Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees With Laurence Edwards - Episode 6
Laurence Edwards answers rapid-fire beekeeping questions from his community. Topics include nuc dividers, queen banking, fondant feeding, swarm control, equipment choices like Flow Hives and polyhives, and breeding lines like Yolanta and Buckfast for different traits.
Chapters
Right, so it has been so long since I've done my lives, my latest live stream. I'm totally in the mode there of when I do my videos, I just kind of talk and mumble my words and stitch it all together, and then I realize I'm not doing that now. So hello everyone, I'm back doing another live stream. I'm only going to be here for about an hour tonight, something like that, and I'm going to answer some of the questions, some of the comments that I have not got around to in a very, very long time. So I do apologize. The camera's up there. Hello, camera. I'm looking over here now. Uh, so yeah, I'm gonna answer some, some comments on some of my videos. I'll do a little bit of a screen share, see if I can share my screen. Um, I always forget how to do this. Right, there you go. You should be able to see my screen now. Just push that across. So I'm going to answer some of the questions on here, right? Let's get on with it then. It's been, it's been a very, very long time. As always, if you want to do any comments in the chat, I will answer the comments in the chat and give those priority. And I do apologize for not actually getting around to anybody's comments because I've just been so busy. April is the the worst time in the world for me. Uh, right, so this question here first from OB, bit of a comment really, talking about the BS Honeybee Nucs review. Says he agrees, uh, Correx divider is not very good and also doesn't quite allow the roof or feeder to sit tight, so I have to use a strap to force downward pressure on the roof feeder so it sits tight. Ended up slicing off a millimeter or 2 off the top of one, which was a pain in the neck and wasn't quite even. Totally rubbish feature. So on the one hand, I completely agree with you, um, it's absolutely useless, that Corex divider. On the other hand, they have well and truly fixed it and turned it into market-leading nuke. So you can get a Dibond aluminium divider now. The, the fit of it is pretty much perfect. I bought loads of them recently and it seals it up completely. So I think the design is good, 2-in-1 design is really nice. And now with that new composite divider, it's very, very good indeed. A few people there to say hi. Hi, Austin Wright from Vermont, USA. I bet it is very cold there. Yoga Lotus, to you too. And Mark Murphy. Hi, Mark. You need to send me your address for your prize. Mark, I've just come to your comment here. So yeah, super apiary. Your Lancer queens are definitely doing it right. They're doing very, very good in that apiary. Absolutely unreal just how strong the colonies are up there. Getting a lot of this at the moment— Tinder, Tinder spam. I'm gonna try and get rid of that now. Here we go, we'll remove that. Let's see what other questions have people got. Hi to Carl, how you doing? Anyone got any questions, I'll answer them on here. It's always easier to answer the questions from the chat than trying to filter through in here. One from Hogster saying, great review on the Abello 12-frame polystyrene nuc, saying, can you get it in the US? Definitely can't get the Abello one in the US because they're just licensed UK agent, but you can get licensed polyhives from Better Bee, but I don't think they do the 12-frame. Because that's in a bellow mold. Um, I've got a question in here. Okay, so Soren Jensen— sorry if I got that wrong— what to do with honey from a dead out? Can I give it to my nucs or simply melt it down? So that's a good question. Um, you really need to be on top of why it's dead. Uh, so today I did a video, drone laying queen dwindled down to absolutely nothing, and said in the video you can, you can take those frames and you can just use the frames straight away, put them into other colonies, use the stores, use the drawn comb, because I know that it was a drone-laying queen. Whereas anything where there's any sort of suspicion of something other than it being a queen mating issue, then I wouldn't use them. No, I'd be melting all of that down, starting again. Uh, it could be something horrible, it could be something not too bad, but still, good, good hygiene. You should be melting those down. Got a question here. How long do you bank queens? What do you suggest the longest time? So we don't really bank queens other than for ourselves. We use an incubator to keep our F1 queens, and we keep them for about a week. I speak to people who do bank queens though, and they say you can bank queens for a very, very long time indeed. Tips for when you're banking queens though, from what I've found, is that you need to take all of the attendants out. The attendants definitely shouldn't be in with them when you're banking them, and you need to constantly replenish the young stock of young nurse bees, and you need to constantly be feeding that colony as well. And then I reckon you can get like 3 or 4 weeks out of a good queen bank, maybe longer. I've heard of people doing overwintering queen banks, which is quite interesting and certainly resolves the issue of not being able to get queens that early in the year. So yeah, quite, quite a long time. Hi from Lincolnshire. I have a hive with no signs of brood. What would you recommend? I've had a few of those this year. They look fantastic, big strong colonies, and you go through and there's just no, no brood at all, no eggs. I'd be very, very surprised if there was still a viable queen in there at this time of the year with no brood. The way to test is to put a frame of eggs in and see if they draw out any cells, see what they do with the brood. Or, or I would just suggest trying to go through it and trying to find a queen, if there is a queen in there, and kill it and, and requeen, or combine it, or shake it out. There's lots of different options. But colonies, big colonies at this point of the year with no eggs or no brood, I'd be getting very, very worried. I'm having problems with my fondant melting and dripping down into my hive. Is it possible to melt the fondant down and feed like sugar water in a rapid feeder? So yep, 100%, you can do that. That's what a lot of people do, get to the end of the year and do that. I find whenever there's fondant dripping down on the colony, there's generally something wrong with the colony. And that's not to say that it's anything bad, but it just might be that the colony is not very strong. So if you've got really big strong colonies, I know it's counterintuitive because they're going to be a lot hotter and melt that fondant more, but they clean everything up really well. So I find if I've ever got a drone-laying queen or a weaker colony and I'm feeding fondant, that's where you start to get it dripping down. Um, but I end up just chucking a lot of the fondant away at the end of the year. Same issue as Andrew in terms of possible queenless colony. Is it doomed? So they're definitely not doomed. I, I've recovered really small colonies this time of the year and you can just stick a queen in and it kind of makes it all right. So Mark's saying, hi, just wanted to say the bees are doing great, just seen the queen today. Good stuff, Mark. I'm glad. Good to meet you as well. I think I met you. I get so bad with people's names at the moment because you're kind of meeting so many people and sending out so many queens and nucs. It's a little bit crazy. Um, Jay's 200 SPF reef tank, nothing to do with beekeeping. Favorite drink? I, I love questions like this, absolutely love them. Um, that's