Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees With Laurence Edwards - Episode 4

Right, we're live, and for the first time I've managed to get on without breaking the system or the camera or anything. So what you can see on the screen, for all of the zero people that are here at the moment, is 2 videos that I've just finished. So the first one is the Apotek Queen Cell Incubator, a cool little video on that. And then probably my favorite video of the year, definitely the one that's taken me the longest to So far is the Smoker versus the Apis solis. So they're both on the channel, uh, the, the membership section of the channel at the moment. Feel free to go in and have a look. Um, what I'm doing today is I'm just going through some comments. So it is blowing a gale outside, and I reckon everyone is inside doing nothing. I certainly, I certainly can't get out to do anything today, so I thought what a good chance to get up to date with some comments and have a chat with you guys. So I'm just going to go through. Hope you've all enjoyed the videos recently. We've been doing like a video a day, so we've had a good stockpile. Hello, I saw you on a live stream the other day. I was going to say hello, but then why did I not say hello in the end? I had to go and do something, so I thought I didn't want to pop in and say hello and then leave. But what I would say is you have a mighty fine beard, very good beard. But that was cool. I love the live streams. I do think they're very good fun. Right, so we've got a few people in. China's Honey from Texas, very nice. Arctic Beekeeping from northern Norway, very nice. We're moaning about a little bit of wind over here today, but it's actually, it is actually quite bad. 122 miles an hour on the Isle of Wight, and there is no roof left on the O2. So I'm just getting my new favorite toy. This is a really cool toy. I'm going to show you it now. I don't know if anyone's seen this before. I couldn't find many YouTube videos on this. I'm just going to try and get it to work now. Yeah, here we go. Right, has anyone seen this before? The Apisolis. So it's an electronic bee smoker, but like a completely— just, oh, the guy tells me off. I'm not allowed to call it a smoker. It's a vaporizer. Check this out. Oh, that's cool. How cool is that? Apisolis. That is on the membership section already, and it'll be out in about a week in terms of looking at the video. So I've had good, good fun with that, but you'll have to wait and see a little bit more. You turn it off. It's got not got an on and off switch. That's how you turn it off. Pretty cool, right? Um. So as normal, I'm just going to go through answering questions that are on the channel. There's loads of questions. I'm really struggling to keep up with the questions in the comments, so I do apologize if I've not got in contact with people and got back to the comments. I just haven't got the time at the moment, so I'll try and do as many as I can on this video, and I'll also answer people's questions in the chat, and I'll give priority to those. So I've seen a couple come up first. I saw your video on creamed honey. What happens if you get bubbles in it? That is a problem with both oilseed rape honey and borage honey, are the two that I find are really, really bad. But you just get a little bit of like foam on the top. Some people really like it. It goes like a real thick honey meringue and it is impossible to get rid of it, but it's really nice. Just so you just got to try not to get bubbles in it. With that drill method, you don't get bubbles in it because you're not really kind of whipping it up too much. But there's no issue if you do get bubbles in it, it works cool. Does it block pheromones like a normal smoker? So yeah, so Apisolis, and you'll see this on the video, it is a little bit like an advertorial, the video, but I had good fun with it. They have done tons and tons and tons of studies showing the effectiveness between using smoke and using their e-vaporizer, and they've— what they think terms of the studies is that it's less stressful for the bees but quite a lot more effective in terms of keeping them calm, blocking the pheromones, and it certainly doesn't get in your eyes, which is really nice. Just looking at some other ones on here then. What do you think about robotic beekeeping? I think it's really, really cool. I know there's a company, I can't remember what their name is, Israeli-based company, and they've been doing it for a good few years now. and been very, very successful with their crowdfunding. But it's like just a big side of a truck that you go and plonk in a field and come back at the end of the year, and they reckon it's not— all of the colonies haven't swarmed and you've just got loads of honey. I love stuff like that. You'll never see me dismissing anything that's innovative, people trying stuff new. I think it's really cool. Love the videos. Thank you. I do. I hope everyone's okay. Like, I've seen some of the pictures around the country and it's pretty bad. We've seemed to have dodged, touch wood, the worst of it at the moment. It's not been too bad up here at all. I was out this morning and it was like fully sunny and calm, and it's kind of a bit windy now, a bit windy, a bit rainy, but not too bad at all. I'm not going back out, no chance. Well, I'm going to answer some of the questions on On the channel then. So I'm just trying to get through all of them, and I will, as always, I'll just stick a little note in there saying answered on livestream. I know that's not really an answer for that one joke, but yeah, I hope your mimosa tree comes back at some point. Right, so Ralph Is saying, do I have a link to the drill bit that I used for the soft set honey video? So the answer is no, I don't, because in the UK you can't get them. I got that secondhand because I know that drill bit's really good, but it's a German-made drill bit and you can't get them anymore. So it's a little bit rubbish. You have to win it in the competition, is the only way you can get one. But I think most of the drill bits do, do kind of do pretty much the same thing. So this question here, Mike at Coon Lake Hives talking about the cork beehive video that I did, and this is a perfect example of— I like comments like this, like perfectly courteous, doesn't agree with what I've done, but it's kind of given his argument for it, and I agree. So he says, a lot of work and cost for less than an R4 increase. So you're talking about an insulation level increase. With no clear way to seam/seal it, and the general rule for housing heat rises is to have 3 times as much insulation on the ceiling roof compared to the walls. My 2 cents. So no problem at all, people commenting like that, very much welcome it. My response would be, um, I think what I'm gonna do is put like a 3mm piece of ply on the outside just to give it that extra level of protection from the water getting into it. And then I did mention in the video I'm I fully agree with your comment. Now, I did mention it about doubling up the insulation on top of the cluster, so putting the crown board on. You might have missed that bit, but you don't want to insulate the walls really loads and then not insulate above because then you're going to cause more problems. Okay, there's quite a lot of, quite a lot of comments about the soffit, honey, because people are entering the competition, so I'm just going to try and jump through all of them here. Any other comments on here? What do you sell heather honey for? Here in the north we can get 60 to 80 BP for 1 kilogram. I'm not sure what BP is, but what I found up here is that it demands a premium and people are willing to pay it, but far fewer people are willing to pay it. So we kind of find, well, you need to find a happy medium. So at the moment we sell it for like £1 more per jar. And we sell quite a bit of it. We find the heather blend is actually more popular. A lot of people don't like heather honey. I sometimes find heather honey can be like a little bit strong. Let's have a look at some of these other questions then. There's quite a lot of ones about the soft-set honey. Right, this one here from Glynis saying gloves that I was wearing. So in this video here, I was using my BB Red gauntlet, Ultra Red gauntlets that were stitched onto a rubber glove, and they were so good. I love those gloves, but you couldn't really, you couldn't get them through the whole season. It was so difficult because they weren't designed, the gloves, actual glove bit weren't designed to be properly cleaned. So every time you wash them, they degraded a little bit. So they were from BB Ware, custom made from BB Ware, but I wouldn't suggest doing it because it didn't last very long. I'm just going to flick through until we get to some that aren't on soft-set honey. A lot of comments, this is why I've been struggling. Right, Joshua, he was saying about where did I get my metal smoker box. So I got mine from Abello, they do 2 versions. They do kind of like a cheaper one and a more expensive stainless one. And then Thorn do a really good one as well, yellow one that you can keep things in. A few different places do them, they're all pretty much the same. All right, I've got a few questions in the chat then. So Kevin's saying you've got Buckfast colonies and want to requeen with native Irish AMM, would they accept? Thanks, love the channel. Yeah, I've had no issue. requeening between kind of blacks and oranges at all. Some people do say that they will, they'll tend to not kind of accept them, but I've never found that. If you search for the method that I use, which is that quite long-winded method, it does work and it leaves them with absolutely no choice. Are you expecting any damage or do you think we'll all be okay? I don't want to, I don't want to tempt fate. It's not that bad up here though. So the biggest risk for us is that trees will come down and smash up the hives. And like in some apiaries, you could get like a big pine tree come down and just take out 30 hives. And that's, that's the big risk for us. So I'm not worried about them tipping over. They're all quite strapped down, and if they do tip over, you can rescue them. I'll go around tomorrow morning. Right, so next one on here then. Naughty Goat Farm, what a cool name for a YouTube channel, saying, is it okay to use PVA glue when putting together a beehive like this? Talking about the fake Flow Hive that I bought. What can I use rather than paint to protect the timber inside and out? Can I use a mix of beeswax and boiled linseed oil? So I never paint the inside, I never treat or do anything to the inside. Some people do like to kind of make up a propolis tincture with some alcohol and paint that on the inside, but the bees do that anyway, so I never do anything on the inside of polyhives or wooden hives. In terms of PVA glue, no problem whatsoever. I use Type 1-3, that's my favourite one, exterior-grade PVA glue, works really well. And then, can you use a mix of beeswax and boiled linseed oil? Yeah, I've seen people do that. You can also completely them in wax as well, mixture of different waxes. That's what a lot of the bee farms do. I forgot to forget that I, uh, put on tickets, so it's been answered. I do feel bad, like, I get all these questions now. I used to, I used to set aside like an hour a day to go through them, and it would take way longer than an hour a day at the moment because there is a lot. Uh, but there's some great questions in here, right? So Mark says, Hi Lawrence, thanks for the great videos. As a really new beekeeper, the wide range of subjects and information you've covered has made That's really helpful, thanks Mark. As we're not massively interested in huge honey production, so he's talking about long hives here in particular, so as we're not massively interested in huge honey production and only in keeping a couple of colonies for fun, the long hive seems like a good future upgrade for us. However, I wondered if there were any special methods for managing the swarming process with colonies in a long hive. So I've only had a long hive for a year and it is difficult to manage the swarming process In the wrong hive. You really do limit the amount of things that you can do. The only way that you can really manage it is make sure they've got enough space, and you do that by removing honey frames constantly, just taking out honey frames as soon as they're capped and replacing them with foundation if you've got it, preferably foundation, not drawn comb, just to give the bees something to do, give them something to draw on, try and keep that swarm impulse down as low as possible. But like, I don't know what I would do. I've not found charged swarm cells in a long hive yet. The only real thing you can do is just get a nuc, make up a split, and keep on splitting. But you can't keep on doing that indefinitely because you'll just end up with hundreds and hundreds of colonies. So, uh, good luck with it though. I do love my long hive. Right, so I'm gonna flick through all of the soft set comments. A lot of people in that competition. So Paula Jones saying, does the cork get damp on the outside and do you have to paint it? So cork is naturally water resistant, and from what I've seen when other people have done this, unless it's sitting on a horizontal surface and pooling on it, it should be okay. But I'm, I'm a little bit concerned about it now, so I'm not going to paint it, I'm not going to seal it because Because I think if it did absorb it anyway, it would bust through the seal. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of cut like a bit of metal, or if I want to go fully compostable, cut like a bit of pine, thin 3mm pine, and just stick that on the outer bits just to protect it. Just, there's only one hive, it's not going to take me long, so I'm going to do that. Right, other questions on the chat then? Cesar, is that how you say it? Hi from Andover, Hampshire. My hives are still in one piece. How bad is the wind in your area? It's really not that bad. I've not gone out and seen what the hives are looking like yet, but it's, it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. It's forecast like 70 here, so at the low end of what was forecast. And I think you've got like red, amber, and then yellow maybe, and we're on the cusp between amber and yellow. So we're miles away from all that bad stuff going on down south, which is nice. But I do, I do hope everyone's hearts are okay. Have you tried any other hybrid types except for Buckfast? I've heard that if mated well, an Italian Carniolan hybrid could often do really well. I've not got any experience with that. I've had some Carnies, some of the Yalantas are Carnica, and they're very good. A bit more frugal over winter, massive, massive spring expansion, can bring in a lot of honey, and I've not found that they're overly swarmy. That's what people have said to me, and I've seen people saying that about Carnica. So, but they're the only ones I've really tried, kind of local mongrels, Buckfast and Carnica. I'm going to try some more this year. I'm going to play around with some different types this year. Right, let's look some more of these comments in. There's so many on this Soft Central. You can see there's a lot. You imagine me trying to get back to all these, it'd be a nightmare. Okay, that one there talking about the Apotek Queen Cell incubator that I bought. So that's quite fun. That's like a membership question. Let's get back to that one. Sorry. Right, we'll get past all these in a minute, don't worry. What would you say is better for spring buildup, sugar water or inverted syrup? Either, it doesn't matter. 2:1, 1:1, whatever, they will build up on it. You don't need anything more than 1:1. Sugar syrup's fine. It's not going to go off. They don't need to store it. I would just go with whatever is cheapest, and 1:1 homemade sugar syrup using cold water would be fine for that. And do it little and often. That's— you can get yourself in a lot of trouble doing feeding in the spring because if there's not enough space for the bees and you give them like 15 litres of 1:1 syrup, they just suck it all down, and then they're kind of like, what are we doing now? And there's no space for them. And then the queen can't lay, and then the bees don't really know what to do. So you want to do it little and often, just kind of— if you can do it like half a litre a day, really good. Half a litre to a litre a day, just do it every day over the course of like 2 or 3 weeks, and making sure they've constantly got space. And once they've got through that whole box, give them another box and keep on feeding. But we don't feed in the spring, only if you kind of want to make Make up splits or do something different, or your queen rearing. Just let them get on with it. Like, I've been going around checking— when I've been checking my colonies, I've been lifting them up, checking them for weight. Some of them have been a bit light, but most of them have been okay. But they're massive. Oh wow, like box fillers, all of them. Like, I'd say on average it's between 8 and 9 frames of 14 by 12, and some of them are just completely filling the box already. So there's no way I'd be feeding them. I just— they're where I want them to be. I want some nice cold weather to see them through, get through to April, and just load them up with the supers. That's the plan. Right, Georgina Roberts said on the Should You Not Kill Honeybees video, that was quite controversial, this one, saying she loves the video. She has one mega grumpy colony at home.

