the disease and stop it dead, because if it did, there wouldn't be any EFB. So it clearly carries on and spreads and stuff. So I don't know, it'd be interesting. I'd love to see like proper detailed statistics on On that in terms of like the effectiveness of it, and maybe you could like try it in the UK and see see whether it worked. Don't know. Obviously not without the VMD signing it off. Thomas says David McDowell. I don't know why people are obsessed with them black bees. I've kept them for two years now, and I'm always having problems with them. Terry says thanks for all the information, Lawrence. I'll be ordering some more queens for next week. Look forward to the next stream. Thanks again, mate. Cheers, Terry. My pleasure. BBB. It's a thumbs up, good stuff. Uh, where have we got to here? Hi Lawrence, I've been using the Correx floor to my wooden hive as a temporary draft regulator over the last few days of bad weather. I live in northeast Cumbria. It appears to have had a massive positive effect. Yeah, so a lot of people do just use a solid floor the whole way. I really don't think there's a massive difference between the two, and if you, if you've got windy conditions, cold conditions, it's gonna, it's gonna keep the brood temperature way warmer. warmer, which means that they can draw out more brood— sorry, draw out more frames, rear more brood. So there is an argument to not have open mesh floors, and I definitely see the side of that. And Richard's 100% solid floors. He doesn't like open mesh floors. Hey Lawrence, can I introduce a special genetic queen to Buckfast bees, for example Carniolan queen to Buckfast bees, and is the process the same? So all of like the crossbreeding like that, So like pure species to hybridize and stuff, you'll always have the risk that the bees will say no thanks, or thanks but no thanks, I'm going to supersede. And they generally accept them, but then they might let them lay some eggs and then try and supersede. So I just think if you're doing any different genetics, the way to do it is exactly the same, but go in after 3 or 4 days of popping the tabs, and as soon as the queen starts laying eggs, go in every 3 days. And if you see them drawing out supersedure cells, Just take the supercedure cells down. Just keep on doing that for like a few weeks, and if you get through a few weeks, you should be fine. Should be no problem after that. But that is the risk. They don't always do it, but that's the way to fix it if they do. Alex Ward says, any news on where Staunton Park Bees has gone? His bees okay? I don't know. I've not spoken to him for ages. He seemed very ambitious with his plans, but now I know he's hopefully not taking everyone's money for AMMB. I'm sure he hasn't. I know he wouldn't do that. Um, but no, I've not, I've not heard from him for a while. I'll give him a text. Uh, Massive thanks, Lawrence. Fantastic dedication here until the end. Wish you and all the family well. Thank you very much, Neil. Split, uh, 15th of May, queen first sign on the 26th of June. Old queen going strong, so thinking of making a small nuc. Is it too late to split? Have 2 hives, so we'd have to buy a new hive, or can I and overwinter in a nuc. So definitely not too late to split, really good time to split and do it in a nuc. Yeah, don't need to buy a new hive, just 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, new queen, 2 frames of bees, like shake the bees in and you should be good. Thanks, Laurence, another informative and interactive evening. Thank you, Robert. Laurence, are you always looking to reduce the number of hives that you have? So, so no, not, not always looking to reduce the number. Like we said, we just changed our strategy a little So instead of big production colonies now, we just go like for nucs because we sell a lot of nucs and like that side of it more. It's more profitable as well. So overall, our numbers have been going up for, for years and years and years. It's just our production colonies that are going down. Um, Aiden says you want to put your stream in the Just Chatting category on Twitch. Yeah, I should. I don't know how to do that, I'm afraid, but I did see that, that there was a Just Chatting category and there were some people talking about that. Someone was playing chess or something. Tyler Rapson says, can you explain why we love Buckfasts in the UK? So I can give you from my own experience why I love Buckfasts. So when I had local Mongrels, they were angry, they chased me, they stung, I didn't get that much honey, they had lots of chalk brood, and they swarmed when they got to about 6 frames. And then when I have Buckfasts, they're very calm, they're very prolific, they produce loads of honey, they don't swarm anywhere near as much, they don't have anywhere near as many brood disorders like sac brood, chalk brood, or bald brood, and it just makes beekeeping like loads more fun. So that's how I like them. Uh, David says, great stream, still number one in the country doing this. Thanks very much, Chris. Chris, I like Chris streams, they're good. Uh, I've got to the bottom, right? I have a queen coming Saturday, but my nuc won't be hopelessly queenless till Wednesday, or leave the tabs closed till then. So yeah, leave the tabs closed till then, but put it in the nuc. Don't just leave the queen outside of the Um, that's the way to do it. BBB says via game, just chatting on Twitch as I recall, or set it by the dashboard. So I think, I think I'll have to do that for next one, but I just, I chucked it on there because I'm using the new, new thing. So I'm going to add this back on because the final thing I'm just going to say on here is I'll probably write it a bit better. There we go. Goodbye. 2 hours 52 minutes of talking about bees. And that is it, we have reached the end, goodbye. I'm not going to cut it off directly like that. At the beginning I did say about the few things though— special genetics, this is your absolute last chance. If you've gone through 2 hours and 52 minutes, I might as well chuck a little sales pitch in at the end, but it genuinely is the last chance. You've got 5 days left to order the special genetic queens. Um, live streams from the apiary will be coming this Wednesday. I've worked out how to do that now, it's going to be absolutely awesome. So when that comes, come along and have a look. Um, overwintered nucs selling really, really fast. If you're interested in overwintered nucs, get in contact quickly. £35 Buckfast queens for the 4th of July dispatch. £32 Buckfast queens if you are buying 5 for the Thursday the 11th of July dispatch. Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram 1080p streams. I'm really happy with that. I hope it went well. I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes. If I don't see you on the live stream Um, for the apiaries, I will see you in 2 weeks' time, but I hope you all have very happy beekeeping until then. So I'll see you later.
