Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 49

Welcome everyone to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. Now I've not got any public service announcements tonight. I'm not talking about nucs, I'm not talking about queens. You can ask me about nucs, you can ask me about queens, but I've got nothing pre-prepared to talk to you about. What I am going to do though is I'm going to answer as many questions as I possibly can, and I can see already in the, in the comments section there's a lot of people asking questions, which is great. So I'll just come straight to it and answer some questions. I've got a hair on my hat there. Randy, you'll like this one. I've got my Dirt Rooster hat on. Love the Dirt Rooster hat, the only hats that actually fit my head. And if you're wondering why I'm wearing a hat inside, it's because my house is freezing, absolutely freezing, uh, and the heating is— it works, but it's just rubbish. A very expensive air source heat pump that doesn't work and, uh, is not designed for my house, so it is freezing. But let's jump straight into it then. Let's go and answer some questions about bees. I bet everyone is like Ready to get back to some beekeeping now. I actually did some beekeeping today. I went and looked at an abandoned colony of bees, properly abandoned colony of bees, and I'm halfway through editing the video. So I got stung on the ear today. So did it, did a bit of beekeeping today, and I really enjoyed it. I'm not going to give away anything more than that. So it will be out as a channel member exclusive kind of for a few weeks, and then it will go live. But let's go straight in and answer some questions. So Ryan McGrath says, if I were to squish, uh, squash a queen in a colony that is a little bit aggressive with the hope of producing a new queen, is it possible for the newly hatched out queen to produce a calmer colony? Just going to zoom myself out a little bit there. There we go. Um, yeah, of course it is. So when you, when you have that, you might have, say, like an F2 or an F3 generation queen in there, and she might be a little bit angry, and then her offspring is going to carry half of the genetics of that mother And then the other half are going to come from the surrounding drones. So I would say if you've got an aggressive colony and you do that, the likelihood is you'll get another aggressive colony. But if you just happen to come across some really nice friendly drones in your area, you could get a slightly calmer colony. Now if you're say you're marking your colonies from one to five, one being really calm and five being really aggressive, and you had a queen. a colony that was a 5, you're never going to get back down to a 1 just by doing that. It would take you hundreds of iterations and generations, and you'd have to do loads of work to kind of ever make that kind of jump. So I would say it is possible to go from a 5, super aggressive, to a 4, which is like kind of still pretty aggressive but not quite as bad. You're never going to get any further improvement than that in, in that generation. Obviously, if you add a queen in there, get a queen from wherever you like, but if it's a good quality queen known to have a calm temperament, you're going to go from a 5, super aggressive, to a 1 within like 8 weeks. So much, much more cost effective and much more time efficient, I would say. Also, I suppose it could work in reverse and the colony could end up more aggressive, but I suppose I'm wondering more so if the new queen would end up being a similar temperament to her mother or different. So you're right, so it could, it could get slightly more aggressive, it could get slightly less aggressive. All I would say is you're not going to get that step change, you're not going to get a transformation just by doing like a walkaway split like that, or kind of killing the queen and raising a new one via the emergency impulse. They'll be similar even with the influence of 50% of the drones in the area. You're not going to make, yeah, drastic steps by doing that. Is the mask and cape method merely a labor-saving technique to avoid a second visit to pop the cage? Tab, or does it have other advantages towards queen acceptance? I have to say, I'm not gonna lie, I think it's a bit of a fad. I know Melita Bees do it as well, and they might do it as a bit of a time-saving method. It's not one for me though. I think you've got a big bit of fondant there, and the fondant slows things down enough anyway. So I've, I've never used masking tape on any of the colonies like that, or any of the queen introductions. The only time I really would use it is if I'm doing an introduction of a very, very expensive queen when I just want to lengthen it out and just slow it down as much as possible. I never use it as a method to avoid going back in. And I have to say that the advice that I give is— you'll all know the advice by now— kill the original queen, wait 8 days, take down the emergency queen cells, put the new queen in, tab closed, go back 24 hours later and pop the tab. Some of the older advice says 48 hours later as well. That's the advice that I give people because that is the absolute Rolls-Royce gold-plated advice to give you the best chance of getting the queens accepted. Do I use that method myself? Mostly, but the difference, the slight tweak that I'll use on that method is I will kill the queen 8 days, take down all the emergency queen cells, go back in, put the queen in, and pop the tab. So I don't wait 24 hours because for me, if I lose 5 out of 100 queens doing it that way, it, it kind of pays for itself with the, the not having to go back 24 hours and, and pop all of the cages. And I would say it is probably in the region of, yeah, like 3 or 4 out of 100 that you might lose just by not using that 24 hours. So the masking tape could alleviate that somewhat, but they'll go through that masking tape pretty quick. I'm, I'm not a fan of the masking tape method. It's not one for me. I know, I know I put it on the channel and showed the Malik Bees one, but it— I, I think it's a bit of a fad. Not one for me. John, um, is, is answering questions. Good man, John, thank you. Right, John Sylvester says, good evening, Lawrence and the family. Have you ever seen the Indonesian giant bee, thought to be extinct for 38 years? Imagine keeping those massive beasts. I've not, you know, I've not seen it. I'll have to, I'll have to take a look on that. John also says smash up the likes. Very, very kind of you there, John. Would appreciate you giving it a thumbs up if you're enjoying and watching this stream. Uh, hello to James. Hi, James. Got Rick Warner in. Hi, Rick. He says, hello, Lawrence. Hope you and your family are well. Blessings to you this holiday season. Should give a massive Happy Thanksgiving shout out to anyone watching in the US, shouldn't I, as well? Or North America. Anyone who celebrates Thanksgiving, Happy Thanksgiving to you. John Begri says, good evening. Good man, John. Good to see you here. Thank you for all your hard work. Alex Robinson says, can you introduce a queen via a cage whilst at the same time performing a demeray to prevent the brood box coming bound with honey due to the queen being absent from the previous artificial split? Hmm, I guess, I guess you could, but my challenge back would be why, why would you want to? I know some people are worried about contamination of honey and stuff like that, but the big thing for me, the reason that I really like the Demeray, one, it prevents them swarming for a few weeks, but two, you get massive colonies. And you get massive colonies because you get this, all of the brood emerging in the top box whilst the queen's just kind of busy in the bottom box laying up all the brood. So then 3 weeks after, all of the next round of brood emerges, you get these mega colonies produce so much honey. So if you cage the queen, then you wouldn't, you wouldn't get that kind of like second flush of brood being laid, which kind of like for me defeats like half of the really good part of a demerare, which is really big strong mega colonies. But I guess you could, you could kind of cage her down the bottom if you wanted, but it wouldn't— let me read the question again. It says, can you introduce a queen via a cage whilst at the same time performing a demerare to prevent the brood box coming bound with honey? Due to the— okay, so, so I've never found the brood box gets bound with honey. It's the top box that gets bound with honey. It's not that— it's not the bottom box. You go back down to the bottom box after you do a demerary split and it is just full of brood, absolutely full to the rafters of brood. And then the top box, as soon as the top box, the brood starts to emerge, they backfill that one with honey. So it would kind of work if you put the queen upstairs, but you don't, you don't put the queen upstairs in the demerary. Uh, Alex, I very much like their thinking though. I'm all for like thinking about doing things differently and challenging stuff and tweaking it and seeing if it works. And there might, there might be some, there might be some method of doing it, some different tweak that we could do on the Demaray that makes it better. But like I said, for me the Demaray is 2 things: one, to delay the swarming, but 2, to get these mega, mega colonies that if you time it right for the flows, you get really, really good honey crops. Channel member says, good evening, Lawrence, from the Urban Apiary. Question: how many bee farmers do you think do weekly inspections? I like the way David Wainwright from Wainwright Bees Farm looks after his hives. Now I've said it, I've said it on here before, massive respect for David. Like David, he's a good guy and he is one of the good guys out there as well. I'm not a fan of his approach to managing bees like that. I don't think it's a good approach and I think it's— I don't— I understand his reasons for doing it and if I was in his situation I would potentially look at doing that for myself, but I'm just not, I'm not a fan and the reasons I'm not a fan is I think it's a bit lazy. And again, I can see the reason why he doesn't do it, because he doesn't have the resource to do it and make it cost effective. So I understand it. But the second one is, I think it's slightly irresponsible. I do think it's irresponsible for 2 reasons. One, you're letting colonies just swarm out into the wild, so they could be going into people's chimneys and stuff, could be causing like a little bit of a nuisance. But 2, if you're not monitoring the colonies— okay, he wants to go back at the end of the year, doesn't do any inspections, and comes back and finds 4 supers full of honey. Brilliant, it's happy, great when that happens. But what about the colony that turns drone laying and fails and then gets robbed out and maybe has EFB? And I'd like, you know, if you're managing hundreds and thousands of colonies, you're gonna have some EFB knocking around somewhere, and that could potentially happen. So then if you've got a colony like that that fails, like, what you want to be doing is consolidating that and closing it up and making sure that it doesn't get robbed and making sure that you don't spread the disease. So for those 2 reasons, I really don't like it. Like, I know on paper it's like a nice system, isn't it? You do all your varroa checks and get everything ready, and then you just get your bees ready for winter, smash 4 supers on there, and go back, and hopefully you just find loads of honey. But it's that bit in the middle. I think there's a bit more to beekeeping than that, and we're kind of responsible for other things outside of just getting lots of honey. We're responsible for the bees' health, and we're responsible for the health of other bees like outside of our own, you know, like local other beekeepers' apiaries and stuff like that. So I think it's responsible to go and inspect your colonies each week, and I think that David is, uh, I wouldn't say an anomaly. I think there are a few beekeepers that do that, but I think the majority of beekeepers