Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 64

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. So sorry I missed last week, I was very ill and I've kind of recovered, but I'm still pretty ill, I'm not gonna lie. I've been soldiering on this week. I won't go into what is wrong with me, but you can probably tell from my face I'm not in the best of places. Um, but don't— do not worry about that, it's something very, very easy to fix, but it means that I'm just a bit weak, a bit weak, a bit tired, bit weak. But I'm here to answer your questions, so I'll be here for 1 hour. And what I'm going to do as well is I'm going to bring in Buzz, who is our chatbot, who is amazing, sponsored by ChatLab. And when I say sponsored, they're not really sponsored, but they provide us with exceptional support, and they provided us with the chatbot. So I thought it'd be a good idea to test Buzz, do a little bit of testing on Buzz. And the way that I can do that is I can ask— ah, it's not going to let me Paste questions, right? That's really annoying. That completely scuppered what I was going to do there. We'll have to try something different then. So I think we'll do the test next week for Chat Lab. Let me let me quickly flick it up and let me write a couple of the questions in to show you what it's doing. So the question there is: Is it too late to graft queens? So let's write that. Is it too late to graft queens? You just chuck that into the Buzz chatbot and it's going to come back with an answer. Let's see if it was answered while it's doing the answer. I would say definitely not. Still plenty of time left. I'm going to be grafting all the way through to probably. Probably early August, middle of August, something like that. So it says— here we go— it's generally best to finish queen rearing by early August in the UK. A season— as late season queens may not build up to strong colonies before winter, if you're considering grafting now, it may be too late for optimal results. So it's kind of got that a little bit wrong, but it's got the right bit there. It said it's generally best to finish queen rearing by early August in the UK. That is exactly what I would have said. So answering your question, Sam, is it too late to graft queens now, and is it too late to do a walkaway split? The answers for me are no and no. Absolutely fine to still go and do those. So Vera says, is Lawrence better? Yes, I am feeling a lot better. Thanks. I was going to ask Buzz that then to see if Buzz knew if I was feeling any better, but I don't think he knows that yet. Some of the questions that people have been asking Buzz have been fantastic though. I really do enjoy going through and looking at the questions and seeing what people asking him or her or it, not quite sure. The gender of buzz. Right, Richard Mallion, channel member, says, thanks, Laurence, for your help. Both the stroppy hive and the second hive have accepted their new Black Mountain honey queens. They are back in business. Excellent. I've been seeing lots of people posting that on social media, saying, you know, got a colony of bees and it's dying, dwindling away to nothing. I put a new queen in there and bang, back to business. Full brood hive, full brood box full of bees, and lots of nice frames of brood. That's exactly what we want to see. So if you want to do any posts like that, tag me in them. I will 100% share them. Vera says 7-day hive check. 7, 7-day check hive check. Okay, queen question. Oh, I'm not, I'm not sure I can do all the acronyms, Vera. You just have to write it out properly. So 7-day check hive check. Q: old had planned to requeen with Black Mountain Honey Queen, right? So you're saying you're trying to— the queen you'd planned to requeen with the Black Mountain Honey Queen. It's like crossword this. But today capped queen cells, queen's still there. Best line of attack: took queen cells down. So if that was me and they were definitely swarm cells and I'd have gone in there and they were capped, I would say they're probably going to swarm today or tomorrow, maybe Sunday. So I would go back in, make up a split at this point in the year, take out that queen on maybe 1 or 2 frames of brood, add in a frame of stores, and then you should be good. Uh, Carl Bridges, channel member, says received new queen today. Hopefully it all goes to plan, fingers crossed. Uh, Richard Mallion, channel member, says do you do paid talks? Our local association have a guest speaker over Zoom once a month. you would be fab. It would be the end of the year. So that's very kind of you, thanks for the offer. I do, I will do Zoom calls, definitely do Zoom calls if I've got availability and time. Generally I do, and I will travel a little bit of distance. I can't travel hours to go and do in-person talks, although I do like doing in-person talks, but I want to do more with beekeeping associations. So any beekeeping associations that do want me to do a talk, whether it's remote or kind of actually in person, do get in contact and I will do my very best to attend in any way that I can. Uh, right, where do we get to? Scout About, channel member, says, tried a mini mating nuc, checked 2 weeks after starting it with a virgin, definitely no queen found but multiple eggs in cells. Would this be laying workers already? So with mini mating nucs, it goes very, very quickly. It goes from failed mating queen to like instant, they put multiple eggs in the cell. So yeah, they've gone laying worker. Luckily though, with a mini mating nuc, it's super simple. You just shake the bees out, scrape the wax or the plastic back, and start all over again. Stuart Wood, good evening. For anyone who— we spoke about this before— Stuart is an incredible photographer with a specialty in macro photography, and he is a YouTuber as well, and he's got about 60,000-65,000 followers or subscribers, so a really big channel on YouTube. And he is coming up here to North Wales tomorrow to take some pictures of some of my bees and my queens. And I'm not gonna lie, Stuart, I'm very, very excited. So I'll see you in the morning. Channel member says, hi Lawrence, 2 questions. One of my colonies is one frame of fully capped drone brood and it's been like that 6 weeks and hasn't hatched. What would be causing that, and what's the deadline for making— I'm guessing there's something else— nucs? Um, okay, so drone brood can stick around like that. It looks like it's hanging around for much longer. If you think about the days from egg through to kind of emerging for drones, it's like 24, but it can be 25 or 26 days, which isn't that far off the 5 weeks that you said there. So it might be the case that it's just starting to emerge now, and you should be all good, and you start to see it go. It's very rare that you get any defective or chilled big slabs of brood like that unless there's been a massive die-off or swarm, and then it coincides with a very cold period. So I suspect it will emerge all at some point. Um, latest time for nucs? We've, we've made up all of our nucs for overwinter for next year, every single one, and we make up a lot. So that's well over 1,000 done. So that means that we're not making any small splits later on in the season, and you'll start to see pressure from robbing bees and from wasps and from hornets and stuff now. So we like to make sure that we've done all of that, got that all out of the way, and we've got nice big strong, you know, colonies on 3 or 4 frames as a minimum for now. And then we'll double them up or expand them or upgrade them into full-size beehives if they need it. The problem with trying to make piddly little splits, 1 or 2 frame splits in August, is that they might build up. If you feed them well and you give them a good queen and they have everything they need and you get good pollen coming in, you get a good ivy flow, they'll probably be all right going into the winter if you get them past the wasps. And often you can't get them past the wasps because the wasps take over. There's just too many wasps. and not enough bees at that point in the year. Pardon me. Right, next up, uh, Andy, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, have 2 weak colonies, one queenless with a single— WC, I don't know, WC single, I'm guessing it's QC, single queen cell, tore down the rest— and another with emerging who emerged 3 weeks ago but still no eggs. Do you think she's a dud? How best to merge them? Oh, how best to merge them? What would I do on that one there? I would The one, the one that is a dud, I would go in, find her, kill her, and then I would shake out all of the bees and remove the beehive and let all of the other bees beg their way into the other one. And then with the other, and then with the other one, hope that the, the queen that you've got the queen cell on there goes out and does the business and comes back mated. And then that would be a really easy way to merge those 2. Found charged queen cells, so I did a split. Normally add a mated queen into a queenless hive, but want to see if they can raise their own. Knocked down all queens except one. What's the next steps? How long do I leave them? Love questions like that. 4 weeks, then go in and hopefully all is good. There's nothing you can do in the first 4 weeks to make any difference, so you might as well just leave them to it. Hello to you too. Do you— will consider the Scalvini oxalic acid method now? I've always liked the idea of trapping queens and using oxalic acid during a brood break. I think it's a really good system. I think you'll see a lot more of that coming up over the next few years. Evening, Lawrence. Getting 2 of your Obsidian Queens next week, planning on making 2 nucs in the same apiary. Any tips for making nucs in the same apiary? So I do have some tips for making nucs in the same apiary. Let's ask Buzz just to see, because that's quite a complicated question, right? Have you got any tips for— I'll put it up on the screen for you so you can see it. Have you got any tips for making splits in the Same apiary. Buzz has transformed my life, by the way. He really— or he or she is really good at answering questions and giving people updates on their orders and tracking queens and things like that. But what I love about it is that you get instant advice. So that question there, here's what Buzz said. Absolutely. Here are some tips on making splits in the same apiary. Ensure the parent colony is strong with at least 6 to 8 frames of brood. Make splits early in the season for best results and to reduce wasp robbing risks. Provide supplemental feeding, 1:1 sugar syrup, to help the new split build up. Use a mated queen for the split to ensure quick establishment. Monitor both colonies for, for growth and for queen performance. So for a detailed guide, there is a detailed guide there, and then it's asking you more questions to keep the conversation going. So I would say that answer is not perfect there. So what I do is I go into my Chat Lab every morning, got a little dashboard, and I can see all of the chats, and I just filter through the chats and Any questions where it's kind of like a slightly more complex question, I'll just go through the chat and have a look. So this one here, I would have said, okay, yeah, ensure the parent colony is strong. Really good advice, I'll stick with that. Make splits early in the season. 