my dog, that's Jasper. I'm partial to a glass of squash, so, uh, I don't really drink that much at all. Um, last time, last time I went out and actually got drunk, I, uh, I lost my cricket trophy that I won and I was a little bit devastated, so I've not drank since. So yeah, I like a glass of squash. How do you decide when to do a preemptive demarée split? I kind of go and do them on all of my colonies all at once because I find it a lot easier to manage. My kind of rule of thumb is that I want at least 2 supers full of bees. If you've got 2 supers full of bees then you can quite easily lift that top box up to the top above those 2 supers, maybe add in another one, and then set up a new box underneath. I wouldn't do it with anything less than 2 supers full of bees plus the brood box. Hi Emma, hi from Lancashire. Been watching the Canadian Beekeeper as I've watched all of yours. He feeds syrup all winter. Any idea how it doesn't freeze? You've done very well to watch all my videos. Thanks very much. And no, I don't know, I don't know how he feeds it. He must be warming it up. He feeds— he keeps all of his hives indoors, doesn't he? So, um, he's got like a heated, big heated shed, so I'm guessing that's the reason he does it. Uh, I just gotta sort my dog because he is whimpering. Right, so I'm back. Um, and there we go, that's all the questions done. So any more questions from anyone, stick it in the chat. Oh, here we go. Austin, have you used ApiMai hives? I tried them past year and I think they're great, although expensive. Um, no, I've never tried them. I've come so close to buying them a couple of times, but I just can't. I can't bring myself to buy them knowing that I probably won't like them. Um, I had a good play around with one at B Tradex, the guy there, but they're just so expensive. And like, I was looking at, looking at them and they were like £400, and then that was without any supers. And then if you wanted to add another brood box on, it was like another £180 for a brood box. So I just, I've just given up on them. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna play around with them or try them, but they do look cool. But there's just, there's a few too many bits, I think, for me. In terms of something that might go wrong, something that might break. So yeah, not too sure. Arctic beekeeping. First inspection of the year today up here. Five degrees. Still snow on the ground and no natural pollen. Yeah, it's. I've seen some of the Canadian beekeeper ones, and it's it's crazy the weather they're getting. It was about nineteen degrees here today. It was very very nice indeed. Right, so I'm going to look at some of these more questions from here. So transporting bees, I realised in that video it's kind of— it's supposed to just be like a product review. I will do a video showing you how I use those as well. But Keith Dowsett says you might want to add some feet underneath so there is airflow from the bottom. Very good point. So what we suggest with everyone coming up now to collect either nucs or hives is that they bring a couple of planks of wood just like kind of 3 by 2 or something like that, so you can put the nucs or the beehives on them. Because if you've got an open mesh floor underneath and then you put that directly onto the floor, then you've got— makes, makes no difference. You've essentially got a solid floor underneath it anyway. So yeah, good point, add some feet underneath. Yep, the weather has improved today in North Wales. Certainly has. It looks nice for the next couple of, a couple of days. Then it's getting cold again. I'm just looking at some of the other questions on here. So question on the secret to splitting beehives in under four minutes. Sorry, they're so they're so kind of clickbait the titles, aren't they? Can I use my spare empty brood box instead of a nuc to transport to transfer a hive preparing to swarm? Yeah, you can use, you can use any box you like, that's no problem. Oh, here we go, another question on the chat. Uh, what queen rearing method are you using? Cell builder is the most productive one, isn't it? Uh, so I, so I use the Michael Palmer method and I copy it exactly. So 10 over 10 method, uh, with a cell starter and then separate finishers. But I was speaking to another guy who I speak to on Twitter quite a lot, who is well into his breeding, very, very good, and he doesn't, he doesn't do it like that. He uses separates. He just does it on one colony. So he sets it up in a similar fashion to, to Michael Palmer in that he'll harvest lots of brood, bring that all together the same way that you would do with the starter, but then he just runs 2 sets of grafts through that box And then after 2 sets of grafts, he breaks it all back up again and then sticks those into the nuc, um, with the idea that you're going to feed them better because there's going to be less mouths to feed, as opposed to putting them above a cell finisher where there's going to be some open brood elsewhere. So it— I think there's many different ways to do it, but I, I use, I use a cell starter and a cell finisher. I find that works well, but I do, I just copy Michael Palmer's method because it is such a good method. Hi Lawrence, weird thing happened. I watched my bees chew out the whole entrance block on their poly hive. Any ideas why do you think they might do that? The bees know best. It's probably too small, or I don't know, they do chew poly. It is annoying, especially some of the poor quality poly as well. What, what kind of poly hive was it? Um, and how big do they make it? Uh, Jay saying nitrile gloves. I get dexterity is better, but do you still get stings? Yeah, I get stings all the time. I kind of like it. It is a bit different for me because I, I don't mind getting stung too much. Um, but when you're going through like lots of different colonies, you do get so kind of grubby and sticky. So I do find, yeah, I like nitrile gloves. I like the Viking ones as well, like the marigold copies. They're, they're very good. Um, I find myself using them quite a lot. Um, but I don't, I don't mind getting stung. It's not too bad. Uh, Walker Bee Ranch just ordered some more lice and kit. Good to hear. Walker Bee Ranch is going for, going for my record of most YouTube videos in a month. Um, absolutely churning them out. Good stuff. Right, I'll have a look at some more of these questions. I'm so struggling with the comments on YouTube at the moment. I really, really have not got time to go through them. So I thought I'd do it on these videos. So some of the— so here's one. The winners of the competition, only one person's come forward. So there is— there's a— get it here. There's a £200 Apisolis. That no one's claimed. Um, so I might give them another quick chance to claim that before giving it to someone else. The stainless steel honey drill bit, no one's claimed that. Um, the bottle of gin, the £40 bottle of Cornish propolis gin, no one's claimed that yet. Only Mark's claimed his prize. I think everyone would probably got annoyed with that video with me overlaying 2 different audio tracks. Um, so sorry about that. Again, just me being a bit Slapdash. But yeah, I need to, I need to get these prizes out to people. I've got another prize as well, um, that I haven't done the video for yet because I'm just struggling. Um, Uncle Bob's Bees on the queen rearing equipment video said if the bars— so these are the grafting bars— won't hold the JZBZ cups, you can pour wax into the slot. I just dip the whole bar in wax and it holds more firmly in the frame. I think that is such a good tip. I love that. As soon as I read that one, I thought, wow, that is such a good idea. Really nice and simple. Um, so Walker Bee Ranch, you should join us Tuesday evening for our live stream. I'm happy