Why?

They've taught me more than any other colony, and they've taught me how to read bees, and I continue to learn from them every season. I now understand if they're linked to me, it's 90% of the time it's me, as opposed to the other 10% of the time they're just— I'll let you make up what's in the stars there. Still have to take a few deep breaths before I pop the lid though. I'd agree with that. You can really— and I found this with the gloves that I was wearing last year and the Ultra Suit that I wear— it breeds really bad beekeeping habits because you're so fully protected from them. And I do think there's a place to be stung. You should get stung, you should know how to read your bees, and you should know when to back off, and you You should know how to handle them properly and not squish them and move them around and not roll the queen and all of that. But yeah, I'm getting rid of all of my angry colonies just because of the queen rearing side. I don't want to have to have those genetics in my apiary anymore. But I do, I fully appreciate what you say. You can learn a lot managing a horrible colony like that. EJ's saying about using a drip feeding. Yeah, trickle feeding is surprisingly effective. 10 litres of syrup at once versus 10 litres over 10 days is completely different, and it really does make a big, big difference. I hope, I hope you can see how many comments I'm getting here. It's good, I love it. Thanks for all the comments. Um, right, that one there is more— oh, you're getting some snippets of some videos that are coming up. Pros and cons of Brexit beekeeping. That is controversial, that one. it? Feel free to say in the comments whether you voted in or out. I give— I reveal all in that video. Right, David's saying, what grain of cork would I suggest? So I went with the coarse cork grain on there because I didn't— I just thought it might hold up a little bit better, but I don't think it makes a massive difference. My basis for that was that it was— there was going to be more air encapsulated in it, which was going to give it a better insulation value. Let's have a look. Sinister Hippo is not only an amazing YouTube name, but he knows his beekeeping stuff. The comments he puts in, he does— he knows it all great, and I have good, very good conversations with him. So I've been going kind of back and forth on that. And he's saying everything you say about insulation is completely correct. Cork is a fantastic alternative to poly inside the hive. It can encourage propolis for a hygiene envelope around the colony. Very interesting. But what he was saying is that it is a bit prone to things nibbling at it, so I'm going to keep an eye on it and we'll see how it goes. About the BS Honeybees polyhive that never really came to anything. Such a shame, that was a good hive, that one. Be interested to know how many, how many people got one. I got the first ever UK one and I still not put bees in it, so I'll be putting bees in that this year. But he's saying about the corks and nice idea, looking forward to seeing you get on. Such a shame that the BS Honeybees polyhive had such a short production run. It's a great product, any chance of someone else buying the molds and the rights of production and making them again? So absolutely zero chance of someone buying those molds because I know Dan and Tristan will do everything they possibly can in order to get that mold working for them again. There's no, there's no chance they're going to sell it. It's not looking good at the moment in terms of getting that one back online, and it's also looking a little bit worrying in terms of whether the VS Honeybees nucs are even going to be going after next year. So yeah, it's a slight concern, I think, of the whole polyhive market. Do you find any differences between winterizing vertical or horizontal hives? Is one better than the other? I've done a video recently in terms of this as well. I don't know whether— well, I do. I think the vertical format's better. Definitely think it's better. And I think without a shadow of a doubt, it's easier to manage because you know where these are going. They start at the bottom and they work to the top, and you don't have to worry about this left and right. But the horizontal ones look really nice. So here's— this is good. This is like full promo for the membership, isn't it? So there's another competition coming out, Upstairs Downstairs Beehive Competition. I might release that one tonight, but I'm fitting some hive entrances, which I'm sure people will have seen, some hive entrances. I'm going to run that, that's next to the cork hive, so that should be good fun. And then Jeremy's saying, used them for 2 years, impossible for the wasps to get in, used to watch them try and they come shooting out within seconds. So that was quite fun. Uh, let's have a look at some of the other ones. So Naboo Shaman was saying, I look forward to seeing how this holds up. I reckon the frost will make it fall apart. I hope it doesn't though. You're talking about the cork sheeting again. I've just got hold of 2-inch polystyrene sheet from under an old gym floor. I'm going to clad hives in that plus some protective outer material. He thinks insulation is the way to go. More insulation means less condensation. So I hope that the cork sheet holds up as well. I would say the frost may be a little bit of an issue. It didn't get too cold around here, but I am going to clad— I am going to clad the outside of it just to hold it all in, because then it will keep it going for a lot longer. Insulation is definitely the way to go. More insulation doesn't mean less insulation— sorry, more insulation doesn't mean less condensation though. It just gives you the ability to track and direct where that condensation is going. Oh, stick that on there. The whole basis is that you put more insulation at the top, so then the walls are less insulated, so the condensation forms on the walls, tracks down out of the hive, as opposed to forming on the roof and then drips on the cluster. So I'm just, I'm just going through. I don't want to talk all about cork bee hives. It shows how long since I've gone in here and answered any of these questions. These are all sitting here ready to go. A lot of comments on the live stream with Richard. People really enjoyed that live stream. Some of the numbers were absolutely mind-boggling. So on that day, I had 970 hours of watch time. in a day, which is quite remarkable. And then the last 4 weeks with that stream has been about 17,000 hours of watch time, which is, which is 2 years of watch time in 4 weeks. So thanks to everyone who watches the videos, sits there and watches them all. Nothing is better than soft-set heather honey, the true king honey. I like soft-set heather honey. The blend is really, really nice. I do it half oilseed rape, half heather honey. It's really nice. Salem says, what do you sell 1 kilogram in your town for? In Yemen, it costs $100. Wow, we do not sell it for $100. So we sell— we only sell ours in 8-ounce, which is like a quarter of a kilo. So I can do it up to probably It's difficult. We do it for around like £6, £7, and then you pay for the delivery on top. So per kilo, that's probably like £30 a kilo or something like that. But the bulk price is like £3.50 a pound, so it's like £7.50 a kilo bulk price if you want to buy it in the bucket. So there's a good little business there. Come and buy, come and buy some buckets and, uh, them over to Yemen. That's a good one. A little tip from Mike here, if you ever get stung and dealing with bees, recommend you to use lemongrass oil on the sting immediately, or grow a couple of periwinkle plants and keep them handy with you and break a leaf or 2 off and rub them into the sting. It's a nice little tip, thanks very much. Says, loving the hairnet, hoping to have a go at making some soft-set honey after you've they got some oilseed rape honey. I was hoping that Bella were going to Bee Trade Expo so I could have a look at the creamers. Might have to take a trip up to see them. I don't know what's going on with Bee Trade Expo. Like, it's on the, it's on the website still saying that all these people are going. They're not going. I'm gonna go. I've decided now I am going because I need to pick up a hive from Hyde Hives, and I'm gonna get a concrete hive from someone who lives near there as well, one of the Bee Bunker concrete hives to do some I like to play around with it, really, a bit of fun. So I'm going to go down. I don't think I'll be there for very long though. I'm going to sign up to the Dogs Trust. Hi Lawrence, love your channel. Do you— did you ever make a hot honey? If so, would you share the process? Keep up the great videos. So yeah, Hot Fire Honey, that's our kind of sister company. I can share the process. Yeah, it's just we use honey, obviously. Welsh-grown Scotch bonnet powder and then apple cider vinegar and just kind of heat it up. You've got to heat it up hot, so you have to go— you have to take it up to 75°C in the bottles to eliminate the risk of salmonella in the pepper powder. This is what the company said to me. I thought it was a bit overkill, but you can't be too careful. There is always a reason for aggression. On the bees, and I kind of I looked at that comment and thought, yeah, okay. The reason might be that the bees are just naturally really aggressive bees. The guy Richard, who's been who's coming to help me this year to do the bees, he's away in Gambia at the moment, and he's taking some videos for me. So I might post some of them when he sends them over. And he was saying that like they're fully fully Africanized, obviously in Gambia, and he said just. You can only ever get near them at night, pitch black with red lights, full suits on. And he said you've never seen anything like it. So I think we got it quite— I think we got it quite good. Yeah. Um, more people saying about, uh, the stream with Richard, they enjoyed that stream. Sentimental bloke. Again, another person on here who comments quite a lot. and clearly knows their stuff. It's great. I love this community. It's great because you get people who just know so much, so much more than me, and they put you in your place. Is there any research at all being done to find possible treatments about AFB, or has everyone just put it in the too hard basket? I think it's just in the too hard basket, isn't it, at the moment? There must be some way of combating the spores or like neutralizing them or Doing something, but it's quite a rare disease really. It's not something that's, that's that bad. Like, I've never had it in any of my colonies. You speak to other people, it rarely crops its head up. EFB is the one where you get it a bit more, and it's not quite as severe. And I think people are breeding for bees to be a bit more resistant to EFB, and whether there could be any breeding against AFB, I don't know. But it does seem that it's been put in the too-hard basket, which always comes down to, is there going to be something that they can sell at the end of it? And I don't think they have. Glad you mentioned humane removal. I've been speaking to the admin guy from the UK Bee Removers Facebook group. I had a Zoom call with him the other day, and he was a really nice guy. So we're going to do maybe a couple of videos this year. We're trying to get in and do some Bee removals with him, or he's just going to do them and I'm going to video them. But that should be quite fun. And he was telling me— Phone coming off. And he was telling me about some of the ones that he's rescued over the past few years and how the demand for people to actually go and want to get these colonies out humanely has grown. And then we were talking about some of the mortality rates and how many of them you get through, and he was saying it hovers around 60%. so it's quite difficult to get them out and keep them alive, but it's really interesting. I'm going to do more of that this year, along with all the other things I say I'm going to do more of this year and then get through to October and not realise where the year's gone. So on the checkerboard in swarm video, Don Outland saying, having a full super of honey above the brood chamber looks wrong. That should go on the top of the hive or just get extracted when the bees finish the honey dome. Isn't where to start the swarm prep. So yeah, that method, I know it looks backward, but the whole point is that you leave the honey super on over the winter so you've got the ability to checkerboard in the spring. I just don't know if it's going to work. Like, I'm not going to say, oh, it's definitely going to work, because I have no idea. But they look all right. And even if they get to the end of the year and they don't swarm, I'm still going to be a bit like Was that the checkerboarding, or was it just good luck? Because not every swarm, not every colony swarms every year. But I do like having a play with different things. Can you spray paint a wooden pine hive too, or is it just poly hives? I spray paint a lot of my wooden hives, but what I do if I'm spray painting wood, I'll put the primer on first, so spray paint primer Let that dry and then spray paint over the top. Scott's saying, hi Lawrence, how did you get on with the Abello mating hive? You made a video a while ago about them. They're very expensive now, but at the same time they look good. So I sold them because I didn't, I didn't have the time to be doing them back then, and I knew someone who wanted them. But they are very good, and looking at Richard's presentation last week, it's based on the same system, the Mini Plus frames. slight differences but essentially the same. And then you've got the divider in there as well. So they were made, they were made really well, and it was nice that frames were fully made and fully wired. Someone got a good deal because I sold them a lot cheaper than I bought them for. I should have probably kept hold of them the way that the prices have been going up. But no, I didn't, I didn't use them. And then I've bought some different ones now to have a go this year, and I've just bought a pallet of BS Honeybees 6-frame nucs as well with the dividers. So I've got a fair amount to be rearing my queens this year, so that should be quite fun. Beekeeper's Guide for Pollen Identification says, hi Lawrence, Muhammad El Laban, what are the minimum number of bee frames and bee brood in the colony of which you can apply the Demaray split? So I would say there was a comment and a bit of a discussion on the Facebook group the other day about when you can do your Demaray. Should you wait for them to swarm prep, or should you Do it preemptively? And I said, I think do it preemptively, definitely, but you need them to be in a position where they're strong enough to be able to cope with it. So I would say in your box down below, it needs to be full. You need to have a full box of bees. Anything less, like we have like 10 or 11 frames in our boxes, and I wouldn't do it with anything less than 10 or 11 frames of bees, like completely full. brood box and bees, lots of bees in the supers, maybe 1 or 2 supers full, because you can get yourself in a little bit of a mess if you start doing it with not enough bees in there. I saw your video. I hope everything goes well with your son. Best of luck with it. Really sorry to hear that. Hi Lawrence, how do you encourage bees to go up in a foundationless honey super? That is a very good question. How do you encourage them to go up in a foundationless honey super? And what I would say is you need to, you need to get the timing right. But the trick that I would use is I would undersuper, as in I would put the super underneath the brood box. Because if you've got the brood box here and then you've got a foundationless super above, you've got kind of like maybe starter strips up there, and then you've got this void directly above where the bees are. And I speak from experience, it is very, very difficult to get them to go up past that kind of like 4 inches of nothingness to go to your starter strips. So I would take the super, the foundation and the super with starter strips, and I'll put it underneath the brood box and just let them naturally expand into it. And the queen will go in there and she will lay and get it all drawn out. And then once it's drawn out, you need to take that up, put it above the brood box, put a queen excluder in between the two. Find the queen and put the queen underneath the queen excluder, and that is the foolproof way of doing it. You just keep, keep on doing that all the way through the season. So every time you add a new one, add it to the brood box. The bees will just make use for it, and then you should be good to go. But once you've had the first one in, you can just undersuper without going underneath the brood box, if that makes sense. So you'll have your brood box, you get like that.