100% easier to do splits, especially in the same apiary, early on in the season, just because you've not got the robbing pressure and you've not got the wasp pressure. Provide supplemental feeding, 1:1 sugar syrup, to help the new split build up. I agree with, but I would put a caveat in there, which is after 7 days. So I wouldn't feed straight away. If you feed straight away, the nuc will get robbed out. But then use a mated queen for the split to ensure quick establishment. That is really important if you're doing splits in the same apiary because you want to keep it queen right as much as you possibly can. If you leave a nuc without a queen or you're doing it with like a virgin that's in there, all of the bees just head over to where the actual mated queen is and you end up with a little piddly split. And then the final one, monitor both colonies closely for growth and queen performance. So I would say that as well. So I'll go back in after this and I'll tweak that. And if you were to ask it again, and you can try this, ask this tomorrow maybe. It will say provide supplemental feeding, 1:1 sugar syrup, to help the new split build up, but don't feed it for the first 7 days due to the risk of robbing. And then the chatbot knows that forever. And what I'll also do on there is I'll tell the chatbot if someone's asking that, have you got tips for making splits in the same apiary, I'll get them to link out to the YouTube video on it as well. So instead of just getting the guide, which is here, you can click on the guide and it will take you to our website guide, which is how to split a beehive, which has got loads of information on it and loads of videos and stuff like that. I will— I'll put the video, and it's— it is this one here. No, this one here is split a hive without finding the queen. The other one is split a hive in the same apiary. I'll link the 2 of those together, and then forever and a day, if anyone asks that question, that is the answer that they're going to get. So I'll take a chat, uh, what's his name, back down. Here we go. See what my searches are there. Uh, where are we going now? So the chatbot's going to come back up. I'm going to remove that. Right, so next question we've got. Hi Lawrence, I have a question about doing a demaray split. I know how to do one on single brood, but how would I go about doing this on a double brood configuration? So you can do a Demeray split on a double brood configuration, and it is exactly the same as doing it on a single brood. You just have to imagine that the original double brood configuration is just a single brood box. So instead of lifting up one box, you have to lift up 2 boxes. If you want my advice, should you do a Demeray split on a double brood? Probably not. It's counterproductive, I would say. You're going to have a double brood at this point in the year. and you're likely to have a huge amount of brood in there at the moment, but also quite a lot of honey. The bees are going to naturally compress that down, and you'll probably get left with the end of the year, which is just a brood box full of bees, and then that top brood box will just end up being honey anyway. So if you can extract that honey, you've not got Apivar, you've not had Apivar in those frames, and you can extract directly out of them, all I would do is take the queen, put her in the bottom box, put the queen excluder in between the two, and just see how much honey they collect over the next few weeks, and you'll be surprised. That would be a very, very efficient way of doing it. But in terms of managing the swarming risk, get through the next few weeks and you will see the swarming risk, uh, the swarming risk of your colonies really start to go down. We're at the longest day now, and you have like a 3-week lag. It's like a 3 or 4-week lag because the queen and the colony don't really know that the days are getting shorter until the days actually start getting shorter, and then they stop laying or they reduce laying at that point. And you've still got all of the old legacy brood that needs to come through. But you do, as you get into kind of early, mid, back end of July, you don't have the same kind of risk of swarming. And I certainly wouldn't be doing any demerary splits, kind of probably from now onwards. I would say stick with what you've got and just work out if you want to double brood over winter or you want to go into single brood for the winter. Oh, and then Lee just asked the same question, so there we go. Hi Lawrence, how late in the season can you perform a demerary split? Um, I'm just going to go into the chat box See if we can ask that one because that's that's a good question. That's something that gets asked quite a lot as well. The chatbot seems to have disappeared though. Has it gone? Okay, that's that's not good. It's failed on me already. The chatbot—it's not really failed. It's probably hiding somewhere. Let's have a look. Okay, we'll come back to the chatbot. I'll answer that one. How late in the season can you do a demeray split? I wouldn't do them after June. You probably get away with doing one kind of now or maybe a week ago. Um, and, and it's not to say that you couldn't do it, but I think you start to lose the benefit of doing it. Yeah, the Demaray split for me works very well as the colonies are building up. You're ramping up the amount of bees that you're going to get, uh, in your colony, and you're trying to mitigate that swarming. Whereas when you go towards the end of the year, the risk of swarming is low, so I like to leave my bees to it, and the number of bees is going down naturally anyway. So to try and force them to do something different, they get a bit confused, and maybe the beekeeper gets confused, and you end up not really getting anything that you want. Um, but just with extra work, which is not what you want. Harry Reynolds says, evening, Lawrence, great to have you back on a live. Question on queen rearing: the 5 out of 9 cells I managed to get drawn out, uh, got taken down by a queen. Must have had a virgin in there still. Never mind. Oh no, that's an absolute nightmare. Uh, or one of them, or one of them emerged early. This is the problem if you have different, uh, graft sizes. So when you're grafting, you get— you learn this quite quickly, uh, through your own mistakes. So don't worry, I've made these takes loads of times. When you're grafting, people just think, you know, get the, get the smallest, smallest larva that you can get. But really, you want the smallest larva that you can get, but you want 30 of the same size larva because they're going to be the same age. So if you take like a tiny minuscule larva that's just hatched out, literally hours after hatching out from an egg, and you take that on your, your grafting tool, you put it into a cup, and then you get the bees to draw it out and turn it into a queen, and then you compare that to one where you're taking it out on like day 5, day 6, something like that. Big fat chubby larva. And this is what a lot of beginners do, and I'm not saying you've done this, Harry, but a lot of beginners can't see the small ones, so they take out what they can see and they think, wow, I can just see that, so it must be small. But it's 2 days older, which means it's going to emerge 2 days earlier. So then if you've got a row of 9, uh, cells like that and one of them's coming out 2 days earlier, you think they're coming out in 2 days' time, but it's come out 48 hours earlier, and it just comes out and kills all the rest of the queens through the cells. And then the bees start to take them down. So that's what's happened. But you know, it's all good practice for you, and then you know, you know for next time to put some cell protectors on when you get to kind of like 2 days before emergence, just as, just as good practice. Uh, Peter McGuire says, hi Lawrence, glad you're fit and well. I'm getting there. I'm definitely, I'm definitely better than I was a couple of weeks ago, let's put it that way. Got my voice back again. Uh, Thomas says, also wondering if you have any specific tips for taking care of them in the new year. Do they build up super fast or more slow and steady? So if we're talking just about colonies of bees, I would say it's, it's generally slow and steady, and then it just kicks up just as you get into spring. So yeah, the bees always keep you on your toes. Channel member says, I've been doing weekly