to pop along for, for a bit of a live stream, no problem. Uh, maybe not this Tuesday though. This Tuesday is carnage. I've got 50 nucs going out in the post and I've got 200 queens going out in the post. and I've got someone coming up to come and look at my bees, and I've got— no, I've not got the bee inspectors coming. And then my mum's coming and my sister's coming and her 2 children, so probably not this Tuesday. Uh, Joy's saying it's a Maysmore poly hive, standard entrance, and was on largest opening. That's really strange. I've never ever seen that before. Um, are you— yeah, maybe send me a video. That sounds really interesting. Uh, Yoga Lotus saying, how do you register for goodies? You just need to keep watching the videos and we will do some more competition videos, and then all you need to do is just kind of comment on them, maybe share them. Um, any news on the colony in the fallen tree? Do you know what, people want to know what's going on with that fallen tree colony, don't they? I'm keeping everyone in suspense. I was close to going there today and doing it. Instead, I went and filmed 7 videos today. Took me about a good 5 hours to film them, and then I realized that I'd filmed them all in manual focus, so none of them were any good. That's probably the most annoying YouTube day I've had so far. Absolutely gutted. So I thought I'd do a live stream instead. But that— yeah, I haven't even been back to the colony in the fallen tree. I'm gonna have to go and have a look at it and see if it's still there, see if it's got through the winter. I might just do a little intermediate video before me going in and getting it out because I'm going to need some sort of assistance with someone with a chainsaw. I had someone message me the other day about going and getting some bees out of a chimney as well. And as much as I'd love to start going and doing cutout videos because I think they do really well on YouTube, uh, A, I've not got the skills to be going up ladders and smashing, smashing things down, um, but it just takes up too much time. You've got to travel there, you've got to do all your risk assessments, and then you've got to really get someone to film you doing it. as opposed to me kind of being in there trying to film it myself. But I was, I was very tempted. Brooklyn's Honeybees here. Hi Andy, how you doing? Jasper Grob, my dog's called Jasper. Hi Laurence, just a question from the Netherlands. My bees took out a line of capped brood, about 20 eyes already had pigment, took out a straight line. Do you know why? Almost certainly to do if it's wired foundation. I find that they just avoid the wired foundation, wired foundation. So behind where the wires are, they just don't don't like putting proper brood in there. Maybe something to do with that. Past seeker best place to buy Langstroth frames and foundation. I think a lot a lot of places do Langstroth. I would say modern beekeeping do it. I know a Bello do it. A few people do it. Why do people mostly feed fondant over winter as opposed to syrup? I've fed my syrup over winter and they've done really well. Is there a difference? Absolutely no difference. As long as the bees will take down the syrup, um, you shouldn't need to feed fondant. So if you feed your bees up nice and strong going into winter, you shouldn't need to feed fondant. I quite like feeding them a little bit light and then putting fondant on it means I can get a really easy visual. I haven't got to guess what's going on. If I open up the top and I see a cluster of bees in contact with some fondant, I know they've got enough food. Really, really easy. But there's no difference. I've got loads of colonies that have never seen fondant and they've only ever been fed syrup, and I've got loads of colonies that I've only fed fondant through the winter, and they both do just, just fine. Uh, Chris saying can't do no nonsense with health and safety. Very true, that would not be a good video. Uh, Good evening from Greece. I'm jealous, but it's nice weather in Greece. Do you have any negative effects clipping the queen's wings? Not, not that I'm aware of. It's the best thing I've ever done, moving over to clipping, clipping the wings for queens. Just gives you so much more time to go around and do your inspections, and then it's great going into the apiary And as opposed to going through your boxes and then realizing that the colony's gone and they've swarmed, you just go into your boxes and then you're like, oh yeah, the cluster of bees is underneath, big massive swarm cluster of bees underneath. So I don't see any negative effects from clipping wings. Right, that's the chat up to date. On the gloves video, one big issue with nitrile or rubber gloves is how wet your hands get, so wears thin cotton gloves and the long cuff nitrile. You can still be stung through the combination, but it's mild as this thing doesn't get embedded. It's definitely true, you, you do get very, very wet hands when you use nitriles or rubber gloves. And the Viking ones, they kind of got like a flock lining, so it's, it goes all like powdery and bitty. And I find it doesn't bother me while I've still got the glove on, but when I take the glove off if you ever try and put that glove back on again, it feels like so disgusting. It goes like all really bitty and not nice. Um, but it's just one of the things like you kind of put up with it in, in that I'd prefer to have clean hands that are a bit soppy and wet underneath than, than really sticky fingers. Um, yep, JD's offer— sorry, Jay's offer a few JDs, so So enjoy that. How is the climate in Wales really? I'm not sure, but I've heard that the UK have a lot of rain and not the highest temperatures, 15 to 20 during summer. How is it where you are? It is absolutely rubbish. It really is bad climate for bees. The south coast and kind of up the east coast as well a bit, I guess, is so much better than North Wales. North Wales is very, very wet. and not very hot at all. So we struggle with getting a good crop up here. If we get kind of a 50-60 pound crop from a colony throughout the whole year, we've done really, really well. But we spoke about it before in terms of how climate change is changing that, and I swear that it's changing it in that it's pushing forward the spring, as in making the spring later. Like, it's— I know it's 19 degrees 19 degrees here today, but next week it's back down to 12, 13 degrees all week. And like, it's kind of like back end of April. So I don't know whether it's me just being pessimistic about things, but it does, uh, it, it feels like we're feeling the effects of global warming already in that the seasons are shifting a bit, in that the spring comes later and then the summer lasts a bit longer. Because like September and October last year were just fantastically warm, and the bees did really well. And then we've struggled a bit with getting out of the cold session over here. Uh, Plan B saying, do you have any experience with plastic frames? Could a beehive exist exclusively on plastic frames? So I've just— I've got some plastic frames recently. I've done a video that's still on the members section, but that'll probably come out this week, uh, about me waxing them up. I made such a mess waxing them up. But yeah, definitely you could use a beehive, could exclusively exist on plastic frames. I know a lot of people in America use plastic frames and are very fond of them. My concern with them always is how do you recycle them and how do you kind of get them to a point where you can reuse them again, like sterilize them without them warping, and I don't have any experience of that just yet. Uh, let's look at some of these other questions on here then. I had a lot of, a lot of questions about this wax conversion versus wax exchange. It