Wow.

There you go, you do it right. Your brood box, your first super with honey in, and then you lift that one up, you can put it kind of underneath there, and then they don't mind a void once you've got bees working it. Right, let's have a look at a few more of these comments then. Talking about killing honeybees. Dickie Mint saying probably one of the best bee videos he's ever seen. Thanks very much. That was, that was the demo A split. I like that video. I was absolutely gutted on that video because it took me so long to film it. It's a 35-minute video if you've not watched that one already, and it was filmed over maybe 10 visits. And then when I was putting it all together at the end, I've messed up the audio, and it's the kind of thing that you can't go back and film it. So I just had to try and repair the audio, and it was a bit naff. So all of that effort for nothing, but it's getting a lot of views now. He's a good video. He's just, yeah, he posed a similar question on Fred's site. I'm guessing that's Frederick Dunn. He got the question, the answer that he needed. Syntax Prepper talking about should you kill honeybees. He's saying he agrees shouldn't kill them. He views highly defensive aggressive colonies as an opportunity. I've only been beekeeping for a little over 2 years but living in an area with a good bit of African colonization, it's easy to pick up those genetics. Yeah, I kind of want to say something there, but I'm not going to say it. I'll bite my tongue. I do see that, and what I would say firsthand is what is one of the most amazing things is having a really horrible aggressive colony and not enjoying your beekeeping and finding the queen and killing her, which is never nice. I don't enjoy killing a queen, and then getting them to accept a nice new queen, and then seeing the transformation of that colony, and then going in the next year, and it's the next year when you open them up and you're just like, wow, it's just completely, completely different colony. So it is good fun. And I— this is part of the reason I did this video, because I just— it just drives me insane when I see people saying, I'm gonna pour petrol all over my bees because they're really angry. And I just think, bloody hell, just then £30 on a new queen as opposed to killing everything. Going into rant mode again now, right? Right, looking a few more. There's like, there's absolutely tons of questions. Right, so on the checkerboarding video as well, Stephen Dawes is saying, when is the queen excluder installed? So the guy who invented this technique, or at least wrote about it, doesn't use a queen excluder. So I'm not going to use a queen excluder, and I'm just going to follow his technique exactly as he does it. So it's not coming in. Be interesting to see how it goes. Right, Alan saying you definitely do not talk too much. So I think I got a little bit of a complex last year with people saying that I talk too much about things, and I do. I look back at some of the videos and I get what they're coming from now. I tried to hone my presentation style a bit, but there was a lot of just blabbing. So I'm really— you will notice it, like the differences in the thumbnails, the differences in, in everything really, and trying to condense everything down. Um, the, the one comment that I will never get back to because I'll just I'll go mad is when people say that I talk too fast because I purposely talk fast to keep people engaged. So sorry if you can't understand it, I will try and slow down a little bit, but you can't keep everyone happy. But on that note as well, like, we changed— we lost the original intros, we lost, hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey, welcome to another episode of Nerdnets and beekeeping, which you do get to occasionally hear on the streams. And I'm cutting out the— I'm cutting out the new intro as well, so that is going next video, that's gone. And then there's going to be no— there's going to be no intro whatsoever. I'm just going to go straight in, trying to implement a few little tips and tricks. Sounds like whistling. Is it a signal of a swarm? Is that whistling in my house now and signal of a storm? Because it is whistling and stormy outside. But no, I've never heard, I've never heard kind of like audible signals for a hive that's going to swarm. This is one of the things when you learn about beekeeping and you get the experience, you know when the colony is going to swarm. Like, they are so odd and act so differently, and you can just tell the way the colonies Not really doing much, not got much purpose, is congested on a hot day when they shouldn't be congested. You open them up, you can see from the entrance. I think you do, you really get to know quite quickly when a colony is not right and they're going to swarm. Let's have a look at some more. I think talking about my insulation on the long hive video, saying, is it some special type of rockwool that you use? You seem to have both a yellow type and an orange type. Don't they cause you to become itchy when handling them? So no, it was— I stole it out of my roof.

Don't tell my wife.