checks this year. They seem to make sealed queen cells a lot faster. Maybe 5 days is called for. It's interesting, I've seen people talking about doing 5-day queen cell inspections. I think it was BBKA I saw it on, and obviously, like, you're gonna catch more swarms if you reduce it down, but my argument would be, well, You're gonna go 5 days, why don't you go 3 days? You'll probably lose less swarms if you do 3 days. And if you can do 3 days, why don't you just inspect them every single day? I don't like 5-day inspections, and the reason I don't like 5-day inspections is because it puts people out of their rhythm. So if you're doing Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, and then all of a sudden you go bang, right, Thursday, and then you're trying to think in your head, right, when's the next inspection? Is it next Thursday or is it Saturday? Because if it's Saturday, I've only got 3 days in between the inspections, so you miss that one. So then you end up missing them and having longer gaps than 5 days. So I think on the whole and on the average, if you just have 7 days, do it religiously every single Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning or whatever it is, you're much more likely to get in there and actually find those swarms. What would be your quick and easy hive setup for queen rearing? Also, I, I like the 10 over 10 method. I all— I always use the 10 over 10 method or a kind of like a tweak on the 10 over 10 method. And the reason that I do it is I know it well, I can do it without thinking about it at all And it, for me, it's just a combination of those 2 impulses that make it really, really powerful. So if you, if you've got a colony of bees, big strong colony of bees, and you just took the queen away, let it go hopelessly queenless, and then knock down all the queen cells and graft it into it, you'd get some really good queens out of it. You would get good queens out of it, but would those queens be fed as well as they could possibly be? If I added more nurse bees into that mix, would they feed them more? If I made them think that they were swarming at the same time as not having a queen, would they feed them more? And the answer is definitely yes, 100% yes. You can see it with your own eyes. It's been proven to— they produce more royal jelly and they feed the larva more royal jelly, which means you get bigger, fatter, chubbier queens. And everyone knows bigger queens are going to be better for your beehive because they can take in more semen, which means they're going to live for a lot longer. So that's, that's the reason that I use that method, 10 over 10. I've just done a video on it at the moment calling it the 12 over 12, only because I've done it in a Payne's hive that is a 12-frame Payne's hive. But it's dead simple. All you do is you go in on day 0 and you find your queen. I like to find my queen and mark her, put her in the brood box, back in the brood box. So you just have the bottom brood boxes, as many frames of brood that are in that hive, but generally like 10, 11, 12 frames of brood and the queen. And then you should put queen excluder on top and then put another brood box on top of it and then put in another 10 frames of brood from hives around the apiary. Uh, you're choosing your very, your very best capped emerging brood. You need to make sure there's enough bees in the donor hive to accept that brood. You then wait 10 days, you then go through all of the frames, and you're going to have the swarming impulse and the emergency impulse working together. So you're going to see swarm cells, you're going to see emergency cells, you're going to see cells all over the place. Then your job is to condense that hive down just to the bottom box— I was getting it wrong— the top box of brood that is all of the emerged brood, and then you take the queen away And you shake the original box through, the queen excluded, to make sure there's no additional queens in there. So I know that sounds difficult. I probably should have got the drawing app up for that. I am doing a video on that this week, Harry, so it's going to be done towards the back end of the year. It's going to be no good for this season, but for next season you're going to have a much, much better video than the previous one. That method there is exceptional, combines those 2 impulses, the swarming impulse and the emergency impulse, and produces the fattest, chubbiest queens. Now a lot of people say I don't want to do that. That's 20 frames of brood that you've put into that starter finisher. And the way that I use it is I use it as a starter only. So I just start grafts in there and I move grafts off. Very, very good at starting them, and you can move them anywhere really. They'll just finish them off in a super or finish them off anywhere kind of away from a queen where they're protected. But people say that's a huge amount of resources to put into a starter. Like, what do you do with those 20 frames of brood? You can't use it indefinitely. You can only use that for a kind of like 2 weeks, maybe pushing it, maybe pushing it 2 weeks. Like, I have them rolling on 2 weeks, and I do find towards the end of them they're not quite as good as when they're set up at the beginning. But the really easy thing to do, and this is where, like, people— I don't, I don't understand why people don't understand this. I say to them, well, all I do at the end of— I've got 20 frames of brood there, all of the bees emerge, I do my grafts, and then I've got 20 frames of bees. I've not— look, I've not lost those bees. And they say, well, what do you do to them? I say, well, just make up loads of splits. I just split them out into like maybe 7, 7 or 8 nucs, take them off to another apiary, give them all a queen cell, and then they just kind of— I've just, I've repurposed my starter, um, into, into nucs. I need the bees anyway, so it's a very efficient system, um, and anyone can use it as long as you're doing like a few, a few queens or a few nucs, then it's a very good system indeed. We have a hive on double brood box, 14 by 12 bees. are not drawing out all of the frames in one of the boxes. Shall I put them down to one box? We have borage fields nearby on flower now. Um, so I wouldn't put them down to one box if they've got the borage near them, because when they get a good— when they get a good run of good weather on the borage, if there's enough bees in there, they'll draw those boxes out very, very quickly. I would just leave them to it. But double brood 14x12 boxes is excessive for a brood nest though, so I, I'd probably be inclined to find a queen, put the queen in the bottom one, put a queen excluder in between the two And then if they've not done anything on that top box, maybe remove the double 14 by 12 brood box and just put a shallow box on and try and collect some honey. That is what I would do. Had CBPV in 2 hives. One has died, the other is hanging on. What would you do next? Do you know, I really feel bad because I'm never the best one to give advice for CBPV. We've never ever had a single case of it up here. We're away from most people, don't get too many kind of outbreaks of stuff like that up here. Uh, and, and even if you do get outbreaks up here, like where we are, we're miles away from anyone, so we don't kind of come close to anything. So I'll— I'm gonna have to go and research what to do. I've seen loads of different things, loads of different treatments for CBPV. You talk about people taking off the floor and letting the dead bees drop out and trying to clean up the contamination, clean up the dead bees in the front, and obviously like burn them and kind of take them out the game. Space is the big one I think that people say is in order to relieve the congestion in the colony, reduces the transmission from bee to bee, and if you reduce that transmission, hopefully you can kind of get the colony through it. I think a lot of bee farmers are reeling from them, quite substantial losses from CBPV, and I don't think anyone's got their head quite round what actually to do. But the things that I've just said about there, they're well known. Taking off the floor apparently is a good thing to do, although some people do object to that now, but definitely giving them more space. So if you've got a brood box and they're really confined, I would suggest going double brood. If they need another super, give them another super or 2. Just give them a little bit more space in the hive, and hopefully you should get the other one through. Sam Brister, channel member, says, "Hi Lawrence, I'm 15 years old and 21 hives strong. I have an honesty box and sell about four jars per day. Next year, when all the production hives, I will will I have trouble selling the honey? Sorry, next year when they're all production hives, will I have trouble selling the honey? I do not think you'll have trouble selling the honey, Sam, because you have got 21 hives and you're managing them well, and you're only 15 years old. I'm sure you will come up with some very ingenious ways to sell it, and I don't think you need to be that clever to sell." good quality honey anyway. Uh, First time with the rolling demerare on the Black Mountain honey overwintered nuc. Hive massive, taking 17 kilograms of honey off, but no extractor for honey. Filled the top brood frames. When can we move and nadir the top box under the bottom one? So you can nadir the top box anytime. You can do it now, it's fine. I like to nadir before they cap it because then it saves me uncapping it or bruising it. Uh, you'll go into the top box of a demerare and you'll see loads of nectar up there. You can do it at that point. You can even sacrifice a tiny little bit of brood if you think, you know, there's loads of good nectar in there, I want to get that in the supers, and I'm not fussed about the 1 or 2% of brood that's left over. You can just nadir