seems that people use their wax for lots of weird and wonderful things. My wife's just started using it, trying to use it for making like lip balms and creams and stuff, so I've been rubbing it on my hands and it's been very nice. We did one just like a hand cream with olive oil, coconut oil, and beeswax, and that was good. Lawrence, if you owned land, would you plant it with pollen-rich plants amongst your hives? I like the idea of a wildflower meadow with hives around. Yeah, 100%, I would plant it up, and I would really target the species that I go for. I know a bee farmer who plants lots of willow, so lots of pussy willow, And I mean like loads and loads of it because they don't all flower at the same time. They kind of seem like quite sporadic in the spring in terms of when they actually flower. So you're getting this long prolonged amount of pussy willow pollen early in the year, which is good. But yeah, I would just go for a huge variety of different plants and I would go for trying to target those really early ones where they're going to get good pollen early on. Um, and then some, some late pollen ones as well. Um, I think I saw before there's like something called like a bee tree. Has anyone heard of a bee tree that flowers really, really late in the year, like September, when not many other things are flowering? I'd plant something like that, but I definitely do like wildflower mixes as well. I keep bees on a farm at the moment, and the guy, the farmer, said he needs to wait for the soil temperature to get up to about 10 degrees Celsius and then he's going to plant this season's wildflower mix. So he does what's called like a ley mixture. I think it's, I think it's a ley mixture, but he's doing it as like a rotational crop to try and fix nitrogen back into the soil. And he's let me, he's let me kind of pick the mix, uh, as long as, as long as he can have his nitrogen fixes in there. Um, I just see a member saying hi from Meltham. I'll come to that, come back to that in a sec. But yeah, I'll just, I'll be picking all the different wildflowers, and I would definitely do that. If I had my own land, I'd be doing borage. I'd be doing phacelia. I'd be doing like santhuan. I think that's how you pronounce it. Nice little clovers and then loads of different wildflowers as well. Christian Van Schalkooy. Sorry, I call you Christian. There you go. Am I from Down Under? No, I'm not from Down Under. I'm from Eltham, which brings me to Mem's point. Mem Mustafa. Hi from Eltham. Crazy. I used to live in Eltham. What is the best queens in your aviaries? In my apiaries, you seem to have different bees from all over the world. Um, so we, we do, uh, and it depends kind of what you mean by best. So, so I would say the best ones for us, the best performing ones, are the Yolanta ones. They're, they're quite crazy. The, the performance that we get from those Yolanta queens is— I've never seen anything like it. They consistently outperform all of the other ones. But then if you said, right, what are the most gentle bees and what are the most consistently calm bees, I'd say the Buckfast by quite a long way. It's not that the Jolanta are like aggressive, they're not like horrible bees, but they're not bred purely for kind of being docile. So it depends what you're looking for. If you want to keep like a really super calm colony of bees in your garden, I probably wouldn't go with the Yelantas. If you were like a bee farmer and you're interested in getting as absolute much honey as you can whilst keeping like a nice, good quality, healthy bee, I'd go with the Yelantas. But yeah, we've got bees from all over the world. Uh, Brooklyn's Honeybees, we started making lip balm which seemed to work really well, but unfortunately so much testing and stuff which needs doing just doesn't make it worthwhile to sell for a small beekeeper. Yep, we wouldn't do it. It's, uh, it's way too much work. But I, I looked, I looked into the lip balm. The lip balm is not too bad. Um, it's £120 to do the, like, the base certificate, and then I think if you pay an extra £50, you can add on different 8 flavors or, like, recipes. So you could have, like, a tea tree one and a, I don't know, whatever additions you want to add into it. So for a few hundred quid, you can get it certified for lip balms for, like, up to 8 different lip balms. But then when you're adding your own beeswax in, the shelf life and the batch testing is where it becomes quite expensive. Um, hey, if you want a little tip, Andy, the way to do it if you want to sell them is get little nice little blocks of wax, get the lip balm containers, and then sell them a kit for them to make their own lip balm, and then you haven't got to do any of it. Ah, Stiphobolomium japonicum. I reckon I said that perfectly. Is the bee tree. Uh, that's interesting. I've heard of that before, and someone said if you're going to plant something, that's a really good one to plant. It's interesting. I'm not sure how, uh, how much like protection it needs, or whether it actually does quite well over here. Uh, Arthur, uh, hi from South London. What do you think about urban beekeeping? Starting with two hives this year. Any suggestions, advice? I think urban beekeeping is quite cool, and I really like the idea. You do hear about people saying that they're outcompeting local pollinators in kind of like a built-up environment, but I don't have any experience of that. I think it's a nice thing to do, and I hear they do very, very well because in cities like especially South London, you get lots of like tree-lined streets, and that's where I'd be heading for. I'd be looking for the tree-lined streets that have got like big lime trees on. And if you're not sure what a lime tree is, if you park your car underneath it for a day and come back and it's covered in like sticky sap, it's almost certainly going to be a lime tree. And that will give you some of the best flows that you can get in the UK off the lime. Doesn't always yield, you need the right temperature and the humidity conditions, but when it does yield, you get the nicest honey. I like it anyway. Some people, some people are not too keen on lime honey and think it's a bit minty. I quite like it. Plan B, last year I had 5 hives and now I am currently at 30+ and the target is 50+. The problem that I have is I don't have drawn frames. The new ones get packed with pollen and nectar. Any recommendations? It's difficult, you know, when you're increasing your colonies like that, you're always just having to use foundation and there's not really much you can do. All I would say is that that is aggressive expansion, going from 5 hives to 30 to 50. It's fine. Like, it's kind of what we did. But I would just say my recommendation is you can't do both. You can't kind of try and maintain a good honey yield whilst doing such aggressive expansion. So if you, if you take that on board and think, right, we're not going to get any honey, then it opens up the possibility of just feeding them constantly. And then if you're feeding them constantly, you'll get that foundation drawn out way, way quicker. And I would just use a weak kind of 1:1 sugar syrup solution. and just keep on going with it. And you'll find that by feeding them as well, they'll rear more brood, which means that you've got more packed in with pollen. That would be my tip. Great advice, plan on doing the same with bee wraps. Yeah, we did something similar, but it's quite hard work, all of the bee wraps and lip balm stuff. A lot of legislation that goes with that. Uh, Money Bungee King said on the wax conversion video, what's wrong with you Poms? Us Aussies got rid of pounds and shillings 70 years ago. Get with the times. Which is amazing. I'd— we are so strange in the UK, aren't we? Like, you— we drive