And it was just the same stuff. And yeah, it is a little bit itchy, but it does a really, really good job of keeping it nice and warm. Joe's saying, say I want to make 5 splits this year, would it be more efficient to stick another brood box on after winter, waiting for it to fill up, and then taking off the extra brood box and making 5 2-frame splits? I'll be doing a video on exactly this, which is the best method for getting maximum expansion from a single colony. And it does depend on your genetics because there's no point kind of doubling up if they're just going to stick loads of honey in it. But I will go at least to a double brood, and then I'm contemplating going from a double brood and splitting the 2 boxes and then going double brood again, because I think that, that, that's a better way of building up the numbers of frames of brood and the number of bees that you need in order to make numerous splits. So this will be, this will be a video and a number of videos this year, but this is the plan, to take one big strong national brood box. Put another brood box on the top, feed them so they fill it, so they're over 2 boxes between 20 and 22 frames of national deeps. And then the plan is to split those, do the same again. So you split them into 2 and then start feeding them again and put another brood box on each. So then you've got 2 colonies both on double brood, so you should have between 40 and 44 frames depending on the number of frames you've got in the boxes. And then at that point, I'm going to split them out, the whole colonies, break them up into 2 frames. So should get 20 nucs from each colony, double brood box colony. And then I'm going to try and build those up and feed them, keep on going. That's the plan. We'll see how we go. But I'll be adding mating queens to that. I won't be rearing my own. Jamie says, hi, Laurence, do you have any advice or dos and don'ts of approaching a farmer or someone with land to host bees? So yeah, I did a video on this, so if you search for that, there is a video. I will cover it again now. Phone call's coming through. The first one is use Google Earth. So David on the Apiarist did a really good post on this the other day. Google that as well. It's like top first or second on theaparist.org. So he's got loads of good tips. Go on Google Earth and identify where you want to put for bees. That's the first thing that you need to do. Don't kind of just meet someone who says, oh, I've got some land here, I've got somewhere suitable for you. Go and identify it. So you look at access, close to rivers, what the forage is like, out of sight from people. Figure out all the things that you want in an apiary and then go and identify the exact place where you want to keep bees. Preferably go and do a little bit of a recce on it as railway, drive past it, see if it is actually suitable, and then go find the landowner and approach them. And what I would just say is go there in your car or in your truck with your bee suit on. It sounds a bit cheesy, but it works. With some honey with a nice label on it, with a plan about what you're going to talk about, maybe like a written letter, um, and, and like a real bullet point list of what you're willing to agree to. So maybe you're going to give him one jar of honey per year, and these are— if you want unconditional access to the land, if you go there with all of those, those things, they'll realize that you're coming across seriously and you're not just like a chancer who wants to go and stick some bees on someone's land. But yeah, definitely find out where you want to keep bees first and then tell them where it is, because otherwise you'll just end up with some rubbish places. Saying, exactly my thinking, seems a lot easier than taking a few frames out of one box every so often to make splits. Yeah, that's the way I'm going to do it. Saying, I like getting stung. I definitely don't like getting stung, but I appreciate people like it, at least they like watching me get stung. Joe's saying, would you use pollen patties and syrup to fill the extra brood box faster for the splits, or are pollen patties a minefield? So what do you want to fill the frames with? You want to fill them with brood. You don't want to fill them with stores because that's kind of defeating the point of doing it. So pollen patties do work, but for us in North Wales, we definitely don't need pollen patties because there's tons of available pollinators there. You only really need it in a terrible year when the weather's bad and the bees can't get out. But you can't. Do you know what, I'm going to start trapping more pollen. That's what I'm going to do because I like to feed pollen back to the bees. I think it's better than feeding them pollen, but thin syrup, feeding them thin syrup slower than they can store it is the best way for them to kind of turbocharge and get them going. That's what I'm going to do. I've just done this, approached people in the field till I found farmer's name and then had a chat, got 2 apiaries just before friendly and honest. Good advice. Saying of traditional hive boxes and he's willing to move to modern hives, you have no idea will it work or not. There's nothing wrong with traditional, like, wooden hives. I've got loads of them. You do get kind of like incremental benefit from polyhives, but there's other things that aren't quite as good. Joe's saying, how much honey payment do you tend to give to the landowners? I'm looking to set up my first out April this year. So the standard amount is £1 of honey per hive per year. We've taken that to just be like one jar of honey, so we use like a smaller jar, but we give them extra. Like, the landowners are great. It doesn't— when you've got a few colonies, we just give them whatever they want, a bit of honey. We kind of sort them out with it. And some other products, like a little Christmas hamper, and keep your landowners happy. Gotta be done. Well, I'm gonna go back to comments on here then. So Brad's saying, do you ever lose a colony? So when they would not break cluster and move over a frame where food is. So talking about isolation starvation, I would say in the UK it is very, very rare. But as long as you've got a big lump of fondant on the top, it's kind of not going to happen. I'd say a lot of people will confuse other issues in the hive with isolation starvation. That definitely happens because you get a colony, you've got like a droneless queen, and it looks like the colony's dwindled to nothing. You've just got this little cluster of bees, dead bees, a little bit of brood, and there's loads of stores around them. People say, oh, well, my bees died, there was loads of food left in the hive, it must have been isolation starvation, when it could have just been anything that killed them and they left loads of food. So in the UK, it's very, very rare, and sticking a big slab of fondant on the top, as long as they can get access to it, it's like, i.e., touching the frames, then this shouldn't really happen. Joe's saying, have you ever had a landowner get bees themselves after seeing bees on their land? No, never happened. I think like farmers have enough on, they do. So if you're approaching a farmer like the guys around here, they've got like 500, 600, 700 acres of land and they've got like 1,000 sheep or something, they've got enough on without having to worry about bees. So it's never happened. Not to say Not to say it wouldn't happen, but I have seen— I've seen other people try and think that beekeeping is easy and invest quite a lot of money in it and then realize that it's not quite as easy. This is the kind of comment that I do feel a bit bad about. So he's a Bangladeshi bee farmer. Can he be employed on my farm? I'd love to employ someone, especially someone who's like got experience bee farming. We just— I've just not got the ability to manage someone coming in at the moment, so it's maybe, maybe next year. Let's have a look. Kenties Kicks, who was here before, saying not surprised the angry bees with me going and opening the colony and putting a big slab of fondant on them. Yeah, you need to do it though. It's not easy changing it, but someone said, I think a comment on the other day, saying, at what temperature would you go down? What temperature would you go down to to put a slab of fondant on a hive? And I said, well, I'd go down to -20, like -30, whatever, because if you're going to your colony and you're lifting them up and you're saying they are dangerously light, they need to be fed fondant. I do not care what temperature it is because if you— it might, it might take 3 weeks for the temperature to get within your ideal range, and then by that time they're dead. So bees are amazing at bringing the heat back up there. Just pop the lid, pop the lid, open it up, 10 seconds, big slab of fondant on, close it back up again. And I reckon if you put a thermometer in the hive, they would have lost a couple of degrees and they'll soon build it back up again. And in the UK, like, it just doesn't get very cold, does it? I don't think there's been a single ground frost where I live at the moment, which is like, it's kind of like isolated a bit, but it is like quite rural. But yeah, no major frost at all, which is strange. So Kate's talking about wish they did ekes for their Langstroth, the pains Polynucs. It's crazy in the UK how they've got so many different variations of nucs and different feeders and everything doesn't connect together. But yeah, I don't like the side feeder in the Payne's Polynucs. And a couple of people have asked me this already. They said, you don't like the Payne's nucs, but why do you send out all of your nucs in Payne's nucs? And the simple answer is, is that they're a lot more secure to send them in the post So with the other ones, you have to— the only way to really secure the other one down properly is by removing the feeder, removing the feeder, putting on a ventilated screen, and then screwing down all the 4 corners. That's the only way you can get it secure. So then I end up having to buy feeders every year, but because I'm buying feeders that I don't need, and none of the nuc companies sell the modular nucs without the feeders because I've asked them. They said no, it's all done on the same mould. Whereas panes, because it's built in, you just get a single ventilated roof and then you can screw it down. So it is the most secure way to send them, and they're fine. Like, they're absolutely fine as soon as you get a little bit of insulation on them. Some other questions. Oh, Graham's saying, uh, here we go. Oh, Salem's saying you're the best honeykeeper on YouTube. Thanks very much. I don't know, I don't know if that's true, but I appreciate your comment. Thank you, it's very kind. Ollie's honey is rich, rich as honeybees. Can you get your honey tested to find out where they get the nectar from? So sign up to the National Honey Monitoring Scheme. Depending on how many people you've got in your area, they do it for free. They do it maybe once or twice a year. But generally you get one, and what they do is they give you like a pollen rating. So you send some honey off to them and then they'll analyze all of the pollen, they'll send you back all of the pollen that's within your honey sample. You need to take it with a bit of a pinch of salt though, because sometimes you get stuff like rose pollen in there, which clearly the bees haven't been foraging on those. But it gives you— and the reason is that you get like cross-contamination, so you might have like a a bumblebee on a rose that then goes to some clover, and the bee goes to the clover and picks up the rose pollen. But it gives you a rough breakdown of, um, what your bees are foraging on and the percentages as well. So the last time we had it done, I think we had 72 different pollens in ours, and I ticked a few of them off saying there's no way that's real, um, but it was loads. This is one thing that North Wales is very very, very good for. You get huge diversity of what's available because you've just got big swathes of wild areas, and then it gives you a very unique honey. So no jar of honey is the same. But yeah, sign up to it, it is free, it's really good. Didn't realize you were live streaming. Today is the 18th, not the 17th. Don't know if someone has already said— I'll put that— have I put that on the live stream? You're right, it is the 18th. You'd have missed it if you looked at that. What is the problem, poly problem, at BS Honeybees? So it's in— he did a big article in the Bee Farmer magazine, but I speak to Dan a fair bit about this. I did last year as well when I was talking to him, and the company that make that, the actual hive, has gone, has just liquidated. They've gone. So they spent all of this money doing it, getting the molds, and now there's no company to do it. And they've searched high and low to get a company to take it on, and just no one's willing to mold and produce that Polyhive anymore. So they've got the mold, but they can't do anything with it. And then they've had to spend a lot of money refurbishing the nucleus molds as well. And I think they get the feeling that they're going to pull the plug. And if they pull the plug on it, that's not just BS Honeybees that won't do it. You're talking BS Honeybees, Paynes, Maysmore— they all use this same factory. I suspect that won't happen, and what will happen is the cost will just keep on going up like it has this year. I just, I can't get over how expensive poly nucs are at the moment. Really, really expensive. Not good. If I know any way to send you Yemen honey, I will do it for you as a Humble gift. I would love that. You're very nice. Thank you. It's expensive though, $100 a kilo. Um, so just do me like a little hotel portion, a little 10-grammer. Um, have I ever watched Cayman Reynolds on YouTube or know of him? He seems very knowledgeable. Yeah, I've watched his things. I've reached out to him a number of times, said about doing a collaboration. He just completely ignores me. I've not got enough subscribers for Caiman to take any notice of me yet. He needs to be on Ian Stepler's level to get Caiman to notice. But yeah, great beekeeper, very, very good beekeeper, knows what he's doing. And you know what I love? I love his picking the ukulele or whatever it was. Absolutely love that video. Joe's saying, any idea why there isn't more British manuka honey. So far I've only seen Trigothman Estate producing it, but it grows well in temperate climates like ours. Yeah, I don't know. I thought this— it's madness, isn't it? It must take like quite a long time to, to produce it. Um, but yeah, that is, that is raking it in. You'd think someone with land like in bloody Wales where it's just sheep and land is cheap, you'd get some manuka trees in and give it a go. I guess the problem is that you need to ensure that it's just solely Manuka, so you need kind of like 27 square miles of land to say, right, this is Manuka honey. You couldn't just do it on like 20 acres because then the bees would just fly off and get some dandelions. But yeah, I don't know why they don't do it. Graham's saying, at least, yeah, at least they have the mold. Yeah, I think need the factory. That's the problem. They've just got a complete monopoly on it, but they're all made in the same, you know, same factory. Do beehives and dogs mix in the garden? Probably not. I always say to people, don't keep bees in your garden. I know loads of you will keep bees in your garden, but I just say, if you can get them out the garden, get them out the garden. It's just not worth it. I remember when I had bees in the garden up here and I had 4 hives up there and I used to be quite blasé about it. And Jasper came up one day, you've all met Jasper, and he got stung really badly and he ran the full length of the garden in through the house, the full length of the house upstairs into the bedroom, into his crate, like his safe place, and he was just whimpering, really crying. I felt so bad. And every single time I come back from doing the bees now He's like all over me, sniffing me, like trying to clean me. So he's, he's, he's offended and he doesn't like these. And I've got these just out there. You can't see them, just, just out there. And, uh, you can climb out the window to get on the roof, so that's what I often do, go and take like videos of him. And every time I open the door— I'll go and show you. I'll open the window now, I'll show you what he does. Hopefully you heard that. He's like, um, so he doesn't like it. Dry Cut Homestead, you recommended me to Cayman in his Hive Life poll, maybe he would check you out. Thank you very much, that would be good. I would just, I want to go to Hive Life conference just to have fun, it looks so much better than Bee Trade Ex. It's really bad to say that, but like a proper, proper show. Fastest way to get drawn comb? Keep it from the year before, definitely the fastest way. But to feed, feed your bees 1:1 sugar syrup, just keep on feeding them, and you'll get your drawn comb. When making a split, is it best to purchase the mated queen or allow them to make your own? I would say to everyone, it's best to learn how to graft your own queens. So if you had like a— I don't know how to say it, you say when things are in order like that, I would say number one, learn how to graft. And then get like a proper grafted mated queen cell. Number 2, buy a mated queen. Number 3, let them create a cell like an emergency cell. That's my, that's my order. Uh, JK saying he's trying both. Yeah, just have a go, it's all good fun. Uh, Joe's saying, how early would the Yelantas be distributed? So I'm well and truly at the mercy of my roomie Gregor for that, but last year I think it was like first or second week of June. I wouldn't let that put you off. I think you've ordered already. It's at that time of the year, if you get them in, you can still target all the summer flows kind of with the good genetics. But what I always say to people is if you're requeening, requeen, do them in September, even into October. Requeen them that late in the year with a late season mating queen. And not only will your overwintering numbers be dramatically improved, but also the next year you'll just— the amount of honey you get from a late-mated season queen the following year is significantly more, and it reduces the swarming impulse as well. And it means you don't have to fight with everyone else in April for trying to get the early imported queens because there's massive demand for people to make splits there. So you kind of spread the demand out a little bit. It's a lot easier. Right, back to these comments then. Um, let's find some of the ones I was going to answer. Andrew's saying about, um, the Payne's Poly Nucs, and he was saying that he's got the Miller feeder on top to provide extra insulation, which I think is a really good idea. By taking out the clear plastic bridge in the middle, the bees haven't Access to the feed chambers, takeaway tray of fondant on one side and half of the protein patty on the other side. Saying wild comb may become an issue, but I think the benefit is worth it. So the only issue that you've got with doing that is that if they— if it gets cold, it gets like really, really cold and they're struggling for stores down in the box, they won't go up there to get it. But it is the UK, so I don't think that's going to happen. I've done something similar to that.

Previously.

In a nuc is where you do need to be careful, like feeding them too much can be counterproductive because they just get to a point where they're just like saturated with feed. Also, feeding pollen can be like— pollen patties can be bad if they've not got the weather in order to process it, so it gives them— they need to go out more to go to the toilet, and if they can't get out, then you can start getting dysentery in the hive and then diseases can start Again, not too much of an issue in the UK, but there's nowhere the bees are going to be flying at the moment with all the wind. So if you started feeding early Feb, you could, you could have a little bit of an issue now. You're very generous with your Super Stickers, thank you very much, much appreciated. I thought Manuka was a New Zealand appellation, a bit like Bordeaux. We can't make Parmigiano-Reggiano, Italian cheese either, just like can only make bolognese champagne style. That may well be the case actually.