do go and do either 7-day, 10-day, or 14-day inspections. They'll go around and actually inspect. Evening. Aidan as well, good evening. Um, that's Alex asking the same bit again. Uh, John says he's nipping off on taxi duties at 8:30, so we'll catch up on his return and see if he needs to post any links to past videos required on the Facebook page. Brilliant, you are the top man, John, thank you very much. Uh, Richie, Richie says evening, you chilly legend. Thank you very much, I like that. Denby Honey, hey Lawrence, hope all is well, mate. It's very, very good. I hope you're somewhere Nice. Always, always on the move, this man. Just holiday, holiday every other week. I love it. Uh, Jay. I was speaking about Jay the other day because I'm doing something and your name popped up because got the best saltwater fish tank in the world. Uh, Sephia Dem, my one Twitch person. Hi, good to see you. I'm loving it. Gary Wheeler says, good evening, Lawrence. Hope you and your family are well. Uh, Aiden says, how is your eye after being stung? Well, do you know what? I obviously— that was a bit of a slip. It wasn't my eye, it was my ear. And it's not—it's fine, it's fine. It was funny because I was at the dinner table. I was like, "I swear, my ear hurts," and just pulled. I was like, "Pull that sting, sting right in my ear." James Camplin, channel member, says, "Good evening all. Do you think that an OA dribble will be sufficient?" So it's it's a little bit more unsettling for the bees, but in terms of varroa efficacy, it's very very good. So I would say OA dribble, right time of the year, broodless colony. very, very efficient, very good. Do you ever have a problem with drowning in your Ashforth feeders? So I've seen, I've seen a few people do this. So if you, if you've got the Abello feeder, there's like a little hole that is on there, and the hole is designed for kind of cleaning out the feeders at the end of the year. If you leave that hole open, you'll have loads of bees drowning, so just close that one up. That's the first one. And then the second one is you can get drowning in Ashforth feeders kind of if you've got cracks going in, but also they fall down the slope a little bit. So what I do on all my Ashforth feeders now is if there's metal grid or like the plastic bit, I just take it out and then get loads of straw, fill it up with straw, like pack loads of straw in and just pour the invert all over the straw, and then you'll never, never have another single bee that drowns. And they take it down really, really good as well. Is that a Black Mountain Honey woolly hat you're sporting? Can I buy one please? So I would love to sell you one, but it's not. It is a Dirt Rooster hat. 628 Dirt Rooster, the legend that is Randy, uh, and the biggest hats in the world, so I don't think it would fit you unless you've got a massive head like me. My head is absolutely vast. Um, I've had a few people asking for merch. We do need to do something more with merch, so we will, we will see. I've got another— look, Randy, I'm your biggest fan. I've got another hat here as well. Just looking around for the other hats that I've got. Cool, aren't they? Keeping me warm throughout the very chilly nights. Uh, says, hi Lawrence, what is the dosage rate for using the Instant Vac for a nuc and a full hive, please? So I'll give you the Universal standard measurements, not the apibioxyl ones. So four grams full for a full-size hive and two grams for a nuc. That will get you going. Hive then honey says, "Will you be willing to come to Australia to see our beekeeping and other things like to go to Queensland and see the flow hive?" Well, that sounds like a very, very lovely offer. Yeah, I'm up for it. Book my tickets and I'll come, and and we'll go and watch the ashes as well. How about that? Mick Hoyle. says, next season, is there any chance you could try a Horsley board? They are very easy to work every time. So yeah, definitely up for having a look at a Horsley board. I've seen you raving about them before, and I always like to go on a good recommendation. Good evening, Laurence. Did you get around to doing the video on how to acquire a new apiary location, how to speak to farmers, landowners, and give some advice on what to say to them to win them over? So I am doing that video along with a number of other videos at the moment, Uh, but they— it's probably going to take quite a while for me to get around. I've got, I've got quite a lot on at the moment, and I'm planning lots of things, and I'm kind of getting up early in the morning, send my daughter to school, come back, work all day getting stuff done, looking after, looking after the other baby as well, but just trying to get stuff done at the same time, and then working late at night moving things forward. Um, but I've not, I've not done that one yet, so sorry. It is on my list though. I will get around to it. Whilst I'm— whilst I think of it, because I will forget about it, I want to ask a favour of everyone on here. Here's my favour to you. So I want you to rewind. We'll get to Sephy Adem next, we've got your question next. I want you to rewind back to the day that you started beekeeping, first day that you started beekeeping, and think back even further from that, maybe 6 months before that. Like, did you know you were going to start beekeeping, or did it get like pushed upon you immediately, or did there— was there a little bit of planning? in there. But let me think, kind of maybe the, maybe the 3 months before you started beekeeping and the first 3 months of beekeeping. I want you to put in the comments what were you worried about, what were your biggest fears, what did you not know, what answers couldn't you get. Stick that in the comments and you can put it with like a hashtag fear. There we go, hashtag fear. Put it in the comments. Um, I'm doing some market research and that'd be really, really useful. What were your worries when you started out beekeeping? what we want, big fears. Thank you. Right, so says, I have one national hive and looking to expand to maybe 8 to 12 next year and considering jumping to Langstroth while I still can. I'm wondering if that format lends itself well to the Demeray or is the brood box too big for that? So a lot of people look at the Demeray as this, this silver kind of bullet. So I should put your, put your question up there for anyone who wants to read it, and they want to use it for some manipulations and, and some expansion techniques where it's not necessarily the best, the best one to use. So I would say for you there, wouldn't use the Demaray. Demaray's probably not gonna do what you want it to do. For me, the Demaray does 2 things, like I said before. It delays swarming and it builds up mega colonies that are suited for gathering lots of honey. Now, if you just want the mega colonies for making splits, just double brood the colonies. Double brood them and just keep on feeding them. It's the easiest way of doing it, and it cuts out that kind of middle period of having like fill supers, and your bees are just wasting their effort filling supers where you're thinking, I don't want you to fill supers. I've got a hair coming down. I want you to draw frames of brood so I can split you. So you're much better off just double brooding them. So if you've got one National Hive at the moment, you want to go over to Langstroth, the split over to Langstroth really isn't that bad. What I would do, I'd get you one National Hive, double brood it on national format, get a feeder on nice and early. I would underbrood, so I'd get your brood box that you've got here, put your new brood box underneath it, and have your polyashworth feeder on top. You can do that nice and early. Do that depending on the weather, middle of March, late March, something like that. Sounds way too early, but we've spoken about this before, the bees are absolutely fine in that configuration. If anything, they're slightly cosier than if you left them. And then just keep on feeding them 1:1 syrup. Let them take it down, and eventually they'll build that out, and you'll just have 2 boxes full of bees. If you're national, you probably have like 22 frames there, and then you can just make 2-frame splits. You want to get to 8 to 12, so you can make 2-frame splits— frame of brood, frame of stores. Either bungee them in or strap them in. You've seen loads of different ways that you can get a national frame into a Langstroth frame. You need to take them to separate apiaries though. This is when you're doing big splits like that, like one colony one double brood into 12 colonies, you need to take them to separate apiaries, which I know is difficult. That doesn't mean you need 8 separate apiaries, I mean you need to take them from one apiary to a new apiary, all 8 or 10 or whatever, and then you can feed them straight away and just keep on feeding them, and by the end of the year you'll have 8 to 12 full-size hives over on Langstroth. So let me know how that goes, my one Twitch watcher. Here we go. Right, Julian says, good evening all, still got the girls bringing in pollen here in Devon. Crazy warm, isn't it, still? I looked back though to the video I put— I reposted a few videos on YouTube. The one I did the other day was very relevant because it was the 29th of November, which is today's date, and it was very similar weather. It was like 12, 13 degrees, bees still active, you know, you could go in, you can have a look. I don't recommend it, but I went in and there was no brood. Vasily says, how to make spoon honey or creamy honey? So a couple of different ways of doing it. You can whip the honey, make a whipped honey, just put it in the KitchenAid with a balloon whisk and whip it until it goes like frothy, and that's called whipped honey. Or you can use oilseed rape honey and put it in like a churner, like a purpose-built churning machine. That's really good for making nice soft-set honey. And then I think the best soft-set honey is made using the dice method, whereby you take any honey Heat it up to over 40°C. I think it's like 42°C, which I know is going to knock down some of those good enzymes, but it is a crucial step. Resets the crystalline structure. So it's not— kind of has this memory, it wants to go and like set at a certain size. But if you reset it, then it takes on this, this seed crystal that you're going to add. So take, take your honey that you want to use, heat it up to 42°C, and then you bring it back down to 35°C. and then you beat slowly in without incorporating any air 10% seed honey, which is the best, smoothest, creamiest honey that you can buy. Just go and buy it from the shop, even if it's one of the Chinese honeys, we'll call them. Um, you know, if you've opened it up and it's super, super smooth, that'll work. And by the time you know it, it's all blended in. And 5 years down the line, you'll have point— like 0.0001% of that honey left in there. So it shouldn't be A massive issue, but it works really, really well. So that is that's the method I use. Dice method, really good. D Y C E if you want to Google it. Hello, Lynette. How are you? Good to hear from you again. P K channel member. Sorry, Lynette was channel member as well. Vasily said hello before. Hello to you too. Hollow Oak Stores. Nikki says evening all. How is it the end of November already? I I can't quite believe how much the time is going on. Like I think back to last Christmas and. I didn't have, didn't have a baby. And now I've got a baby, and I've got, you know, a nice chubby dancey baby. And, um, yeah, it goes so quick, doesn't it, time? But it's all good. Great name. Says, would it be a good idea to drop my grafts in the top box of a demerare to raise some queens? Um, no, I wouldn't say it's the best place to put it. You potentially get some uh, some queen cells drawn using like the emergency impulse up there, but I don't think it's the— it's not the best. It's not the best impulse, although it is used in conjunction with other impulses quite well. But you've not— you've not really got enough nurse bees up there. You could have, I guess, after some