Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 44

Good evening. That was a good start, wasn't it? So something popped up there and I got that completely wrong. So I got two letters into the podcast and I already already made my first mistake. What I meant to say there was good evening everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. Instead, I said so that was that was a bit rubbish. We are back with another. Probably quite long episode of Let's Talk Bees. First, I'm going to do some public service announcements with my whiteboard, with stuff that I've already written down. I've just— the thing that threw me there is that I tried to livestream to Twitter using StreamYard, and it's just come up saying that you now need to pay. I need to pay Twitter to livestream on there. So sorry, Twitter, you're not getting on the livestreams anymore. So I struggled with Instagram as well. So we're down now to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch. I have one person that watches me on Twitch. Um, let's jump straight into the public service announcements. Here we go. So I'll add that onto the stage. So we have got cap— found a cap. There we go, Black Mountain honey cap. I know a few people were keen to get their hands on these. This is like even more limited edition than the other ones because this is blue, navy blue with gold. Brand new, never been worn, still got the tags. I'm gonna give it away to someone tonight, and I will be giving it away to someone tonight. So I'm not just going to say I'm going to give it away and then send me your entries. We will work out who is getting it this very evening. And the way you enter is on the top there, it says Brood Frame Competition. So you need to send me— and I know I put a note on Facebook earlier, so I've got loads of them already sent in— but you can WhatsApp me either a video or a picture of your very best brood frame that you have got. And I will go through them and we'll pick out a winner live at the end of the stream. We'll do it at the end. Um, the number is down there, as you can see, so 01352 372247. That's my business WhatsApp number. I know it seems like it's a house number, but it's not. Add that as WhatsApp, Black Mountain Honey WhatsApp, and you can WhatsApp me. Uh, what else have we got next? Right, 5 queens for £160. That is the last bulk discount of the year going out this Thursday. So if you need queens, I know People are thinking— people are just like, uh, blinkered vision at the moment, which is get as much honey as possible. And then come the end of September, or the end of August, early September, people think, right, I'm gonna make some splits, and then we're not gonna have any queens there. So the one at the end is last queens week commencing the 21st of August. We finish up early at Black Mountain Honey. So if you are interested in queens for making splits, now is the time to do it. And that is the last bulk discount one of the year, so 5 queens for £160. I've just realized that my WhatsApp notification is still on, so I'm gonna try and turn that down a little bit. There we go. I don't think that worked. So those five buckfast queens for yeah, that's definitely not worked. How am I going to turn this down? Right. There we go. I think I've worked it out. I think we worked out last time that I can't do two things at once, so trying to talk and do anything at the same time is impossible. Five queens, 160 pounds. Thursday the first of August. There we go. Got that one out the way. Channel memberships going very steady, very steady channel memberships. Lots of people signing up. Three different, four different membership levels. But the the really popular one at the moment is the exclusive content one. I think there's fourteen or fifteen exclusive videos on there now. So if you've not seen those already, they're really good. Learn a lot on the exclusive videos. Very rough, very uncut footage of me generally talking as I go about my inspections or. driving around in the car, but give you some good snippets of information, hopefully save you quite a lot of money as well. Nucleus colonies. I genuinely cannot believe how many nucleus colonies we have sold for 2025, which is like 10 months away, 9 and a half months away before we're going to send them out. We're nearly at 50% capacity. We're probably going to sell out before the end of the beekeeping season. It's crazy. If you want nucs next year, get them in as soon as possible. This one's— this one is an apology. I know I tempted you last week or the week before last with no adverts, but YouTube apparently did not like that because it was like the worst performing stream that I think I've ever done. And I thought it was a pretty good stream, and the only— the only thing that I can think of is that I just— I hadn't put the adverts on. So the YouTube thinks, well, not showing your stream to anyone because you've not got adverts on. So I had to put the adverts back on. So sorry about that. And then the final one is, we said it already, last Queen's Week commencing 21st of August. So let me quickly take that down and let me quickly add the WhatsApp screen on to see if it's going to work, because it'd be pretty cool if it does work. So there we go, here we go, WhatsApp screen. Um, so we're going to kind of like jump into stuff like that and take a look at some frames. Very nice frame. I haven't got people's names, um, so if I find it How are we going to do this? Put your names on there. But that is a chat with glasses. Very, very nice frame. I like that a lot. So we'll go through all of those at the end. That would be really cool. Another thing that I thought I would do as well, I can just, I can go and like look on web pages and stuff. I've finally worked out how to do some stuff on here. So if I remove that one and then add another one on. So I do apologize for anybody watching Or listening to this as a podcast, I appreciate it is a podcast as well. I'll try and talk about what happened there. So that was a brood frame, very nice brood frame. And now I'm showing a picture of what looks like a regular hive that people would be very aware of, but it is not. So this is Old Castle Farm Hives, which you can't see on there. They've released a brand new nucleus. So nucleus colonies, so polystyrene nucs or polystyrene beehives in the UK are made from EPS, so extended polystyrene. Expanded polystyrene, and they always have been. And believe it or not, barring the Abello ones, which are made obviously by license in Poland using a slightly different steam-molded injection method, all of the polyhives that you buy in the UK are made at the same manufacturing facility. Hence why they have a monopoly on the price, and the price seems to just go crazy up all the time. So Maysmore polynucs, BS Honeybees polynucs, Paynes polynucs, And I suspect probably like the National Beehive Supply one, all of the UK-made polynucs are made at this one facility with EPS, expanded polystyrene. But Old Castle Farm Hives have come out with a new one, and this isn't a plug. I've just got the email notification just like everybody else, which was, there is a new product in town. And I had spoken to Ian about it, so I was aware that it was coming up. But this is, although it looks like expanded polystyrene. It's not, it's expanded polypropylene. So it's not EPS, it's EPP. And design features very similar to a well-known nuke, uh, very similar. But it's, it's a good nuke, and I can see why they've adopted some of those design features there. Um, and I've not tried it. Apparently really, really light, which is a good benefit, I think. Apparently you don't need to paint it, which is nice. Uh, what else I'm gonna say? So yeah, what, light is only 1.6 kilos, which I've not really weighed the other Poly Nukes, but that does seem very, very light. They reckon that the impact resistance is, is as good if not better than EPS, and they're saying you don't even need to paint it, it's that durable, which is, which is pretty cool. So I'm, I am well up for stuff like this. The cost of poly in the UK has just gone wild in the past 5 years, and I hate the fact that one manufacturing facility has the monopoly on the market. Because they just say, yeah, putting the price up 20%. And everyone says, oh, okay, fine. And then next, next week or next month they say, yeah, we're just putting the price up 20% again because we can, because we've not got any competition. And it looks like they've got a bit of competition now because these are £54.99 including the VAT, which is a hefty chunk cheaper than the equivalent made out of EPS. Now, I often get myself in like a sticky situation, like recommending things. Or maybe like I don't recommend them, but people say, oh, you recommended it. So I'll go on the record, I'm not recommending this as of yet because I've not tried it, but I'm definitely going to have a go and try it because I think it looks pretty cool and I like the price point and I like all of the features that they state that are there. So I'm going to give it a go and we will see how we get on. But I just thought that was pretty cool being able to like do stuff like that on live streams as well. So again, if you're watching a podcast, that was just pictures of the Old Castle Farm hives EPP, extended polypropylene nucleus colony that they have got. Um, you, you might notice I've got a bit of a tan. I've been outside all day in the sun. I love the sun. I, I, I'm sorry, anybody who has moaned about it being too warm today, I think you might have to get banned from the stream because— I'm only joking, you're not really banned— but how can anybody in the UK moan about it being too warm? Because it is it's like 24, 25, maybe 26 degrees, not really that hot, and we get like a week of it max per year. So don't, don't moan about it, just embrace the nice weather. My bees have certainly been embracing it, and I think after what was a shocking start to the year for everyone— cold, damp, miserable, starving bees— I think the last 8 weeks have pretty much turned it around, and I see a lot of people with a lot of good summer crops, and we're nowhere near finished yet. You look at like, what's the date at the moment? 20-something. I've still got a good, a good 3 weeks, or maybe bang on 3 weeks left, and bees can do a huge amount in 3 weeks. Like, you're talking at least a super a week, but in good, like, even in heather, you're talking a couple of supers a week if you get a good flow. So there's still a lot of honey to come in, even if you curtail your season quite early like I do. For those people who are going to just keep on going, um, to the end of September or whenever it is, then you'll probably get an extra super or something like that as well. But there we go, we're done. That was the intro. So I probably should rub out everything. I can't talk and rub out at the same time, can I? So right, we will do some questions while I do that. First question, I can see, I can see Big Grease Bees John has put some admin stuff in there as well, putting some questions on or saying to not put your questions on, but I can see there's a lot of questions that have already gone on there. If you're wondering why I'm not really talking about a huge amount at the moment, it's because I'm just rubbing out the whiteboard. For anybody who's listening on the podcast thinking, get on with it, um, if I start trying to answer questions whilst rubbing out the whiteboard, we're never going to get anywhere. And you know how much I love my whiteboard. So there we go, let's get on with it. It's— what's the time? 20 to 9. We're gonna, we're gonna get this one through today in 2 and a half hours. I know we will. Right, Cal the Spa. He says, "Hi Lawrence, what are your thoughts about doing a shook swarm at this time of year? I have two fresh frames of comb that I can use to get the queen going." Hmm. So shook swarm on a nice big strong colony at this point of the year, no problem. But only do it if you need to do it. Only if there's like a reason to do it. Like maybe you've concerned that you've got a few cells that don't look very good, and the bee inspector says that you should do it, or you're sitting on tons and tons and tons of horrible black comb. I wouldn't just do it just for the sake of it. Maybe you've got like really bad chalkbrood that a new queen hasn't fixed, then go for it, do a shook swarm. I would say minimum, you're looking at at least like between a minimum of 6 or 7 frames of bees, I would say is a good— you wouldn't want to do it any less than that at this time of the year. And I would do the recommendation that I said before, shook swarm as well, is just get the queen, cage the queen, and then let all of the brood emerge, and then shook swarm. As opposed to, like, it never sits well with me burning all the brood, just thinking, well, I could have had those bees. If I'd have just caged the queen for a week or 10 days or whatever it is to get all of the, the bees to emerge out of that, and then I'll just burn the frames, the empty frames. Surely that's a much better word than shook swarm. Um, the only thing that I'm slightly concerned about there, you say I have 2 fresh frames of comb that I can use to get the queen mowing. So for me, that completely negates the, the benefit of a shook swarm. I would just shook swarm brand new equipment or scorched or cleaned equipment, brand new frames and foundation. Don't put any frames of found— I don't put any frames of comb in there because, you know, Sod's Law, it'll be the frame of comb in there that gives you the disease. So I would have— if you're going to do it, do it properly and have a nice clean break. Uh, I'm not going to pronounce that name, but P, I'll call you P. He says, hi Lawrence, how do you find using the Abello 12-frame hive? Still need double brood. I'm still, I, I'm still confused if I should go for DN4 or 14 by 12. Um, I'm, I'm a bit confused by that, so I'll answer it. I'll answer it kind of as we go. Right, the Abello 12-frame hive— really like the Abello 12-frame hive. I do wish that all of my hives were the Abello 12-frame hive, and I, I get it doesn't breed complacency really. It does, because I picked— I picked the Abella 12-frame hive up and I can like walk along with like 5 or 6 boxes stacked up and they're just like rebated so they don't fall over anywhere. And then I pick up other boxes and they're just off level and I drop them and I think, ah, not rebated. I do— I much prefer the rebated system. I know some people say crush more bees, but I don't find that it crushes more bees. Um, the 12-frame hive, I'd say the fact that it's 12-frame versus 11-frame and a dummy board in the wooden variant isn't— it's— I don't want to say it's like a sales tactic or ploy, it's not. You get an extra frame, but the extra frame doesn't make a huge amount of difference overall. So I would still double brood the 14x12, uh, the, uh, the standard national 12-frame. That's what— that's what got me there, the 12-frame variant. But the versus 14x12, that is the big question. Because I just— when, when 14 by 12 works on a single brood system, it's very neat and it's cheaper because you need to buy one box. But I just always come to, what, what do I do with my boxes of 14 by 12 when they start to swarm? And unless you've got loads of nucs on hand to make up nucs with the splits and the cells that are in there, you do become a little bit snookered. So I just like double brood because you can demaray them. and it makes it loads easier. And demerays, I like demeray with the Abelo boxes with the entrances as well. So it's personal preference. The bit, should I go for DM4? DM4 is just like the Deep National, um, 4-variant frame, not a self-spacing frame. But I think you're saying it is, should you go with the Deep National, should you go with the 14x12? I prefer the Deep National. Hello Lawrence, I've got a question. I have a double brood box and a super on, but the bees are not drawing comb out in the super. Any ideas what I can do? Thank you, and I hope you're doing good. Very good, thanks, Jean. So all I would say is that the bees will draw out the super when they're ready to draw out the super. All comes down to how many bees are in the box. There needs to be enough bees to fill the super, or at least kind of get them up there to start working it. If there's not enough bees in the beehive, they won't work it. There's nothing that you can do to kind of speed that up. You wouldn't want to feed them because there's a good flow on at the moment, and you need good nice warm temperatures. So I would just, I would be patient, sit on your plans, and, uh, and they will do it when the time is right. Uh, also says, introduced mated queen to one of my queenless hives using— queenless hives using— and went there a week later to check if she was accepted but found the bees balling the queen. So I've caged her and put her in a different nuc and put in new cage. Um, with the new queen, what should I do next time going there on Wednesday to open the tabs? So sometimes they do just ball queens for no reason. I, I had a video, I did a video, um, well, I think it was part of the live stream that