I don't—

I didn't think they could— I don't think they could do that on a plant to be like, right, Manuka honey is ours. What they could do is call it like New Zealand Manuka honey because I know they had the big— Griff did it near the post, the video about Australia coming into Manuka honey. So you can get Australian Manuka honey now, and I guess that applies across the world. But I know that what they could do is they could, they could put that legislation or that certification, whatever it is, on New Zealand Manuka honey. We're doing something similar in Wales, so they're looking at doing a Welsh wildflower honey, doing a Welsh heather honey. I think Scotland are doing a Scottish heather honey as well. Times for Welsh Manuka then. Yeah, but more than that, Welsh Heather. Like, I know again this was controversial, but when I said like, what's the best, what's the best honey in the world? It's Welsh Heather honey. Like, I said it tongue-in-cheek because it was just a joke to try and get people to click the video, uh, and it wound a few people up. But I don't like Manuka honey. Like, I bought it and tasted it and kind of thought, it's all right. It's not even that it's all right, like, I don't particularly like the taste of it. I find it a bit bitter and a bit off-tasting. But what the New Zealand government are good at, and it is driven by the New Zealand government, this is that they're just the art— like, the masters in marketing. They've turned that product into just a world leader for people making themselves themselves, like, feel better about themselves and got all of these health benefits. Can you imagine trying to do that in the UK? They have trading standards all over you saying, well, you can't say this, you can't say that. And you need to be careful with what you claim. You need to be able to prove it. But like, you look at the Manuka honey here, what was the first thing that they measured themselves by? Manuka honey was the unique Manuka factor. And it's like, well, we don't really give many other honeys much of a chance compete, do you, when like you're rating it on the unique Manuka factor? So I was thinking we could do like a unique Welsh factor and then no one else can buy it. But I say all of this and I'm massively jealous, is all it is. Look, like, if you're, if you're from New Zealand, don't, don't take offense to that. My, my granddad was from New Zealand, so I, I am quarter Kiwi, so I like to think. So I've got black cap on, black caps. But yeah, I am jealous. I wish I was— I wish I could supply them with garlic from my bees. It'd be great. Has anyone at your work or in your family been inspired by you to get bees? So no, so at work I don't talk about it. It's a weird thing, like I just— I don't talk about bees at work, full stop. And I'd say 99% of people at work don't even know I I keep bees, but no interest whatsoever. And my family know they've had enough of me talking about bees. My wife's just constantly like, just stop talking about bees, you absolute lunatic. So, and then I just like, okay, so I'll talk about food or something else. But yeah, no, none of them have been inspired. Danny C saying, oh yes, the Italians made us change our wine because they're Prosecco with a similar name. Yeah, it's all in the marketing, isn't it? There's a lot of difference between the Manuka content percentage concentration. There is, but it's all kind of marketing hoodoo, isn't it? You can test, you can test whatever you want. Like, I could come up with a unique Welsh factor and test for it and say, right, mine is more unique Welsh than yours because it's got more of, I don't know, some wildflower or something. So mine's more of a unique Welsh factor than yours, where in reality it doesn't make a difference. And they did test, didn't they? They did like a really big worldwide study showing like the top-grade Manuka with the top concentration of all of the different things that they were testing for, and then tested it against other different honeys from around the world. And one of the ones they used was heather honey. So I think it was Scottish heather honey, actually. And they showed that Scottish heather honey either competed on a level playing field with Manuka on a lot of the categories, and then in some of them it far exceeded it. And one of them was like the level of manganese. So we've got all these different things, and I just— are we just missing a trick? We're missing a trick because Manuka honey is— sorry, heather honey is incredible, and like, it tastes so unique. and it would just have worldwide appeal, easily a contender against Manuka honey. But we're just not good at that as a nation, like blowing our own trumpet and trying to sell something for the collective good of everyone. So Joe's saying the stuff at Tregothman is marketed as British Manuka honey, not Manuka honey. The New Zealand is eligible for official certifications and anywhere else, but yeah, but that's exactly it. Yeah, so they won't let you do these tests on it. You try getting your honey because it's unique. It's the UMF, Unique Manuka Factor. And then they do another one that shows kind of like the activity. Try getting your honey tested for that outside of New Zealand. And they're like, no, no, no, you have to be part of the New Zealand group in order to do that. So it's just, it is great marketing. I'm so jealous. So Joe's saying, would you say heather honey is our version of Manuka? I'd say it's the closest in that it's so unique. And when they did the tests, kind of the activity levels, the antibacterial, antimicrobial levels were very, very strong in heather honey. And that's heather honey across the UK, but particularly Ling Heather Honey. Have you got a job outside of beekeeping? How are you able to produce so much content? So yeah, I've got got a full-time job in construction. Luckily we finish at about 1 on a Friday, so I normally squeeze like all of my beekeeping into a Friday. I do from like 1 to about 10 at night because you get late days in the summer. Um, but then, but then also like the videos, people, I don't know, I speak to people and they say, how do you produce so many videos? You do like one a day. And I say, oh, it doesn't take me that long. Like I did the last time I filmed it took me about maybe 2 hours, and I think I filmed like 13 videos. And then I just like play around in the evenings editing them. So I get, I get quite a lot done in the day. And they're not very good, the videos, but you know, it's quite a lot of them. Has the wild thought of setting up a bee farm in New Zealand ever crossed your mind? Do you know any bee farmers that have gone there to produce Manuka? Now that is a very interesting point, and you need to get outside of my brain, please, Joe, because because my uncle retired from work when he was 30. He retired when he was 30, like proper, proper retired, never went back. He used to work in the City of London and nobody knew what he ever did. Nobody knew. So probably some sort of criminal. But it wasn't. He wore nice suits, he went in every day and he worked in the City of London and earned a lot of money. And so he retired when he was 30. and lived in the UK for quite a while, and then he moved to Patagonia. He was in Patagonia for like 15 years, and then when COVID kicked off in Patagonia, um, he wanted to get out because he didn't want to be— didn't want to get stuck there. And we've got loads of family in New Zealand, so he's moved to New Zealand. So he's sitting there at the moment in New Zealand. Like, I've just been nudging him, saying, do you want to just kind of like go and speak to some bee farmers and put in a good word for me? The setup, like, I don't know, some sort of relationship, but he's not, no, he's not, he's not doing it. Like I say, he's 72 now, so he retired 42 years ago, so he just wants to chill out and drink wine and eat nice steak. Right, back, sorry, back to bees. How do you tell the difference between a swarm and a supersedure cell? Have you done a video on this? So yeah, I've done a video on this, and the cells are identical, so there's no difference whatsoever in the cells. It's the number of the cells. So if you've got a colony and there is a single— this is my rule now— if there is one cell in the whole colony on all of the frames, it's definitely a supersedure cell. One single cell. I say anything above that, you don't know, but you can't be clear. So if it's 2 cells, they might be swarming and it's just kind of like a weak colony. You might get 2 supersedure cells If you're going into the 3s and 4s and 5s, they're definitely swarming. Treat them as swarming. That's what I would say. Pink, it's Honey saying hi. I love the Q&A. No problem, I enjoy it as well. I come on every time to go through some comments and I never get through them, so I just— this is an easier way of doing it. If people want to ask questions, stick it on, stick a comment on there saying you're going to ask it in the it's a live one, and I'll hang around until my daughter comes back. But you know what, the weather outside is— there is no issue up here whatsoever, so we missed the storm so far for today. I'm happy with that. Where's my accent? So, South, Southeast London originally, not Wales. Saying he understands they drop hives in and out by helicopter get Manuka honey. Yeah, it's cool, isn't it? It could be a good YouTube video. Dry Cut Homestead saying he's in construction as well. We work like 60 hours a week, probably not healthy. I tell you what, the US work way more hours than we do in the UK. It is bonkers, the hours that you guys work out there. So like, I'm, I got 4— I'm on a 42-hour week contract. And a lot of other people around here are like 37.5 hours. A lot of public sector people are on like 36.25, seems to be like a standard working week. And I get like 6 weeks a year annual leave, which is pretty good. 6 weeks a year plus your bank holidays and stuff. In America, it's like 60 hours a week and you get like a week off. That's it. So if I've got that completely wrong and that's just a stereotype, let me know. I could not believe the differences in how long your working week was and how many days leave you got from that. Audrey Larkin's real life. I do not know what that comment means, and I see it come up. I think it's just— I think it might be spam. Comes up on all of my videos. Do you use QuickBooks? Quilt boxes, what are your thoughts on them? So I, when I first started beekeeping, when I moved here, I had some quilt boxes and I made them up like an eke and then put some mesh on it and I put wood chips in with the vents going out the side because I saw it on YouTube and there wasn't really much UK YouTube content. And then since then I've moved over to just insulating, so heavy top insulation, open mesh floor underneath, and then not so insulated walls, and that's what I do now. But that's, that's what it's like for me. That's just what it's like for me over here. I just— the, the US is very, very different. And I was chatting with someone about this the other day. I think Pete was talking about it on the No Nonsense Speaking Facebook group about the differences between kind of like the climate we've got over here and the climate in, say, Canada, northern Canada, where it's incredibly cold up there, but it's very, very dry. And then over here, it's kind of like relatively mild but very, very wet, and the different— you need different approaches to manage your bees there. So I'm like, I would never call myself an expert anyway, but I'm used to kind of UK conditions. I don't know about US conditions or northern Canada or anywhere else like that. So I've tried them, my bees all survived the winter in them, but that's kind of as far as I'd go. Time is honey. These chats are the adult version of Saturday morning cartoons. I'm sitting here with my pancake and eggs loving every moment of this even though it's Friday. I'm glad, I'm glad you like it. You can come on to the chat if you want. Let me just send you a link, you can come and say hello. If you do, let me know, I'll send you a link now, send me your email. I'm getting bees for the first time this year, currently doing a beginner's course. I feel uncomfortable getting a clipped queen. Can a beginner manage an unclipped queen? So I would— my words out— I understand why you're uncomfortable with clipping a queen. All I would say is, from someone who didn't clip queens for like 6 years and then moved over to clipping all of my queens, the management of the colonies is so much easier. It really, really is. And as I was saying before, you get so So used to recognizing when a colony is going to swarm, and you do get experience. But when you don't have that experience, like if you, if you inspect all of your colonies and you miss this one tiny beginning of a swarm cell, and then you go about 7 days later, your bees will be gone. Half your bees will be gone with the queen. If you clip the queen, you'll go back 7 days later and the queen probably won't be gone. You'll look into the colony and you'll see like 50 swarm cells, and you'll be like, oh my God, there's 50 swarm cells. Swarm cells. I need to do something, but all of your bees will still be there. So I see it as a as an excellent insurance policy, and I would recommend everyone to to clip their queens. However, I appreciate some people don't like to clip queens. Yeah, now it goes. Good luck with your bees. Time is honey saying, yeah, when you're paid a salary. The company kind of owns you. They do, they do. Uh, then there's the healthcare costs taken out of your checks. Yeah, we get, we get that over here, you know, with kind of like National Insurance. And that's, that's going to be a killer come April. Video, fucking extra 2 grand, 2 grand a year coming out this year. I can't wait to get to Rich's comment there. Uh, Joe's saying, cheers for the advice as always. Not gonna lie, I see a New Zealand bee farm forming part of the Black Manta Honeybee Empire in the future. I don't know about that. It would be good though, wouldn't it? I think that what could happen is, and this is on the Brexit beekeeping video, is that I form some sort of alliance with a New Zealand bee farmer to import New Zealand queens. Not that that would go down very well, obviously. So Rich saying, do you do any DJing in the local pub, DJ Rex? You, you know about my past. This is really disturbing. Uh, how do you know that? You need to message me how you know that before I answer it any further. Right, In Yugoslavia we worked from 7 AM to 2 PM. Now in Croatia we work from 9 to 5, 6, 7. That's, that's strange. I didn't think it'd be that bad in Croatia. I don't know why I thought that, but yeah, the working week is changing though. It really is changing. Like, construction is early start, so like 7 AM start, and then we work on like a 4-day. So you do 4 long days and then 1 kind of half day, um, still a 42-hour week. But then when you're, when you're in a position like managing people, like leading, you're kind of always there. You're always getting emails, you're always getting calls, so you never really switch off. Right, I'm gonna invite someone. Okay, right, I posted it in there. I can bet people coming in, but if anyone wants to come in, feel free if you've got a decent connection. Expect some time, honey, to come in and come say hi. Let's have a chat. Saying, I've recently seen stuff about people keeping bees in a natural dead tree hollow, some a carv, very creative. The bees were exiting the hive trough through the carving mouth. Yeah, I've seen, I've seen that, it's cool. Can I clip the 2 loops for you please? Do you know what, I can't, I'm really sorry, it becomes so difficult tracking what's what. There we go.