of it emerges. But what happens is the nurse bees emerge up at the top of the demerara and they're kind of like drawn down to where all of the larvae is, so you get this trickle effect down, so you just don't have the correct amount of nurse bees up there. You could try it, you could try it. I just, I think you would get some cells drawn, I just don't think they'd be the best cells. I would do it, I'd do it using the 10 over 10 method, loads better, and you're getting like an excessive amount of young nurse bees with the pollen all at the right time, and that works very, very well. Uh, says, hi Lawrence, from very cold South London. Are your queens going to be the same price next year? Oh, brilliant question, love that one. My queens are for the whole going to be the same price next year. A couple of them, a couple of the like slightly exotic breeds are going to change, but the Buckfast are still going to be £40 each, and that's what like 95% of people buy. So they are, they are going to be the same. The reason, the way that we're going to be able to make them the same with the cost of everything else going up is that we're just gonna have to slightly tweak the way that we do deals. So maybe the, maybe the value of the deals will be slightly less better than it was, but they'll still be— the deals will still be less than the RRP of £40 per queen. Um, so the cost of the majority of queens and the cost of nucs will be the same in 2025. Heard it here first. Hello to Harry, hope you're well. Hi Lawrence, I have what looks like a strong colony in a long hive and they are consuming 2 litres of 2:1 per week. Does this sound about right in terms of consumption, or should I turn them to fondant? So I don't think you can tell anything about a colony in terms of the rate of consumption. They will, as long as the temperature is there, they'll just keep on consuming it if they've got space. So it's, it's more, it's more about like the weight. And I know in a long hive it's very, very difficult to kind of identify how much weight is in there, but you almost need to keep tabs of the amount that's been fed in total. So if they're consuming 2 liters of 2:1 per week and you've been doing it for, I don't know, 10 weeks, so you've had 20 liters going in there, that's— it's— I'd say that's about right. But it's very, very difficult. It's hard to judge on a long hive how much is right. And, and I'm not a fan of fondant. I really have turned my back a little bit on fondant. I definitely— someone said you used to advise, you know, feeding them up and then sticking a big slab of fondant on as an insurance policy. Do you not do that anymore? And I said, no, I definitely don't do that anymore. It's a pain having to go and take fondant off when they haven't fed it and having puny little colonies or little clusters because they've just been feeding on fondant the whole time and there's no space for the bees to, or the queen to create any brood. So I don't do that now, and I try and just feed— I try and not feed fondant wherever I can, and I'll just let the bees take as much syrup down as they want late on in the year, and then I'll just keep on hefting them and hefting them and hefting them, and I'll only put fondant on when I feel the bees are really light, and that's the only time that I'll put fondant on now. So I never switch. I never say, right, it's end of November, I'm switching from invert to fondant. I just, I just feed invert as much as I can and then stop, and then don't feed December, January, February, maybe. It all depending on like the hefting and the weight of the hive, which for a long hive is difficult, but you can kind of heft a long hive. You can You know, you can get in there and you can lift it up. Benefit of a lot of long hives as well is you have a Perspex board, so you can, you can see through and you can see how many bees are in there, and you can, you can kind of like take a peek down and see if they've got food. And if they're clustering up nice and tight, you, you're thinking that they're probably gonna be okay in there. But what I would just say, if a feeding invert is— just leave the invert on, just leave the invert on, and they'll come up on a nice warm day and take some invert down. if they need it, and then that's a little bit of a buffer. And if you're really, really worried about them, you can just take the invert off and feed them fondant, put some fondant on. It's not the end of the world, it just is, is sometimes a waste and sometimes sets them back a bit, and it's a mess to clean it all out. Channel member, says, good evening, Laurence. Do you recommend having the inspection boards in or out during winter with an open mesh floor on national wooden hives? So I don't think it's a massive issue either way. So for people who keep them out, it's fine. For people who keep them in, it's fine. I think the bees probably prefer it In, but you'll deal with more condensation issues with it being in. So what some people like to do is they like to kind of put it in 80% of the way, and I think putting it in 80% of the way is a really good way. If you can fix it there somehow, that's brilliant because it takes the vast majority of the, the wind out of the equation, keeps them nice and cozy, and then any moisture can still come out and actually get out if it is condensing, and it can go out. So it's, um, I would say yeah, there we go. Oh, someone's just told me to have a sip of tea. Oh, that's absolutely miles away. Where have we gone here? I do, I do find it amazing how many comments are on here. I think I'll do it on a Friday night and then there won't be that many people around, there won't be that many comments. Only joking. And I'm always amazed how many comments there are. You are a brilliant group of people with lots and lots of good questions. I love it. Uh, Right, here we go. Dan Price was the next one. Sorry. Dan Price says, hey Lawrence, hope you and the family are well. Do you offer mentorship to beekeepers prior to actually having bees? May sound stupid, but I'm looking for help with setup and then ongoing. So, so Dan, that sounds like the most plugged question ever because I, I do offer a new membership level on— as a channel member where you can become part of the VIP exclusive mentoring level, which is me. I give loads of exclusive videos Um, anyone who's a channel member with the early access, you will notice we've, we've switched over now. I did say at the end of the beekeeping season I was going to switch, and I kind of extended it for another 2 months, but we have switched over now. So you might not be seeing the exclusive videos come up, but I do loads of exclusive videos on there giving people heads up what to do at the time of the year. So if you need to put your varroa treatments in, or you need to take them out, or you need to do sublimation, or you need to feed your bees, I give kind of heads up videos the whole time. But then the other benefit of that level is, if you put a comment anywhere on YouTube, just on any video, I filter on the, the VIP exclusive mentor channel members, and then I'll just get back to you. So you can basically ask me a question at any time, and I'll get back to you by the next day at the latest. I don't do one-to-one mentoring because it— I just wouldn't be able to manage with the amount of people that have questions. Um, but, but hopefully that is of interest to you. I think a lot of people do enjoy their membership. John Hayes, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, enjoyed your MBKA talk recently, especially the Zoom member eating her pudding. Absolutely brilliant that was. So I was supposed to do a talk for the Medway Beekeepers Association, and 10 minutes before, the lady rang me up and said, or emailed me and said, the Zoom's not working, like, what can we do? So I said, I can do it on, I can do it on StreamYard. So we did it on StreamYard instead, and I sent out 2 links. So I sent out one link for people know, like the link that I would send out for people coming and watching the Q&A. And then I also sent out another link for people who maybe want to like talk and actually like ask a face-to-face question. And one of the ladies just came on via that link and was just sitting there watching Coronation Street eating her pudding. So we had to mute her at one point, but it was, it was great. She was nice, she asked lots of questions, but she was eating her pudding very loudly. Says something weird going on with your members-only videos. I can't view them, it just shows an image of your logo. I'm still paying, so not sure if there is any issue at your end. So it's probably that, John. So I've got 4, 4 or 5 different membership options now. So you've got one, option 1 is a channel supporter, which you get like a nice little badge. Uh, option 2 is early access videos where you get early access to all of the YouTube videos that will end up going out to the public. So kind of like how to stop bee swarming and all those standard videos that I would do. And then there's, and then there's the option 3 now, the level above that, which is the VIP exclusive mentoring one where you get access to the exclusive video. So, you know, the videos that come up and say like channel member exclusive episode 49, that's at the level above. So I did, I did give people the warning in that in February saying that I was, I was tweaking that and changing the memberships around a little bit. But I was— but as a gesture of goodwill, I'll, I'll give everyone the whole of 2024 as a freebie. But I just tweaked that, so I tweaked it about a week and a half ago. So that's almost certainly what that is. And then there's a couple of extra memberships on there as well for anyone who wants more than that. There is a premium membership whereby you get to become part of a WhatsApp group. So part of a WhatsApp group that I've got for premium members only. It's only a couple of people on that at the moment, but then there is also a one-to-one WhatsApp where if you join at that level, we just, we can kind of chat endlessly on WhatsApp and you can hound me night and day with lots of pictures and videos of your bees and I will answer as many questions as you want. Good evening from South Florida, Brit here and new beekeeper. Having no drawn-out comb and trying to expand, adding supers with bare foundation will encourage small hive beetle or wonky comb. It seems a bit of catch-22. So luckily over here we have no, we have no issue with, um, small hive beetle. We don't, we don't have small hive beetle over here. And I have to say, I wasn't aware that just empty comb encouraged small hive beetle. I always thought it was empty space that encouraged small hive beetle. So I would say as long as you're ensuring that when you put a new box on, the, the bees are instantly up kind of covering it, you should be fine. Uh, and bare foundation, this is the thing in America, it's just really classic to— it's like a standard to plastic foundation, isn't it? Like wax to plastic foundation, whereas over here we just have like wax foundation, no plastic in there either. So you don't get any wonky comb with normal wax foundation. A way to get around it as well is once you say you've got one box full of drawn comb, you can probably checkerboard the next box. That means if you've got 10 frames in a box and they've drawn it all out, you put the next box on above, take out 5 frames from the box below, Put the five frames above and just intersperse them, kind of like drawn out foundation, drawn out foundation, and then the bees will stop it going wonky like that. That's what I would do if I was trying to move them on as quick as I could. Neil says, "Hi Lawrence, hope you're well. You didn't get a notification you were going to stream, so happy it came up." So that's strange. I think you need to hit the bell on the channel. There's like a bell that you need to hit, and then I think you need to enable it in YouTube as well to say like notify me of your. notifications that you sign up for, but luckily, luckily you are here anyway. Hi Lawrence, I've got a hive and a