around in our cars and we do everything in like miles per gallon. but we buy it in litres. And then if you're driving somewhere, you say, I'm going 50 miles. We just like completely use the metric and imperial systems interchangeably. I, I did like physics at A-level, so I really quite like the metric system and understand how the metric system works, uh, and think it's much better than the imperial system, which I know a lot of people over a certain age think the complete opposite. But it is weird how we just, we do, we do use things interchangeably, and beekeeping is one of those as well. Like, you just, it's all like pounds, isn't it? Like a pound of wax, a pound of honey, um, where it'd be much easier just to use kilos. Good evening. That was, I met Peter the other day. He came up and collected a nuc, and it was the, like, the most cool and casual nuc collection in the world. He'd driven for like 3 hours and was just like, hi, how you doing? Collected the nuc and went. So yeah, pretty cool. It was good, good to speak to someone with a similar accent for once. How's the fake Flow Hive going? So I've not put bees in either my fake Flow Hive or my normal Flow Hive yet. Uh, I've got 50 packages on order because I'm trying to downsize and I've stupidly ordered 50 packages. So what am I doing? But I'm gonna, I'm gonna stock all of my nifty fancy different shaped hives with packages because it's just so much easier than trying to convert frames into them. So I think they're going to be coming like middle of May, which works quite well for the Flow hives because I don't want to mess around. And I've moved them, they're a different apiary now, and the apiary that they're at is quite close to some oilseed rape. You can see the oilseed rape from the apiary, so they will find it. So So I'm quite keen to not have the supers on when there's any orcein rape in flower. Can you leave heather honey in the hives through winter, or do you end up with Nosema? We need to remove all heather honey before winter and feed sugar syrup. So I spoke about this on the video the other day. I've never experienced that, and we've overwintered at that apiary now 2 years and never had it. But like, my base apiary is kind of really awkward apiary that you get a lot of heather late on in the year but not really enough for a crop, so it always ends up in the brood nest. And I've never had any issues with, like, I'm not checking for Nosema, but I've not had any issues with dysentery at all. So I think that's probably like a bit of a myth. It's something that I hear a lot, and when I speak to people, they say they've not had any experience of it, and I've certainly not had any experience of it either. Um, so no, I'm not sure about that one. Right, I'm going to look for some, some more, uh, questions on here. So on the gloves video, Foxy's Local Honey says tends to not use gloves at all if possible, and then speaks about the ones that he would use, about how quickly they break down. Um, it disgruntled a lot of people, that video about gloves. I, I did not even think about it from that kind of point point of view. Uh, not, not that it would change what we do because we're like essentially where we are, we'd be farmers, um, and we need to use the correct tools for the job. Uh, and I saw a couple of comments on there saying, oh, just sod it then to the environment. And I kind of thought, that's a, that's a little bit of a strange comment, that one, because you could use the same argument with like a surgeon. You wouldn't expect like a surgeon to use reusable gloves because they've got to deal with kind of like sterilization and not transferring over disease, which is kind of the same for us. You can't go from hive to hive and expect not to transfer over disease like that. So we care quite a lot about the environment and try and do everything we can to minimize our impact on it, but we need to make sure that we're not spreading disease around. Plan B says, I live on a small island in Greece and we harvest exclusively thyme honey, but the honey flow is 2 months away, so I have plenty of time to expand. Plus our winters are smooth and the bees are strong. Right, sorry, that's in relation to your numbers going up, right? Cool, that sounds good. I love the idea of thyme honey. How big is your island that you're on? Are there many people keeping bees on there? Sounds like a really good place to do. Not like island mated because those queens are lit like a basically on like a rock out in the middle of nowhere, but could be could be a good place to rear some queens. That's what a lot of people do. I think I think some of the BS honeybees ones come in from Greece. I think I remember that. Which island? I'm interested to know. Well, I'm going to look at some more comments on here. I've just seen past seeker the same comment that you just asked there, so I've already answered that one for you. I see a lot a lot of people on there in terms of the gloves that they use. They they're using like thick leather gloves. I didn't I didn't think so many people use those still. Well, I'm going to scroll through some that aren't on. About gloves. So I suppose I better talk about my my queen that died. I was so gutted when that one died, and I'm still just completely don't know what happened to it. I've also got a new video coming out talking about I've got to stop calling them F zero breeder queens. I've had a couple of people have a real go at me for saying that, saying. F0 doesn't exist, but they understand what I mean by F0. But they're saying that the first, the first line of the lineage is F1, uh, but you can't, you can't call it F0. So I've got to stop calling them F0 breeder queens. I got to call them pure queens from now on. But my pure queen that died that I was planning to use for breeding this year, I was just devastated. So annoying because I did everything right and everything looked good, and she was such a nice queen, and she just, yeah, just packed up and keeled over by the looks of it out of nowhere. Really frustrating. But I did a video today on my, my other pure German Buckfast queen, and I, I can't get over how good that German queen is. I overwintered them on 6 frames, uh, in a nuc, and then at the time that the other one died, I said, right, these, these need some more space, so I put on another 6 frames and went back a week later and they'd drawn out all the frames and laid them all up. So I put on another stack of 6 and went back about 8 days later, 9 days later, and there were 16 frames of brood across the 18 frames. That's an absolute machine. Really nice, good, calm bees as well. So I'm equally excited about that one. Um, Leon says, do you see any issues using foundation from eBay as it seems to be the cheapest you can buy. It is a difficult one. Like, we use a lot of Simon the Beekeeper Foundation, and I, I don't know, is it pure beeswax? I don't know. You look at it up against like thorn beeswax when you're getting it from the exchange, it's definitely not the same. There's definitely something else in it. It's like a lot thicker and a lot stiffer and kind of like a lot more yellow. So I reckon they're blending it with something. But saying that, I've had good experience with it and they seem to work it absolutely no problem at all. Is it contaminated with something? I just I just don't know. But make sure you're getting it from someone decent if you're going to get it from eBay. I find the Simon the Beekeeper stuff one though. It's it's fine. We use it. It's so much cheaper. Really really is much cheaper. Arctic Beekeeping saying I've seen videos that you take a lot of stings but almost don't get any reaction. What's your secret? I guess I'm just quite lucky when it comes to stings. I did used to get a reaction, like quite