Morning, Lawrence. How you doing today, man? Good morning from Texas. How you doing?

There we go. This is amazing. That was so quick.

Awesome. Good morning.

So how many bees do you keep?

I'm just starting. This is my first year. I took a class out of Michigan State called Hives to Heroes or Heroes to Hives. It was a— it was just a basic education. I didn't know anything about bees. My family had kept them for a little bit. I, I killed a lot of bees as a pest control tech, um, and it killed me every time I did it because I killed a lot of wild hives, man, in California growing up. Probably for about 2 years I was out killing bees, man. I didn't feel good about any one of it. Um, after I got out of the military, I'd been wanting to keep bees for some time actually, and I was laying in bed one night late. And an email came in and said, hey, there's a new beekeeping class for veterans that want to get tied up in beekeeping. I was like, yes, right here, please. Signed up right away, got, got enrolled and took the class all last year. The mentor, our mentor named Adam, he was our teacher and he's, he's an entomologist out of Michigan State, mind you. He's like, don't buy your bees yet, let us teach you first because you're going to kill your bees. He promises like, you guys go into this Not knowing anything, you're gonna kill your bees. And I didn't want to be that guy, man. I wanted to take care of them, um, because I was, I was listening to somebody talk the other night, and to maintain pests, uh, uh, a superorganism like that, you know, it's kind of a humbling experience.

Yeah.

You know, no doubt. So, um, I'm gonna push for 16 colonies. That's what I'm gonna push for in my yard. And then from there, I have some other people out here interested in wanting to get tax exemptions on their property, so I'm working with them Well, um, so I'm first year. I'm gonna trap all my bees. I got swarm traps set up here on my yard and they're all showing promising signs.

I'm just— Swarm traps?

Just a 5-gallon bucket waxed inside with some lemongrass scent, poked holes. Yep, I got one I hoisted up in a tree yesterday about 20 feet up, see what that one does. But—

And when do you, when do you start getting like swarms coming through in Texas?

Right now the weather's real kind of— as you guys have seen it too all over the world, man, the weather's real touchy right now. I'm gonna have 85-degree days. Uh, let's see, I'll tell you, I'll be having 84 and 85. This is Fahrenheit. Monday and Tuesday next week, right? Then it's going to drop back down into the 60s and 50s the fall of that week, right? But the night difference is the nighttime temperature difference Let's see, next Friday it's going to be 52 in the day but 24 at night. That's a big drop in temperature, man. You're talking— that's a 30-degree drop. That's going to push the bees in the cluster and they're not going to break until— those bees aren't going to break until probably 3 days because we're going to have 3 nights where it's going to be below 30 degrees.

It's good fun. So have you got any questions you want to ask me then? Because this is quite a good one in terms of like you're a beginner, you've not got much experience. Experience with bees? Like, what, what are you worried about for the season?

Well, learning— I have a good mentor here in Texas that I met. Um, I was actually flagged down in a parking lot at a grocery store because I was wearing my channel shirt. My— this guy's like, hey, my, my neighbor has all kinds of beekeeping stuff. He's a beekeeper, been doing it for 40-plus years. Let me get you in contact with him. I told the guy my story and he's like, yeah, let me get you in contact with him. And at the time, mind you, Lawrence, I was looking for a mentor because I was like, I, I need somebody here that knows the climate, knows the bees. Um, so him being here, that's been a real big help, you know, because I talked to him 3, 4 times a week and we bounce a lot of ideas off each other because he's, he's been doing it 40-plus years, but he's still learning new stuff online too.

It's, it's great. It's great that you've got someone to dedicate so much kind of time to you. You don't often see that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to jump back to this format here so you can jump. You stay on, it's cool. And I'm just going to ask a question, so feel free just to kind of chip in.

Yeah, no, definitely.

So I think somebody has asked, would you remove the internal insulation during the summer? Talking about like the cork insulation. So no. So I've always said insulation is good like all the way through the year.

See, in here in Texas, it gets hot, you know, it gets hot down here in Texas. So cork insulation in the summer, like, we're going to have our boards, we're going to have our entrances wide open here in Texas in the summer, you know, let the bees fan it out.

You know, it's interesting though, I, I don't want to start an argument with someone this week, but I kind of had an argument with someone this week about this, which was he was saying that like poly hives and insulated hives, when it gets really hot, he was saying it just melts the hives. And I was saying to him, well, It kind of works both ways, doesn't it? You've got like a mass of bees and they're inside of the colony, they're trying to keep it at a certain temperature, and then if it's insulated, you've got the heat coming in, the insulation is actually stopping that heat coming in and reducing the rate that the temperature is going to build up. So then it's less work for the bees to go out, collect water, to fan the entrances down to keep it cool. And it's the same way that you'd get like a house, you'd kind of—

Yeah.

A fully well-insulated house uses a lot less energy in the air conditioning to keep it cool.

Definitely.

But he didn't want any to know any of that. But it's similar to what you're saying there, like, I don't have experience of 45-degree heat, so I don't know what it's like. I speak to someone in Australia, and I looked at a link on Australia, and they were saying a lot of them are moving over to, like, insulated poly hives in, like, Australia and in hot places because it gives the bees It means that they can spend more time foraging for honey as opposed to foraging for water to keep the colony cool. Yeah, but you don't see many people in Texas with polyhives, do you?

No, because that's the thing, you know, in Texas, you know, some days it gets 110 degrees here. That's hot, you know. We're not gonna— a lot of people out here are using standard Langstroth, you know, if it gets cold. But what I've learned is, you know, the cold is is kind of essential too to the health of the hive. It kills a lot of the, the pests off— mites, beetles, you know. It's going to help prevent a lot of those, the hive-borne pests that you're going to experience.

Yeah.

So I'm going to take the cold as it comes, the hot with the cold. And I'm learning a lot from everybody here, man. And that's what's so great about it. I'm first year again. I don't know anything about this, man. I'm going in it to, you know, kind of blindish, but you know, learning from you guys, everybody all over the world. It's been probably one of the best experiences the last couple years because I took Hives to Heroes all last year, and in that time I was picking up on all your guys' channels, taking notes, watching videos, meeting people on the flip side, and just starting to network. And I've learned a lot, you know, and now I'm ready to apply it. I'm just waiting on the bees to show up here in Texas.

Yeah, and, and what I always say to people is like You just need to learn what works for you. Like, 100% in North Wales is so different from keeping bees in southern England, and it's about 150 miles away. So if you're, like I said, 1,000 miles away, it's the same again, isn't it?

Yeah, like I said, it's crispy here in Texas. It is right now. Everything outside is brown and dry. You know, some of the cedars and some of the oaks have some, have some flowers and a little bit of pollen on them. But the bees are starving down here right now. They're hungry. We're waiting for that first rain to hit. We're waiting for that first night where there's that, you know, 15 to 20 degree difference and it holds for a couple of weeks. Then we'll start seeing more of that activity down here. But not just yet. And everybody is on like a knife's edge right now waiting for the bees to pop, which is kind of cool.

Yeah, I think everyone's like that over here as well. Graham's saying the non-insulated, non-poly disbelievers in the UK often say that polyhives sweat too much, and my simple answer to that is that a colony of bees will produce X amount of condensation regardless of whether they're in a wooden hive or a polyhive.

Yeah.

It shows up a lot more in a polyhive, and in a wooden hive it just absorbs into the wood, but it is more important in making sure that you do have the top surface insulated more than the walls, because you can do it really bad if you insulate the walls heavy and then don't have that insulation on top and you have that cold surface. You just get dripping on the cluster. And then if you get cold weather coupled with a lot of moisture above the cluster, you do get a lot of issues.

And you guys, Lawrence, you guys—

I'm gonna ask some more of these questions. So go on, say it again.

You probably deal with a lot of moisture issues where you're from. You're in where? UK, you said?

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, see, we deal with moisture issues too, but I'm guessing not as much as you guys do. We still get coastal fog, you know, we'll get 70, 80% some days.

So I think we just get kind of like 100% every day in North Carolina.

All the time.

Yeah, just miserable.

Seeing in the summer too where I live, it's— we have microclimates because I live in kind of hilly area of Texas. Yeah, um, you know, we get, we get weather systems that drop down into our area and they'll just linger around, you know. So different humidity, temperatures, everything happens here.

Yeah, Danny C's here saying he always has the argument with people that say they can't use formic acid and saying that the bees keep the temperature within the hive at over 30 degrees. It's a good point that, because it does say on the kind of Formic Pro and the Max that you can't use it in hot temperatures above 25 degrees C. I've had issues with Max, and I won't use it as a a treatment of choice anymore, but I still use it like it is. It's definitely got a place. It's the only thing you can really use when the supers are on in the UK. But I think it comes down a bit more back to the age of the queens as well. Max and formic acid will kill old queens, definitely.

I was in a really good chat last night about oxalic acid use. What's your regulation like there in the UK? How's your government on regulation there?

Full stop, can't use oxalic acid.

Really?

Yeah, full stop. You can use a product called apibioxal, which is about 80% pure oxalic acid mixed with 20% crap, which is just like glucose and sugar, and it's just in there so a company can sell it and regulate it. You're allowed to vape once per year using apibioxal, and you can't vape when the supers are on. That's, that's the legislation, and it is Wow, I'm so jealous of the USA being able to just constantly vape, do like 10 shots of oxalic acid throughout with all the supers on.

A year, yeah.

Doesn't taint the honey, no problem with it whatsoever. It costs peanuts. The bees end up being a lot more healthier because we're killing all the mites all the time, and we can't do it.

So full stop. Okay, man, see, we're— and we're What we were talking about, these guys were talking about, is the doctor from Florida State, I believe, was trying to get regulators here in America more involved with getting like mite control, getting mites under control. But they're also talking about, you know, that resistance that mites could possibly build up to new forms of control.

Yeah, so I think in terms of like chemical levels of control, like Amitraz, and I saw Kaymon was talking about this as well, they do build up resistance and they can build up resistance to it. And we've seen it with, I think, Parathyroids, that they've built up a big resistance to, and people are seeing resistance to Amitraz. Whereas oxalic acid, like, it'd be very difficult for them to build up a resistance to it because it's like a mechanical— they just can't really do it. It's a mechanical breaking down of their exoskeleton.

It shuts them down.

Yeah, that's why it's so effective, but you never know, you never know what comes from there.

And it makes you wonder how the mite has evolved, you know, how has the mite evolved to treatment over the last, what, 60, 70 years that we've known about it?

Yeah.

You know, what evolution has the mite taken that maybe we haven't really noticed yet? You're talking, you know, generations of evolution there that Could have happened.

Yeah, it certainly could. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna answer a few more questions. I always want to answer a question like this. I sometimes do that in Google Translate. What are you like with getting stung? I did this video on getting stung. Are you have you been stung much?

I got stung yesterday.

Do you get much of a reaction? You love it.

Yeah, I welked up a little bit. I got stung. Right here, kind of on the arm yesterday, and it welted up a little bit. Yeah, I got stung on the back of the neck a couple weeks ago. You know, part of the deal, man.

Would you—

It's not a matter of—

What do you use for protection? You've got like a full suit?

Yeah, I'm gonna full suit up here because we have Africanized, and my mentor, he told— he won't let me in his yard if I don't full suit. He told me, he's like, I don't want to see you in my— in your yard really without a full suit. So I'm taking his full advice and gonna listen to him.

So, so how come Texas Bee Works can go and do it with their hair down?

I don't know. That's them. That's not going to be me. I'm not going to be that guy that's like going to get stung 100 times and end up in the hospital, you know.

I'm not saying that in a challenging way. I'm saying it is in like—

Yeah, no, I get you.

They can go and do it, it seems, you know.

And I get it, I get it. Some people are comfortable like that. I'm not that comfortable, you know. Do you 100%, do how you're gonna do your bees. You know, I'm not gonna be out in my yard unsuited, there's no way, because we have Africanized bees here. And my mentor already told me, he's like, you get into Africanized colony, it's gonna ruin your day, I promise you.