poly nuc box. Used a thermal camera to see if they were still alive. Hive was showing heat but poly box not. Do you think I should go into the poly box to rescue frames? So no, it's— you've probably got like one of those FLIR thermal cameras and they're just not powerful enough to see through polys. Poly is so insulative that even if you've got like a big full strong colony in there, you you won't see the heat escaping because it's doing what it's supposed to do and keeping the heat inside. So I wouldn't worry about it, I'd leave them, and hopefully you've just got a nice big strong full colony in there that you can deal with in the spring. If not, you can close it up as soon as they start to fly and deal with all of the frames. So we are getting a 20-frame electric radial extractor, but I'm not sure which is the better of the two, the Lysen or the Conaghan, and why? So always difficult for me to answer that one because I've got very limited experience on Conaghan. All that I do have with Conaghan is, is hearing what other people say, and I'd say it's probably 50/50 in terms of what I hear. I hear some people say really, really good things about Conaghan. I've heard some people say like quite bad things about Conaghan and like get difficult— difficulty getting parts and customer service and stuff, but that could be the vendor that they're going to as well. So, you know, you know, I've got good things to say about Lyson, but I can't, I can't really I couldn't give you a definitive answer and say Lyson's the better or Connegan's the better because I've not, I've not got that personal experience myself. And you know that I hate people regurgitating other people's experiences and kind of like saying it, saying it like it's their own. So I'll sit on the fence with that one. I'm sure, I'm sure you'd be happy with both, but I'd be interested if you do get the Connegan, like, see, let me know how it goes. I know the Connegan I think is, is cheaper. Where do you get your Black Mountain Honey merchandise made. So this is, this is Randy's hat, Dirt Rooster. Randy is on it with the merch. I, I am quite like in awe of the amount of different things that he has, always doing like different merch. Over here, merch is rubbish. You go on to like Spreadstore and stuff like that and they just send you the cheapest of rubbish t-shirts, like with your label logo like printed, not even embroidered and stuff. So I've given up on merch. I really have. And I, I do have a few people message and say, I want to buy a hat, I want to buy this. And I just say, it's— if I, if I— when I sell people hats at the price I pay for the hats, so like at a loss basically for, for my time and the boxes and the posters and stuff like that, they moan and say it's too expensive. So I just can't— I literally can't win. So I've still— I've not done any merch, and I don't plan to do any merch in the near future. Oh, I like it. People are doing their hashtag fear, right? Here we go. Hashtag fear. I didn't think. I just went for it. Laugh out loud. And now have no spare time. Okay, that's that's good. I think a lot of people like that. Richie Richie fear not being able to keep the girls alive. I think that as I go further down, we're going to see more of that one. I think that's the biggest one. Mick says starting an urban apiary. Our main fear was swarming into local buildings, especially schools. Oh, that's that's a really interesting one. Yeah, I think that's a a very location specific one, but equally. worrying one. We'll do some more fears in a little bit, or just do John one. Fear was the bees chasing to sting the neighbors. Yeah, I know that one, not good. Do you think it was only treating in the— sorry, do you think that only treating in the autumn is sufficient, and why do people give them a treatment in December when the queen is not laying any eggs? So why do people do it? So I think with a good integrated pest management plan, when you're treating for varroa, you're best off to use 2 different types of treatments, and you're best off at targeting them at different times of the year. And it just means that if one of your treatments doesn't work as well, you've got a second one as like a backup. So I do think treating twice is preferred. However, I went for ages just treating with one using Apivar, and if you use Apivar at the right time of the year, then it is very, very effective. But I do like to back it up with some Api-Bioxal in like the now. I've done mine Um, and then, and anyone who's channel members would have seen that because I've been sending out notifications to people saying Christmas Day is way, way too late. You want to be doing it like mid to end of November. And then we had that perfect spot last week, and I think everyone went out and did that. So again, if you're not a channel member and you want that advice relevant when it was relevant advice last week, then, uh, definitely sign up for that one. The other one though, Mem, is you're saying about doing it when there's not any eggs, that's the best time to do it for Varroa. So you have You have like reproductive mites that live down in the cells and they go down in the cells and reproduce, and then you have phoretic mites that live on the bees. And when there's no brood in the colony, all of the mites become phoretic because they're living on the bees, which means if you sublimate them, you knock down basically all of them. So you're always going to lose a few, always going to leave a few, but you're probably talking kind of like 90% upwards if you do it when they're broodless versus 60-70% will remain in the colony if you do it when there is brood in the colony. So it is the best time to sublimate or to dribble oxalic acid. Uh, Hi Lawrence, just had 10 triple nucs delivered today from Abello. Sold off my Payne's kit to buy the Abello nucs, planning ahead for next year. Very nice. Surprised no one said anything about the Payne's nucs yet. I'm sure, I'm sure that will come up. Hashtag fear. I was worried about them getting through the winter, then I was worried I didn't have enough kit. Very good. Aiden says the, uh, the thing I found confusing about beekeeping is that there are a lot of correct, correct ways to get the same result. That is very true. Who do you, who do you listen to? And do you just listen to one person, or do you listen to a combination of a few different people? Because that can be the confusing bit, is if you're, if you're taking like bits of information from different people and then you get to a bit which is like, well, he says don't treat bees for varroa, and this guy says treat bees for varroa, and then another guy says treat but do it at a different time. You're thinking, well, like, what what way do I go? Yeah, I think that one will be common as well. Evening, Laurence. I have a Flow Hive and took a little bit of honey off them but decided to leave the super on so they had food this winter. Is the Flow Hive super okay to be left on over winter? Oh, Anthony, I'm not gonna lie, I hate questions like this because it— the, the answer that I'm going to give you is not the answer that you're going to like, and there's not really anything that you can do about it now. So the issue and the risk that you have with leaving supers on over winter you know, you've got the colony set up like this. You've got brood box, queen excluder, super, and the bees live down there where all the brood is, and the honey's kept up there. What happens over winter is you get this cluster of bees and it would just move upwards like this, consuming all of the stores, and it ends up at the end of the year at the top of the box. So it's going to end up in your super eating all of the food up there. Now, if you've got a queen excluder in the middle, and you don't take that out, what's going to happen is all of the bees will end up at the top, and you'll come back in the spring and they'll all be dead because there's no queen. The queen would have just got trapped in the queen excluder. She'll be dead at the bottom, and you'll just have loads of old bees, and there'll be no brood that's continually reproduced. Now, if you take the queen excluder out, what's going to happen is your queen is going to start laying brood in the Flow Hive super, which is probably the, probably the worst possible thing. that you can get for a Flow Hive super. You would need to like properly take it apart and clean it after that. I don't even know how you'd get that back round and if it would work again after that. So I know that's pretty miserable, isn't it? And not, not the answer that you were maybe expecting or hoping for. What would I do if I had that situation there now? I would 100%— This is, this is probably, this is what I would probably do. I would go and take this— I would, on a warm day, go and take the super off. If you've got the queen excluder in place, great, leave the queen excluder in place. Take the super off, shake all of the bees back into the box, go and get yourself an eke, or go and get yourself another wooden super in the same format as your brood box that you've got for the Flow Hive. So like an 8-frame Langstroth wooden super, and I would go and lay directly on top of the queen excluder, a mega slab of fondant. And I know I said I don't like feeding fondant, but the caveat for that is that I only like feeding fondant in an emergency. And what you have is very much an emergency. Get a, get a full slab of baker's fondant and stick it on the top, cover it with insulation, like good Celotex insulation, and then put the roof on. And that should be okay. You need to take action pretty quick for that one. Good luck, let me know how you got on. Hi mate, at what hive numbers would you get a 20-frame electric extractor? So electric extractors and, and the, the size of electric extractor should be way in advance of like your hive numbers. So say, say I thought if you had 20 hives you should have a 20, a 20-frame extractor, I would say probably get it when you've got 8 hives because it would just make your life so much easier. You know, no one gets up to 8 hives and they just stops at 8 hives. So there's no point going from like a 6-frame to a 12-frame to a 20-frame. You might as well just go from a 6-frame to a 20-frame and then just stick at that extractor for a lot longer. Like, I know, you know, Richard, he uses a 20-frame extractor for 400 production colonies or whatever it is. He's got 2 of them side by side, but 20 frames, a big extractor. Make sure you can get it through the door. Someone did say before, have a sip of tea, and I didn't, I didn't take heed. of their advice. Oh, there we go, lots of questions. But yeah, I'd go for anything over 10 hives, I'd go for a 20-frame extractor. Losing money and overheads. Okay, nice. We had talked about getting bees 2 years before we got them, no more than a comment, nothing else. 5 weeks into my beekeeping, I bought a hive 2 weeks after we decided to get bees. It does often go like that, doesn't it, with bees? It just spirals out of control. Hi Lawrence, can you give the reason you abandoned from treating your bees this year with Apidraz and reverted back to Apivar strips? Um, it was cost related. They're exactly the same, so I'll just go with whatever one I can get at the best price. And I'll also look at the best before dates on them as well, because sometimes when you buy them, like maybe Apivar is only available with a really short best before date, and I like to buy them make sure that I've got enough for that season, but then they can be used the following season as well. So I use them interchangeably, and it just comes down to cost and it comes down to expiry date. Simple as that. Says another fear was bees going crazy like the movies and chasing to sting family and neighbors. Yeah, I think, I think a lot of people are thinking that one, aren't they? Like putting it in the garden and worrying about being stung. Says 10 of our hives are Anil, which are good but have a Varroa floor without a cover. I'm, I'm about to vape the bees, so do I need to get a cover under the slotted floor? What I