I did at one of the apiaries there. And you see the queen that I posted on one of the shorts today, not actually splodge that one, I think it's splidge, um, one of the other variants. There were 3 that were shocking how badly they were painted, but this one wasn't splodge. And I put her in, in a cage, and I went to go and check up a week later, and there was a thick, you know, big thick ball at the bottom. And I was like, I knew that was gonna happen. And I managed to go in, and you always find the queen alive in the ball. It's weird, isn't it? You think like you'd find them dead, but she was she was alive. So I got her, put her in a cage, scraped a bit of honey from that hive to block the the cage because I just had an empty cage with me. And then I was like, "I'm gonna do this queen." I put it back in. So I just put it back in the same hive and went back, and they'd accepted her. So it's strange. They just sometimes they're just like, "Yeah, get her, ball her," and then they're just like, "Yeah." Just fine. You can be our queen now. So it's is a bit of a weird one. I think with with different genetics, they sometimes don't take kindly to queens like that, and they'll they'll try and ball them. But this one was fine. And so what would you do next time? I I would expect you'd go to the the new nuc, and they'll just accept her, and everything will be all good and fine. Chick Jean says good afternoon from California. Hi, Jean. Right. Next question. Ben Davis says hi, Lawrence. I inspected my beehive today, but only the top super. I did this as you mentioned in your live video. ago, you don't really need to inspect at this time of the season. Was I correct to do this? So there's no correct and incorrect in beekeeping. Some people quite enjoy their inspections and just like, I don't want to not inspect my bees just because I don't have to. And I know plenty of people that have lost swarms this week as well, so it's not foolproof. It's not a case of you're not going to lose swarms, but when you're inspecting like hundreds of colonies won't go in and inspect at this time of the year because they'll say, well, I might lose, I might lose 2 out of 100, and I'd prefer to save the time doing something else. Like, 2 swarms, not going to cost me a huge amount of money. So that's all I do, that's all I do at this point of the year is I just go, go to the top box, check what the top box is like. If the top box is empty, great, don't do anything, just put the roof back on. If the top box has got 1 or 2 frames drawn out, I'll leave them. if the top box is, say, like half drawn out or 60% drawn out with bees in, I'll give them another box, and that's all I do. It's brilliant. And then you go to the next hive, and then you find they've swarmed. But that's not— I did lose a swarm from a nuc today, and I knew that I was going to lose it, and I just— it's been such a busy week with school holidays, and I was thinking kind of like on Monday this week, I really need to go and get that nuc because it is definitely going to swarm. and finally managed to get there this morning and capped, capped queen cells. None that had emerged, so she probably went like Thursday, Friday, something like that, which was a bit annoying because it was a really nice queen. And I, I knew they were going to do it, and I just should have got there before, given them space. So they will swarm if they've not got enough space, but if you've got young queens like this year's queens, it's unlikely, I think, that they swarm this point in the year. if they've got a full brood box to go at and plenty of space upstairs. Hi Peter, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, planning to overwinter a large demerared colony on double brood. My top box is a brood box now full of stores. There's more to this. Is it best to put this under the actual brood box? Not so much. Um, so yeah, so, so what you could do, Peter, you can, you can do that quite early, do that manipulation now. It's called cordon adare. to adhere that box, take it underneath the brood nest, bruise— I would bruise all of the stores, and then put another super on top, and then move it up. But if you want to keep it as that's the overwintering configuration, I would wait until you take all of your supers off, and I'd actually put it on top. So let's get the whiteboard out. I'm not going to use yellow because yellow is really difficult to see. So you're probably in a configuration kind of like this at the moment, which is brood and then super, super. You might have more supers than that. And then that is like— it's a brood box, but brood box with honey. So you could, uh, take your supers off. So your brood box is going to stay there, and what you're suggesting is taking the brood box with honey, putting it underneath there. I had, you know, I had someone message me, um, a screenshot of part of my stream where I had drawn a bee, and they were just in hysterics. And it did look quite funny. He said, you draw like a 6-year-old. Um, so what you're suggesting is putting the brood with the honey down there, and if you do that, just put some more supers on and they'll move the honey up. So that's fine. And then you could overwinter kind of once you've taken the super off in that configuration, but you basically just have an empty box down there. Because they've moved the honey up. So what I would suggest, if you're going to do it and you don't want to do that there, I would take all of your supers off and then I would just put that box on top. And then that's going to give you the configuration that the bees like at winter, which is brood nest at the bottom with the honey at the top. And then what they'll do is over winter they'll move up, and that's what they do. They don't like— at the end of the year, they don't like loads of honey underneath them because it's really hard for them to defend. and they won't go and sit down underneath it. It really messes with the bees if you, if you do it that way around. So that, that's the good winter configuration if you don't want to do the nadir. There we go, first use of the whiteboard. Uh, take that away. Okay, I'm just going to remove this other one while I remember, get the bandwidth good. All right, next question. Was the queen still as— uh, wait, what does it say? Was the queen as was a tiny remnant of paint still on it. Oh, sorry, I— there you go, missed the first bit. Right, Hi Lawrence, last time I told you out of 2 queens I had a failed introduction, or at least I thought I did. Next inspection I found eggs, larvae, and queen. See, my— seems I missed it as the paint's gone. So then your follow-up is, was still the queen as a tiny remnant of paint still on it? Okay, so I'm glad you put the follow-up on there because I was going to say very, very often the case there is that it's not the queen and it's a different queen, and that's the reason that you couldn't find the queen. But it's good that there is— you've got the evidence because there's a little bit of paint still on it. So I— we do get that occasionally, that there— and you know what's probably happened there? They probably bored the queen, probably said no, or she's got into a bit of a, a bit of a ruckus somewhere, and that's why the paint has come off. Um, but it's good. There you go, you've got your queen, you've got, you've got the eggs, you've got larvae. So it wasn't a failed introduction. So that, that is very good, good to hear. Uh, uh, good evening, Adam. How's it going? Carol O'Donnell says, my Buckfast Queen has gone through 3 hives this year. She's been in third for 6 weeks and covered 9 frames of CB brood and both end frames full of honey. Thursday put second brood box on due to no more room in main brood box. Was I right? Um, so I did, I did a video on this, but this week saying kind of like, is it right to double brood? And I know that was quite speculative, not speculative, but like an ambiguous title. But they got this YouTube and you've got to be a little bit ambiguous. But what I was talking about in that video was, is it right to double brood at this point in the year? And my answer was kind of no, I don't think it is right to brood, double brood at this point in the year. Now it's not going to do any, it's not going to harm your bees. All it is, it's just a very efficient, sorry, inefficient way to collect honey from your bees, because all the brood nest is doing at the moment is it's contracting, and it is noticeable. Now you'll start to see frames, you'll start to see frames with like bands of honey around it, you'll start to see the outer frames in your brood box just being covered in pollen or covered in stores. And if you put another brood box on, they'll just fill it with honey, and they might, they might move up and lay in there and then just abandon the bottom box and leave that. as just empty space, but there's no, there's no way that you're going to turn 8 frames of brood to 16 frames of brood at this point in the year. It's just not physically possible. The bees won't do it. So I always just think at this time of the year, all you need to worry about is just giving your bees sufficient space in the supers, and that's probably what I would have done in that situation there. Even with a big prolific colony, just give them the space upstairs in the supers, and then they should be, should be fine downstairs in the brood box. I can have a cup of tea, a sip of tea even, my relaxed pucker tea I'm on today. All right, Matt Burrows says, hi Lawrence, I'm on a commercial setup and have 15 hives. Um, now some are double brood, most are single. How would you reduce the doubles to singles to overwinter? Um, so unless, unless you had a good reason to do it I probably wouldn't. Um, get a whiteboard out. So if you've got them at the moment, they're on doubles, and you've obviously got like all your supers up there. I would just leave them like that to overwinter because it is a nice overwintering configuration, and you've probably got like a bunch of bees covering all this area like this now, loads of brood, loads of bees, and then As they get ready for winter, you'll probably end up with— oh, let's get, let's get crazy and go colors as well— probably end up with like honey there, and then like this is brood. So that's like, let's say that's September, something like that. Um, now if you start messing around with them at this point, you're thinking, well, what, what do you take away there? Do you take away this top box that's like brood Half brood, half honey, or do you take away the bottom box? There's loads of brood. You've got to go in and you're probably like taking frames and moving stuff around. Where if you just wait and like fast forward this hive through to like March, every single colony will end up exactly like this, which is that whole bottom box there. Let me just like scrub everything out. That's just empty. And spell it. And then the bees are kind of just like up there somewhere. And then there's the honey. It's kind of like around the edges a bit. So that's kind of where you're going to end up in March. So then if you want to go from doubles to singles, you just take the box out in March. And it's like a really, really easy time to do it. And the bees have done all the hard work for you. They've just manipulated themselves into a single box because that is what bees do over winter. They just move up. So that's what I would do. I wouldn't do the manipulation now. I would do it in March. Just let them overwinter. If you were— if you are going to do it now, I would say the easiest way to do it would just be— oh, I don't know, I don't— I probably wouldn't even recommend it. No, if you've got them on double brew, just leave them on double brew. Do it in March. Loads easier. There we go. That's my recommendation. Uh, evening, John. Good work as always. Uh, KTM Machinery, hello. Uh, threw me a bit there. Uh, says, my bees swarmed. I put, uh, I put in a new queen and now they've killed her and replaced her with the new one, but they're not producing honey. Is that normal? Um, so bees do— bees are stupid. They do stupid things. They don't read the books. They just do what they want. But It's, it's completely understandable what they've done, which is your bees have swarmed, so you put in a new queen, but there's probably already a virgin in there. So when bees swarm, produce loads of swarm cells, queen goes off when the swarm cells are capped over-ish, give or take a couple of days, and then loads of virgins emerge, have a little bit of a fight, and then a few days later there's generally one left, but can be multiple virgins left in the colonies for a long time. And then beekeepers come along and look inside the colony and say they're just like, there's, there's no brood, they must be queenless, which I, I understand is, um, a natural assumption to make, but it's just there's a virgin and it's not mated. So then you put the mated queen bee in and the virgin says, no chance, this is my colony, kills that queen. And then you've said they've replaced her with a new one. Um, Okay, but they're not producing honey. Is that normal? So they probably just dwindled down. So when they swarm, they take out so many bees. Your prime swarm, maybe 50 or 60% of the bees are gone. If you've not knocked that down to a single cell, they'll cast further out. So you've probably got like 20 or 30% of the bees left, and then it looks like they're not producing honey. You're thinking, come on, get up, get up to the supers, but there's just not enough bees there. So the way to fix that is like time machine— sorry, But it's to stop the bees swarming. Stopping bees swarming is the best way to get loads of honey, and it's like more bees, more honey. So sorry, Will, it's not, it's not really an answer, um, but next year just got to be on top of the swarming. Uh, Evening guys from sunny Yorkshire. Is, is the best weather, isn't it? I love sunny weather. You can tell I'm in a really good mood. Great sunny weather is the best. Channel member says, hello Lawrence, similar question to others. I added a new queen to a queenless hive and opened the tab on the cage last Sunday I inspected an hour ago. I couldn't find the queen. Bees bit calmer. Is there more? Does this mean the queen is okay? So I wouldn't. I would not read into any temperament thing to say whether there's a queen in there or not, because you can go into the you can go to the bees on like a rainy day and they're miserable, and a sunny day and they're wonderful. Or you can go in on a sunny day when the flow stopped and they snap at you and go horrible. So there's so many other factors other than the queen that's there, but going in and not finding the queen doesn't mean that the queen is not there. So give it, give it like a couple of weeks, 2 or 3 weeks, to see whether you get eggs in there. And if you, if you've got another frame of eggs that you can add in, there's no problem adding in a frame of eggs now. It's not the same as doing it when you're halfway through the introduction and you're worried that it's going to mess up the introduction. doing it afterwards, after the queen is out, you can add a frame of eggs in. If they draw out emergency cells, you know there's not a queen and it failed. If they don't draw out emergency cells, then you know it went well and the queen should still be there. So that would be my recommendation. Um, I just— people liking the cap, isn't it? All nice cap. Give me, give me, give me the cap. People want these caps. Um, but people also moaned about how expensive they were. But yeah, I found one, gonna give it away. Good evening, it was lovely to see Ivy enjoying the bees. I bet you were so proud of her. I'm always so proud of her. She absolutely loved it, she really did. And she has— I've set her up her own YouTube channel. Um, she is desperate for me to print this, so she's like, print this for me, Dad. It's called Ivy and Lily Explore. That's what she wants to call her YouTube channel. She loves it. She wants to like design the logo and stuff like that. She is dead cute. But I think it's, I think it's quite nice. She's got to have a YouTube channel. Um, How we doing? Says, hey Lawrence. Says, hi Lawrence, what are your thoughts on extracting out brood frames? No varroa treatment, of course. So absolutely no problem extracting out brood frames. It— no varroa treatment, of course. It In terms of the honey, it's fine. There's no contamination. In terms of the usability and the ease of extracting, it is pretty difficult, not gonna lie. Not, not, not terrible, but it's just, you know, if you get like a nice, uh, new wax super— not even a new wax super, new wax supers are a little bit more difficult than old wax supers— but a nicely capped super with the wax protruding, you get your knife on it and you just cut down and it's all like really nice and easy. When you do that on a brood Generally, the cappings don't protrude as much if you— because if you're running them on like a DN4 spacing, so you've not put them in castellations. But then also when you're cutting through, you've got to cut through all the cocoons as well. So unless you've got like a really sharp knife, even with a really sharp knife, it's quite difficult to cut through them. So it's just quite time-consuming, and then you don't get as much honey out of them. And then they are— you, you couldn't get— once you've extracted it out, you couldn't get something that wax moth would want more. than that frame, which is like a wet honey frame with loads of old cocoons in it. So be warned. And even putting that in with like some other supers, they'll just go through the lot of them. That is the perfect thing for them. But definitely fine to extract, without a doubt. Do you know what Richard used to do? I'll tell you, I'll tell you what Richard used to do. He didn't like extract— I'll draw a picture just because I can. Um, so he used to run all wooden nationals like that, and he'd have like— imagine they're all the frames. I'm not going to be— I'll try and get the right amount. He always used to get 12 frames. Is that 12? 