Yeah, oh, definitely.

He's like, you get—

I wear like a full, a fully protective, nearly 400-pound bee suit to, uh, to make sure I don't get stung. So I'm in the same camp. I think it's good to wear protection.

You know, if you, you take 30 or 40 stings, that's, you know, that's a possible ER visit. Yeah, you never know. You never know what kind of reaction you're gonna get. You know, my arm welted up after one sting. You know, if I got stung 40, 50 times, you know, I'm probably going to take a trip to the hospital. So I'm, I'm not going to risk that. That's just me.

No, I've got a question here from Walker Bee Ranch, your mate. Which he says, can you place empty foundation in the 2 boxes above the bottom box, or should it already be drawn out? So he's talking here about the checkerboard in one that I did. So I asked these questions to the person who put together this method, saying, surely you just stick empty boxes on, it does the same job. And he categorically said no, it's all about the interchangeable nature of having a frame of stores and then a frame of foundation. And at the moment it's all just complete theory. I don't know whether it's going to work, uh, but you can—

It's a good friend of mine, Walker Bee Ranch. I was on the phone with him earlier.

And look, your comments there.

Yeah, man, that was really cool. I like that. That video is awesome, man. No doubt.

It was cool. So you love your YouTube? You're gonna, you're gonna start a YouTube channel, aren't you?

I already have one going.

Yeah. So when I click on it there, how many videos have you got on it? So we'll look at it.

Uh, probably about 10 or 12 maybe. I think I just put one up the other day.

Uh, there you go, subscribe.

Nice round, thanks man, appreciate it.

Um, everyone on here, subscribe to the channel as well. I love supporting like smaller channels and watching them, and I'm really trying to—

I'm gearing my channel towards a lot of veterans because the class I took was better. It was It was a veteran-based class for their veterans and family members.

Yeah.

Basically veterans with mental health issues, uh, veterans trying to reintegrate, find some way to become more involved with family life. You know, they put a lot of aspects surrounding the class, you know, not just to be beekeepers but to be great beekeepers, you know.

Yeah.

And the— our instructor is a veteran. He was field artillery, you know. So there's all walks of life in there, man, which was really great. And it puts you in touch with a lot of other veterans, which was really awesome. Walker B. Brown, he's a veteran.

Definitely. I think, I think it's such a good thing. So this is your swarm trap setup that you've done. Is that wax on the inside of that bucket?

Yeah, I wax the insides because bees can't drop the plastic.

Yeah, just like rolled it on with the brush, man. Just the brush. Yeah.

Yep, drilled a few holes in it and, uh, yep.

And then you go and what, you put them on like— how'd you put them on? Let's see if we can open the video and see if it'll let me watch.

Yeah, definitely. So I just got them hanging on some pretty simple math.

So they're okay, so they're that way around, are they?

Yeah.

And how—

so the—

okay, okay, I see what you mean. Yeah. Oh nice, I see.

I put 2 holes in them because the bees were having a hard time finding that hole, so I drilled another one. They found both holes eventually, you know.

So yeah, have you— it'd be interesting to see whether you catch them in there. Not like— we have real issues with anything, any holes underneath, they don't particularly like them, but little holes like that might be all right. Maybe like If it doesn't work, maybe block the bottom off completely and just put the hole right in the side.

Put a cork in it or something.

Well, just even, even that, just that— see that top hole that you've got there on that one?

I'm experimenting different ways. I got— I drilled holes in the bottom. Um, the one I just hung out my tree, it's just got a hole in the bottom, but it's 20 feet up. Yeah, so I'm gonna see how it works, you know. I'm experimenting different ways.

Just beeswax and Lemongrass oil.

Lemongrass scent.

And can you get any black comb from your mentor? Will he give you some?

I could probably get some comb from my mentor.

I'd get some comb. Do you know what? Black comb is by far and away the best thing you can get. Just get some black comb.

Just send a trap?

Okay, just, just rest it in the trap and they absolutely love it.

I'll talk to him, and he's not far. I'm probably going to see him this week sometime. I told him we're going to take him out to dinner and stuff, but Yeah, so I, you know, I set up different— just experimented different ways, set them up different heights just to see how they work, man.

It's great fun. I absolutely love trapping swarms. It is so much fun and doing different ways.

And again, for me, this is like the mental health part of the class I took, is the patience part of it, you know, learning to be able to accept situations that you can't control, you know. So there's, there's a learning process to it, and I'm being patient with it. So I think for them to come to me—

The, the whole mental health aspect of beekeeping is often overlooked. Like, I, I use it— it's awesome— retreat from the stress of normal life.

Yeah, I like to sit out there and just watch the bees, man, because it, it kind of blocks everything out. It really does.

So what did you do? What did you do? You're a veteran, but what division?

I was a mechanic out of my first duty unit while I was in the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg. So I did jump duty there. And then I deployed there to Afghanistan, came back, went to 1st Armored Division and deployed there out of Germany. So I did 2 tours.

Thank you for your service. We're all one big organization.

Yeah, we gotta thank the ones that didn't come back. I think those are the ones we have to thank most of all, man. You know, we're here carrying on for them pretty much at this point. So, you know, but thanks for the support, man. It's really good, you know, to know that there's a community out there that is supporting the beekeeping veterans, you know. And, um, I was talking to some other veterans from other countries like, hey, is there a program like this for your veterans?

I, I think, I think there is something similar. I don't think it's, it's as widespread. Um, the guy I sit opposite at work, he's like a an ex-major in the army, and he did like 3 seasons in Afghanistan. So I talked to him kind of often about— it might be 2, and then he went somewhere else, I think, actually. He was quite high up as a major, and some of the things he told me, I just— yeah, I couldn't go to war. Not built for it.

Thanks, Ollie. Thanks for the subscription, man. Appreciate you.

Um, well, I'm gonna answer some more of these questions. So Graham Craven says he bought a rather expensive suit Suit too, the Oz Armour triple layered works a treat. I've seen those suits, good to hear that that's working for you. And then he's saying he has the opposite problem, he had one hive and trapped swarms and now has 3, worrying about how to manage and split them in 2022. This, I say this to a lot of people, they say, what technique can you use to manage swarm control without constantly doing splits? And I just say to people, if you don't want to do that, do a demo of a vertical If you don't want to do that, just split them, and then when you get to like July, just merge them back together again, stick them back together again, just keep on combining them, and you end up with the colonies. They overwinter so well.

You get to pick the best queens.

It's a really good way of doing it.

I think my opinion also is being ready for those bees to split, having the equipment necessary, having that space ready. You know your bees are going to reproduce. We know that. We know bees reproduce exponentially certain times of the year based on weather, based on food stores, based on pollen, based on their food protein sources, everything. Bees are going to reproduce 100%. We can't stop that. That's that is a very natural instinct is to grow the colony for to protect the colony, to strengthen the colony, to make sure that the species survives. That's what the bee is going to do.

I think that's great advice, really good advice. You need to be prepared for the season.

Be prepared.

Yeah, people run out of boxes, they run out of supers, but split and recombine is a really good way to do it, and you end up cycling out the comb quite well, but you end up picking the best queens as well. So if you split, you've got an old queen and you've got the chance of getting a new queen. If you get that new queen mated and she looks really good then I would suggest you just kill the old queen, merge them back together again, and then your colony next year is less likely to swarm because you've got the younger queen. So you're kind of constantly building in this tolerance to them swarming. And if you get in there before they swarm, then you get more honey as well.

Yeah, just be ready for them. We're not going to stop that swarm process if we're not ready for them. You know, have the boxes ready, have the space ready for them. When you see them ready about to swarm, guess what? Go stack a box on them.

Yeah, Dry Cut Homestead has just said he sees you in lots of chats. You're becoming like a YouTube celebrity. You're going to be on everyone's chats now.

I enjoy the chats, man. Um, it's a lot of fun. It's a different community out there. I don't have Facebook, I don't have Instagram. I'm kind of anti-social media, I really am. Um, because it— I won't get into a rant about the social media platforms. Um, it's— this is my only kind of outlet. I live out in the country, um, and I like it, and I like my solitude. I like the peace and quiet, and this is where I learn a lot from you guys, man, and it's, it's amazing. Um, I wanna— You've got good—

you've got good internet connection for being out in the sticks.

I'm on— I actually have, uh, it's inter— I have, uh, what is it, fiber optic, actually.

Really?

How good.

You'd never get that out here. And like Joe said, how many, how many Demaray splits could you do in a season? I had a colony last year, I did 3 Demaray splits on a single box of bees. So I had a brood box and then I split them, took them up to the top like that, and then within 2 weeks they started doing swarm cells again. So I did it again, took that bottom box up to the top, put a new box underneath, and then they did it again. And it was on 14 by 12s, so I have 4 14 by 12 boxes. Plus 4 supers on a colony. It was ridiculous, and I actually needed a little step to get to the top of it. And they didn't fill the top kind of 2 14x12 boxes, but they filled all the rest of them. So they filled 4 supers of honey and then a 14x12 box, which is equivalent to like a jumbo Langstroth there or thereabouts, full of heather honey, absolutely jam-packed. So you can just, you can just keep on going. Joe, and what I would say is, I've just read Joe's next question which made me laugh, is you do that first split, so you do the split, take it up to the top. What I would say is if you don't want to keep honey in those brood boxes up top, you can just swipe them out as soon as all the brood has emerged from them, and then you can do exactly the same thing again. So take that bottom box up, cycle it to the top, and you just keep this kind of cycling loop on there. It keeps all of the bees in that single unit. And it means that you do end up with a huge, huge amount of honey.

Danny C, I'm sorry, I'm reading Danny C's message. Yeah, well, um, I have PTSD, man. That's why I started working bees, man. It kills— it takes the anxiety away right away. I, I can't even tell you how, but it does.

It's not a good thing to have, and I can completely—

I'm open about the mental health issue, man. I really am, because that's That's the whole class. It was— that was the base of the foundation of the class, man, was mental health. So I try to be open about that.

Yeah, well, it's good that you are because it helps others, doesn't it, to cope with it, to see people absolutely talking about it?

Yeah, and everybody's going to suffer from that condition differently, right? Everybody's going to suffer from it differently. I deal with it differently. Everybody's going to deal with it differently, but There's a whole community out there that's suffering with it that, you know, should be paid attention to, and this could probably help a lot, you know, maybe get those bee populations back up. That's what I'm doing it for, help push the population back up.

I think it does. It's one of the best kind of mindful activities that you can do because you have to be so focused on all the different things going on. But right, I'm going to ask some of these questions on here. Um, Time is Honey, be honest, can you understand Gwyneth Paltrow's accent or do you stick the subtitles on? Do you know who Gwyneth Paltrow is? She watches—

I don't. Sorry, buddy. Sorry.

I'll answer the question instead, Joe. I, I have to put the subtitles on sometimes, but you know what the best thing about putting the subtitles on is? The subtitles do not have a clue what he's saying. It's one of the funnest things in the world. Yeah, put the subtitles on his videos. and watch what Google thinks he's saying. It is hilarious. So when he comes on, he's on in 2 weeks' time, we'll do that. He has the best accent in the whole world.

Boris, thanks for your service, man. I see you're a vet. Right on, man. Thank you.

Right, next one. Dry Cut Homestead was asking, where are you located in Texas?

San Antonio. I don't give my direct location because one, there's theft issues out here. So I don't give my direct location. Yeah. My mentor actually has 3 active theft cases right now where his gear is getting stolen. Not only his gear, but the genetics. Somebody that knows how to work bees is stealing genetics out of his colonies. Wow. Coming and taking the queens, the brood, and then replacing the frames with their equipment.

So— Isn't it like you— it must be rife out there because we've all got the almond pollinations Someone, someone else has asked a question about this. There's so much money changing hands, and I see it all the time on like big commercial Facebook groups saying, I've had 400 colonies nicked. And you just think, it's—

you've got to look at that worldwide now. It's a billion-dollar theft industry. There's a series on Netflix called Rotten, I think, and there's one called, uh, uh, Honey, Guns, and Lawyers. And it's specifically all tied to the beekeeping industry, the pollen, pollination countries creating fake honey and shipping it to other countries, creating fake labels and shipping it into the US adulterated and selling it on shelves, undercutting the hard-working beekeeper big time.