would do, John, is I would just build a little eke, just like the cheapest eke with some timber, just like an inch, drill a hole in it, take the roof off, and then just put the eke on. And you can do it like you basically want to do an eke, but then it's like a bit of plywood on the top, so it's got a solid top. And then, and then just vape from the top, loads easier, and you get better sublimation going in from the top like that. That's what we do. Julian says, with the new Apivar Lite, can you use on poly hives? Obviously pipe is hot, or I'm just being dumb. I'm guessing you mean the, the Instant Vap Lite. Uh, no, I don't think you can. They'll still melt. It will still melt the poly. Instant Vap Lite is, is basically the same, just a bit smaller and a bit less metal. I think they're just trying to— they've realized that £400, not, not gonna, not gonna sell that many to your backyard beekeeper, so they've just done a cheaper version, but it will still melt Uh, Polly, but what I do, what I do with it is I just, like I said just to John there, just build an eke, a wooden eke, and then just do it from the top, and then you've not got to worry about melting stuff. Says, #fair, understanding the differences between all of the different sizes and jargon used to describe all the boxes and frame, utterly confused. I think that is a very good one. I'm going to be coming back and writing all of these down, so it's very helpful. Says, thanks for the advice. Yes, the demo rate consideration is for the year. after the expansion to swarm control and try things at the 12 highest level. Okay, that, that makes more sense. So I would definitely, I would definitely still go for the Demeray even with, uh, the Langstroth. Works very, very well on the Langstroth as well. I'd say the Langstroth you can probably get away better with just like a single brood box management system versus the National, so it's not, uh, it's not as much of a necessity, and it makes your life a little bit easier not having to do it, and you only need one box. But I would give it a go. Demerays are great. Uh, Vera also says hello. Hi Vera, how are you? We were mid-spring since getting the hive. I have split the hive, added a, a bit breaded queen— breaded queen that I confirmed yesterday was introduced successfully. I'm guessing that was mated. I have learned everything I know from you and other YouTubers. Good to hear, I'm glad it's going well. Fear not recognizing disease and pests. Okay, that's, that's a good one. Evening, Lawrence. A month without your streams is way too long. Short, dark, wet days are too depressing. Can't wait for the spring. The biggest disappointment this year for you is not buying Pains. Do you know what? Yeah, everything happens for a reason. So when Roger rang me up and said, you know, we're selling— whatever is happening to Pains is happening to Pains— I, uh, I was, I was a bit— I was really concerned because I thought, well, what are we gonna do? And he said, well, in the short term it's fine because, you know, we'll sell you all of the nucs, Langstroth and, um, national nucs, and sold me, you know, as many as I wanted. So that kept us going until through until 2026. And it immediately got me thinking though, like, we need, we need that nuc. I can't use a BS Honeybees nuc because it's no good for sending through the post, and I can't use an Abello nuc because it's modular and it's just going to fall apart in the post. I need that Payne's nuc. So it got me thinking and like looking at the mold costs and stuff, and like we did, we put in a bid, but I knew that there was a— I knew there was a big bid going in from someone, and I knew that we weren't going to win it. So, but I didn't know who it was at that point. So I did, I kind of thought, well, I don't want to be held ransom to paying crazy money for these nukes because I know how much the molds cost. I know how much it costs to make a mold for new, and I know how much, you know, I know how much we're paying and probably worthwhile just going off and doing our own. And then as soon as I found out that it was Simon— after, you know, I knew it was Simon for a few weeks, I'd say like Simon the Beekeeper Harry— and I, um, he's made my life so much easier. It's absolutely brilliant because he's the one person that I just cannot compete with. Like, there's lots of people out there that I wouldn't be able to compete with, but he drives the cost of absolutely everything to rock bottom, which is brilliant for beekeepers. And he's already done that with the Payne's nuc, you know, it was, it was, they were like £55 when Roger was selling them and now they're down to £49.99. And I think if you buy bulk off him, it's potentially going to go less. So I spoke to Harry and said, this is, this is the situation that I'm in. I can either go away and develop my own nuc or we come to an agreement. And I'm very happy to say we've come to an agreement, so I won't be producing my own Nuc, unfortunately. And I can see good business sense when it's there, but I can equally see terrible business sense when it's there. And there's no, there's no way that I can compete against someone who, who has the purchasing power and the storage and the systems of Simon the Beekeeper. So The good news is the Payne's boxes live on and there's no issue with them because they're fine as they are. And the bad news is I won't be doing my own nuc, which is a massive relief, I have to say. I'll be thinking about other stuff as well. So we focus on some other things, and I'm— I, I am excited, but we won't give away too much. Channel members do know about this already. Right, says, what my worries— sorry, what, what to do with crystallized honeys in your frames and the journey into varroa mite being in Victoria, Australia? It's funny, isn't it, with, with varroa? Because over here, varroa, you know, if you don't do anything with your colonies, the varroa will get them eventually. But it's quite easy to manage your bees for varroa. But I don't know whether that's because the bees over here have kind of got used to it over 30 years. Do bees get— do bees get used to things over 30 years, or surely it takes a bit longer than that? But over there, I just kind of think, well, what would happen if they just did if they just used Apivar at the right time, it's going to be like potent to the varroa out there because they're never going to have experienced it before. And oxalic acid or whatever in the winter, like, just nail them and you'll get similar losses to over here. So I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be too worried about varroa if I was in Australia, but what do I know? Uh, John Sylvester says, do you do Black Friday deals on your products? So I'm not against, I'm not against doing Black Friday deals, but we don't, we don't really need to do Black Friday deals. You know, we're not, not really selling queens at the moment. Queens don't come back in for another 6 months, and we basically sold out of nucs. We sold out of nucs, but like, we're— there's a few left. There's hardly any left, so there's no need to discount them because they're going to sell anyway, which is very, very good. Uh, Peter has advised me to have a sip of tea. Thank you, I do appreciate that. Oh, a lot of talking. Uh, Terry Endersby says, hi Lawrence, hope you and your family are well. Thank you, Terry, hope you're well too. Alan says, hi Lawrence, thanks for getting— sorry, thanks for your thoughts on the picture of the cappings on the honey super I sent you a few days ago after getting some honey out of the frame. The cells in question were indeed solid wax, so I don't know why they did that. Interesting. Yeah, I've never, I've never seen them do it solid wax like that either, so— but good deal, wasn't anything sinister. John Sylvester says, I'm still doing sugar syrup with the Hive Alive. Last year did the bee pollen fondant. I like late feeding with Hive Alive. I do find the bees do very well with that. Flower Street Farm Bee says hello from Colorado. Hello to you too. I bet it's cool in Colorado this time of year. Ed Walton says, hi Lawrence, have you made fondant before and can you recommend a recipe? So I've never made my own fondant and I never would make my own fondant because there's so much that can go wrong. And buying good quality fondant is very, very cheap. And good quality fondant just has 3 ingredients: glucose, sugar, and water. That's it. If your fondant has anything more than those 3 things, it's not the right one to be feeding your bees. And in order to buy the sugar, buy the glucose, buy— get your water for cheaper than it costs to make the fondant, once you add in like the energy costs, and the time, like how much you value your time, it's just so much cheaper to do it, um, by buying it in. And you can, you can kill your bees badly by making up your own fondant, doing it wrong. If you, if you heat the sugar up too much and increase the HMF, and it poisons the bees. So you're adding in like a ton of risk as well. So I've not got a recipe, and I would recommend not making your own, just buying it. Just wondering, I used Apivar strips like you said in all my hives. Do I also have to use oxalic acid as well, or am I covered? So you should be fine, but some people like to use it as kind of like double bubble, make sure you, you clean up anything that the Apivar hasn't got around to getting. And because it's a slightly different method and because you're doing it during a broodless period, very, very effective. So I, I do like to do both, but you don't have to do both. I know it's expensive buying an instant vat. Uh, Harry says, hi Lawrence, I saw on one of your membership levels you had 10% off queens. If I pre-ordered 25, would I get the discount for buying 25? 25 plus the 10%? Unfortunately not. It's not— it doesn't, uh, it won't go over the top of existing ones. So it is just for— it's less— for less than 4 queens, for people just kind of buying a few queens throughout the year. You do, you do get your discount for buying 25 queens though, but yeah, you don't get another 10% on top. Need to leave some profit for us, Harry, I'm afraid. Uh, Julian says, with the instant cap light, can you use on polyhives? Uh, we did that one before, so I would just make an eek That should be fine. Vera Jar says, Lawrence, I'm not sure how to go about accessing your members-only videos, and I've loaded it on Discord. Can I use it anytime? I don't like to bother you. Um, so, so I, I rarely get onto Discord, I have to say. I am sorry if anyone's tagging me over there. It's just, it's the communications channel that I kind of like get to last. I'm always like on emails and WhatsApps and stuff like that. So if you ever need anything urgently, it's best to email. Email is like the best way, and then WhatsApp. Um, if you're, if you're struggling to access the members-only videos, it's Probably because, like I said before, the membership has slightly changed now. So a lot of people are on that early access video level where you get access, you get early access to videos that are gonna go public. But then the level above that is the exclusive one for the videos that never go public, which is just for channel members. Um, and I, I know that might have come as a shock to some people, but it has— I have been doing that for free since February and saying it regularly that there's going to be a change. So hopefully, hopefully that explains it for you. John Sylvester says Logar is good. I've seen some of the Logar extractors as well. They look very nice. Vera says, when did the baby arrive? Congratulations. So little Lily is now six months old. She was in here dancing before. She's very good fun. Very, very dribbly. Never seen such a dribbler. Just like pools of dribble everywhere. But she's very, very smiley. Very happy little girl. Karen Evans on Facebook says, hi Lawrence. Doing our first Christmas market this weekend. Very excited. Hope everyone loves honey and bees as much as we do. Wow, I, I've not done markets for ages because it's, it's quite a lot of work to go and like get them set up