1, 2, 3— no, 10. Miles off. I know, I know the wooden national is square. This is like a Langstroth one, isn't it? For anyone, for anyone listening on the podcast, I'm drawing a box with 12 frames in and not being able to count 12. There we go, sorry, I've got to get accurate. So a box with 12 frames in, that's what Richard used to have. He always used to squeeze them in brood box, and then to overwinter, he would— he'd let them kind of like naturally, um, he never, he never used to feed. Richard never ever used to feed his single brood box bees when he had his Hereford Vikings because they were so frugal that he didn't feel the need. to feed. But what, what he did was he wasn't— he didn't like to overwinter with 12 frames in there, so he used to come along and just take out those 2 side frames like that and extract the honey out of them, which is, which is fine because they've not been treated with Apivar. And, um, and overwinter like that with like a gap there and there. And that's what, that's what he did for years and years and years, and he doesn't do it anymore. And I said, why don't you do it anymore? And he said, oh, it's just Buckfast bees, they need, they need the feed. So he does feed now, and he, he leaves the full 12 frames in there. But when he had the Hereford Vikings, that was, um, that was what he did. And you can imagine on a, on like a big scale, if you probably got 3— he had like 300 or 400 production colonies at that point. If you're pinching 2 frames out of each, you've got 800 frames, DM4 frames. It's like, it's like, what, 150 Boxes? No, I don't know what we're talking about. No, it's 800 frames, so it's like 80 boxes, isn't it? 80 boxes of deep, deep nationals. It's quite a lot of honey doing it, uh, so I can see why you did it. Uh, The Morris Homestead says, hey Lawrence from New York. Hello, how's it going? Jay's SPF Reef Tank says, evening Lawrence, great to see Ivy in the videos. The 5 Buckfast and 1 Caucasian I had from you last week were all slow release and accepted. Not all are laying yet, but one of them has a frame and a half of national already laid up. How long before I can clip the queens, do you reckon? So as soon as they're laying eggs, I would go clipping them. Should be fine. Good to hear they've all been accepted. I'm sure they'll all be laying very, very soon. Just moved a 5-frame nuc into a full-size national hive this week. I filled the remaining space with frames of foundation. Should I feed these bees sugar syrup to get them to help draw out the foundation? So if your weather is like my weather for the next 3 or 4 days, which is 24, 25 degrees, like really sunny, I wouldn't feed them— I wouldn't feed them sugar syrup just yet because it's probably a bit of a waste at the moment when there's such a nice natural flow on. But I would— I'd kind of play it by ear and see what happens because you might get to next week and they've just drawn out all the frames anyway. But if it goes, if it goes rainy, then I would, I'd get some, I'd get some feed into them just to get them to draw them out. I wouldn't go wild with it. There's still loads of time left of the season. You— if I had to hedge my bets, I would say if you didn't feed them, they'd fill all of that by the end of the year easily if it's a good 5-frame nuc. So don't feed them just for the sake of feeding them. I'd sit tight and see, see how it goes. Bill Todd says, good evening, bud. Loving the apiary chats. We've just extracted some honey but have left it for too long and it's become too wet. How would you dry it? So that's, that's interesting. I've never heard of honey becoming too wet from being left too long. Um, so honey, honey is hygroscopic, uh, which means that it attracts moisture. So if you left it somewhere that was very moist it would, it would attract moisture and would get too wet. But I've never, I've never heard that. Um, so when you extract honey, you obviously need to take account of the moisture content of the honey. Needs to be below, I believe, 20% to even be classed as honey, unless I've got that wrong. I think— I'm pretty sure it is. I think it needs to be below 20% to be classed as honey and below 23% for heather honey, something like that. A normal good ripe honey will be like around 17%. 17% when you get the refractometer on it, sometimes a lot less. So I would, I would potentially be testing it first, getting a reading, getting it all stirred up and getting a little smidgen on the refractometer and seeing what the percent moisture is. And if it's, if it's kind of like below 20%, I probably wouldn't do a huge amount. If it's way above, if it's like 22, 23%, I'd be looking to do something with it. And what you need to do is— our first thing I need to do is get my little drawing pen up. You will be amazed how much moisture you can take out of honey using a dehumidifier, and all you need is just a nice clean room. There's like a sealed room, you don't want like dust and stuff floating around in this room, so a nice clean sealed room, something like a bathroom or a kitchen or something like that, and you want to get— so you can do it buckets. You do buckets. Draw a bucket if I can. So you've got a bucket like that, and you just take the lid off, and you've got your honey in there. And then you just got like a dehumidifier over here and just turn the dehumidifier on in the room and let it go. And you can put like a bit of muslin over the top like that if you're worried about any dust getting into it. And just every like couple of hours, just stir the honey. Just like stir it up a little bit, and you'll be amazed because all that happens is the moisture kind of comes out, just like naturally evaporates out. And then because the air is so dry, all the moisture gets collected up over in the dehumidifier, and then more comes out. Now if you want to really go for this, go wild for it, you can get these trays— make sure they're food-grade trays— that are quite like long and deep like that, and then you pour your honey in and then you end up getting this much bigger, like, surface area. So I think you can get them 600 by 600, and that would really, really speed it up. And it's amazing. I did, I did this with heather honey once where I got heather honey off and it was like 24%, and heather honey's renowned for fermenting, so I didn't want it. So it was 24%, and what I did— because sometimes with heather honey as well, it's not all fully capped over, so like a lot of it's capped over— but what I did was I uncapped And then put it back in the boxes with a— you see my steel drawing? Here I am. So basically uncapped it and then put it back in the supers like that. And then I had this big like stainless steel tank underneath just to like catch any drips. So none of it's— it's heather honey, so not much falls out anyway, but just something to catch the drips. And then run the dehumidifier, and I got it down from 24% to 15%. And you know what? It was the worst thing I ever did because it was almost unprocessable. Like heather honey is really difficult to process anyway, but when you get the moisture content down so much, it like almost turned to like proper thick jelly. It was nice, it was amazing honey, it was just incredibly difficult to filter. But you can, you can manipulate the moisture content of honey both inside the combs and outside the combs relatively easy. It's much best just to get the bees to do it for you though and not extract honey before it's the correct moisture content. But I've never, I've never heard that we've just extracted some honey and left it too long and it's become wet. How would you dry it? it, I would say the moisture content was not right and it's just kind of risen to the surface. Um, sorry, yeah, Colin had written the rest of that there. Here we go. Do you clip breeder queens and how long do you leave them in pushing cages? Thanks. So we do, we clip, we clip all our queens, especially the breeder queens, but we clip all of our queens and I I really don't like pushing cages. Not a fan of pushing cages, not at all. I just, for all of our queens, I just use standard method, hopelessly queenless, and then I just use the postal cages and I find it really, really good. If you are using a pushing cage, I would say once the brood is, once her own brood is emerging from that pushing cage and she's got, you know, a good 100 bees of her own brood in there, you should be good to remove it. But all I would say is when you remove it, you'll probably see that there's bees coming in and out of the underside of it anyway. They've just like ripped a bit of it out. Not a fan of pushing cages. Dan Brooks says, also, what have I done wrong as my brood boxes are full of honey and not supers? This year's tested me. What was the rest of yours, Dan? Um, you're saying, okay, yeah, the bees are calmer. So, so when, um, when you, when you requeen, when your queen goes off, if the bees swarm, they, they do, they just backfill. So, so whenever bees Whenever bees come back with nectar into the hive, they dump it in the brood box. They don't go up into the supers and put it up there. They're just like, yeah, first open cell, yeah, that'll do, get rid of it. And then when you go to the hive overnight and you hear that, that's the bees fanning off the honey and moving it upwards. And they do, I see this regularly. If you go into a colony at like 8 o'clock at night and do an inspection, every single cell in the brood nest is full of nectar, just like unripe nectar, and if you shake it out, it's just liquid. And then if you go at 8 o'clock in the morning, it's gone. Every day it's gone. They just spend the whole night moving it upwards. But, and, and the reason, the reason that they move it upwards is, I guess, there is a— it's probably like pheromone-driven. So they're thinking, well, the queen is here, we know she's gonna lay, so we need to make sure that she's got somewhere to lay. And, and they like to set themselves up like that with brood at the bottom and honey at the top. And then when you take the queen out, there's obviously not that pheromone there, or not that demand for the bees to move the honey upwards, so they just leave it down in the brood nest. But as soon as you get the queen back in there, as long as the frames and the stores are open, they do gradually move it back up. If they're capped over, you need to bruise them all, bruise them all, and then put them like central. They will clear it back up for you, but it is annoying. But I see it all the time. Uh, right. Oh wow, I have just scrolled down to the bottom and I can't believe how many comments there are. Whoa, that is, uh, I'm gonna have to catch up and stop talking for absolutely ages about one thing. Right, let's go quick. Um, where'd I get to? Oh, sorry, I don't know why it jumps off like that. Here we go, right. Another question, I let one of my hives naturally mate and the queen is really black and laying well. Do light bees and dark bees tend to get on together? So they're fine, I don't think they particularly hate each other that much. Some people would maybe lead you to believe that they do, but in this, in the same hive, I don't, I don't think they're that, they're that fussed. really. You do find that darker bees will try and reject lighter queens, but I think you get the opposite as well. It's not a case of lighter bees are just like, yeah, whatever. I do, I do think if you had like a full Buckfast colony and you give them a really dark, like, AMM queen, they'd probably reject that in, in a similar fashion, or at least be not as straightforward. Um, but it's, it is interesting. Sometimes you find when you get open mating— I do like it— you get like orange, real orange bees and real black bees in the same hive, and I don't think they— I don't think they're that fussed. They just get on with it because they've basically got— they're basically sisters. They are sisters still. It just— they just look different. Uh, right, Would you recommend extracting honey later than normal as the weather has finally picked up? Ben, you are going to absolutely love next weekend's video. I'll leave it at that. Um, the answer is no, I wouldn't. But the video goes into more detail. Hi Lawrence, have you ever used Honey Bee Gone? If so, what's your thoughts? So I've tried a number of different— it's like a herbal, um, like a fume board release, isn't it, to get your bees to move up? Maybe not a fume board, but it's, uh, no. So I've tried a couple of them before, but I just think, do you know what the easiest way to get bees out of supers is? Is just put them on castellations and just use a petrol blower. And it's brilliant. It's so quick and the bees just don't really care. And you can turn up one— turn up on day 1 and clear all the supers and just put them back on, or like put the boxes back on, put your feeders back on. You haven't got to go and do it in 2 stages. Brilliant. So that is my preferred method and that's the only one that I would use. Colin Beacom says that one, we did that one before, answered that one already. Good evening. Thanks, sir. Sharon Smith says, is there often pollen amongst the honey in supers? So I'll get my whiteboard out for this one. So bees generally set themselves up like brood, and then pollen, and then like stores, and I know the stores will just go up. That's like, that is pretty textbook, and it's not always like that, that's generally what it's like. So if you, if you're on like a single brood like that with a super on, so you can see that's a super, you'll often get something like this, which is brood. And obviously the brood can't go up any higher because you've got the queen excluder in place. But then you'll get pollen, like a pollen ring like that, obviously not outside the hives. So that first super, like the the bottom half of it is always liable to get a bit of pollen in it, and it is annoying, and it does make extracting very, very difficult. But the only, the only way to deal with it is to just not have single brood boxes like that and just double brood. And then if you double brood, you'll often get like the brood like that, or a little bit less, but then there's like enough space for them to put the pollen around there, and then it doesn't— you still might still get a little bit up in the supers, but generally you don't get anywhere near as much up if you double brood. So the answer is keep a bigger brood box and it will stop it. With the poor weather-wise, really surprised just to, uh, 40 pounds of honey. Oh, you just took 40 pounds of honey off 2 hives? Yeah, so the weather's really picked up, really good weather, and, and there's the, the ground is moist so the trees are yielding really well. Um, everything's in, in fine form and nick at the moment. Hi Lawrence, is it too late to get a mated queen from an egg currently? Made a split and wanted to get an open mated queen from So no, we're still grafting at the moment, should be fine. I think everything's pushed back a little bit. There's still— I've got still loads of drones in my colonies, so all good. Good evening. Hi, David. Hi, I'm new to your channel and have 2 questions. When you get your bees down to one brood box, what do you do with supers that have not been capped, and how do you store super frames with drawn comb? Right, so supers That have— so super frames that have not been capped. So I categorize— this is a channel member exclusive I did the other day. So I, um, I'll go through. I use like an 80% rule with my supers. So if a frame, a single frame, is 80% capped, it's good for extraction. If a box has 80% frames fully capped, the whole box is good for extraction. And then I'll take all of the really like If I'm shaking frames and there's nectar coming out, I'll take all of the frames individually out and put them on a single box, and I'll probably adhere them underneath the colony and let the bees just take that honey up into the brood box. But there's, you know what, there's not many that get left like that. I tend to be able to extract the vast majority of the honey that's in the supers. Storing super frames with drawn comb, for me, is really easy. I'll draw it for you. I take an upturned roof like that, and then I put the first super in, and then I have the second super. And then what I like