it at that point and then everything should be good. Hi Lawrence, we've done a demo 2 weeks ago. They're filling the top brood box with nectar and starting to cap it. I went into the bottom box and they have only drawn 2 frames and they are making cells. What should I do now? Um, right, let's have a look. They're filling the top brood box with nectar, which is right, and starting to cap it, which is right. Went into the bottom box and they've only drawn 2 frames and are making cells. So This is a classic— I'm really sorry, Kieran— this is a classic early, too early demerite. So if you do a demerite and there's not enough bees in the colony— and my prerequisites are a brood box full of bees and then at least 2 supers pretty much full of bees— I wouldn't do it if I just had 1 super full. 1.5 is pushing it. If it's cold, I would make sure that you have at least 2 supers full. But if you, if you remove the brood up to the top like that and take the queen and put her at the bottom, All of the bees— if there's only enough bees to keep the brood warm, they sacrifice the queen. And I know you wouldn't think that they would do that, but they do. You need to make sure that there's enough bees in the colony to keep all of the brood warm and to start a new colony. What you're trying to do is trick the bees that they've swarmed. And this is why the timing of a demerare is so important. You do it too early and you're trying to trick them that they've swarmed before they would have naturally swarmed. You do it too late and the demerare becomes ineffective because they've either swarmed or you go in and they're trying to swarm, and then the demerare doesn't work. You want to do the Demeray like a week or 2 weeks before they're naturally going to swarm. And if you do it at that time, it is very, very effective. If you do it too early, what happens is what's, what's happened to Kieran. I'm really sorry, I do think the queen has died. She's probably starved and they've created some emergency cells there. And I know it's strange because you think, well, they're creating cells, so she must have laid some eggs. They'll probably leave some bees down there just as an emergency, like, stunt. Or they might have started off in the day, so you might have done the split and they're drawing everything out and the queen's in there laying eggs, and it gets cold and all the bees just move up to the brood to keep it warm overnight and they abandon the queen and the queen dies. So I think that is what has happened. To get you back on track really easily though, just take down all the emergency cells, put the, uh, the top box back down on the bottom, go double brood if you need to, and then you could just add in a mated queen straight away. Evening, Laurence. Supers once extracted are now full of pollen. Would you use them again or take them out and put new foundation in? So really easy way to get pollen out of your supers is just to leave them in like storage, dry storage over winter. You want to do it dry, so let the bees clear up all of the supers. So you can put them back on the same hive, let the bees clear it up, blow all the bees back off, and then store it somewhere dry but sealed. Don't let the bees rob it all out. You want it somewhere dry and sealed, but it's really important that you're going to get good ventilation in there, so don't wrap it in plastic or anything like that. You want a little bit of air to kind of like sneak through the gaps, but you don't want anything else to go in. What will happen then is you'll get pollen mites go in and they will just work that pollen all the way throughout the winter, and then you'll come into the spring and hopefully if you've left enough airflow going through it and it's not gone moldy, you should just be able to tap all of the pollen out and you can start again. If you don't set it up correctly, what will happen is it will go moldy over winter and then you could probably still use it, but they would just have to clear it all out first and you're giving the bees a little bit of extra work. I don't like doing it like that. I like to keep them keep them dry, get the pollen mites working on them, and then tap it all out. Uh, Madaras says, hey Lawrence, hope you're doing well, glad to see you here on the live. Hello to you too, Chris, looking forward to your email. Uh, Scout About, channel member, says, with regards to the Obsidian Queens, what breed of bees are they? Oh, so top secret what breed of bees the Obsidian Bees are. They are a Black Mountain Honey exclusive, the darkest bees on the internet, I think they are. Um, I might answer that at some point, but at the moment it is a secret. Uh, Jizz Wizard— sorry, The Jizz Wizard says, more than half of my hives are superseding. Is it possible they're is something in nature that's triggering them all to do it at the same time. Oh, I don't know, I guess so, yeah. But that's— are they definitely superseding? So my challenge back would be just, just tell me, go on, what's going on? Are they— is there just like one cell in each of the hives, or is there multiple cells kind of maybe on the face of the frame? Because if it's multiple cells on the face of the frame, I would say it's, it's almost certainly they're all trying to swarm. And then you do find that colonies do swarm kind of in a row. It's, uh, it's contagious, but also it's very much driven by the weather and the conditions, and then all the colonies are subject to the weather and weather and the conditions. Uh, says, bought my first hive this year, checked the hive last week and was queenless after she hadn't been laying for a week, had no eggs. So got 2 frames from a friend, gone in today and got 2 capped queen cells. Nice. Hopefully a bit of weather and then you'll be back on track. says, hey Lawrence, Black Mountain honey queen that I won in the battleships game is going strong already. Water wall brood So super excellent, I'm glad to hear that. We will get the competitions back on for the free queens. I just— the whole point of doing free competitions and queens is to try and like do something nice for customers and to make it a little bit fun. And then when people are getting into arguments and stuff over it and throwing accusations left, right, and center, it kind of takes— it takes the fun away from it a little bit. So I need to work out a foolproof way of doing the competitions. I will, I will get there in the end. Says, I'm going to let it play out naturally instead of getting a new queen. Will I have enough time in the season to get any splits once the queen's emergence starts laying. So I would say almost certainly not if you've got a colony that is, uh, naturally requeening now. It could be 4 weeks till you see the first egg, could be another 3 weeks, or it will be another 3 weeks after that until you see the first bee emerge. All that time the colony is going like that, population of the bees is going down, and then it's your job, or the queen's new job, to get that back up before winter. Definitely don't split them any further. Are you going to sell Yolanta queens again? Um, undecided at the moment. Undecided. Probably not. Channel member says, hi Lawrence, at the end of the season, how do you downsize your double brood hive? Will they condense into one box themselves? If not, what do you do? So if, if I can condense them down at that point in the season, I will, and I'll just literally take the boxes away or put the queen excluder in between it and take the honey off if it's not been tainted with Apivar, which a lot of my boxes haven't because I've kind of regularly changed out the boxes and melt down the wax and put new ones in, which is brilliant. But the easiest way I would say to convert from double brood to over— uh, sorry, from double brood to single brood over winter is to actually let the bees do the hard work for you. If you've got a double brood, so brood box there and a brood box there— that made no sense, I need my drawing app— a top box and a bottom box for a brood box, and, uh, you let them go into winter like that, I can guarantee 9 times out of 10 you'll go there in February and all the bees and everything and stores and brood and honey will be in the top box and the bottom box will just be empty. 9 times out of 10. So then you just remove the bottom box, start again. Very very easy way of doing it. Where are we going next? Here we go. Paul Brown on Facebook says we're having a nightmare with one of our hives. Oh, didn't say you didn't say which which problem. I would have loved to know more. Hopefully you sent it further down here. Pedro Neto says do you make shipping of queens to Portugal? I'm afraid we don't. Pedro isn't Pedro Neto not the Chelsea player? I think it's another Pedro Neto. But he says no, I'm afraid we don't sell. Queens to anywhere outside of the UK. I wish we could, we get a lot of inquiries. Hello, I have a bee colony with 24 slats, I think we call them frames but I understand what you mean, slats, and maybe 15 slats are pollen blocked. Why is this the case and what should I do? Greetings from Turkey. So I suspect it is because in Turkey you have wonderful weather and the bees go out all the time and just have ample forage and pollen that comes in, and bees are very opportunist and they will just take out as much pollen and bring it back as they can. and then they're just expecting that they're going to have more space put into the hive. So I would say if it's causing you an issue, take it out. You can freeze pollen frames. Pollen frames freeze really well, and you can put them back in when you need to. Maybe they need it over winter. Or you could start— this is what I would probably do for you— is make yourself a pollen trap. You can make yourself a pollen trap for about £10. It is really, really cheap to do it. I've got a little video coming out at some point on how to make one for £10. And, um, I