and do them. But I've really enjoyed doing Christmas markets and like proper markets. Not so much when it's like raining and cold and wet and stuff, but if you get like a late November, early December Saturday or Sunday market, nice weather where it doesn't rain, oh, you just be run off your feet. You, you make lots and lots of money. And make sure you do tasters. Tasters, got to do tasters. You'll like treble the amount that you sell by getting people in with tasters, which I'm sure, I'm sure you already know. Um, but I do, I do enjoy it. Uh, Flower Street Farm B says Randy's wife Elizabeth does a great job with the Dirt Rooster merch. She certainly does, she's on it. Uh, Denby Honey says, I'm guessing hashtag fear, the rate that they expanded from zero to hero. Yeah, that's a good point. I think a lot of people don't expect that, do they, how quick they're going to go. Denby Honey, yep, Simon the Beekeeper has taken on Payne's, so they bought the job lot, bought everything all in one, made the liquidators' lives very easy. Hi Lawrence, just got some gear from Simon, hope the Payne's goes well for him, just done my 6 colonies with oxalic acid dribble. Excellent, everyone's on it, aren't they, getting their bees nice and healthy for winter. Peter also says some bees clustering, some not, even though it was frosty, very interesting. I always find that interesting how different colonies respond to the, the temperature slightly differently, but I think, yeah, it's been relatively mild so far. I, I want it to, I want to get cold. The bees will kind of like maintain their stores a little bit better in, in the cold. When it's warm like this, if it stays warm, it's not good. I'll be moving from 10 hives total to 50 honey hives and extra nucs next year. What were the biggest issues you came across when you stepped up the numbers, and what would you like to do differently? It's interesting you say that because I just remembered that Adam Goodall texted me earlier and asked me to answer some questions, and one of them was pretty similar to that, so I'll get them on there and do that next. Right, what were the biggest issues you came across when you stepped up numbers, and what would you like to have done differently? So biggest issues were not having enough equipment. Another issue was underestimating the amount of time that it would take me to do it, massively underestimating the amount of time that it takes to extract all of that honey and kind of get the treatments on and get the bees fed. at the end of the year. Standardization of kit was an issue, so if you can standardize everything up front nice and early, it makes things really, really easy. Protecting your drawn comb massively improves your honey yield. Thinking of bees, thinking of colonies of bees as the box in which they're in, as opposed to the number of frames of bees. This is a really good, like, beekeeping mindset thing. Because I remember like a good few years back now, people say, how many colonies of bees you've got? And I say, I've got 200. And I remember I lost about 35% of the bees that year. And the reason that I lost so many is because I'd gone so aggressive with the splits. I had like full-size beehives with 2 frames of bees in there, and I counted that as a colony. But really what I should have done is I should have answered the question slightly differently, which is how many frames of bees do I have? Because it doesn't matter if you have 100 frames of bees in 10 hives or you have 100 frames of bees in 100 hives, still got 100 frames of bees. That's the important number. So don't get too ambitious with your expansion plans and just kind of track the number of frames of bees and number of frames of brood that you have as opposed to the number of colonies that you have. Good question though, I like questions like that. because it makes— it reminds me of all the horrendous mistakes that I've made, things that, things that went wrong, still do go wrong. Um, but yeah, keep, keep— just keep the numbers manageable, I guess. Don't get overambitious. Uh, Adam's questions— I'll quickly answer your questions now, Adam. So he said, what did you find the hardest challenge as you moved from large-scale hobbyist to commercial? So it's kind of your question there, Adam. It was, it was very, very similar. I would say A slightly different slant on that for me is the interaction with customers. So there's the beekeeping side, which you can plan for, you can manage, you can standardize, you can keep things realistic, and, you know, whatever comes around comes around. But as you grow, especially as the way that we've kind of grown into nucs and queens and beekeeping education and answering people's questions and mentoring and stuff like that, there's only so much time that I give to people. There's only so much time that I can spend like answering emails and answering the phone and answering WhatsApp. And the more you grow, the more that side of it grows. And I, and I just, I'm so passionate and think it's so important that that element is— that element kind of almost comes first. Like if someone, if someone calls up, I'll answer the phone. And if someone emails me, I'll get back to them the next day. And it might, you know, there might be occasions where it's, it's 48 hours. I think in the winter I'm probably a little bit slower than in the, in the summer because in the summer I have to just clear my inbox every single day. But that's the biggest challenge that I've had going from hobby to commercial, is that kind of like customer expectation side, which I do— I like to think I do a good job of that, and I do put a huge amount of effort into that. You know, like, I'll be going to bed at midnight, 1 o'clock, kind of wide-eyed. You know, I'll go to bed at 1 in the summer and I can't get to sleep until like 3 because I'm so charged from you know, sitting there just typing away here at this desk, emailing people back about everything, everything to do with bees. But I love that. Uh, and then Adam also says, what was/is your largest bad habit when looking after running your hives and, and the company? Oh, laying the cards on the table here. Biggest, biggest bad habit— I've got loads of bad habits when it comes to beekeeping. And it's funny because in, in the videos, like, I, I do have to be quite responsible in the videos, you know, so I can't I can't say, I just do that, that's fine. I have to look at it from like a beginner's perspective. I have to look at it from an experienced beekeeper's perspective. I have to look at it from a bee inspector's perspective, the NBU perspective, everyone. And, you know, any— anyone can watch those videos and scrutinize them, and believe me, people do scrutinize them. So I have to come from a very, uh, I have to sit on the fence a lot. So I'll always say, you know, you use the hive tool like this, or you should always have your smoker lit. So my terrible habit that I have is never lighting a smoker. Like, I never light it ever. But, you know, you see it on videos lit a lot of the time, and I light it for videos because people say I should have a smoker lit. Using hive tools. So a lot of the time I just don't use the hive tool, which is fine. I don't think that's necessarily a bad habit. That's more just like preference. And if your bees don't propolize stuff down too much, then it's not that bad. Um, what else do I do? I think like in terms of apiary hygiene, like I'm pretty good at apiary hygiene now. That, that would have been without a doubt my worst habit previously. Like you see in the pre— in the old videos of my like retractable hive tool, I thought that was a great idea. You look back on those videos and you see the state of my bees, the state of that hive tool, and you just think like if you had disease there, you'd have just been carrying that around again and again and again to all of those different colonies. So I'm pretty good now at having, you know, I've got like a bucket of of soda crystals and hive tools at each location. And what I do is I get a big— this is a good tip from the NBU— so I leave them, they're always basically left on site, the same bucket just gets left there. And then what I do is I get a big jerry can at the beginning of the day, stick a couple of things of soda crystals in it, fill it up with water, and I just carry that round from apiary to apiary. So I get to the apiary, empty all the water that's in there, and then just put new soda water on the top, give it a little swish around, and then I can use the hive tool straight away because they're nice and clean. But the hive tools like live in that apiary, so they never go around. And I think the reason that I don't use a smoker as well a lot is, A, the bees are chilled, so they don't need to be smoked. But also, I didn't want to have a smoker at each site, and I didn't want to carry around a smoker from site to site as well, because that's a classic way to carry around disease. So I think, I think I had a lot of bad habits. starting out, especially reusing comb. Reusing old comb is terrible for that. Reusing like drone laying frames, which, you know, if they're in good condition you can still reuse them, and occasionally we'll still reuse them, but if they're in bad condition should definitely be changing them. Reusing boxes, you know, colonies have failed overwintering boxes and not cleaning them, not sterilizing them properly, not burning them and scorching them. All of that, I'm well on top of now, and I really notice the benefit. I see like healthiness in my bees after doing all of these changes. So some good habits, lots of bad habits that I used to have, but let's get back to the questions on here. Hmm, where do we get to? Right, we've got to here. Is Europe seeking Apivar resistance too? So I don't think we're necessarily seeking it. You do hear about isolated occurrences of Apivar resistance, but I speak from personal experience, and it's so interesting seeing— like, I went and saw these bees today, abandoned colony, absolutely ridden with mites. Like, you've never seen anything like it. And then I look at my bees, and I've been treating them with oxalic acid and apibioxal and Apivar, and you never see mites, and you never see the impact of mites, and you never see holes in cappings. And it's only kind of like in August, September that you might see one B that's got deformed ring virus. So it's definitely doing its job. How long that will last, I'm not sure. Oh, I love a question like this, Bob Bob. A YouTube question: if if it's not what your average click-through rate is there more? Oh, there you go. If if it's not if it's not too personal, what's your average click-through rate on long-form videos? Let's have a look. I like a question like that. Love love digging into the stats, right? So I'll go into the stats. I'm not gonna share the screen with you, unfortunately, although you might like to see the screen. Be embarrassing, wouldn't it, if you could see the screen? Right, let's go into click-through rate. I forget where that is. I think it's in audience, isn't it? Oh, I'm not very good. I'm under pressure now. I'm under pressure. I've got unique viewers. I don't even know where it is, you know. It used to be in the middle under Audience, but it's not there anymore. I seem to remember when last time I checked it was about 5%. Where is it? Now it's gone. Yeah, I think, I think it's about 5% from, from memory, and I think it like fluctuates kind of like between 4 and 7. It's pretty— it's not, it's not too bad. Oh no, camera's gone. That's not good. You can still hear me, but let's say— what's going on here? Oh no, that's my old other camera. That's embarrassing. Well, I'll keep on talking because I know you can hear me, but I just need to reset my camera. God, that's not going to be good for retention, is it? Having a, a massive glitch like that. There we go. That was someone asking about YouTube click-through rates and retention, and I just go ahead and do something silly like that. So hopefully everyone can hear me again now. Let me just check that the audio is working okay. Yeah, we're