to do is I put like a Correx board in the middle there, and I'll tell you why in a minute. And then I put another 2 supers on, and then I put this overturned roof like that, and then I ratchet strap the whole thing up really, really tight. And then I'll go along and I'm looking to see if there's any holes. If there's any holes, I will put a bit of tape over them. And then what you can do as well, if you, if you want, is you can just wrap the whole thing in like food-grade plastic as well. And then, and then I store them outside. And the reason I store them outside is because I want them to get frozen. So I don't use any kind of like chemical treatments to stop wax moth, but I rely— in Wales we can do this— I rely on getting like a cold snap just to kill all wax moth, all eggs, all everything. So if you've got somewhere, the best place for them is kind of like outside but out of the rain. So like a— if you've got like a— you see like the big farm buildings that just haven't got any walls but have got a roof, somewhere like that, up off the floor, perfect place to keep supers. The reason I put the Correx in the middle is because if you do get wax moth in, then they can eat through plastic, they can eat through Correx, but it slows them right down and generally confines them. It just means that you just lose— you lose 2 boxes as opposed to losing all 4 boxes. But that's, that's how I store all of ours, and it works very well. Can I ask how you manage your uncapped super frames once removed from hive for varroa treatments? Um, say that again. So can I ask how you manage your uncapped super frames once removed from hives for varroa treatments? I'm not sure I understand that. How do you mean it for varroa treatments? We, our varroa treatments that we use don't ever come into contact with any of the super frames, and they're not allowed to into contact with any of the super frames, so they're— they just go off before we put any of our treatments in. So I think, I think that covers it. I'm not, not 100% sure if, um, if you're saying about what I said there about nadiring there, then we just, um, mark the box and then melt out those frames. But like I say, out of hundreds of supers, I would say you're talking about 1 or 2 do per year, and I try and avoid it completely where possible. Thank you for the 3 new queens. After failed matings, a hive wanting to instantly supersede a new queen, the options are becoming limited. Wonder how much impact it will have with colony losses over winter. Um, so nice fresh new well-mated young queens will have a dramatically positive impact, I would say, on overwintering success, which would be good. Honeybee says, is your daughter enjoying beekeeping? Her suit looks great. So she, oh, she loves it. She's not talking about it. Do you know my favorite thing that she comes out with? I better check she's not listening. Is, is her little facts that she comes out with that just like sometimes I shouldn't say it because she watches some of these live streams. So sorry, Ivy, if you're watching this and getting offended, um, but I gotta be careful what I say. So she, she says stuff that isn't necessarily 100% true but I'm not gonna like correct her. So she was saying something about like that the wasps getting stinging the bees and stealing their honey, but then the bees go back and do it to the wasps as well. And I just thought, oh, it's brilliant. I just want her to think and believe that. But her suit was very cool. Yeah, BB Wear sent me up the suit, which is very kind of them, and it was a cool suit. I'm so glad today I did put 2 bought queen cells in a 4-frame split I did on the 26th of June, and it has new eggs, lovely babies. There's nothing quite like it, is there, doing— putting cells in or putting queens in and getting eggs at the end of it. It's brilliant. Buzz Stings and Bee Juice says, I've made a few of your underfloor entrance hives. Seen as the frames are now closer to the floor, do I have to add bee space to the top, and is it best to have the frames running back to front instead? So warm way or cold way, I don't think it makes a massive difference. I, I've always preferred the warm way, so from running side to side. In terms of bee space, it does The ones that I built are for National Hive, so they are bottom bee space, which means that you don't need to put a rim around them. But if you're building a Langstroth one, the underfloor entrance will have a rim around it. I won't, I won't draw it, but it will need to have an additional rim because Langstroth is top bee space, so it needs the space underneath. So you will need to put a rim on it, but they are good floors. Um, Lee, I'm guessing you're saying about the nuc. It was £54.99. Uh, Julian Lawley says, hi Lawrence, where do you get your second brood box for poly nuc box poly? Where do I get them? I, I get all of mine from Abello now, so the licensed ones. Very good. Uh, Matt Burrows said, will that nuc that you put up at the beginning of the stream for commercial brood frames, do you know? So I'm, I'm pretty sure it's just national they're doing it for. Uh, UK Honey Marketing Board says, good Wonderful people. Good evening to you too, John Sylvester. Good evening to you, Lawrence, and your family. Thank you so much for the queens. Are they the Norwegian ones you mentioned in the full apiary inspection video? So if they say BGS on them, then yes, they are. Uh, Mick Hoyle says the new nuc from Old Castle Hives looks great. Ian said that it doesn't need painting, including the feeder. That I really like. Indeed, I, I, I don't know what I like that, but I quite like the look of a painted hive. As well. So it'd be interesting to see how they take paint, but it's definitely a positive if you've not actually got to paint them. But I'd be interested to see, you know, what, what the difference is, because I know the difference between painting like an EPS nuke, a polystyrene nuke, and not painting it. It is the difference between it lasting like 30 or 40 years versus maybe like 5 years, 10 years. It's quite a big difference in the actual amount of time that it is going to be around for. Uh, so yeah, I'd probably still paint them anyway, but it's nice to think that they wouldn't need painting. I just finished a hive inspection here in VA— Vancouver? No, Virginia something, sorry. Everything looked great, lots of brood, larva, and eggs in 2 deep brood boxes. Even spotted the queen laying a few eggs. Excellent, good to hear. Glyn says, the Italian I bought from you a couple of months ago seems to have a twin turbocharger fitted. Eggs everywhere. The Italians are very, very keen to lay the brood, aren't they? It's good. B Folk says, it's been beautiful today. I've lost about half a stone today in sweat, but wow, it's been beautiful. I hope you've not been moaning about it being too hot. I know you won't have been. Uh, John Sylvester says, exactly, how can they moan about the weather? We had no spring really. I'm way behind on these comments, but it, but it is true. Oh dude, sorry. Julian says, I use BS Honeybees 2-in-1 and would like a second box. So the second box is for the nucs, they're the Mazemore ones. But if you're buying second boxes from Mazemore for the BS Honeybees ones, you need to trim the runner because they're different bee spaces. And I just, I've completely mixed mine up now. I've got loads of mixed bee spaces. But it's, uh, I, I will draw that for you because loads of people get caught out on this. So if you buy the Maysmore nuc like that. I'll tell you what, I'll draw it a bit bigger actually. Perfectly square Maysmore nuc there, and then your frames are, say, there, top of your frames, and then you buy the extension box. That's the bottom of the other frames, so the gap in the middle is 8mm-ish. It's a single bee space. Now if you Let me get this right. Yeah, so if you put— if that's a BS honeybees nuc now and you put the Maysmore one on top, you end up with a double bee space. So you end up with 16mm-ish, and then the bees don't respect that 16mm, so they brace it all up together. Um, or, or they'll be— or they'll build loads of, um, burr comb. On the top of one, like, to take it down to 8mm. They do weird and wonderful things on it. But either way, you need to fix it. And the way that you fix it is they have the runners up here that are like that. And you see that? And the frame sits on the top. And then the way to fix it is that you just cut the end of the runners off. So instead of having that little nub bit there, you just cut it off with a multi-tool. And then let the frames sit directly on like that, and then you end up with the 8mm gap between the top and the bottom frames again. It goes down to 8mm, so it works. But you just need to make— if you do, if you're doing it all with Maysmore extension boxes and all BS Honeybees nucs, then it always works. But if you start mixing back to Maysmore nucs, you end up with no bee space, and then they stick it all together. So it just get— it can get a little bit messy. But if you're all on BS Honeybees nucs and all Maysmore extension boxes, then it's it works quite well. BS Honeybees did have the moulds and stuff made for them, but I just think there was like cost pressures and they didn't want to adopt the— or basically keep all the stock when the Maysmore one was so close to it, which probably, probably a good idea. Uh, Wellesbourne Honey Company says hello everyone. Uh, JK Photography, hello, how's it going? Mem Mustafa says, hi Lawrence, what do you plan to do with your drone laying queen hive that you spoke about in your vid from yesterday? Got a hive exactly the same. What should I do? Thanks. No photos of brood frames. So it does depend. I think if you're— if you've got a colony that's just like dwindled down to nothing and it's turned drone laying and you go in and it's 80% drones, I just shake them out. Like, there's not much to save there. But if you've like put in a new queen and then she's just turned drone laying straight away, just kill her, put a new queen in, you should be good. And then you know, anywhere along that timeline between the two of them there, you've got to make a decision on is the colony worth saving. If it's quite far gone, you can add a frame of brood in, just emerging brood, just to boost the number of nurse bees that are in there. But it's quite easy to get them back on track. My dog barking in the background there. Says, agree with YouTube rules, Laurence. I removed mid-roll ads from my channel and the views fell off a cliff. life. Luckily for me, it doesn't affect me, but I see your point. Yeah, so it's got to do— got to do what YouTube tells you to do. It really didn't like me not putting the ads on, so sorry everyone. Likes the whiteboard. I like it too. Uh, says, Jasper, stop it. I recently put another super on my hive. However, they have been very slow drawing out the comb, nearly 2 weeks. Is this normal? So they will just draw it out when they're ready to draw it out. It's not doing any harm having an additional Super box on there at the moment, but you just as soon as the brood that's in there emerges, you'll get an influx or an increase in the amount of bees that are there, and then they'll draw it out really, really quickly in this weather. Mem is very keen to get a hat. So if you if you come late, you've got to get your best brood frames in, and you can win Black Mountain Honey hat. They're cool hats. John Hayes says, "So I remember you mentioning about some buckfast heavily propolising. My frames are getting stuck." together between the bottom and the top. It's difficult to separate them as it pulls up the frames. So that could be a hive defect. So the, the Swienty hives, if you've got Swienty hives, they just— it's a really, really bad design, the Swienty hives. So they will propolize them down. There's no space between the top. Oh, I can draw it. Why not? Um, there's no space between The top of the bottom box's frame. So you have imagine that's like the cross section. You can see the frame sitting there like that. It's a bottom B space, so there's no frame at the top. On the this bit here, there should be like a single B space above the lugs. It's really unclear. That's a terrible drawing. But basically in Suenti, it doesn't have that. It's all filled in. And it means they just stick it down, so as soon as you lift up this box, it just pulls out all of these frames here, and it is just really, really bad. Modern Beekeeping did design and have designed something to fix it, which I think is a bit— I don't think it's ridiculous, I think it's really good that they've done it, but come on, Sweet NC, like, just fix the box, fix the mold so it's not got a problem with it. But I don't— yeah, so I don't think it's down to the bees. I think that's potentially down to the configuration Colin Beacom says, is it possible to put a full-size super onto a 6-frame poly nuc using a National Crown board with a bigger hole cut in the center? Um, probably, but I don't think they really take very well to it. But give it a go, it would be very handy to get that to work. They— most of the, most of the nucs do sell extension boxes, or if they wouldn't, you could just make yourself an extension box. Uh, John Hayes says split a colony into a nuc, now drone laying workers, should I just leave them be? Oh man, I've had it up to here with drone laying workers this year. They're driving me a little bit mad, and I think there's a lot of them about. So, so I make the judgment call on what the size of the colony is like now. So I've got one that's like 3 or 4 frames, and I was just thinking, I'm just gonna leave them be. Gonna leave them be until they dwindle away to nothing, and then I'll just close the entrance up. That is my plan. I've spoken loads about laying workers, don't like them. I've seen on Threads people opening cappings with a heat gun. What's your thought on this process? Ever tried it? So yeah, I have tried it and I thought it's a brilliant idea. The one negative is you lose all of your cappings wax, which is like a really valuable resource. And I guess you could argue that the bees don't have to create more wax each time that you're taking it off of the cappings, so there's no reclamation on it, but also it doesn't work. So you see, you see people doing it, it, it works in like really small scale. So if you've got like a 2-frame extractor, like you go do the heat gun on one, heat gun on the other side, do a couple of frames, you'll probably get a bit of the honey out doing it that. But if you're trying to heat gun like 10 frames or 20 frames or 30 frames and get them in the extractor, it just all sets again and you end up with Like some frames, some cells, sorry, that are open, some that are completely re-waxed over because the wax is just melted. And I don't know, it didn't work for me. I couldn't get it to work, and I had a really good heat gun as well. And when I was doing the heat, I was thinking, this is brilliant, this is like, oh my God, definitely gonna do this, because it worked and it was so quick. And then when I extracted it, I just couldn't get any honey out. And I tried 2 or 3 different ways of doing it and like different levels of heating it, and I just couldn't get it to work. So it does look good for Instagram though, or Threads. Um, I think that's just John tidying things up. Thanks, John. Um, Wellesbourne Honey Company, what are your thoughts on Bob Binney's video on fixing EFB with essential oils? He did some experiments with promising results. Legalities? So I think in the UK you definitely wouldn't get away with it. The VMD will be all over you saying you can't treat EFB with Whatever oil he has used. I would also question whether it whether it really was. Still like don't like to question Bob because Bob is the oracle and knows it all, and I like that he tries stuff like this. So I would never I'd never say oh that doesn't work because I've not tried it myself. But I would oh just don't know probably reserve judgment on it. I love that he's doing it. I love that he's just. Showing trying out new things. But you, you do see a lot of things that are cured with essential— cured with essential oils, um, or rhubarb leaves. And I just— does Bob use, um, antibiotics for EFB as well? I think it is, it's quite well used, isn't it, in America? So whether he's getting any knock-on effects of using that or using that previously He just— I don't think they— I don't think EFB in America is deemed to be that much of an issue. It's more of like a hindrance. It's like— and I think a lot of the big operations do just have— I just don't want to say it's rife, but it's, it's almost accepted that there will be a percentage. And it's true, if you've got a lot, you've got thousands of colonies, there's no way that you're not going to have some with EFB in. And that means that it's pretty much throughout your operation. And I just think that there's— I don't know whether it's accepted and you accept that you're going to have some colonies with it and some that are underperforming, but you've, you've got 10,000 colonies or something like that, so overall it doesn't really make a massive difference. I don't