would put, I would put that on the front of your hives, and then that would stop the problem. And you wouldn't have 15 frames of pollen blocked, and you'd have a really nice, uh, sellable product. Pollen's very, very popular. I'm sure you could sell it for probably more than the honey. Hayes Honey says, how long can a freshly hatched queen last in the incubator before needing to transfer to hive with feeding honey and water? So I moved away from hatching my virgins quite quickly after starting queen rearing. I find it really, really difficult getting virgins into a full-size hive, a mini mating hive, a nuc Um, when they're alive. I find it very, very difficult. And even putting cells into mini mating nucs, they often take them down. But I found putting cells into mini mating nucs just as they're about to emerge with a cell protector on or covering them in foil, but then keeping the mini mating nucs in stasis as best as I can— I've not got a 7-degree fridge to put them in, but I do have a garage that I can get down to about 12 degrees with the air conditioning. It's pretty cold in there and the bees don't move around much. And I have the virgins emerge out of the cells through the cell protectors into the mating nucs during that period. And because they're so cold and like in this stasis, they're just like, yeah, whatever, just, just let her chill. Whereas if you run them in live virgins, they just kill them straight away. So the question— that wasn't— that didn't answer your question at all. How long can you freshly hatch— sorry, how long can you keep a freshly hatched queen in the incubator before they need to transfer with feeding and honey and water? I don't use that process, but I would say maybe a day. But my suggestion to you is It's much, much easier to introduce like protected cells into the hive than introducing the virgins in. I would, I'd try it if you've not tried it already, and I think you'll be, you'll be converted quite quickly. Colin says, thanks for your help a few weeks ago with the problem I was having. The new queen or eggs were not seen 10 days after popping the tabs, but here's hoping I see the queen and eggs tomorrow when I check. Fingers crossed. I hope so too, Colin. Uh, Sandy's Right says, chatbots have a hard time pollinating too. They do indeed. Isn't Chelsea paying enough, Pedro? I I thought this is the actual the same Pedro Neto, isn't it? Danny Bees channel member says evening guys watching from my extraction room. Blooming heck! I'm struggling to keep on top of all these supers. Not a bad problem to have. These black ants in the honey. F1 queens are going full power. I would love to know how much honey has been yielded from our queens this year. That would be an awesome stat. Aiden channel member says hey Lawrence. I had the MBU inspector come to inspect my bees as there was EFB in my area and she gave me the all clear and I'm surprised I didn't have any chalk. Brood as it is common where I am? Um, chalk brood does— it comes and goes, I think, with chalk brood. If you have good quality queens, you won't see it that much. See a tiny bit, I don't think it's the end of the world. Uh, when you start to get like kind of mongrel AMM colonies, you will see more chalk brood. They're much more susceptible to it. Andy, channel member, says thanks for the advice regarding the shakeout. How to handle merging the hives if I can't find the virgin? I saw her 2 weeks ago but I haven't seen her since, so maybe she was a dud or May have been eaten when mating. Very rare that I go into a colony and I can't find a failed virgin. They generally are there. If they go out to mate, they often come back. They don't often go out to mate and fail to mate and come back. A lot of the time they just don't ever leave the hive, so they are still there. I would say if you can find the other one and just kill one, then you ideally need to find and cage that second one if you can, but finding uncaging virgins is, is just impossible. You'll end up killing her. So I would just run the risk, find one, find one queen that you want to kill, kill her, and then just go ahead and merge them and hope that the, the virgin survives the chaos. How was the honey crop in Wales this season? It has been phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. Like, we, we get it every 5, 6 years in Wales where we just get the perfect conditions, and up until now we have had the perfect conditions for not only honey but for queens as well. It has been exceptional, really, really good. What we get in Wales that you don't get a lot in the rest of the— like the rest of the UK is just consistent rain. So even when it's been really hot and sunny for everyone, we still— over the last 4 weeks we've had good, good amount of rain, like enough rain. And then the plants are yielding nicely. And in Wales, because there are trees and the things that our bees go and forage on, are so deep-rooted, we can survive a really long drought. So that, that drought at the beginning of the year— 6, I call it a drought— but that beautiful period of sunny weather, 6 or 7 weeks of no rain whatsoever, that was when we created all of our spring honey. And that lack of rain didn't impact us at all. Now obviously, if it didn't rain for long enough up here, it would start to impact us, but we do seem to be sheltered from it a little bit. And don't think, oh my God, it's so easy for Blacklands in honey in Wales, because you know, it rains and everything yields. It works. So that's one, that's one in every 6 years. The other 5 of every 6 years, when you're all just getting the sunshine, we just get rain all the way through the winter. So we don't get any queens mated and we don't get any honey, and it is a real, real pain. But this year has been perfect, and I want it to be like this every year. And I feel like we deserve for it to be like it, like this every year. And I think we should probably do a petition to say that the weather should just be sunny from now on. I don't know who we send the petition to, but I think it needs to be done, right? Hi Lawrence, requeen 2 weeks Done an inspection today and they obviously— they have obviously killed her. There is no brood, eggs, nor queen cells, but 2 supers of capped honey. What would you suggest? Try another queen? Um, so I, I never suggest trying another queen if you've had a failed introduction straight away. You've got to go in, frame of eggs, see what they do. If they don't do anything and they just turn that frame of eggs into a frame of capped brood, they think they are queen right. Doesn't mean they are queen right, but they suspect that they've got a queen and there's probably a virgin hiding. I think there probably is a virgin hiding. But if you put the frame of eggs in and they draw out emergency cells, then you know they were hopelessly queenless. and when you take down those queen cells again, they will be hopelessly queenless again, and then you can put a new queen in. On Twitch says, do you think I'd be able to graft more queen cells with a hive that's been queenless for 2 weeks and will soon have a virgin out to flight? Um, you'd probably get some takes, but I don't think they'd be very good queens. I certainly wouldn't waste my time on old nurse bees like that. I would make up a nice fresh batch for some grafts. Evening, Lawrence. Had a virgin queen that hatched on the 12th of June. I'm still not seeing eggs and larvae. What's the latest date of the queen laying? Before I realize she's a dud. So it's a little bit how long's a piece of string, this one. I had someone message me the other day saying that they had a queen mate 6 weeks after emergence, and I'd say that's, that's definitely pushing it. I always say kind of like 4 weeks. 4 weeks for me is the cutoff. If I've got— if I leave them a queen cell on the 1st of June, I go back on the 1st of July, and if everything is good, everything is good. If there's no eggs or no nothing, I, I shake them out, or I find the queen and the virgin and kill her and add in a new queen. I don't wait for 5 or 6 or 7 weeks. So you've got maybe 2 and a half, so you've got about a week and a half left. Um, good, good chance that that will still get mated with a week and a half left. I wouldn't give up hope yet. But once you get into 5 weeks or 6 weeks, I would start to give up, even though that guy did say he had it 6 weeks after, which was quite impressive. Uh, Rocky Beach says the chatbot is awesome, how do we find it? So if you're— if you want to get to the chatbot, I don't know where it's gone, it's just come off. I think Do you know what I think's happened? I think I've run out of, um, credits on it again and it's just disappeared. If I go into my email, it will say that. So it's free, like the chatbot is free and everyone can have as many, uh, messages on there as well. But it has, it has been paused. So I just looked on here and it says, yeah, you've used up all your credits. So it's not free for me. I have to pay for that chatbot, um, and it is based on the amount of credits that are used. So at the moment, I think I pay like £100 a month for it, which is well worth it. The next level up is £400 a month though. So, but I do think I'm probably gonna have to up my subscription because it does an exceptional job. It's learning more and more by the day, but people are using it. So I wanna keep it free. I don't wanna, I don't wanna ever put it up behind a paywall because I think it's a useful tool. And it's nice because, you know, you can go to ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT all of that stuff, but ChatGPT does make mistakes and no beekeeper is verifying ChatGPT. So it can give you spurious information that you don't know is spurious. Whereas at least with my one, Like over time, I'll just be constantly vetting all of the information that's in there, and it'll come to a point where it it's it's going to