good, we're good to go. That was embarrassing. Sorry about that. I wonder what happened there. Uh, right, so I missed that one there, didn't I? Right, so Lynette says, I'm going to use the ventilation hole on my Anel hive, doing it tomorrow. I couldn't get in there before. So good luck, sure they will appreciate that. Uh, Richie Richie says, sorry to trouble you again, new bee alert. I put fondant on my hive 6 weeks ago. Okay, uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say go and take it off. Like, it's not, it's not the end of the world if you've got fondant on there. It's just not the advice that I would give anymore, just to put it on for, uh, kind of just to be sure. I just think if you feed them up well with invert or 2:1 Then that's generally enough. So why waste money on fondant if you don't need to? Oh, pardon me. Julian Lawley says, that's answered the question perfectly. Didn't think it was that dumb. There are no dumb questions. No dumb questions. Just arrogant people when they answer them sometimes. Sorry, I shouldn't say that. Lynette says, #fear. Not knowing if I would be allergic to bee stings. That's where the club apiary came in. Local bees that love to sting me even when I'm nowhere near the hives. Brilliant. Peter's fear was worried about swarms. Also started pre-YouTube days, showing my age, so not much advice about. Bit better now. Cheers, Peter. Hi from Fiji, just discovered cane toads queuing up to eat my bees as they return in the evening. Must have solved the why isn't that hive thriving issue. Love the beanie. Oh wow, that's— that is crazy. Firstly, thank you for admiring the beanie, Dirt Rooster. You're getting some serious advertising tonight, Randy. You're gonna have loads of people buying your hats, but I can highly recommend them. I'm only talking to Randy like that because he does occasionally pop in and say hi on here. So sod's law, he won't come tonight. Um, but cane toads eating bees, that's crazy. We don't have anything like that over here. Get like a frog or something. Uh, Juandra— butchered the name, sorry— he says hi from South Africa. I, I do— I, I always like to try someone, say someone's name, and I never get it right. So apologies if I've got that horribly wrong. PJ Morgan says hello from Llandudno. I can't even speak Welsh. Let's just say LW. Llandudno? No, not happening. What new beekeeping stuff are you excited to try next year? Oh, that's a good question. What am I excited to try next year? I bought, uh, some— I bought like quite a new— a few new beehives, so it's quite nice to put them together. I don't really have like anything brand new that I'm gonna be I'm going to be trying. That sounds a bit sad. I, I went through that phase for quite a while, which was, you know, I've got to do every beehive, got to try every beehive, I've got to try every little gizmo or gadget, and was buying it for the, for the channel just to do videos on and lost loads of money. But I think, I think it was quite good. I think people found that, that useful. But then it comes to a point where you just got to say, um, it's probably not the best investment just to spend money on like gadgets and gizmos and stuff. Love it if people give them to me for free and I can play around with them. But no, I'm not. What I am excited about next year is just kind of like getting back into it. I do miss, I do miss beekeeping, and I miss going out and doing the videos. And I really enjoyed going and filming the video today. It's great. And I'm more kind of caught up on the, like, the techniques and the filming and the, the, the, uh, what do you want to call it, the gadgets for filming. So Sony have just released a new camera, the Sony A1. Mark II. And you know when you're sitting on the fence about buying something, you're thinking, oh, I just, just get it. I'm gonna wait until after Christmas, I think, because it is, it's 6 and a half grand for a new camera. But it is a cool camera, and it also does really, really good pictures as well. And I like photography, and I want to get more into like bee photography, specifically macro bee photography. But I'm still on the fence because for anyone who knows photography, full frame is not actually the best for macro because you have this like extended depth of field So I'm looking at the Olympus OM-1, which is a, is a Micro Four Thirds camera, smaller sensor, but it means that when you're doing macro, you get this smaller depth of field or bigger depth of field in terms of like the focusing area. Butchering the, the descriptions there, but it basically means that more of the bee is in focus, which you need for good macro photography. So that's— I'm excited about stuff like that. that. That could be cool. Like, just like to spend my money on things. Channel member says, hi Lawrence, just caught the stream. I know you have videos on the topic, but I'm sat with a glass of wine relaxing. Could you give a quick run-through of maximizing splitting your colonies? I certainly can. So if I was looking to get the absolute maximum value from a colony, this is what I would always do. And I did— I covered it a little bit earlier, but I'll go through it again. I would double brood early in the spring, like very, very early. So let's say you've got a colony on a single national brood box. I would get preferably another brood box of drawn comb. If you've not got drawn comb, use foundation, and if you've got a mix, use a mix. But as much drawn comb as possible will really, really help with the expansion. Lift up the original brood box of all of your bees and put the new brood box underneath, polyashphal feeder on the top, and you can do that You can do that middle of Feb, you can do it now, it makes no difference. Do it early, as early as possible. And what that means is that when the bees want to start expanding, they've got space to expand into, but the bees and the cluster are always in contact with the feeder and they're close to the top, which means they're nice and well insulated. So there's no issues with the colony thinking, oh, it's a bit too cold, we're not going to expand. Start feeding as soon as you get warm weather, start feeding 1:1 sugar syrup. So that might be the middle of Feb. Could be really, really early. You have to, if you're looking for like maximum return on your investment, you have to take risks. So feeding that early is a little bit of a risk. So don't go in and stick 10 liters of 1:1 sugar syrup in there, but go in, stick a couple of liters in. If they take it down, great, stick another couple of liters in and just keep on doing that. And if it goes back cold again, don't worry about it, just stop feeding them for a bit. And as soon as it warms up, keep on going back. And you're looking to trickle feed just constantly, liter Liter and a half, maybe 2 liters every week, something like that. Not huge amounts, but just enough to kind of get them going, get them kick-started, get them to a point where they're completely filling top brood box, bottom brood box. That syrup that you're putting in there, you do not want them to store any of that syrup. If you're going through your colony and you're finding you've got 4 frames of brood, 16 frames of syrup, you've fed too much and you've fed too quick. You want to be going through the boxes and you've got 20 frames of brood and 2 frames of stores, something like that, somewhere like maybe with a little bit of stores on some of the frames. At that point, it's probably gonna be about mid-April, queens are available from Black Mountain Honey. Come to us, buy some queens, or order the queens, make your splits, one frame of brood, one frame of stores, shake of bees, and just keep on doing that until they're all gone. And then take them to a new apiary. You have to take them to a new apiary doing that. It's a nightmare doing this in the same apiary. So just take all of those nucs, take them to a new apiary. Put the feeders back on, 1:1 sugar syrup, wait 8 days, knock down all the queen cells, mated queens in, leave it 24 hours, pop the tabs, and just keep on feeding those colonies until they build up. You will find that kind of— oh geez, I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on with this camera tonight. It is not, it is not going well. I'm gonna try and unplug it a little bit. Told you I need a new camera, and it, it heard me, I reckon, talking about buying a new camera, and it's throwing a hissy fit. We'll get it back on though. I can carry on talking while I'm doing this. So you will find if you do that in mid-April, come the end of May, by the time you get to the June gap, you will have nuc boxes full of bees And once you have nuc boxes full of bees like that, then— so I'm back now— then you can split them again. So that's not just to kind of like turn one colony into 20 or one colony into 10, you can turn it from 1 to 20 to 40. And the only limiting factor there is you have to keep on adding in mated queens. But you know, you're getting like massive return on your investment because you've got nucs that you can sell or colonies that you can turn into production colonies. Um, I don't know why, I don't know why that camera's doing that. It's never ever happened before. I think it might be the USB. I think it's me like nudging. I've got a cable just in front of it here, so I will— I'll move stuff over a little bit. Sorry about that. Every time I do it, I see people are leaving, so we'll have to get to the bottom quick. Uh, Bree says, are you coming to Louisville in January? Unfortunately not. No, didn't get an invite from Cayman this year, so long way. Uh, Julian says, so are the panes available from Simon yet? So yep, they're available from from today. There we go, a bit of promotion for Simon there. So they— he has launched them today. You can buy the panes from Simon. What is your favorite beekeeping moment? Oh, that's— that could be viewed in so many different ways. I would say favorite beekeeping moment is when I come back from a queen, like a virgin queen that's gone out and mated, and you come back and that first round of eggs turns into nice capped worker brood. Nothing better than that. Is there any info out there that gives you a guide of how much nectar certain plants produce. It'd be nice to look at a plant and think that's about X amount of honey there. No, I don't think there is anything like that. You get a lot of like the ones that kind of indicate where the pollen comes from, but nothing in terms of the amount that it yields. That would be really quite useful, wouldn't it? Yeah, we should definitely do something like that. Hi Lawrence and the Bee Gang, is it true that the milder autumn, early winter weather will result in bees eating stores more quickly? So yes, straightforward, 100% yes, it will. But it will also result in very, very strong colonies of bees. So if you keep them well fed, you'll get much, much stronger bees coming out of the winter, which is a good thing. Harry says, no problem about the discount. What is your best advertising techniques for selling nucs? So I, I will, I will have to refrain, I'm afraid, Harry, from answering ones like that. Sorry, there's— we, we can give good advice and stuff, but there comes a point where you've got, you've got to keep And it's not necessarily referenced for you, but like it might be other people who are trying to sell nucs in that same environment. So if we, uh, if we've stumbled across something that works, we have to, uh, we have to keep that one under wraps, I'm afraid. Sorry, I'm not, I'm not doing— not helping you much with your questions tonight. Julian says, totally agree, your help is invaluable even when it's from your pain in the ass from Devon. There is no— there really isn't. Uh, I love, I love the questions coming in. Keep them coming. Hello Lawrence, can you explain the difference between hive tool styles and what's your favorite and why? Yeah, so I'm not I'm not like an expert on hive tool styles. The one that that rubs people up the wrong way is the J one, and and I can understand why. Especially like Murray hates the J tool. He's banned