know, it would be, it'd be interesting to see. But I like, I like watching him doing stuff like that, but I've not watched that specific video. Where can we listen to your podcast? So it is available exclusively on YouTube YouTube Music. It's not on any of the other platforms because I've not worked out how to put it on there yet, but it is on— it is on YouTube Music. Uh, James Null says hello. David McDowell says, hey bud, saw you once lift a queen from a colony and put her straight into a queenless hive. Planning to do this. Should I cage her with attendants or drop her straight in? Do they readily accept? So they 100% readily accept. So the 2 caveats— one, no, 3 caveats First one though is— I've forgotten all of them now. No, I'm joking. The first one is she needs to be laying as you do it, so that the queen that you're going to pick up and take in and drop, like, she needs to be laying an egg in one hive and you pick her up and you drop her into another. Don't transport her anywhere, she needs to be in the process of laying. The second caveat is that the hive that you're putting it into needs to be hopelessly queenless, definitely hopelessly queenless. Don't do it with brood in there. Uh, don't do it with virgins running around, of course, but it needs to be hopelessly queenless. And it's not really a caveat, but I would— I wouldn't cage her. No, she needs to go in and she needs to be free. She needs to pop her in immediately like that, and it works. And I've done it loads of times and it's never ever failed. And apparently it's what, um, Brother Adam did, was like standard practice, which was like moving them around like that, picking them up, popping them in. Works every single time. Really, really good. Liam Jennings says, evening, just about to fly out of the shower and got some questions. Don't do— don't go anywhere. No worries, here all night, don't worry. Uh, oh, Carol O'Donnell says that new Nuke charges £18.99 delivery. Ouch, that's, that's not good. That's not good. Um, Hi Lawrence, sorry I'm late. Love seeing Ivy on the show. Start 'em Young, the F1 queens are still laying full frames. I can't believe it. I'm very happy. Thank you. We've had so many good comments and feedback from people just really, really happy with our queens and with our nucs this year. So it makes, it makes me a very happy man, um, when I hear people talk about how good the queens are and how good the nucs are. So thank you, Paul. Good evening, Terry. Hope you're doing well. The UK Honey Marketing Board says beekeeping is like poker. There are a set of rules, the rest is intuition, observation, experience, and skill. And bluffing. It's a lot of bluffing. That's just me, just me, sorry. But yeah, good point. Says lost a swarm this week, only had a new queen in there for 3 weeks. Maybe, maybe ran out of space. Some, some colonies just like to swarm. Yeah, if it's a new queen, you'd think Hello, what honey spinner would you recommend? I'm thinking about an 11— sorry, an electric 12-frame spinner, just not sure which one is best. So I always feel bad giving advice for honey extractors because I've not had a huge amount of experience with honey extractors other than the ones that I've used. It's not the kind of thing that you, you have a new one each year or you try out loads of different brands. So I, I've tried a grand total of either 4 So I think that's maybe more than most people. I had a really cheap 6-frame manual one that I bought off like Amazon, and it was rubbish, really rubbish. And then I had a 12-frame Abello that I didn't have for that long, which I liked, but it was just, it was just too small for me. And then I upgraded to the 24-frame with the 6-frame radial cage, which was good, but I always The only reason I bought it was to extract heather honey, and I thought, well, I'm, I'm kind of like sacrificing two things here. I'm not getting the full 30 frames, and then I'm only getting 6 frames when I do my heather. It's quite slow. So I exchanged that one, and then I've got the brand new 30-frame, which I've not even tried yet, but the 30-frame premium. But you can just tell it's a monster, and I really, really like that. So I, I'm very happy with that. I would say a lot of people say to me with the Abello stuff and the light and stuff, should you go for the premium? And I think it's really weird because on some things, like the premium makes a massive difference, extractors being one of them, and then some other things doesn't make as much of a difference, doesn't make like any difference at all. So it's on a case-by-case basis, but I do, I do like my Lysen extraction equipment. Sage and Bellflower Honeybees, he says, hello, do you find with extracting middle of August you have some honey which isn't ready for extraction? If so, then what do you do with those frames? So kind of answered that at the it before, but not, not really, no. Um, once I find, once you mix everything up, you know, it generally works. If you've got 3 supers that are 100% capped and then you've got 1 super that's got like 3 or 4 frames of capped stores in, or even like most of the frames are not capped and then a little bit of it is like really like nectary, once you've mixed that all together with the 3 supers of full, fully frapped Fully capped frames, the moisture content is always sitting around like 17, 18, max like 19%. So you get— pardon me— you get used to making a judgment call, and you can put some stuff in that you wouldn't extract on its own as a super, knowing that the fully capped ones are going to balance them out. And it just, it makes life so much easier getting all the extraction done at once and leaving the bees to it. Um, David says, when coming to extraction time and some of the frames haven't been kept, what's the procedure? That's crazy, you both asked the same question within a minute of each other. So that, that is, that is my procedure. I get them in. Oh wow, I got my first— I shouldn't, I shouldn't really post it. I just got spam coming through on Twitch, um, about cheap viewers, but I won't, I won't post it. I've been interested in taking up this as a hobby, but it's a bad time to get into what I think. So it's probably the worst time because it looks so nice and sunny outside and you think, oh, it's a good time to get into it. But if you get a nuc now, you're not going to get any honey from them. And then all you've got to do is you've got to go through the difficult, relatively difficult part of getting the bees through the winter. And I would say for like a beginner, it's probably difficult to get them through the winter well to a point where they're going to thrive next year. and they might die. So you might like invest in all the money and the kit and stuff and then they die, whereas if you just let someone like me take the risk of getting them through and then we send you a nuc, nice healthy nuc ready to go in the spring, then you— there's no risk. So it's just, it's a much, a much easier and less risky way to get it in the spring and then spend the time from now until then like learning about stuff. That's the best way to do it. I'm using National deep boxes for my brood and hoping to use them as my supers so I only have one type of box for everything. Is the National Brew Box okay to use as supers, or are they too big? So I, I like them as supers. Richard doesn't like them as supers, and we have this conversation a lot. He says they're just way too heavy. I, I once extracted a whole 14 by 12 box of honey, and that was really like— that was too heavy to move it around. And, and I, I was talking to Murray McGregor about it, and he said, you must never moan about a heavy box of honey. And I thought, that's a very good point, you must never moan about a heavy box of honey, but it was too heavy, so I gave up on that experiment. But for me, a National deep full of honey is manageable. I would say from— I'm not— I'm pretty weak, to be honest, but I would say for most people, a National deep box of honey isn't manageable, and I guess as I get a bit older, it wouldn't be manageable. For me either. The other slightly annoying things I think with extracting as well, I find shallow frames extract a lot better. I find they do a lot better in the extractor, and I guess it's because the weight is positioned kind of like further out. So there's like some weird thing going on with the centrifugal force. So the further away it is from the center, the easier it is to balance or something. I don't know. I find extracting shallow frames way easier than extracting. Deep frames. And then what was the other one I was going to say? Oh, the uncapping of them as well. I said there's 2 things. The uncapping of them is loads easier on the shallow frames, but then the clearing them— this is the big one— with a petrol blower, clearing shallow castellated frames is— I was going to say it's a breeze, but that's a bad pun. It's really easy, whereas clearing the deep ones, even if they're castellated, is really, really difficult. So that's, that's a big one for me. So we've moved back to using the shallows now. We find the shallows a bit easier. We're back to the first question, sorry. He says, I don't need to do the shook swarm yet, just wanted to get a 14 by 12. I don't like them. Shall I wait until the spring? I would wait until the spring. Let them start building up in the spring and then do it then. It's a good way to do it. But if you just want to get a 14 by 12, I would just— like, queen excluder is your friend. Just, um, you, you could potentially set yourself up like this. So what were you on? You were on— you just want to get off 14 by 12. So say you're on 14 by 12 at the moment. Oh, drawing it and not showing people. If you, if you're on 14 by 12 with some supers, what you could do is this. So take your supers off. Nice early honey extraction. Like, I'd do this now, definitely now, no later than now, and add on like a, a deep national like that, and then your feeder. And that's your winter configuration. Just let them overwinter like that. And if you do that now, they'll start drawing all this out up here, and you'll go into winter kind of with brood probably down here. And all of that there will be honey around like that. And then we'll just— like, this is September, and then we'll just fast forward to March again, and you're just— all of your bees— I'll just wipe most of it out. Sorry. You just— all your bees would just be up there just living in that top box. And then just remove your 14 by 12. Easiest way of doing it, and they'll do that like over winter for you. So that's what I would do, nice and neat. Lawrence, when you start feeding— so when do you start feeding and what do you use? Also, do you know the people's purpose of feeding bananas? Thank you. Um, brilliant. So, uh, my regime, the regime I use is I take off all the honey on the 15th of August-ish, there or thereabouts. within a few days, take it all back to the honey extraction room, go back, supers on, Apivar strips in, 1:1 sugar syrup. Not much, just because there's only a single brood box there now, maybe like a couple of litres, 2 or 3 litres, and then I just leave the bees to it. And if the weather's nice, I just leave them all the way through until kind of middle of October, 8 weeks for the Apivar, and then I'll go back in and I'll give them— I'll basically give them like an Ashworth feeder full of invert sugar syrup. That's probably about 10 liters, something like that, and that's enough for a national deep, single national deep, even for a double national, that's plenty because they would have taken loads of additional feed on anyway. The purpose of feeding bananas is— feed your bees anything, but apparently it's a really easily processable sugar for them. I just think it's like nonsense. Sorry, no-nonsense beekeeping. Don't feed your bee bananas. What's the point? Just feed them cheap white sugar. It's cheaper and way better for the bees. Um, P, just P, it's like my sister, says, Susan, would you mind expanding on the best way to replace old brood box comb, please? Um, so I'm not sure If that's directed at me, but I'll probably answer it. I answered to Susan. Would I mind expanding on the best way to replace old brood box comb, please? So you can use— you can do like a Bailey comb exchange, which is about taking out the outside ones and putting new frames in the middle and moving it out, and you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. That's quite slow. Or the way that I like to do it, just swarm them, shake it, shake them all onto— or cage the queen first, let all the brood emerge, shake them all onto brand 2 combs of foundation and then feed them after like 3 or 4 days. That's the easiest, quickest way of doing it. Channel member says, 2 new queens this year, both on the same size splits from the same hive, yet one is a full brood box and filling a super, yet the one at the side of it is struggling to get off, uh, to get above 8 frames. Any ideas why? So the same— you say the same size splits, but there's always going to be like a little bit of variation in the splits that are there. In terms of the density of the brood and the amount of bees that are actually going to emerge on it. And then the only other thing is just the quality of the queens. I know it's probably queens for me, but not all queens are mated equal, and not all queens are— not all colonies will react the same way to the climatic conditions that are outside. So that is, I guess, the fun in beekeeping, is trying to keep things kind of like simple. and balance things. So what I'd definitely be doing on there is just taking a couple of frames of brood from the stronger one and giving it to the smaller one and trying to get them up to speed. And I think when you have a colony that looks like it's lagging behind, it's always lagging behind because it's relative to the stronger one, where it might not be, it might not be as weak as it seems. But you've got what, you've got one hive is a full brood box and filling a super, yet the other one is struggling to get above 8 frames. But that, that's not that much difference. That's 3 weeks difference between them. Once that one that's on 8 frames, the broods emerge, they'll probably be filling the super as well. So it's— yeah, I just give them time. I love it. David says hit the like button, it's free. Thank you very much, David. Also giving away a free cap, so someone's gonna get a cap. Um, I should probably go and look at some of these YouTube ones. There's so many that have come in. How many have come in? Whoa, yeah, there's loads. Okay, we'll look. Oh, I've just lost my place on here as well. All right, let's find out where you were. Here we go. Says— guessing that's not your real name— he says, hiya Lawrence from sunny Anglesey. Had my best hive swarm, virgin, not mated, now drone laying, but can't find the drone laying queen. What would you do? It's a really awkward situation that one. If it's, if it's definitely a drone-laying queen, just gotta find her. If you've got any other colonies, you can shake them through a queen excluder and just steal some brood from another colony and put it underneath, and you should find the drone-laying queen that way. If you've not got any other colonies, that becomes more difficult to do. If it's laying workers, which it, which it could be, oh, I just— Laying workers when it's your only colony there's just nothing you can do, really isn't. And it's quite depressing telling people that. I'm so sorry. Um, what other options have you got? It's your best hive, it's swarmed, virgin, not mated now, drone laying, but can't find the drone laying queen. Maybe get someone to come along and see if they can help you find the drone laying queen. That sometimes just someone else being there and you, you see different things, that could be good way of doing it. But apart from those other options, I— you need to find her, you need to kill her. Hi Lawrence, my bees swarmed 2 weeks ago and I caught them in a BS Honeybee nuc. They have drawn out 5 frames. Once they have developed, would you move them to a hive or put them on a double brood box on the nuc? If so, what fits the BS nuc? Thanks. So the Maysmoor extension boxes fits them, and that's absolutely fine. But personally, if it was me and you've not got that extension box already, I just put them in a— put them in a hive. Loads of time for them to expand yet. They'll be filling that box in no time, so I just get them in there. Hey Lawrence, I had a colony with drone-laying workers. After many failed tries, I put a queen cell in and it solved the issue. So I've seen a couple of people saying that, and I think that is, that is a good way of doing it. You see some people put a frame of capped brood in and then maybe like another frame of capped brood in and then give them a queen cell. And that is a relatively good way to get them doing it. I have done that before, but it's not always worked. And it's— I guess, I guess it— I guess there's no harm in chucking a queen cell in there. Like, we've got loads of queen cells that we could just, we could just put in there. I like the instant fix of a queen, but it doesn't work. And I