be way better than me. It's like already way better than me because it knows most of the things that I know, but it gives instant answers straight away, which is important for people if they want to know kind of where their queen is or if the order's gone through or just to kind of check up on general information like that. So let's go to the next one. Ollie Bond says one of your F1. Sorry, I I had one of your F1 butt fast queens recently for a hot hive, and they've already so much calmer three weeks. After requeening. Awesome. Oh, thanks. I really like these little comments like that. If anyone ever wants to stick that on a Google review, you're more than welcome to, but you're more than welcome just to post it on your own Facebook as well, and I'll just kind of like pinch it out and stick it on our social media. I love stuff like that. Brilliant. Uh, John Sylvester says, good evening, Lawrence. I see you're all recovered now. I received my 3 UK F1 queens today. Thank you so much, and thank you for your order, John. But yes, feeling much better. The Bee Holding says, hello, I have a bee colony with 24 slats and 16 slats of block got by pollen. I think we did that one there. It was under a different name, I think, that one though, wasn't it? Love it. Says, good evening, Lawrence, just a small question. Is it a problem if the hive is very hot in summer? So bees like to keep their colony quite warm. It's not, it's not far off blood temperature, it's a little bit lower than that, but maybe like kind of 34, 35, 36 degrees. So as long as it's not 35, 36, 37 degrees outside, it's going to be okay for the bees. So in the UK There really isn't a time where it's too hot. Absolutely fine for the bees to be outside in the sun for the whole day. But what is really good for the bees is they kind of have their own built-in air conditioning system, especially if you set them up on a ventilated floor. It means that they can fan their wings, they can come outside, they can beard, but they can fan air through the colony. And what they do is they go out and forage water, they bring that water back, and then when someone's fanning, they'll release the water. It's like an air conditioning machine releasing water through that fan. You get this, um, this kind of like evaporation effect which really cools the beehive down. And it is, it is like an air conditioning system, so they can bring the temperature of the hive right down very, very efficiently and effectively. So I don't think it's something that we really need to worry about, um, definitely not in the UK. Maybe in some places in the USA, maybe, maybe some places like in the Middle East and in the desert you'd have issues with that, but I don't think, yeah, I don't think in the UK it's a problem. Uh, Leezes Bees says, hi Lawrence, I've watched your overwintered nuc series and was planning on doing it myself mid-July. However, when I mentioned this to other beekeepers, all bar none have said this is a bad idea, with 1 to 2, 1 saying it's basically a death sentence. Um, so I'm not, so I'm not quite sure what the question is there. So it says, I've watched your overwintered nuc series and was planning on doing it myself mid-July. Making your own overwintered nuc series or just following the advice in the videos? Um, I'm not sure, I'm not sure what the death sentence is. Making up, making up nucs, like 3 or 4 frame nucs in mid-July though, is absolutely fine. We're doing that for ages. Uh, but it is, you know, the seasons change. I would say this year, like, we finished making up all our nucs already, so we're like 2 or 3 weeks ahead. But that's because the season's been compressed and it's been shifted kind of like to the left, been started early, kind of finish early. Um, but where other seasons kind of like start late and finish late. We like to get the majority of them done kind of like back end of June, early July. I would say we've probably moved forward a little bit. Hi from a hot Norwich. Hello to you too. Second question, when is best to go double brood? So definitely not now. Anybody on single brood, do not go double brood between now and the end of the season. I like double brood beginning of the, beginning of the year underneath because it just buys you so much time. It means you never lose an early swarm and it gives you so many options for good splits, and it means that you don't lose too much honey in the brood box, and it gives you options to do stuff later on. Where do we go here? Oh wow, there's a lot more questions than I thought there might. Okay, should we speed up? I've only got 17 minutes left, so you probably don't ask any more questions because I don't think I'm going to get to the bottom of this list, and I do have to finish at half 8, I'm afraid. So I know I was going quick before, I'm going to go even quicker. Thank you, Lawrence. 5 queens arrived today, all in perfect condition. Love the new cages with the QR code on. Nice touch. Thank you very much, Richard. Glad they arrived. Hi mate, how do you store your supers, dry or wet? Really simple— wet. Always wet. And thirdly, thanks for all your help and support on here, and after I bought a nuc from you, you're honestly a star, mate. Keep up the good work. Thank you very much, very kind comment. Hi Lawrence, how do I make my bees, uh, to build up the foundation in the super? They started to fill the brood box with honey to the point that the queen almost has no space to lay. So when you— when that happens, it's generally an issue with the queen. Um, if you've not given them enough space up in the supers and they're just backfilling the brood nest with stores, it's because the queen can't lay enough. Um, if the queen can lay, they'll start moving the honey away. So whenever that happens, I look to fix the queen. Uh, Manya Jazz says, is it possible to get a nuc now and get them through the winter? So it definitely is, but a complete waste of money, and, uh, I don't like it. Poor attitude to risk, but it's good for me. But what I say to people is, if you've got a nuc now, you'll get them through to the end of the year, you probably won't get any honey at all, and then it's on you to get that colony through the winter. You've got to do all the prep, you've got to do all the things that you don't know how to do, and the risk and the chance of you getting it through is much, much lower than leaving it with me, and then I just send it back to you kind of like early, early April or the end of March. But you know you're guaranteed to get it through because if if it does die, then I just send you another colony. So you've you always got another colony. So I I always say to people, don't bother in if you're if you're getting a nuke and it's July or August or September, just wait until the next year. Sit on your hands. Maybe do maybe do a little bit of training. Fourteen day beekeepers coming soon, and then start it off properly. Ami Honey says hi. This is Ami Honey from Ethiopia. Hello to you. Jizz Wizard says to follow up my hive had four to eight queen cells in different places on the frames, and when they started. the cells. They had a queen, but they are now queen cells, um, should emerge any day now. They are queenless. So it definitely wasn't supersedure, that is swarming. All of your colonies have swarmed at the same time. Hi Lawrence, hope you're well. My 4 hives are either in nucs or single full deep with fondant. They are constantly eating it. Why are you feeding fondant? That is very interesting. Um, I've not— I wouldn't feed anything at this point of the year if I can get away with it, but especially not fondant. Really interested to see why you're feeding fondant. Ed, that's a long message, Ed. I'm gonna have to come up here. He says, hi Lawrence, hope you're well. Learned so much from your videos. Seen the untouched hives and question is, can you move an untouched hive 10 years and move it whole? Has a brood box and 3 supers. Have a client wanted it moved and doesn't want us going through it on the property. Uh, yeah, absolutely. As long as you can strap it up and keep it secure, I would say you are good to go. John Sylvester says, good evening Lawrence, uh, good to see you've recovered now. Oh, we've done that one. That was reworded. I love it, John. Uh, Jizz Wizard says, also the bee population is still high, so I don't think they swarm. So I did a video on this exact subject today, which is you cannot tell if a colony has swarmed just by looking at the bee population. There are 2 ways to tell that the colony is definitely swarmed. One is you go and do an inspection and you see multiple swarm cells, which is what, which is what you have seen, so you know they've swarmed. And the only other way to know that they've swarmed is to watch them swarm. You can't go in and say, well, there's not, there's not that many bees there, so I think they've swarmed, or the queen's gone, so I think they swarmed. There's only 2 ways to categorically say that they've swarmed: finding swarm cells and seeing them swarm. So I'm like 100% sure your bees have swarmed. Sorry to say that. Neil Phillips says, loved your pre-Demaray split video, watched after just losing 2 queens to swarms due to a lack of experience of being away for a couple of days. I'm sorry to hear that. At least you can kind of take it on as good learning, and hopefully next year it does a little bit better. John Sylvester says, Arsenal need to start getting good players in. That I agree with 100%. Danny says, hi Lawrence, I've got one of your F1 Buckfast queens coming tomorrow. Can't wait to get her into the hive. I remember packing your orders today, Danny, um, it will be with you in the morning. Uh, Norfolk Honey says, I have some chalk brood in one strain of my treatment-free bees, trying to breed it, but most important is getting through the winter without treatment. Oh, I'm so— I would not be touching any breeding