Yeah, it's not good. I see, I see they won that lawsuit recently, which is good though, isn't it?

Oh yeah.

Right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fly through some of these questions now. I've got to go at kind of like 6. So I'm just going to come and ask a few more of these questions. So Joe's saying, how tall would you make a hive maximum? Ideally, like, not taller than you, but get some steps and strap them down because they can fall over. Biggest honey crop ever from one of your hives in what year? So 2018, and it was about £120. We don't get mega crops in North Wales. I know people from South Wales that year and they had £250 crops in a single year, which is pretty good. We don't get like mega crops. My average is kind of like £50-60 per colony per year. Not huge.

Hey, Laurence, I'm gonna jump out and let you do your thing, man. Thanks for having me on, dude. I appreciate it. No worries.

Good to see you.

Have a good day, man.

All right. Hey, well, that was a bit fun, wasn't it? People are always welcome on here. He's a good guy. I saw him on a chat the other day and knew that he could come cope with coming on. So everyone's welcome. You've got the link there, up there, if you want to come on, have a chat. You're more than welcome. Do different heathlands— Joe, you have lots of questions. I love it. You're keeping this chat going single-handedly. There's another guy called Joe Creaser as well, and the 2 Joes ask all the questions. It's fantastic. But he's saying, do different heathlands vary in the quality of heather honey, as in between Forest, Scottish, Welsh, Yorkshire, etc. I'm near the New Forest and that's where I want to stick an out apiary. So definitely you're going to get different qualities of honey, and then you get like different proportions between bell honey, so bell heather honey and ling heather honey. Ling heather honey is supposed to be a lot better in terms of antibacterial, antimicrobial, but it's a lot more difficult to extract, whereas bell heather is loads— it's just easy, easy to extract. Apparently not quite as good, but you do, yeah, you're going to get completely different makeup and composition of that honey. Obviously the Welsh, the Welsh is the best one, isn't it? In all honesty, the Scottish is probably the best one. The Scottish is well known for their heather honey. They've done more testing and stuff on it.

There is—

you look at Murray McGregor and you look at where he puts his bees, and it is heather as far as the eye can see in every single direction. Don't really get much of that in Wales. There's not, there's not big huge estates that are just all heather. It kind of tends to just be like a bit here and a bit there. Like, I think where we are is like a couple of hundred acres, which, which really in terms of bees isn't, isn't that much. We all love Gwyneth Griffin. Yeah, we do. He's a good lad. Right, Time Is Honey, you're back on there. How long does the bloom last? So we get different ones. So we've got like a bit of oilseed rape that starts early in the year, but there's not that much around here. The spring harvest that we get is like— all of our harvests in North Wales are quite slow and steady and just go on throughout the whole year. So if you set the oilseed rape aside It's kind of like 1st of May through to maybe like last week in August, really, because you've still got a bit of heather there. So you've got May, June, a bit of a gap. Sometimes you don't get a gap, July and August, so 4 months, which is quite, quite a good length. But it's not like, it's not like you get the beans and then you're straight onto it and you get loads, or the same with the oilseed rape. It's just quite slow and steady. Graham's saying, what's the difference between bell and ling heather? So it's a completely different plant, and if you look at it, it's just noticeable. Like, the bell heather looks like little bell flowers, and ling heather is just— it's like ling heather. I don't even know how to describe it, but one is— one, the ling heather is thixotropic, so you can't extract it normally, so you need to agitate it first. Bell heather is just like normal honey, you just kind happen to extract and come straight out, but they taste very similar. I'd say Ling Head's a little bit stronger, but they've both kind of got that heather taste. And most moorlands have a little bit of both. You get like predominant Ling Moorlands and predominant Bell Moorlands, but you generally get like a little bit of both mixed in. Right, I'm going to answer some more questions on here. Let me see what other ones I've got. I do feel bad. I don't, don't think I'm ignoring you if you put a question on a video and I've not got back to you. It's just, it's, uh, you can see there's quite a lot. How about showing a floor plan layout of your planned layout and workflow through the new system? So talking about my honey room. So I kind of did that a bit in the video, but I will do it. I'll put a little graphic on there to show how that works now. I, I'm so, so happy with my new honey extraction room. I've made so many changes to it, and the space that I've got in there now is so good. I can't believe it. I've never been so happy. So the changes I made: I got rid of the big horizontal honey warmer that I built in there, completely stripped that out. That gave me back about two meters square, and then I got rid of got rid of my hundred liter creamer. I got rid of my wax capping. spinner. I got rid of a 100-liter tank, and I got rid of my sump and just really streamlined it and got it to a point where I've actually got some space to work in there now. And then I've— you haven't seen this on a video yet— I've got the joiner to build, uh, like a big box to encapsulate my Mellow Flow that you can slide the Mellow Flow out, and then I can stack my 2 bottling machines on top of it. So I've got so much space in there now, so I'm really excited. I think I can get about 100 supers in there stacked about 100 supers, maybe a little bit less, to work at a time, which I definitely couldn't do before. I could get about 50 before and it was really, really tight. So I will do that. I'll do that on a future video. Uh, Joe's saying, have you got a video on extracting heather honey at a hobbyist level? No, I've not got a video on it. I had a couple of Shorts videos on it. I would suggest if you're doing Ling heather honey at a hobbyist level, the best possible way to do it is like a hydro water press that you use for like squeezing apple juice. That's the best way of doing it. And then you get the combs and you just scrape back to the midrib, put it all in like the mesh that you get with the press, and then you put— it's like a bladder, you inflate the bladder, it pushes it all out. About £500. So not cheap, but then any other way doing it— I'm just looking at Joe. I don't know how Joe knows this. Joe Murphy, how does he know this? Favorite drum and bass artist from my DJing days. So how do you know this, Joe? Do I know you? Joe Murphy doesn't know about Andy C. No one else is going to get that. But what I would say is all the other ways for doing header extraction is you'll get like single looseners and they're about £100 each and they're just not worth it. They take so long and then you need to have like a tangential extractor as well. I would just say no, go down the press route. It's a lot cheaper, it's a lot easier and save you loads of time. I always say, and I've mentioned it before, right? Okay, you absorb that knowledge. thought there was someone stalking me there. But yeah, I do like a bit of drum and bass. It's weird, isn't it? I live this weird, weird life in that I like— I come from London, Southeast London, I like drum and bass, I work on a construction site, and I'm into beekeeping and giving away free flowers. Right, let's answer some more questions. This is an interesting one. I want to go back to Jeremy. Have you lost any hives? So here in Kent, we are losing quite a lot in our club. Some people have lost most of their hives. I watched your video on a bellow queen mating hive and I have one coming. Do you think the queen I have in an Apidea could be used with bees she produced to populate a partitioned-down area? So that's not the comment I thought it was going to be. So Jeremy posted another comment on there previously saying a lot, um, a lot of people are losing their colonies in Kent be saying because they're trying to go treatment-free, and people have been saying you shouldn't treat your bees, it's for the greater good, you should not treat them, and they need to build up a tolerance to varroa. And I think like what's strange with bees is that if you, if you do that in year 1, you get fresh bees on fresh comb and then you don't treat them for the first year and you get them through the year, people kind of think you don't need to treat bees. My bees, my bees are tolerant to varroa. You don't need to treat them, so it reinforces the attitude that you don't need to treat. And then you go into the next year and you might get them through again, and they're thinking, that's it, we don't need to treat, we are treatment-free beekeepers. And I always think it's this kind of 3-year cycle, like the comb starts getting older and blacker and the mite load starts getting heavier and heavier, and then you just get these catastrophic events where swathes of hives just die out and people think, oh, I wonder what that was. And it's clearly linked to treatment-free beekeeping. It doesn't take— it's not like you can— it doesn't happen overnight. You say, right, I'm not going to treat this winter, and all your colonies just die. You'll probably get most of them through for a single winter, but it's that cumulative effect of not treating, because the mites build up at different levels of the year, and then the second year is going to be so much more difficult for you. And I would suggest in the second year you'd lose a lot more of your colonies. And then in the third year, that's when you're likely to get this kind of catastrophic event of most of your hives just getting blitzed out. And that is not to say that that's what happens to all treatment-free beekeepers. I know that some people who are more isolated from others, you will— they'll breed from stocks that are shown to be resistant to it, and they can build on that. So it's not, it's not as straightforward as that. But I do, I feel like really bad for people who have paid good money for all of their beehives and their nucs and, and their extractors and everything that goes with beekeeping, because it is not cheap. And then they're told to not treat them, to not look after them, and not give them the medication they need to be healthy because it's the right thing to do. And then they die, and then they're a bit like, oops, all of my bees are dead. And then you've got to start again. I'll just— the chat over there is talking about drones. Ace, now it's going—

love it.

Right, let's have a look at a couple more of these. These are the spammy ones that I see. Don't click on those, they are spam. Right, so we're down to— these are quite old comments now, so 2 months ago. So Paul, is that right? Is that how you say it? I hope to sell 20 nucs this summer. Any advice on getting getting the word out about them. So if you weren't in Ireland, I wouldn't be answering this question because I would see you as direct competition. But the fact that you're in Ireland, Facebook Marketplace is probably the best way to do it. But also try not to kind of run before you can walk. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, I just mean it in like, don't let people down. Don't say you're going to sell them to them and take orders if you can't fulfill them because it will do it will do like long-term damage doing that. Um, and, and target— so you hope to sell 20 mix this summer, my suggestion would be don't sell them in the summer, overwinter them, sell them in April, and you'll probably get twice as much for them. You might only get half of them through, uh, so you, you balance out, but that would be my advice. Right, I've done all the questions on here. I've gone through, I've answered pretty much all the questions that I wanted to answer. So I'm gonna go back to single screen mode now and I will answer some more questions in the chat. I'm not gonna stay here all day. I'm gonna let people go out and I'll probably go and do a quick check on my apiary to see if nothing's been damaged. So let's see if there's any questions. Right, Joe's saying if you If you started again, what hive type would you choose? I would go the Abello 12-frame, but it's, it's a difficult one. Like, if you'd have asked me that like a year ago, it would have been— yeah, well, maybe not a year ago, 6 months ago— it'd have been the Abello 12-frame because I do love it. It works so well. But with the prices going up at the moment, it's hard to see past just kind of Cedar Seconds. That's what I would go for. I'll do a video on this. build my own floor, cedar second brood box, polyashworth feeder, and then like a second cedar roof. That would be my setup. No supers, I'd use everything national deep. I think you should upload a video of your DJ days. I wasn't, I wasn't good enough to be on video, but I did, I did love DJing. So yeah, so if no one's— if no one else has got any more, I'll give it like 5 minutes more if want to put any last-minute questions in there, I will answer them. But if not, I'm gonna, uh, I'm gonna go get a cup of tea and then go and check on my bees. I hope all of your bees have survived the storm. It's definitely died down here. It's, uh, it's really good. He's noticed a lot of beekeepers all using mediums. Yeah, that's, that's the big regret for me, is that I've got 3 different systems. They're all compatible with each other. I've got the 14 by 12, the National Deep, and shallow, and I use them interchangeably, and it's, it's messy. And I just wish, I just, I wish everything was National Jeeps all the way. It would make my life a lot easier. Um, I don't want to have to sell it and start again because secondhand kit, you never get anywhere near as much money. So no more questions? So I, I'm done. I think I'm done for my chat. That's a good, a good solid 2 hours chat. And thanks for the same people who always come in and dial into all these chats. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope, I hope you enjoyed the little cameo from Time Is Honey as well. I certainly did. But I'm going to post a new video tonight. I think I'm going to do the hive entrances one, so have a go and look at that. And, uh, I'll see you all next time.

Daddy!

How good a timing is that? My daughter's back.

See you later.