guess I should read my own advice sometimes, which is have, have some patience. So maybe I'll try that with the one that I've got because I've got a really bad laying worker colony. Let's see if they'll take a queen cell and actually get a queen mated. It'd be brilliant if they did. Oh, has gone and got the 20-frame lycan extractor. Very nice. Uh, says, hi, getting a few small patches of bald brood in a swarm catcher. Should I be worried? Um, if you're getting it in a swarm catcher, I would say it's Oh, I don't know, depends where you've caught the swarm. If you've put like old black frames up and caught a swarm in there, probably going to have wax moth, wax moth larva maybe in the swarms, especially if you've like bait boxed it, because bait boxes is bait for wax moth larva as well. So if they're in like a dead straight line, you're seeing bald brood just in like a straight line altogether, likely that there's like a wax moth underneath the cells and they're responding to that. If it's just like pepper peppered all over the place, then there's probably just genetics. Um, I wouldn't say it's varroa-related. Bald brood can be varroa-related as well, but if you've got a swarm, they've probably just had a brood break, so I wouldn't expect them to be taking too many varroa with them. So it could be any, could be any of those things, but I would, I would see how it develops with bald brood. Wildwoods Honeybee Farm says hello. Uh, Susan Macy said, I had a colony with laying workers. Oh, you said that one. Yeah, put the queen cell in. Was that just pure luck or is it a good procedure? So I think it is a good procedure. I hear people do that. I have done that. It's, uh, it is a valid way of doing it. I should, I should take up my own advice. Uh, Lee Leatherbury, member for 14 months, hello. He says, evening. So my Black Mountain honey queen swarmed, took down all the queen cells, and reordered a queen. Since then checked, and now I have drone brood in the super. Is there more from this, Lee? The queen is banked in the hive. I did your empty box method in a spare hive and found now queen. What would be your next move? The drone brood in the supers throw me a bit there. So your Black Mountain Honey Queen swarm took down the— took all the queen cells down and reordered a queen. Since then checked, and now I have drone brood in the super. The queen is banked. Hmm. The timings are relevant here because if they swarmed, you know, if they swarmed and you ordered a new queen and you went back in like three or four days later and you found drone brood in the super, that could be just drone brood from the old queen. I know she shouldn't be upstairs in the super, but you might just have like a bent wire, so she managed to get up there previously. And a colony that swarms will, you know, it's a healthy colony that's at the point where it's going to try and swarm. So there will be drone brood in there. But if, if you've got a gap of like 3 or 4 weeks in between, the only real thing that I can think of there is laying workers. So if it's laying workers, maybe, maybe had a queen cell. There's not, not a huge amount that you can do with a queen Trying to add it into a laying worker colony like that. Not sure on that one, Lee. I would you got the queen banked in the hive. I would potentially make up a split with the queen and just get that going and then and then treat the other one round. But the drone brood in the super has really thrown me there a bit. Need to know like the age of the drone brood ideally. David McDowell, channel member, says, also great advice on the members-only video regarding what to do for next season, equipment, etc. Get joining, people, definitely worth it for the free inside scoops. Excellent, my promotion for me. Thank you, David, much appreciated. I'm glad it was useful. Anthony Grace says, evening, Lawrence, love your videos. I'm new to beekeeping. I have one hive in my garden at the moment, but I'm going to be moving it to a friend's farm. All I am concerned about is if I ever had A wait, I've not got the rest of your thing in there. Just cut off unless. Oh, there we go. Miles down. I'm a little bit concerned. I'm I'm missing. There's a bit missing, so I don't know what's missing. Sorry. It says, but if I did, do you know if my insurance that I have with the British Bee Association would then cover any damages to the farm? farmer's land, or is that not a concern? Should I be worried about— So, so the, the insurance definitely won't cover any damage to the farmer's land, no chance. It's very focused, the BBKA insurance, on, um, like public liability. And, and kind of like you get some insurance on your hive, I think, for disease as well, in terms of replacement frames and stuff like that. But you wouldn't get stuff— it's not like, it's not like a housing Or a car insurance thing that covers damage and things like that. So, so in terms of the farmer's land, you wouldn't get— there'd be no coverage whatsoever. But there's no— there's not going to be any damage to the farmer's land, I wouldn't have thought, with a beehive being there. I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be worried about it. It covers things like, say, say you had like a child going to the farm for the day, they got stung, cover stuff like that. Like public liability, and it's pretty good. It's got, I think it's like £10 million or something, which is standard for public liability. Right, let's go back up. I missed out loads of questions there. Uh, right, channel member, says no one seems to be talking about how good the Horsley board is to control swarming. I live by these boards. How about doing a video on these boards? So I've never used Horsley boards. You have to send me a link and, and show me what you do, Mick, and I'll more than happily do a video. Sounds good. Also, have you ever been stung by a queen? I have a mentor and he said he's never been stung since the 40 years of looking after many bees. Said they use the stinger mostly on other queens. Um, so they definitely sting. I've never been stung by one, and they do mostly use them on other queens. And they're the only bee that can repeatedly use their sting, which is— I find that just amazing that A bee has not, um, like, for, for on a human anyway, or like a thick-skinned mammal, it's not, um, developed the ability to like reuse the sting. Just stings once and it pulls out. But they can repeatedly like sting other bees. But I just find that mad because it's evolved on the queen to be able to do that. They can repeatedly sting it and pull out, but it's not evolved on the worker bees. I always find that crazy. Says, got a lot of drone brood under 2 frames of 11-frame national. Should I just leave it to emerge or get rid? I, I'm not a fan of removing drone brood for the sake of it. I appreciate if it's kind of like getting in the way, then fine. But I saw someone posting a video today saying about how they sacrifice drone brood and how to do it with a fork, and I just thought, moan about not getting your queens mated well, and then you're just like sacrificing all of your drone brood fork. Just treat hives for varroa as opposed to sacrificing all the drone brood. Madness. Really not a fan of sacrificing drone brood. UK Honey Marketing Board, for selling extracted, drained, or pressed honey must be from broodless comb. That's different from comb that has previously had brood in it though. So it is different. So it must not have brood in it, obviously must not have brood in it. There mustn't be eggs, there mustn't be larvae, there must not be pupae. But once all of that has emerged, then my understanding— you are the UK Honey Marketing Board— my understanding is if it's backfilled with honey, it can be extracted from, as long as there is no insecticide— not insecticide— as long as there is no chemical called treatments for varroa. I guess, I guess a miticide is the word I was thinking of, as long as there's no miticide remnants on the wax. But more than happy to be corrected on that one. I like having someone who actually knows stuff, it's great. Blue Lab says, I have a question, what do you do with unripened frames of honey at the end of the season? I should— so, so that is what I've done, that one a couple of times now, um, but I, I collect them, all the ones together that are really, really unripe and I nadir them, and I probably nadir them like a few days before I take all of the rest of the honey off. But most of them, they just go in the big tub and get extracted together, and then the overall average honey extract— the moisture content is correct, so they just go in the mix. I'm in Suffolk. I'm in Suffolk. Do you think it's too late to do a split? I've got 4 hives and we'll add 4 mated queens and feed them. So absolutely not. Perfect time to do splits. Really, really good. You can, you can do splits kind of all the way up until really like end of August, September, but the later you go, the bigger the split you need to make. The bigger the split you need to make. So you could still probably get away with now making like a 3-frame split, but we'd like— sorry, be a 4-frame split. 3 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, good shake of bees, and that should build up to a nice 6-frame nuc over winter. But do that at the end of August and you're making a 6-frame— you're making a 6-frame split minimum if you want a 6-frame nuc. They're not going to grow much after that at all. They'll feed themselves a bit, but they're not going to grow. I was sitting next to a hive today and noticed it had a musty but sweet smell. Couldn't find anything untoward with the brood, but it definitely had a stronger aroma than others. Anything to be concerned about? It's probably just what they're foraging on, I would say. Some things that they forage on are a bit pungent, especially when they're unripened, but I wouldn't worry too much about it as long as there's no— nothing else to be worried about. Uh, right, so they're the ones I've already answered. Uh, David Stevens says, in the past week I bought a couple of nucs off BFBs on 14 by 12 frames and transferred them to full-size cedar hives. Should I have transferred them or left them in the poly nuc? I'll definitely transfer them. Yeah, they'll build up very nicely, I would say. Is there anything I should be looking to do now to get them set up for winter? So just at the moment, just leave them be. They'll be quite happy with the weather and they'll be expanding nicely. If you get to like end of August and you've still got frames of foundation, I would say start just like giving them a little bit of 1:1 syrup just to get all of those frames drawn out. And then anytime from kind of mid-August to the end of August, I'd be putting in Apivar strips, which is a miticide, to get the varroa down. Do that nice and early, especially if you're not looking to take a honey crop off. Like, you could do that now, to be honest. The earlier you do that, the better. The more active the hive is during Apivar, the better the effectiveness or the efficacy of the treatment, because it's used— it works by little feet, little bee feet walking over the strips and then walking over the brood. So it's trans— can't even talk— moved around the hive by transmission of little feet. So the busier the bees are, the better it is. So get that on. And then come mid-September, back end of September, give them a big heavy feed just to make sure they've got enough stores in the box, and they should be good. Walker Bee Honey channel member says, hi, extracted, extracted today and refitted the wet supers to get cleaned up. 2 to 3 supers per hive as there is a mega flow on in our area. Once they're cleaned up, would you leave all 3 on or too much space? So I think if you've got 3 supers a hive and you take 3 supers off and extract them, I'd get, I'd get a couple back on. I don't think it makes a massive difference getting 2 back on, but it's just end of the season, what do you want? Do you want 1 full super or 2 mostly full supers or 3 third-full supers? Kind of just makes it more work for you cleaning it up. So you could, could just put 1 back on. That's probably what I would do, is get 1 back on, maximum 2. John Pierce says, hi Lawrence, are there any legal requirements when it comes to selling nukes such as certificate, insurance, etc.? Thanks. So no, there is absolutely nothing. Um, and, and some people think that's a real issue and that there should be, and I kind of agree with that. I would say I think you should be audited and I think there should be like a set standard. And but the problem is you'd never get anyone to agree on what the set standards should be, I don't think, in terms of, you know, like queens and genetics and whether they should be treatment-free or whether they should be treated for varroa. You're never going to get everyone to agree on what it is. So you could probably get some sort of guidelines in there, but they would be so generic to make sure that everyone's covered that they probably wouldn't be worth that much. But what we, what we like to do on Black Mountain Honey is just let our customers talk for us. And if you look at our reviews and you see what our customers post, then you hopefully see kind of what we do with our nucs. And I've— you'll be amazed at the amount of times I get a phone call from someone saying, yeah, I bought, um, I bought a couple of nucs off Facebook and, uh, yeah, they're not that good. And they send me pictures and I'm like, yeah, that's, that is pretty shocking. And they're, you know, wrong frames, old frames, black frames. Nowhere near enough bees in them, fermenting honey, weird-looking brood. Like, there's lots that get sold that isn't, isn't very good. And, and people do— like, there's no denying it— people use selling nucs as a way to get rid of old black frames because brood frames only last 3 years before you should be replacing them. And a lot of people think, well, I've got to replace them anyway, so I'm going to be chucking out those frames. So if I just chuck them in a nuc and sell them on Facebook, then I'm getting paid to kind of get rid of my frames. And we, we don't do that at Blackmans and Honey. We make the nucs up specifically. So every single, every single frame of every single nuc of next year's nucs, 2025 nucs, was made in 2024. Brand new frame, brand new foundation. So they are less than 9 months old by the time they get out to customers. So we'll occasionally get like the odd one that's slightly older than that this year, but from next year onwards, though, not a single frame will be older than 9 months old. And people can, people can tell that. You see on the frames, they're like nice brand new clean frames. They look really, really nice. And when you see them next to each other— sorry, bang the mic— it is like, whoa, that's one looks really good and one doesn't look very good at all. Sorry for turning that into an advertisement. there. When is the best month to get into beekeeping? So in terms of buying nucs, we start sending nucs out between the very end of March and more likely kind of like beginning to middle of April. So I would get, get prepared to get bees in the middle of April. It's pretty average time for most people in the UK. Can you use a queen excluder at the entrance to prevent the queen, I guess, from leaving? So you can and the queen can't get through. So if you've got like a very important queen that you never want to leave, you can put a queen excluder at the bottom and she will not leave through it. If you think that they won't swarm because you've got a queen excluder there, they will still swarm. And what they do is that they try and swarm when they cap over the first queen cell, the swarm cell, and the queen can't get out. So the swarm returns, and then the first virgin that emerges— the prime swarm leaves with the first virgin So you end up with just exactly the same swarming, but you, you basically get the same benefit to doing that that you would get by clipping a queen, in that you— they wouldn't swarm. You get, you get 3, 3 days extra, kind of roughly, give or take a day or so. Um, but not, but not many people do it. And you've got the whole issue of drones getting through as well. You're blocking out all the drones, so it's not— there's no real benefit to doing it over clipping a queen. You could just clip the queen. and the queen can't leave. You have to manage your bees for swarming. I know, I know who you are, um, but I can never say it right. Himalayan balsam is in bloom. I love Himalayan balsam. It's one of those ones that, uh, oh, it's— some people really do not like it, but I quite like it. Obviously it's not good for erosion and stuff like that, but it's good for the bees. Cayman Reynolds, how's it going, Cayman? He says, hi Lawrence, finally caught a live. I know we do it at a slightly different time to you. Your lives are always like 1 o'clock in the morning. I nearly caught a bit of yours last night when Arsenal were playing Man United, which probably means nothing to you, but that was a football team. I'm very excited to see what you have in line for North American Honeybee Expo as well. Sounds really