material that had chalk brood. It's an instant one-cell fail. Um, yeah, if I had a colony that had chalk brood, there's no, there's no way it would ever come close to the grafting tool. Khaled says, hello Lawrence, good evening. May I know the best breeder queen you get and who is the source, please? So that is confidential information, I'm afraid. It reminds me of the, um, what's it, the boxing promoter meme, the Eddie Hearn meme. That is confidential information, I'm afraid. We are not allowed to say who we get them from. Uh, Gerda Prince Lou says, I struggle with wax moth on my drawn super frames. I froze the frames and stacked the 2 supers now on top of the active hive brood super and crown board. Can I do that? Um, yeah, as long as you've not contaminated them with kind of anything. I don't think you have, uh, the bees should clear up the majority of wax moth issues. Hi Lawrence, I've had a few wasps lurking around the hives which have been a concern. I've restricted the entrance to a bee's width with the excluder, but is there much else I can do? So I've seen a lot of wasps, they're starting, um, in one of my containers I've got a big wasp's nest in there. I'm doing a video about trapping wasps, so I thought I'd leave them in there for a little bit just to get some wasps in the traps, make it look like they're doing a good job. I joke, of course, I'm going to take that down shortly, but The best defense against wasps is a good attack. Yeah, it really is. But there's nothing you can do about it. So if you've got a colony, a small colony that's getting battered by wasps, you can't do anything to fix that colony. You can, you can try and move the colony, and you can try and put a wasp trap in its place, and you can remove the entrance. But the best defense is just having a big mega strong colony, and then the wasps don't get in, and they just look after them. So it's all about kind of like knowing roughly when the wasps are going to become a problem, just going through your colonies and shaking out anything that's just too weak or failed or droney, um, and then condensing it down. And then you, you remove the weak ones and you bolster the rest of them, so you kind of get like a double impact, which is good. Received 5 Buckfast queens today, all in perfect condition. Is there a preference between 24 and 48 hours in terms of removing the tabs? I know I've used both. Do you know what, When I do it for making up my own splits, I, I kill the original queen or make a split day zero, go back in at day eight, take down all of the queen cells, put the queen in. I pop the tab there and then I give the advice to other people. It used to be forty-eight hours because that was that was what I was told, but a delay between putting the queen in and her coming out of the cage, and then I reduced it down to twenty-four hours because I thought twenty-four hours is absolutely ample here. But then realized where just kind of by chance one day that if I pop the tab and put it in. it takes them at least 24 hours to get through most cages anyway. If you're not entirely sure, you should kind of extend or delay that 24 or 48 hours, but if you're 100% sure that they are hopelessly queenless, you can pop the tab straight away. Um, or, or if you want to wait 24 hours, wait for 24 hours. Over 35 degrees in Croatia here this week. Oh, lovely! I like a bit of mid-30s temperature. To calm aggressive bees, a few drops of clove oil, a beekeeper recommends. it calms them down. I'll give that one a go. It was like a little housewife's tale. Martin Everson says, purchased an overwintered nuc last week off you. Super excited to see how your bees will be with me. Just got a long wait till next year, but thank you for everything you and your team does. Thank you very much. Excited to get your bees to you next year. It's crazy the amount of orders we've had for nucs next year already, and like you'll see the emails coming out saying, you know, there's 20% sold. They're genuine emails, you know, we do sell out of nucs. We sold out of overwintered nucs before Christmas last year. So I suspect we're going to sell out of overwintered nucs before Christmas again this year, which— and I know it's crazy because it's June, it's still June at the moment, but before you know it, it'll be September and we'll be 50% sold out. And then yeah, it goes very, very quickly. Hey Lawrence, I just received some F1 UK mated queens from Black Mountain, all installed here in their traveling cages. Excited to see how they build for the rest of the summer and how they will— where's the rest of this? Oh, you left me properly hanging there. I don't think you put the rest of it on there. I— yeah, I'm glad. I'm sure they're going to do very, very well for you, Andrew. Um, says, but, but no AI voice. I'm not sure what that's in relation to. Uh, says clove oil on gloves. Sorry, pressed enter by mistake. Okay, putting the oil on the gloves, nice idea. says, so based on your answer regarding the incubator, can I put a caged cell from the incubator into a queenless colony or even bank some in a queen right colony? So you, you could definitely put a caged cell from the incubator into a queenless colony. Yeah, 100%. Do put, like, you'll see them, these little red cell protectors, they're really good. Or if you don't want a cell protector, just wrap the whole cell in foil apart from the tiny little tip at the end where the virgin will come out, and that will stop things going in and trying to kill it. Um, you, you'll be amazed how much better acceptance you get doing that. Uh, Do you need to open the ventilation floor in hot conditions? Some local beekeepers always keep them closed. I would say get them open, definitely helps cool them down. Uh, John's been deleting his messages. So I think it was newly mated virgin instead getting hang of egg laying. Okay, that makes sense. Oh, you've got it here, right? Nigel says, hi Lawrence, I messaged you on WhatsApp about 10 days ago as it looked like I had a drone laying worker in a swarm I caught, which I have in a nuc. However, the multiple eggs have all been cleared up, so I think it was a newly mated virgin instead of the egg laying. You will get that with kind of new queens. They'll put like 1, 2, maybe 3 eggs in there and they're a bit all over the place, but they get the hang of it pretty soon. Carol says, I have a double brooded Buckfast queen and lots of bees. However, I've only got 12 frames of honey in the 2 supers, including spring honey, uncapped capped. Any advice? He's 3 years old. Um, I would say that the reason that you've only got 12 frames of honey in there is that the majority of the honey is probably going to be in the brood box. So I suspect that top brood box is just mostly full of honey. If it's never been treated with Apivar, definitely do this: get the queen, put her in the bottom brood box, queen excluder, and then the next brood box above, and then you can just extract the honey directly out of that brood box. Hi Lawrence, received your queens today, all looking really good. I hope they're all accepted. I'm really excited to see how your premium queens are, as your F1s are incredible. Thank you so much. Thank you, Rosie. Thank you for your extra order as well, last minute order. Love that. Um, Mick Hoyle says, slow down, lad, you look knackered. I'm not going to answer everyone's questions unless I keep up with this pace. So I think there's a slow down option somewhere. You could, uh, be me, like talking a bit slow like that. But, um, I'm just gonna go because I've got 6 minutes left to answer quite a lot of questions. Uh, Amy and Her Bee says, hey Lawrence, hope you're well. When is the latest you'll do a split? So I, I've done all of our splits for overwinter, are already done now, and I would say if you're looking at doing any splits, get them done in the next 2 or 3 weeks. Thanks, dude. To you too. Had a laying worker small swarm I picked up, tried adding a mated queen. 2 days later went in to remove the tab, she was entombed in the fondant at the bottom, assuming they balled her and she tried to escape. Yeah, definitely really annoying when they do that. Split strong colony, removed queen and 2 frames, returned 9 days later to knock down the queen cells and found new eggs and larvae queen cells. Previous weekly checks, no queen cell supersedure, etc. Cannot find the culprit. Help. Oh, that is confusing, isn't it? Right, so you've got a split strong colony, remove the queen, 2 frames, return 9 days later to knock down the queen cells. The only thing I can think is you had 2 queens in there to start off with, so they were like halfway through a supersedure and you had 2 viable queens and you just split them. It's the only, it's the only thing I can think of. Um, but the fact that they knocked down— you had queen cells in there to knock down— why would they be putting queen cells on a supersedure queen? That is all I can think of though. On Twitch says, sorry, my hives are in winter here, that's why my hives are on fondant due to the harsh period. Tighten game here. Ah, okay, that makes sense, right? So if you're, you're somewhere where it's not— yeah, southern hemisphere, very nice. Says hello from Vancouver, Canada. Welcome, uh, welcome to see my bees in Vancouver and on top of the sprinting mountain. Oh, that sounds nice. I do, I do love the idea of traveling around the world and just meeting lots of different beekeepers. It'd be good fun, uh, Seppo said, didn't know these live chats would be so hectic. Uh, going for it. I've got what, 4 and a half minutes left? Hi Lawrence, introduced the virgin queen 31st of May, went into the hive, drone brood in drone cells, no worker brood or eggs. They tried to make a queen cell out of drone brood, introduced a frame with eggs, went 3 days later and no queen cells drawn on the frame. Has the virgin failed to mate and become a drone layer, or