a bad reaction, and I'd take a lot of Piraton and it would like— I'd get stung all the way through the day in like a cheap bee suit, and then I'd take loads of Piraton and then I'd come home and I'd just be like struggling to stay awake, like proper knock me out. But I think I've just kind of become quite tolerant of the stings. Um, I was doing a video today and I got stung in the eye and then stung in the ear, but I just, I just don't really get a reaction. So there's no secret at all, it's just kind of luck that I don't really get a reaction. Uh, Mem saying he used the extra thick gloves from Sainsbury's, they're black, so I turn them inside out, which is why ideal. I always sterilize after each visit only. That's good. And I think reusable gloves like that can be quite good as long as you can kind of get them into some sort of solution to sterilize them. But yeah, it'd be interesting. They don't like black, do they, bees? They do not like black gloves at all. What's your thoughts on using plastic foundation? Uh, I'm not against it, but my argument for not using plastic foundation is what, what is the benefit of using it? Really? Like, really? Because it doesn't really save you any time. In fact, it takes you quite a lot longer, plastic foundation, because you still got to put it in the frames the same way that you would with normal foundation. Jasper getting angry. But then you've got to roll it with the wax, so it takes like longer, um, and then you can't melt it down quite as easily. So yeah, I'm not, I'm not a massive, massive fan of using plastic foundation. What I do like the look of though is the Frames and Feeders website. They're doing it in the UK. And the frames that I got from Modern Beekeeping, the Langstroth ones, which is a fully molded frame with plastic foundation embedded in it. So there's no assembly or anything, it's just like a one-piece unit, and then you just roll your wax onto it. I really like that because that does— it, it's going to stand up to getting bashed around, but it saves you a lot of time as well. It means you don't have to assemble the frame, means you don't have to put the foundation into the frame. The Frames and Feeders company, that's what they're called, Frames and Feeders. They're, um, new company in the UK and they're doing it. They bought a National mold to do it on a shallow, a deep, and a 14 by 12. And it's a fully molded frame with the foundation on and it's coming pre-waxed as well. I'd be— I'm, I'm getting some as soon as they're there. I've got— I'm going to get a pre-order in, but they're going to send me some to have a look at. And I so want them to work because something like that would save you so much time. And they're not that expensive. I think they're like £3.50, £3.54 a frame. So you're talking £40 to get something that's ready to go into your hive, which is pretty much the same price that you pay like kind of like a Bee Equipment or someone to go and get some ready-assembled wooden frames with foundation in. So I'm quite excited about that. Uh, Joseph, hi Joseph, how you doing? Uh, Arctic Beekeeping saying, do you build any equipment yourself? So I do a very limited amount of equipment myself. I will build floors, that's pretty much all I do, and I'll make up some kind of flat pack stuff, not very well, with lots of glue. But no, I don't have the time to do it. And if I didn't have a job, I would probably still not do that much because I'm not very good at it. And I rush things and I try and do things really, really quickly. And when you're building stuff, you need to kind of take your time and get things right and get things square and get the B-spaces correct, or you end up really paying for it. So no, I don't, I don't make a lot. I'm not very good at it. Uh, Darren Walsh saying, yes, they don't like black. Forgot my wellies once, had trainers on with black socks, 4 stings to the ankles. Very nice. I always remember the first time that I showed my sister the bees in the garden. I, I didn't have any wellies for her, so she wore her trainers and she got stung once on the ankle, and she's never let me forget it. Um, but yeah. When are you going to be putting bees in your concrete hive and to do a video? So again, I'm going to probably wait until I get my packages to do that because it's just going to be so much easier. I'm doing 50 packages and I can just go and dump them into those hives. I spoke to the owner of that one as well. Loads of— God, kicked off, didn't it? Concrete beehives, who would have thought that would be so controversial? And a lot of people not keen on it, but I spoke to the guy who made these as well and he's put me right, so I'll cover that on the next episode of that. In that he's— it is mixed with perlite. So all of those hives there, they are mixed with perlite, and he broke one of them open and showed me a picture, and it's like 50-60% perlite. And then he also sent me some infrared images as well with bees inside them, and you can't see the bees inside them. So it looks like it is pretty good in terms of insulation. Um, but I'm gonna have a go, see how it goes. I'm quite excited. They do look nice though, don't they? Sorry, I've just done my first inspection of the season and found multiple queen cells in one hive. I suspect supersedure. No eggs, queen, or larvae, plenty of bees. So multiple queen cells will never be supersedure. I always like— a supersedure for me is a single, single cell, sometimes 2. but even 2, I'd be kind of inclined to treat it as a swarm. I've only ever seen supersedure, really take it as a supersedure with one, one cell. So you found multiple queen cells in one hive, they're trying to swarm, definitely trying to swarm because the weather. Would you leave them alone to get on with it or knock some of the cells down? So I would do a Demarais split, not a preemptive Demarais split, I would do a Demarais split. So if you're not sure how to do a Demerara split, what you need to do is— I've got to think of it now— what you need to do, right, find the queen, take the queen off to one side, lift the brood box up to the top of the hive, assuming you've got some supers on it. If not, put a super in between so you've got your colony at the top— sorry, your brood box at the top with all of the frames in. Knock down all of the queen cells, take them all down. and then put a super underneath it, then your queen excluder, and then a new brood box underneath in the original position filled out with foundation. And then take one frame of brood from the top, emerging brood, and then put the queen on that frame and put that downstairs. Go back in 8 days and you want to make sure that there's no more queen cells at the top, and then Hopefully they shouldn't swarm, and then all of the emerging brood will come out at the top. They'll feed back down into the super downstairs into the new brood nest where that queen is, and then they kind of just keep on going from there. That's what I would do. I 100% would not just leave them because you'll almost certainly lose all of your bees. So I think Joseph Robinson is going to be running out now to do that manipulation. I would do that first thing tomorrow. What honey are you harvesting in your area? So it's strange, like North Wales, you don't really get a type of honey. The only crop that we get from a single source is heather. Everything else is just like mix, wildflower mix, and you'll get a bit from trees, you'll get a bit from that, but we don't get a lot of honey in North Wales. What you do get is very nice and very different and very unique because it's just kind of like wild, like blackthorn, hawthorn, lime trees, um, horse chestnut, a little bit of dandelion in there. You'll get like a real wide mix of all different nectars and pollens, but no real one big main flow apart from the heather. Do you earn enough on the bees to go full-time? Are you planning on going full-time eventually? So, so yeah, I do, I do earn enough to go full-time, but I'm, I'm not going full-time just yet. Uh, I probably will in a few years at some point, but I don't, I don't know when yet. Uh, Tony saying, uh, great videos, keep it up, can't wait to see more videos on the queen rearing long hive. So I'm, I'm excited about that one as well. So the— I've got 2 Danish, pure Danish queens in there. I won't call them breeder queens, and they are filling it up at the moment. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take those out and put those into nucs, and then I'll leave all of those 8— the, the 8 sections open, and then I'll add some queen cells in there. But I'm excited by that one as well. Really nice hive. Have you had any disasters since using polyhives? Um, not really. No, they're quite straightforward, polyhives. The annoying thing with polyhives is that when you drop them, they break like really easily. So if you're carrying— I've had it loads of times— if you're carrying like a stack of— I always try and carry too many— like say 4 brood boxes, just like empty brood boxes with like some frames in, and then you drop them and they just break, and it's like, ah, it's really annoying. And then the other one I had that was really annoying, but this isn't to do with polyhives, this is to do with me just being stupid and building the floors wrong. Is that my first batch of underfloor entrances, the distance from where the slot comes in to the front of the hive was too narrow for a poly brood box. So if you put the brood box on wrong, it blocked the entrance. So from the outside it looks flush, but in reality you need to shift it along like an inch to the right. And I remember like going up to the Heather Apiary and just seeing all the bees flying like on a really warm day and one colony just not flying. I thought they've swarmed, like there's just no bees left, and went in there. They were just melting in the middle of this poly hive because I'd blocked them in. So that was a bit of a disaster, but even those ones made it through. So, uh, There's no brood, maybe a handful of capped ones. I couldn't find the queen. I did wonder whether she might have died. Could there have been emergency cells? Right, that sounds a lot more likely. Yeah. If there's no brood but there's quite a lot of cells in there, then sounds like she's, uh, she's died or you killed her and, uh, there's emergency cells. With stuff like that, yeah, like I would just take pictures. Get into the habit of taking pictures, stick it on Twitter or something and ask people, and people, people will give you really, really good advice. But it's so much easier to see it on a picture, um, because if you sent me a picture of that, you could immediately say they're emergency cells. As opposed to just kind of guessing. Roy's the boy. I had a hive swarm in my garden today. Is that a bit early? No, I had the Welsh. I had loads of people from the National Bee Unit around here the other day because we import the queens. You have to they have to check them all out before you transfer them over to their cages, and they were doing like a bit of a training exercise. So I had four bee inspectors. in the house, and I was chatting to them saying that this weekend is going to be swarm central. There's going to be so many swarms around because we've had all that— we had a good spell of good weather that was about 3 or 4 weeks ago, so all of the colonies would have been turbocharged, all of the queens would have been going, loads of brood. And then it's got cold again and people are not inspecting their bees, and then you get this warm weather again, so you've got this perfect perfect storm of lots of big strong colonies, all of that brood hatching out, loads of bees in there, combined with a really warm weekend. It'll be loads of swarms in there. I'd be amazed if I didn't lose a swarm this weekend because I've been a bit slack with my, uh, spring checks. What do you think about seeding your own area, the drones from nice colonies? Do you think it makes any difference to the wild colonies? So I'll split that into 2. Definitely think it's a good idea flooding the area with drones. I've just done a video on that, um, and we will do a lot of that this year, lots of flooding. And you do need to, you do need to kind of go really go for it and get like kind of 10, 20, 30 colonies with loads of drones in them, all good, and get rid of all of the bad ones to make a difference. But then in terms of do I think that makes a difference to the wild colonies, I'd say in the short term, a little bit. There's no doubt that if you're flooding the area, then the wild local bees that are kind of like feral swarms, when they send out their queens, they're going to get an influence from those drones. But then it's going to be watered down generation upon generation, so I don't think there's going to be any long-standing issues. Um, so yeah, so I don't think there's a long-term a long-term issue with that. But I definitely think it's a good idea and it's something that we're going to do. Uh, Eamon saying, can I requeen without killing the old queen? Um, I, I don't, I don't think so, no. You could run a colony with 2 queens, and I'm going to do a video on that this year. And I'm going to try— you have to do it with a big colony— try lifting one up to the top, keeping the queen up at the top, and then see if we can get another one introduced at the bottom. With enough distance in between them so they're not kind of— the pheromones aren't crossing over. Whether that— I don't know if that's going to work. Going to be a bit of a gamble, but should be fun. Uh, Andy's got to disappear early. Uh, good to see you, Andy. Um, Past Seeker, working with honey all the time, does it put you off eating it sometimes? Not really, because I don't, I don't really work with it all the time. Like, it's not like day in, day out. I can imagine if you were Like around honey harvest time. Yeah, I wouldn't be eating that much honey, but I don't eat that much honey anyway. I'm quite partial to like a peanut butter and jam sandwich, uh, as opposed to having like a honey sandwich. What I do with honey at the moment though, this is my daughter's favorite thing, is I get, um, I get popcorn, nice like, you know, like kernels of popcorn. I make my own popcorn and then I take equal parts of butter, brown sugar, and borage honey and boil that up till it's all sticky, and then I coat the homemade popcorn in it, and it is like the best thing ever. Really nice. They only went 4 doors away, so I managed to get them, but they're still bearding outside the Baines nuc box. It's just, it's just so funny, isn't it? Middle of April, that is it. You've got 2 months of crazy swarming going on. I, I love going and catching swarms. I'd love to do more of it, and I'd love to do videos about like, um, all the people kicking off trying to fight each other for swarms. It's hilarious how much competition there is for them. I just like to sit back and just let people have them. The Bush Bee Man made a long hive out of an old fridge. He made a frame inside the fridge. You use the freezer part as a nuc. Maybe a good idea for all the old fridges that get thrown. Yeah, I've seen that one. I was going to do a video on that, and as I was researching it, I saw that one come up and I thought, I can't just nick his idea. Um, but I got a Zest Hive, I've got the kit ready to go. Um, I need to build it out of aerated blocks, and I know a lot of the Zest people, they use— they reconvert or like recondition fridges or freezers. Um, but they're great. What, what a great way to use something that's kind of