cool. Evening, lovely and hot in Devon. Spent the weekend at events fielding lots of questions about beekeeping. Should have a fair few new subscribers coming your way. It's very nice, thank you. Uh, Tyrell's Honey says, evening, Lawrence, are you still following the full EFB hygiene protocol? New suit, gloves, and smoker. Do you think going to the extreme is the best way to protect your apiaries? Um, so it's 100% yes, following it to the letter. Uh, new suit, gloves, smoker. So I do, so when I do my inspections now, I just go and do one apiary because we've kind of reduced the apiaries down, so I never travel, ever, ever travel from apiary to apiary, and whenever I get to a new apiary, new gloves. I don't use a smoker because I just kind of thought, you know what, my smoker is, I don't really use it because the bees are well chilled out anyway, so why carry around something that that can just transmit disease. And similarly, the hive tool— like, I just find myself not using hive tools anymore. I don't know why. The bee might— the bees that I've got, they don't use a huge amount of propolis. And occasionally you'll get a box where you're just like, oh, you have to like twist it to get it up, but I can get it up. So I've done away with hive tools and done away with smokers. And then I use the bee suit. I have a new bee suit for each apiary, but I only go to one apiary each day. It comes back and I clean my bee suit at the end of each day. The only one thing that I'm probably not following to the letter, and the reason I'm not following it to the letter, is I kind of like planning ahead. What would I do if I came across EFB in a colony? What would I do? What would be my plan of action? And it's already predetermined what I would do, which is I would shook swarm the entire apiary. I wouldn't even I wouldn't even go through and say, right, let's, let's kind of check what's going on here. I would— obviously you'd go through, you'd check every single one. And for me, anyone that had EFB, I would destroy. So I, I'm not one for, even if it's a mild case of EFB, let's shook swarm it and see if we can get it through. I would destroy every colony that had EFB, and then I'd shook swarm the rest of them. So it got me thinking, like, should I really be cleaning my hands in between each Hive, and yes, I should. The textbook answer is I should. But then, if I'm going to shuck swarm them all anyway, does it does it really matter not washing my hands in between? I don't know. So I probably should get back in the habit of washing my hands in between each one. But then I'm not using the hive tools to transfer over. The bees don't have a huge amount of propolis. All I'm doing is picking up the lugs. So like the hive tools, the one is the real. transmitter, I think, if you're getting in and kind of like touching bits of brood with it. So I think I'm doing pretty good. Like, another thing I do is I'll constantly get my truck cleaned as well now, always clean my wellies, I disinfect my wellies as I come in and out of apiaries. I think once you've had EFB, you become like properly nervous about getting it again, and it's great. Like, I went out and looked at my bees this morning And it was just so nice to go out and you're just looking, you just think, oh, my bees look really healthy. I'm really, really happy with how they're looking. Versus like a few years ago when you'd go out and look at them and you'd always— before you have EFB, you don't, but you're not nervous. You're not looking at things and thinking, what's that? And once you have it, you become way over the top, like constantly testing stuff and you're like, right, it's negative, it's negative, it's negative. But you look at stuff and you think, I don't like the look of that. An untended brood does look a lot like EFB. So if you've got like brood and not enough bees to keep it all warm and you get like chilled brood, or there's not enough nurse bees in there, it does start to look like it. But the, the big one for me, the big giveaway for EFB in a colony is the segmentation. And I see loads of people like posting on Facebook saying, oh, this looks like EFB, and you can just see like clear segmentation And a lot of the other stuff doesn't look nice. Like, it looks like it's sunken, it looks like it's a bit twisted, it looks like it's yellowy brown. You're thinking it could be EFB, and then you look at it and it's just clear segmentation, and you don't get clear segmentation with EFB. So I always look at anything like this, I don't think that's EFB. But I do— I quite enjoy that. I think that's a really good thing for people to put that on and say, I'm worried about this, what do you think? And I love that they come back and say, I've got the all clear, like everything's fine, or they come back and say, oh, it was EFB. I think it's a really good, like, learning process for people. But yeah, so I follow it as best as I possibly can. The only one that I've let slip a bit is the washing my gloves in between each hive, but then I never move gloves between apiaries. So if I did get in an apiary, I'm 100% certain it would remain at that apiary, and if I did get it at the apiary, I'd kill all of the infected EFB colonies, and I would shook swarm the rest anyway. Hi Lawrence, it's been a strange year where I've had no eggs, very little brood for about 2 weeks, so hopelessly queenless, but then after a week there is a queen in there somehow. So it's definitely not hopelessly queenless, there's probably just a virgin knocking around in there. And I'd say for 2 weeks, that's pretty normal. Colony swarms, virgin emerges, a few days to get mature, Weeks sitting around waiting for the weather, goes out, gets mated, a few days to get back into lay. Before you know it, two weeks have gone, and then you start to see eggs again. So I'd say that's pretty normal. Anthony Scrace says, "Hello, Lawrence. Love the videos. I'm new to beekeeping and love it, but the more I research about EFB, the more it puts me off. I have one hive in my garden, and I'm just about to move to a friend's farm. What I am concerned about is if I did ever get an EFB outbreak, God forbid I don't." But if I did, do you know if my insurance that I have with the British Bee Association would cover any damages to the farmer's land? So it's the same one again. I don't see where you'd get any damage to the farmer's land with EFB. EFB, they just burn the colony if you wanted it destroyed, or they'd shook swarm it. So the only damage that you'd get to the farmer's land there is Got to dig a hole and then fill it back in. And if you're fine, if, if the person whose land you've got the hives on started trying to charge you for that, I would just take my beehive off there and just say, yeah, thank you very much, go somewhere else. Because that's not a very good farmer or a very good landowner who would, you know, twist the dagger when it's in when something like that happens. And chances of catching EFB, pretty slim, just be— especially with one hive. Very, very rare. So I think, I think you should be good. Uh, Peter B says thanks to the balsam, we have lots of ghostly bees. I love it, love seeing them come in. Uh, Chrissy says hi, hi, hi, super happy with my queen from you after the colony swarmed, and thankfully the swarm was caught, as you know, after cutting them down from a tree, and they have produced the most stunning queen. Excellent, that's good to hear. I love following your adventures, Chrissy. How did your AMM colony do? Haven't seen any update lately. And how does your Yolanta queen compare to the F1 Buckfast? So the AMM colony, uh, died. Just basically tried to supersede itself because the queen wasn't mated very well and had horrific chalk brood. So it didn't do very well. Got about 4 months out of it, which was, which was pretty sad. Um, how does the Yolanta queen compare to the F1 Buckfast? So it's horses for courses. I, I I personally like the Buckfast myself, but the, the Yalanta queens do have some Buckfast. I really like Yalanta's Buckfast lines. So the Yalanta queens aren't just a Yalanta hybrid, they are like generally either Carniolan or Buckfast, one or the other. They don't mix them up together. But all of the Yalanta queens that I've had have been very good. Like, she knows what she's Brilliant queen breeder, and I've been very, very happy with them. And they are bred specifically for Murray's operation, and you can tell the Atlanta colonies when you get them because they get very, very big kind of late on in the season. They just keep on growing and growing and growing, and I've had really good heather harvests from my Atlanta colonies. I would say if you're looking for calm, gentle bees, go for the Buckfast. Not that the, not that the Yolanda aren't all calm, but there's more variation mixed in. It's not as high up the breeding line as maybe some other stuff is, and you can understand that because they're like in the middle of nowhere, and what they're after as a commercial bee farming operation is like bumper honey crops. So if you've got the choice between— obviously they want both, they want to keep nice calm bees, they don't want to get blitzed, and I've not heard any Yolanda that are aggressive, but they can be a little bit more flighty than the Buckfast. But you, you'll be, you'll be happy with either, I'm sure. Uh, Matthew Francis Mountford says, I'm going to use clearer boards to clear my supers for harvest. Very nice. Chrissy says, thanks for all your help, I have a new hive on its way as they are expanding fast. Definitely a good shout. John Hayes says, just, uh, John Hayes says, just wanted to say thank you for the queens this year. I think 14 in total, one All of them accepted perfectly. I do use your belt and braces method, but so worth it as I didn't lose a single queen. Excellent, I'm really happy to hear that, John. So I'm going to use clearer boards to clear my supers for harvest. What do I do with my really strong colonies? Will I be able to clear them into one national brood box? Won't there be too many bees? So this is, this is why I stopped using clearer boards, and like clearer boards with portable bee escapes. Rubbish, chuck them out. Don't like portal bee escapes. But clearer boards with rhombus bee escapes do work, but you need to make sure that there's like sufficient space for them. Obviously put them on the right way as well, and you can only get— you need to have good weather, you need to have a lot of movement in the hive for them to work. But what I always found was you always got some stragglers left over anyway, so unless you were going to go through every single frame and like blow them off— blow them off— Um, or brush them off with like a feather or brush, which I'm not a fan of, just squishing loads of bees, then it didn't really work. So I thought, well, if I'm gonna have to go through and blow them off anyway, I might as well just blow them all off to start off with. So it's quicker and it's less visits, but it does work. You just end up with a few bees still left in there. But do you— do need at least, if you've got say 4 supers and 1 brood box, And you're going to try and clear those 4 supers, you need at least an additional brood box as an absolute minimum, maybe a brood box and a super. They like a bit of space. So Gerald says, I think EFB is treated if confirmed by the bee inspectors. So no, there's varying degrees, but they will advise you on the level of infestation and what they suggest you do. So they can enforce you to destroy them, I believe, but they can also recommend that you do a shooks warm. So I've seen some people, they say that's a really mild case of EFB, we recommend you shooks warm in them, and that, that is the treatment. So there's no, there's no treatment that you can, that you can give in the UK. So I think, I think you might be in America. Um, so in America they'll just give you antibiotics It's like Oxy, whatever it is. Used to be available in the UK, that, and then they stopped doing it. Um, so in the— in America, they will just treat with EFB, so treat with antibiotics for EFB. In the UK, they will either destroy them or they'll let you do a shook swarm. They're the 2 options, and they will advise you on which one in the UK. I love the pre-wired frames. Do you know if anyone does them for commercial hives? So no, I like pre-wired and pre-made frames as well, but I know I don't— I've not seen anyone do them for commercial. I'm pretty sure if you had a big batch, Murray would do a batch for you, kind of like on demand. Tony and Liz says hello. Hello to you too. Peter B's— he says he just bought one. I assume this is the nuc, but we'll still paint it. I think that's a good shout. Julian bought the new nuc. I wonder how many people went out and bought that. that are the basis of me talking about it. Uh, Hey Lawrence, it's Jason from Bohemia Bees in Queenwright Dale. Hi Jason, how you doing? Uh, that's people talking between themselves. Says, I have the Abello 12-frame. They keep sticking the box together by the frames with the honey and comb, sometimes pulling out frames. Hmm, I've not had that on my one. That, that sounds like the bee spacing is not right. But not sure how it could not be right. Have you got— have you got like a super sitting on top of it? You've got like a wooden super sitting on top of the Abello 12-frame rebate? Because if you do that, the bee spaces are wrong, because the Abello 12-frame is the top bee space, and then the, um, the wooden National is a bottom bee space. So you end up with a double bee space in the middle, so they'll brace it all together. So you either need to reduce the super down to a top not be space. Mind-baffling stuff. Um, or, or that might be something else. I might be reading into that too much. Um, Hi Lawrence, I've got 5 queens coming from you on Thursday. Will hopefully put me at 15 hives this year. Very nice. Hopefully you get them all through the winter. Uh, Hi Lawrence, uh, and all my flow— sorry, I'm gonna have a sip of drink. Here we go. Still lukewarm. Hi Lawrence, and all my Flow Hive gone from hardly anything in super to full in just over a week. How long would you recommend it to be capped and for extraction? Um, so it'll be pretty quick if the weather's like this. They'll do it in less than a week, I would say, and then you'll be good to go. Uh, Robert Thomas says, how's the weather with you this week? We have good weather till Friday in South Wales. Hopefully we'll get some more supers this week before wind down. I think it will be a very good week for honey. Uh, Chrissy says, so what's your thoughts on a plastic— recycled plastic beehive but with the standard wooden and wax foundation frame still? I have some very talented YouTube famous friends who recycle plastic into other things. Yeah, do that. Oh, let's collaboration, make it happen. I love the idea of recycling stuff. Do you know what I want to do? I'll let people into my idea. Yeah, because I'm never going to get around to doing it. Do you know how many jerry cans of honey syrup, like syrup, I've got lying around? And I bought loads of them because they're really convenient, and I hate buying them because I think, well, they're, you know, they're recyclable, so it's not like they're going to go into a landfill. But what I really want someone to do is change the design of the honey container, or even better than that, retrofit some design for it, because it's about, you know, It's like pretty big. It's not— it's, it's smaller than a national nuc but bigger than a mating hive, about the same size as like the Abello mating hives. And I just want someone to sell a kit that you can like cut the top off, turn the top lid round some way, and turn it into a little mini mating hive. How cool would that be? I've got hundreds of them and it would be really, really easy to do, but someone needs— someone needs to fix that for me. But I love the idea on a recycled plastic beehive but with the standard wooden and wax foundation frame I think that'd be really cool. Let's definitely do that. Uh, says, apologies if you have answered this 100 times, but I have some hives with 3 supers on, all of which were around 50/50 capped. Worried that at the end of the season I can't extract any of them. Wow, people are experiencing the same pain, aren't they? So I'm glad that these live streams can answer these questions, and I'll always answer the same questions again and again and again. It's no problem. I would just chuck them in, they'll be fine. You— if you've got, say, you've got 100 frames and 80 of them are fully capped and 20 of them are kind of there or thereabouts, or even 80 of them are fully capped, 10 of them are kind of partially capped, and 10 are just completely uncapped. Once you mix all of that together in the tank, it'll be fine. I really wouldn't worry too much about it. Do the shake test. Don't extract anything that shakes out. anything that doesn't shake out, as long as you're mixing in with lots of capped frames as well, it'd be fine. No problem at all. Hi Lawrence, do you store your honey in buckets? So yeah, we do store our honey in buckets, £35 buckets. Got the postage wrong, £8.75 