has the colony gone laying worker? Almost certainly laying worker. I got about halfway through that and I was thinking that they're laying worker. Fuckers. I would shake them out and start again. Cub Rider said, been through a hive today and found a single charged queen cell in the first super on its own above the queen excluder, so that proves they move eggs. Oh, I'd love to say that proves they move eggs. That proves that they might move eggs, or it proves that you might have a defective queen excluder. It can— it could be one of the two. I've seen a number of people talking about defective queen excluders this year, so I'd keep an eye out. Uh, The Coffee Van says, just want to say thanks. Our bees are on the roof at the Hilton Hotel in Sunderland, are doing really well. Excellent. I'm glad, I'm glad you got them. I think it's Alan. Is it Alan? Good stuff. Titan Games says, thanks, Lawrence. By the way, the hives are wintered here in New Zealand. Ran out of room. Oh, nice. I want to get to New Zealand at some point. My grandfather is from New Zealand, so I am quarter Kiwi, as you can tell by the crazy New Zealand hair. Sophia Dem says, hi, Lawrence. Just wondering your take on making a split with an introduced queen at this time of year. Absolutely fine. Minimum two frames of brood now though. Two frames of brood, one frame of stores. Good shake of bees and really, really, really try and take it to a new apiary. It makes it so much easier. Chatutsa says, hi Lawrence, I have a mini mating colony, already introduced an F1 queen. She's laying eggs but only a few larvae and capped cells. Can't figure out what's happening. Um, so it sounds like she's doing what she's supposed to do. She's laying eggs and only a few larvae, but they will— they'll kind of like take time to build it up. The queen can only lay as quick as the colony around her. If you put best queen in a colony with no resources, she can't lay any eggs because she needs the bees there to look after her. So I would potentially add in a frame of capped emerging brood. A frame of capped emerging brood should boost the number of nurse bees and should fix that problem. Uh, Cub Rider says, how can I hide from my wife how much money I'm spending on supers, frames, and foundation this year? You've got to get the spreadsheets out and do the bee maths and show that it's just— it's very profitable in beekeeping and that you earn way more than you spend. That's what everyone does, right? Uh, Andrew Cook— oh sorry, Raf says hi. Hello to you too. Andrew Cook says, hi, it's Andy from Hampshire. 6 full honey supers on my WBC hive from one of your overwintered nucs. Perfect job, sir. I love that. Yeah, Andy sent me through a picture of him with his WBC, 6 full supers from an overwintered nuc. If you've got anything like that, something good from our queen, something good from our nucs, anything at all, feel free to send me a picture, any snippet that I can stick on social media. Very Very much appreciated. Carol says there's no honey in the brood box and used Apivar in August. Thank you for all your answers. So if there's no brood box, if there's no honey in the brood box, what's in the double brood? Have you got 20, like 20 frames of brood and then just 12 frames of super honey above it? Sorry, 12 frames of honey in the supers. I'd gone out filming and can't talk again today because if that's the case, I would say get some more supers on because you're going to have a lot more bees in there over the next few weeks. Uh, Mick says lots of wasps about but weirdly small ones. Anyone seeing the same? I've not noticed the difference in size, but I've definitely noticed a lot more wasps. We've had 2 wasp nests, had to take them out, get someone in to kill them because they're right by the deck, literally where, where the kids play, just like flying all around them. So to get rid of them. Uh, Raf says, what if my 2025 queen looks too small and worried she will get through the queen excluder? Um, so Mated queens can't get through queen excluders even if they've been in a cage and they've shrunk down a bit, but they very soon plump back up. They were preparing to swarm with 20 uncapped queen cells already when the split was made. Okay, I've forgotten what we were talking about, Margaret. Let me go back up to yours here. Uh, so split strong colony, uh, remove the queen and 2 frames, return 9 days later. Okay, so it was a big strong colony, right? Where's, uh, where are you? I think on here now. Here. Uh, so they were preparing to swarm, so Is there any chance that they could have swarmed before that and there's virgins knocking around that would have been missed? It's definitely something. There's definitely loads of virgins just knocking around in those 2 hives. Collector Rick Honeybee says, keeping bees with a smile in Amherst, Ohio. Very nice. Says, 2 queens arrived today. Thank you, thank you, Ben, as well. Says, good evening, Lawrence. Do you work or experiment with bees with VSH behavior and don't treat them? So I don't do that myself. But we work with breeders who do do that. So I kind of think with breeding on a scale like that, you need access to thousands of colonies of bees. Anybody who is like, wants to do breeding properly doesn't just work with their own bees, they work as a collective and they share resources and queens and drone semen on a really wild scale. And throughout Europe, that sharing network is immense. So I could do it. I could have a look at a few of, like, maybe a couple of hundred of our colonies and see if there's any that have got VSH behavior and look at them and try and breed from them. But I've got such a small genetic pool there that anything that I do— I want to say something that Boris Johnson would say there, but I won't say it— but, um, there's no point in me doing that. What's much better for me to do is work with the absolute market leaders in the field of varroa-sensitive hygiene queens, and they produce the breeder queens for me, and then we take them off to nice isolated apiaries, and we make them to try and kind of get the Varroa-sensitive drones into them as well. So I don't do any of the testing on the behavior, although I will be doing some of that next year because I've got a bit more time. I think it's a bit more fun, but, um, I don't do any of the testing at the moment. Uh, right, next up, I have at least 8 colonies from one of your nucs last year. I love that. That's the best one when people say that— they say the nucs are so expensive, £350 for like one nuc, and then you speak to people like Andy who've got 6 supers full of honey Which, let's be conservative and say is £20 of honey per super. So that's £120. That's 240 jars. Sell that for £10 a jar, which that's how much we sell ours for. Even if you sell it for £5 a jar, what's that? 240. So that's like £1,200 of honey. And then you could probably get a split out of that as well and sell the nuc for £350. So Cub Rider there, he's got 8 colonies from 1 nuc. So if you sold all of those for the same price that you bought the nuc for, you'd have nearly £3,000. And the nucs do pay for themselves. A very good circular economy in there somewhere. Mick Hoyle says, thanks again for your time, young man. You're a diamond. Thank you to you too, Mick. Hope that replacement queen got you all sorted. Gerda says, you are a real Speedy Gonzales. I have to be to get it through. Hopefully it's not too fast and people can understand. I have had people say that I do need to slow down. I'm pretty sure there is a slowdown button somewhere. Khaled says, good evening. Do you see any difference between the queen that gets mated in the mini mating nucs and the ones that get mated in regular regular standard hives. Some people telling me that the mini mating nuc queens aren't that good. I do not believe that for one second. Uh, the reason that I use the mini mating nucs is I find it's much more, uh, like an efficient use of resources. When they go right, they go right. When they go wrong, I lose a very small amount of bee resource. If you do that in full-size colonies, you end up losing a huge amount of resources over the course of the season. But in terms of the quality, that's just are complete and utter myth. As long as you're leaving the mated queens in the mini mating nucs for long enough to be able to determine how well mated they are, then everything is fine. And then as long as you're dealing with a company that's got good customer service and will fix any problems with drone layers later on, then you're covered in the case of any failure as well. Uh, says Boozer Pit Bees, the 2 hand-picked premium Black Mountain honey Buckfast queens settled in well and both accepted. Excellent. says cheers for the chat, all the best. Thank you, Rufus. I am 2 minutes over. Uh, Devon Honey and Candles says, looking forward to the queens I ordered from you, can't wait to test them out, hope they go well. And finally, says, I went into the hive yesterday, removed the queen and 2 frames and put them in the nuc box. Reason behind swarm cells— so leaving behind swarm cells in the hive, I'm planning on waiting for the box frames to draw out, then transfer to the hive. I think that's quite a sensible option, um, and I think the queen should get mated at this point in the year. So we have reached the end. Sorry, I have to limit these to an hour now. I got other stuff that I need to do on Friday night. If you want an urgent answer to anything, go over to blackmountainhoney.co.uk once I've reinstated Buzz the chatbot, and Buzz will answer your questions instantly. This is really important: if you get an answer from Buzz that you don't think is right, drop me an email, blackmountainhoney@gmail.com. I really appreciate that feedback coming in, and that feedback will make Buzz much more intelligent going forward. So I hope you all have a brilliant weekend, and I will see you soon.