just going to get chucked away or needs to get recycled and stick a— stick some bees in it. So I think I might do— if I find, if I find a particularly good one, I think I can do it. Danny C, hey Lawrence, when are you sending my nuc? It's a bit, bit harsh. Um, I don't know, when did I say I'd send that one? When, when have I sent you an email telling you when I'm going to send it? There's 3 more delivery slots, so 20th of April, 26th of April, and the 4th of May. So it'll be one of those three, but send me your order number. I'll let you know. We've sold a ridiculous amount of nukes this year. Can't believe it. We've put the orders back open because I've got some spare. I do this every year because I always what I never want to do is take so many orders for the nukes is that I have to say to people, "I'm sorry, you've placed an order for a nuke and we can't fulfill the order because they're." dead, and we've never had to do that. So I always cut the orders off and stop taking orders and leave myself a little bit of a contingency. So then come April, there's always some left over. So they're, they're back out now, so people can order nucs. Um, but I always get a bit worried. I never want to take, take loads of orders. If I say I take 300 nucs into winter, I'd never take 300 orders up to January. I'll take maybe like kind of 250 and then think I'm probably not going to lose 50 nucs. And then this year we've just lost like none. I think we've lost like 2 nucs, just like drone layers. Um, it's been a very, very easy winter. I don't think I've lost— I think I've lost about 8 colonies in total, including the nucs, out of like 350. It's been a very, very good easy winter. I wish they were all like this. Oh, Plan B, how many beehives do you run? So I, I have like kind of— I try and get the numbers down because I've just got too much to do. So I've got about 120 beehives now, but then I— we keep a lot of nucs, um, so we just make up tons of nucs. And we took, we took 300 nucs into winter, um, and we've, we've sold them all pretty much. But I am trying to get the numbers down because it's, it's not sustainable for me to be keeping that many colonies of bees whilst still working. Um, yeah, right, no more questions in the chat, so I'm going to answer some more questions on here if I can find any good ones. Right, so Chris is saying on the massive colony is doomed before the season has even started. Not clickbaity at all, that one. That was a drone laying queen. His question was, how do you stop the bees clustering in the area where the old hive used to be, or clustering on the hive stand? Will they try and draw comb there or just find their way into other colonies? So this is talking about when you shake out drone laying queens, um, the bees will just cluster where you're shaking them out or where the original hive was. So what I said is make sure you just get rid of everything. Don't— you can't leave the hive stand there. It needs to just be a nothingness there. Um, they won't cluster on the floor, very unlikely they're going to cluster on the floor. If it's like grass, they might try and cluster a bit on the grass, but all I do is I just keep on going and moving them on. They'll keep on trying to come back there, just keep on moving them on, sending them up into the air, and as long as there's some other hives within that apiary, they, they will find them. Uh, Jamie's saying, just painted my Flow Hive frames with a bit of melted wax, is the first year of using them, is worked a treat. I can't wait to see how they go. Yeah, I've seen that as a tip as well. That's something that I think I might do. Um, I'm really interested to see how well they move up. I think if you get your colonies big and strong enough, I reckon they'll move on to the Flow Hive frames. Um, it's hard enough getting the bees to move on to just like super frames, um, like national wooden supers with wax on. So, but when they're big enough and when they're strong, they do They have to go somewhere, so I think they will go somewhere. So I'm not going to do— I'm not doing a mega long live stream tonight. I just thought I'd pop on, so I'm going to do like maybe 5 or 10 minutes more. We've got any more questions? Um, I read this one when it came through from Robert Goodrich. Your weather in North Wales is very similar to that of northern Arizona except the rain. Just thought, yeah, it's kind of— I love it. The temp— the temperature might be the same, but it bloody rains here a lot. I can just imagine Northern Arizona just being like the best weather in the world, and over here it rains like 10 months of the year. Uh, a lot of people spoke to me about this video here, so, so going back and looking at that colony that, um, that managed to survive for like however many months without a roof It's incredible. And saying that I should use that kind of like to raise some queens from, or as a breeder queen. And like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't just do it on the fact that they can not have to have a roof. I don't think that's like a really viable trait to breed from. Get what people are saying in that it's clearly a very hardy bee, but that's not something that we would look to kind of have as a breeding trait, just that it's a very hardy bee. Not without some other testing to see what like the temperament's like and see what the health of the colony's like and to see what the honey production's like. It needed to be a little bit more than that, but that— I just, I can't get over how resilient that colony was to live without a roof and just to make themselves a roof out of propolis. And it's strange because one of the traits that we will breed for and we don't like is we don't like them propolising the frames down. And I find that the local bees use way more propolis than the Buckfast. And when the bee inspector comes around, he doesn't keep Buckfast, and he's always amazed at just how easy it is to get the frames apart. Like, the frames kind of almost look like new, and you can just like leave them apart, just pull them out. And he says with his, like, they're just— everything's just glued together. Every single time he goes in, just opens them up, and it takes him ages just to kind of like break the seal on everything. So it might not be a good thing to breed for. So I'm just looking for a few more questions here. Just, yeah, people talking about the loss of that queen, that pure queen. Luckily got another one coming in quite soon. I'm in discussions as well with the guy that we import the F1 Buckfast queens in to see if we can get some pure queens from them as well, which would be good. If anyone's not seen them, it's Melita Bees. You'll see them coming out in the cages now. He said that I can tell people that it's him, and they are very, very good queen breeders from Malta. Um, I'll probably put a little post out of that at some point as well because they've got various different lines, uh, that are specifically bred for UK climate and they do perform very, very well over here. So yeah, so I think that's it. I've kind of planned to do this until about 8 o'clock. I don't think, unless anyone's got any more last-minute questions, I think I'll call it a day there. So I'll give you, I'll give you a couple more minutes just to put any last-minute questions in. That is my dog saying time for dinner. He wants his food. So yeah, no more questions. So I just want to pop in, do a live stream. It's been a long time. Thanks everyone for watching and thanks for liking the videos. Oh, Mem's thrown in a little last minute video— last minute question there. Other people will know this already. I clearly did something bad in a previous life, Mem. an Arsenal fan. So on that terrible ending note, I'll see you all later. Have a good night.