it from his operation completely, and I I don't I don't particularly like the J tool one. I don't use the J tool one, and the reason that people don't like it like it's got like a how are we going to do this like a J tool like that? And what people do is they use it to like lever the hives up, and what it does is it inadvertently like breaks the lugs off, and so you get a lot of broken frames. You know what it's like if you've got a frame that's got one broken lug— nightmare, innit? So I don't like J-hook ones. And then all of the other ones, they're pretty much like a version— they're similar, they're all similar. I see the one that Richard uses, and Richard's has got like that extra leverage bit on it as well, but I'm not— I just, I'm just like quite simple with my hive tool. It doesn't need to be like fancy. I just like the basic standard straightforward hive tool that's got one end that's kind of curved over and then one that's like fluted out with a nice sharp end. What I'd say is I do like my hive tool sharp, and I see a lot of people using like very blunt hive tools. I do like a good, a good sharp hive tool. It's sharp at both ends, like you could properly use it and properly clean it. Richard's favorite one, like Richard, uh, Nukes Richard, is the, the super long one from Thorns. Very, very long. It doesn't fit in most buckets, but it's really, really long and it's super strong. Like, it is impossible to break. If you buy some of the cheap Chinese ones that are on sale in a lot of places, like, you, you kind of like lever them like that, they just snap. Whereas the Thorn ones, I've seen Richard literally like jumping on it and they are, they are completely unbreakable. And they're— because they're very long, you get like a good moment force on them. So like, for the force that you put in, you get a lot more of that turning. What was it called? Moment angle. I should know this. I did maths as A-level and mechanics and stuff. It's a moment, isn't it? The moment force bringing it around. But it's that angular bit that I've lost for words. I need to have a drink. But yeah, so I would go with that. They're probably, probably my favorite. Oh, here we go. John's gutted his product testing position is gone, but great news, the pain's nipped are safe for the future. I think that's, that's probably, yeah, good news. Might be some tweaks to the pains line coming, who knows. Hi Lawrence, a couple of my hives have felt light when I lifted them, so I put a kilogram of Apipasta on. And, and how can you insulate the nucs and reduce— and full hives to reduce moisture? So you're never going to reduce the moisture in a hive. The moisture is always there. The only thing that insulation can do is dictate where the moisture condenses. So I always just insulate the top as much as I possibly can, which means that if it's going to condense, it's going to condense on the sides and it's going to run out the bottom like that. It running out the bottom is much better than it running onto the bees. What was the rest of the question? So the kilogram bag of api pasta, that's fine as long as it's not the one that's got loads of pollen in it. You don't want to be feeding bees anything with protein at this time of the year because they don't need it and it just gives them bad stomach if they can't get out. And then in terms of insulating nucs, I wouldn't worry too much about insulating nucs. Nucs are generally built with the roof slightly more, like, slightly thicker than the rest of the hive, so they kind of insulate themselves. So you should be fine. Luckily, Aiden says audio is good, kept me going. Definitely was embarrassed. That was shocking. First time that's happened for ages. Did anyone see it? I did, I did an interview with the Bush Bee Man and that happened, but I couldn't get my camera back on. And I was, I was interviewing him and he was talking. He was like, oh my geez, mate, he's gone. And then he was chatting to his son and it was— he, he held the show for a little bit there. But, uh, yeah, I don't like, I don't like technical glitches, so apologies for that. Anyone who was watching on the— listening on the podcast, they wouldn't have even known. They would have just heard me stutter a little bit. Could you add the season stage when you quote dates, time of the year? I understand it's very location-based but seasons give it a little more relative relevance. So yeah, I, I have actually started doing that. I started doing that at the beginning of this year, so most of the, most of the 2024 videos do have a date on them, but I will continue doing that, um, going forward. Voice, is this more bees died? Oh, I don't know, it's probably cursing me now. Good evening, Lawrence. Hope you're all doing well. How concerned are you about the Asian yellow-legged hornet? Do you think it'll be a big hit to UK honey producers? It's interesting, that one, because I thought 2024 was going to be really, really bad, and whether the National Bee Unit have done a very, very good job or the climatic conditions in 2024 were very, very bad for the Asian hornet, both of those things I do think have contributed. I do think that the NBU has still put— they're pumping a lot of money into it, And putting a lot of effort into it, and you can't argue with the results. I do think the weather this year has played a part in limiting the spread, and it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few years. But I think you have to say hats off to the NBU. Like they've done a good job of containing it. It's not anywhere near as bad as people expected it to be this year, but 2025 will be like proof proof of the pudding. So I I have to say I'm I'm more. Confident, um, that, that it's not going to impact us hugely in Wales. So I just think it's, it's going to be a case of it might be a little bit of an issue down south in August and September, kind of late enough in the year to not have a huge amount of impact on honey producers, but I think it will change the way that you need to get bees ready for winter. And I think for us up here, it would be like a minor inconvenience, like back end, towards the back end of the year, maybe for like a couple of weeks if they get— if you get colonies close to us up here. So I'm less worried than I was last year, I would say. If you're on double brood box, when would you reduce it down to a single brood box? So depends on what you want to do with it the following year. If you want to— if you're definitely going to run it on a double brood next year, I would just leave them as a double brood, just leave them on it. Um, if not, you can kind of do anytime after the brood and the bees have kind of gone from the bottom up to the top. So I suspect you'd go there in, say, February, March, and all of the bees will be in the top box, and then you can just swipe the bottom box out from underneath. Honey says we can't read the comments on Facebook, it gets confusing. Oh yeah, but that's why, that's why I put the comments up like that as I read them. We're multi-streaming here, we're streaming to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch all at once. Um, but it should be okay if I click them up. Sorry if it's confusing. Uh, How many nucs do you recommend I need for next year? I currently have 7 colonies going into winter. Oh, so that, that's how long is a piece of string, Aiden, that one. It depends, it depends kind of like how much you're looking to grow. I would say though, you know, you've got 7 colonies there, you could grow that to 20, 25 colonies easily without adding any more nucs into it or buying any nucs. If you're thinking of kind of creating your own nucs out of that, you can do it in loads of different ways. You can, you can maybe double up your colonies, go from 7 to 14 production colonies, and then just take a little nuc out of each one as well as a backup. Loads and loads of different ways of doing it. Where do you want to get to next year? And by where do you want to get to? And kind of by when do you want to get to it? Is the questions I would be asking myself there. And if you want to ask them later, later down Then we can we can have a look at that. Paul Horton's book has info about honey yields from certain crops. Ah, this is is is getting very very annoying. This sorry everyone. I might have to go to the very very poor quality camera. I'll carry on talking though. You can hear me. I just don't know. I don't even know why it's doing it. It just seems to be completely random. Anyway, coming back on now. I think I've worked out quickly how to get it back on now. So here we go, back. God knows what's going on. Hi Lawrence, thank you for sharing your experience with bees. I learned from your videos a lot of things. Keep doing that. I certainly will, thank you very much. John says fulcrum point. Yeah, it's kind of getting that. It's more— it's the— it's the force. I think it is. It's just the moment is what I'm talking about. Confusing myself. But yeah, there's a fulcrum in there somewhere, we know that. Tell us more about your podcast. How, where can we access it? So this is the podcast. Sorry to disappoint you, it is just this. it's me talking, but it is available on YouTube Music. So if you go onto YouTube Music and search for Let's Talk Bees, you can listen to all of these in the car, wherever you want. Hi Lawrence, what month do you send your nucs out for delivery? So we start sending nucs out generally in April, April, May, and June. We send nucs out if you get like the perfect weather, we might send the first batch out the back end of March, but it would have to be really, really good weather to do that. But it all depends on when you ordered, so we just send the nucs out in all— in the kind of order that they come in. We've sold a lot of nucs, so we will be shortly moving over to a May delivery. So if you've got an order in at the moment, it will be very, very likely to be delivered in April unless the weather gets shocking. Have you or would you ever run a 1 or 2-day intensive beekeeping Training course. Very interesting you should say that. We we actually started running those last year, and I put them up and sold out a couple of them pretty quickly, and then I had to cancel because because Helen got pregnant. And then I'm not going to go ahead and do any more physical face-to-face training courses. And if you keep an eye on Black Mountain Honey Channel, you'll see why in the relatively near future. Uh, so we, we've come to the end amazingly. I think everyone just dropped off because the camera kept on jumping out. Uh, Debbie, Debbie's put her thumbs up. Demby Honey says, how can I subscribe from my iPhone? If you're interested in becoming a channel member, you just go onto my home page where on YouTube where it says subscribe, there's a button next to it that says join. You hit join, gives you your options for membership. And if you're kind of wondering where the videos have gone, the videos for channel member exclusives on that VIP exclusive mentoring section. That's the one that you need to be in if you want to get the exclusive videos kind of going backwards and going forwards as well. And hopefully you found them very, very useful. Peter's enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it as well. I hope you all have a very, very good weekend. We have come to the end of this one now because, as always, I'll answer every single question, but when we get to the end, we are done. So an hour and 26 minutes. I really enjoyed it. I will do the streams every single month, so I'll do one a month at the moment. When we get back into the season, I will go back to doing them every two weeks. So we'll do them every two weeks from the first of where do we go? First of April. We go back to every two weeks on the first of April. If you've got any questions in the meantime, though, drop me an email or drop me a WhatsApp or drop me a text or whatever. And just as a last shout out, Robert Bone enjoys the mentoring. So if you want to become a channel member, I would suggest getting involved. Have a good night all, and I'll speak to you all soon.