postage. Excellent, I was, I was concerned about that. Maybe it's, maybe it's going like Northern Ireland or something. Um, so if so, what temperature do you keep your buckets at throughout the year prior to bottling? So as cool as possible. They're kind of in like a, an outbuilding garage. It's pretty cool in there. The warmer you keep them, the higher the, the HMF will go, and it will slowly build over time. Uh, okay, yeah, Carol lives in the Highlands. Sorry, Highlands. Right, Ben Davis says, when getting the bees off the supers when wanting to extract? Will a petrol-based blower be okay? I was going to get a battery blower one, but there's no point if the petrol-based one is fine for bees. So yeah, petrol-based one's better for bees because it's, uh, way more powerful. They're really good, you'll love it. Would you be able to recommend a date of extraction? So we take off all our honey middle of August, around the 15th of August, somewhere around then. Alan says, hi Lawrence, the nuc I had from you earlier this year swarmed last week into a neighbor's tree. Managed to get them back and put into a new hive 6 feet from where they came from. Entrances face different way, or should I move them away from the original hive? So when they swarm, they kind of like reset their orientation, so it's great. So you can dump them in anywhere and they'll just reorientate. It's like, it's like they know that the new, the next place that they live is going to be somewhere different, so they just like cancels out everything, so it can be, it can be wherever. It doesn't make any difference, so they should be fine. Uh, Hi Lawrence, will you do a video using your new 30-frame extractor this year? Definitely, well up for that. Um, Have you ever considered opening a shop to sell beer equipment similar to Griff? I certainly have. Um, not one for the foreseeable future, but never say never. Gary Wheeler says, forgot to say the clip of your little one working with your bees was wonderful. Thank you for sharing her experience. You are top man. Thank you very much, Gary. Brought a tear to my eye. I did. I did enjoy it. Terry, I love it when people ask me to have a sip of tea. Brilliant. So he said, don't forget to have a sip of your tea. Are you planning to go to the Thorns Open Day in October? So I hadn't hadn't planned to go to it. I am going to the Abello. Summer day on the Sunday the 11th of August, which I know that's not what you asked, but that is one open day that I am going to. I'm making pizzas there as well. I had pizzas today, they were really nice. I do make a mean pizza, I have to say. I buy most of the stuff in, but it's like a proper nice pepperoni pizza, hot fire honey. Never know, maybe like a— there might be a hat donated to the raffle, something like that. That'd be cool if you can make it up there. I'll be up there the whole day. It should be good fun, but I'm not planning to go to the Thorns one. It's a, it's a long drive to Thorns. It's like nearly 5 hours each way. I, I drove there once and it was, it was a bit far, but it's cool. I recommend people to go to the Thorns open day. Like, it is a, it is a really good facility down there. They'll have a great time. Says, I had a slow colony. I boosted it with a frame or 2 from an adjacent hive. The slow colony is Up to speed. The frame of brood I added haven't changed for weeks. Suspect cold brood. Will the colony clean them out themselves? It's a nightmare when that happens because you just think, oh, if you just left that in the other hive, they would have, um, they would have all emerged. So they will clean it out themselves once they get up to sufficient strength to be able to do what is a very labor-intensive task of clearing out a lot of old dead Chilled cold brewed. So yeah, they will. But do you know what? You're better off just taking it out, burning it. I would say that's what I would do. There's no there's no benefit to keeping that in there. It can only make it more difficult for the bees. Brilliant. I got someone on Twitch. Hello, hello, person on Twitch. That's not like one of the spam bots who says hi Lawrence. Just got my first colony in the hive four weeks ago. I added a super. And a couple of weeks in and another couple of days ago, I noticed they haven't touched 4 of the new frames in the brood box. Have I been too eager with the super? So yeah, a little bit too eager with the supers, but it's not, it's not the end of the world whilst it's warm. I, I would prefer to have all of my colonies, and I have a lot of colonies set up like this, set up with way too much space, unused space in, in the supers, in the brood box, as opposed to them being like not having enough space and swarming. So yeah, bit bit eager. But would I take the super off now? No, I just I just leave it on. Just leave the bees to it. And obviously you've got your queen excluder in place, and hopefully at some point over the next few weeks they they finally make it up to the super. I would say a colony like that you you could still get a super's worth of honey on if you if you eke it out until the end of August. So keep at it. But well done for watching on Twitch as well. You're probably the only person who is watching. watching on Twitch. Can you explain how is best to get my bees prepared for overwinter, please? I started the year with 1 hive due to 2 hives dying. Now I have 11 hives due to catching 10 swarms since May. Excellent. So I hope your colonies that you caught as swarms do well over winter. That sometimes they're not the best ones, but fingers crossed for you. Really, really simple. This is the process that I use. Middle of August, take all of your honey Same day, put your Apivar strips in. Don't cheap out on any rubbish other varroa treatments that people tell you are good. Apivar is still very, very good at the moment. Used at the 15th of August, give them a feed at that point when you take the supers off as well. And then if you want to trickle feed them between the 15th of August to the 15th of October, you can. But I find just like 3 liters at the beginning, and then if the weather's nice, just leave them to it. And they'll be fine. Middle of October, go in, take your apivar strips out, give them a good glug feeder full of like heavy 2:1 or invert sugar syrup. That's it. Really, really good. Great technique. You'll do very, very well like that. The bees like that. Oh my God, I got someone else watching on Twitch. It's brilliant. He says, or she says, hello, sorry for bothering you. I want to offer promotion of your channel. There we go. I got properly caught out there. That was hilarious. But he started off with the hello, sorry for bothering you. I should have really caught that out. Um, I feel, I feel a bit embarrassed. The Autistic Handyman says, can a caged mated queen trigger non-laying queens begin laying eggs once again? Hmm, I, I don't know is the answer to that. I've never tested that, so I wouldn't have thought so though. I think if there's a— not if you've got a queen that's not laying, I think the only thing that's really going to trigger it is like get— getting a good amount of feed into her and for the bees to come on, get a move on. But, but maybe it would. I don't know, I've never tried it. It is— it's a good thought. I like the logic. Uh, Steve's Honeybee says, do you do beekeeping courses or have you considered it? So I've definitely considered it. We, we actually took bookings for this year's beekeeping courses, we, and we will 100% do them next year. We'll do them next year. Like I said, we took bookings for courses this year and then cancelled them, and they were very popular as well. And the reason we cancelled them is that my new daughter was born at the end of May, so we, I kind of thought I can't be doing beekeeping courses the middle of May with a very pregnant wife. It's just not, just not going to be. a good idea. Uh, so, but we will do them and they'll be pretty cool and there'll be food involved as well, which would be fun. I've looked on the website, can't find the joining button. So if you go onto the YouTube homepage next to the subscribe button, there's a button next to it that says join for anyone who wants to become a channel member. Uh, Anais, is it? Hi. She says, hi Lawrence from PA. I've only— I had only 1 out of 5 virgins that started laying in my colonies and I think it's my fault. Since all of the colony boxes are the same color and in a line, any tips for helping them return? So it does, it does make a big difference with virgins, kind of like having them off at different orientations. Different colors help as well, colors that the bees can see. Big shapes on the front as well, apparently even better than colors. The one that I started doing on the mini mating nucs that I didn't use for that long, but you can get UV paint, so bees can see really well in UV. So if you get UV, like proper UV paint, um, and you know it's UV because you get like a UV torch and shine it on it, it's like, whoa, like really bright. And then you paint different color shapes on the front of the mating boxes. And I've done this on all of my like BS honeybees ones, like a circle or a square or a line or a dot or a selection of dots in UV paint. I don't know whether it's good, but it makes sense to me. The bees can see in UV and they're known to be able to determine different like shapes and objects and stuff. So I thought I'd give it a go, and I think it works well. So you've said my mating nucs are painted differently, but my production hives are all the same. Thinking stencils or pictures taped to the front. So yeah, I think that's a really good idea, but do it in a UV-sensitive paint, and I think it's good. Uh, JK Photography says, hi Lawrence, watching you at hospital. Not me, Mrs. got stung yesterday. Now her forearm is swollen up, so watching on my phone in the car park. There is a certain amount of irony, I think, to that statement. I said I shouldn't laugh. I wish, I wish your missus the very best in a full recovery. Um, but yeah, you're sitting watching a beekeeping live chat while she was in hospital with a bee sting. So I don't know why I'm laughing. I'm sorry. I hope she gets better soon. Um, but you— it was your smiley faces here that, that made me laugh, so I'll blame you for that. Uh, Jean says, thank you for sharing your time and videos with all of us and answering all of our questions. Have a great evening. Cheers, Jean. Thank you very much. Hi Lawrence, when you see a supersedure cell, do you leave the failing queen to fight with the supersedure queen, or do you remove the original queen? So if I— if I'm— there's 2 different scenarios for me there. If I'm introducing queens and they start throwing up supersedure cells, I always remove them, always take them down, because it's just a phenomenon that happens, especially with artificially inseminated queens. Do it for months It's really annoying, constantly take them down. If I've got like a big production colony, say double brood, 4 or 5 supers, and I find a single super seizure cell, so one cell in the whole brood box regardless of where it is, not just on the center of the frame but anywhere, depending on the time of the year, I'll act slightly differently. So if they're doing that in September, I'll say, come on, what are you doing? That's just like, why are you superseding now? Um, but if they're doing it like now, middle of July, early August, I'll let them, I'll let them supersede. I won't, I won't interfere whatsoever. And very often you open up a colony in April and there's 2 queens in there. I've had that loads of times happen, and that will be a late season supersedure. And even when I go in, if I find the 2 queens, I'm not going to be the one to make the decision as to which one is going to live and which one isn't. So I just leave them to it. So unless it's very, very late on in the year, I'll just let them, let them supersede if they want to supersede. I quite like superseder as a trait. It's good, especially if like you've got a 3-year-old queen that supersedes itself. Pretty good trait. Hi, I had a drone layer, shook them 30 yards away, no more drones, any laying, added a sheet of eggs but didn't pull a cell. What would you do now? Um, had a queen, probably had a drone there, shook them 30 yards away, no more drones, any laying, added a sheet of eggs but they didn't pull a cell. Hmm, it's, it's difficult that because when they don't, when they don't pull a cell, what it means is they think they've got a queen. Doesn't mean they have got a queen, it means they think they haven't got a queen. So it could be pheromones being emitted by a laying worker. Is stopping them from pulling a cell. So maybe, maybe what you could do if they're not, if they're not laying at that point is add in a queen cell. I do think, I do think that is a good, a good way to do it because you're not— they're not going to be as defensive adding in a queen cell versus adding in a mated queen. They might give a queen cell a chance, and if you can get that virgin to emerge, then she can go and get mated. So if you, if you have access to queen cells, that would be good, or if you've got another colony that's swarmed and you can just pinch a queen cell out, that could be good. You can, you can cut cells out like that, they're pretty resilient. I'd give that a go. Jane Griffith says, sorry I've missed you this evening, I will watch tomorrow. Thank you for all your great videos, Lawrence. Thank you very much, Jane. Dawid says, when you started selling your honey online, did you have to certify it or your kitchen had to be certified? So So yeah, I don't know whether it's a prerequisite for selling online, but we did it anyway. So yeah, you kind of like register as a food producer, like a primary producer, and then they come and inspect you and give you a food hygiene rating. I actually have my food— my repeat— so they're supposed to do it every 3 years, but then because of COVID and stuff, we've gone 5 years without an inspection, and I had my re-inspection on Tuesday. This week just gone, got five stars. Very happy with that, and they were they were they were really pleased, and they were asking like loads of questions and asking me to send in loads of my documents to say that they can keep them on file and like use them for when they go and do honey inspections at other people's places because they said the documentation was the best they'd ever seen, which made me very very happy inside. I like I like getting good feedback like that, which was really good. But I especially like the five star food hygiene rating. I think it's brilliant. Richard says, any leads on good quality bee bread on the market you know of, anybody? Not something that we would use, make sure it's irradiated if you get it. Hi, I caught a swarm and I've put it in an observation hive, a building which can only be opened from the inside, but it's a meeting room so cannot be opened from there. It has glass for observations, but I want to know if you have come across any ways of feeding bees syrup through their entrance if needed in a building. So they do have— you can get entrance feeders, but they're a bit— I'm not a massive fan of entrance feeders because they just attract pests and attract wasps. And but there are, there are entrance feeders available. Bob Binney treats EFB with a thymol mix of essential oils, but he also treats all his hives with a probiotic powder. Okay, it's the probiotic powder like antibiotics, or is it probiotics like yogurt? Should watch his videos really. Um, he is, he is great though, Bob. I love all his videos, and he was very nice to me when I met him as well, so that's good. Uh, we answered that one. JoJo says, I'm learning as much as I can about beekeeping. I would like to get started within a year or two. Uh, Potter just bought 5 queens. Thank you very much. Be with you on Friday. Hi Lawrence, I had a hive that requeened itself and it's become extremely hot. Would you be tempted to requeen now or leave it till the spring? Definitely now. And I'm not just saying that, it just makes it so much easier because you can go in, put the queen in now, and then you've not got to inspect them again for the rest of the year. And then by the time you go in in the spring, every single bee is the daughter of the new queen, as opposed to having to go in in the spring and having to deal like you requeen in the spring, but then you've probably got 3 months of dealing with the angry bees again. Much easier to do it now, get it out of the way. Is it too late to try some grafts just to practice for next year? So nope, get, get involved, be good fun. I'd give it a go. Hi Lawrence. Hi to you too, Harry. I've got a hive which I introduced a Buckfast queen on the 6th. She's been laying and has brood, but the colony has created a single queen cell. Any advice on what you would do? So yes, that is the phenomenon of them just wanting to supersede when they don't need to. Just take down the cells, and if they start doing it, go back in every 3 or 4 days and keep on taking down the cells. And once the queen that you've introduced has got brood that is emerged and in the colony, they stop doing it pretty quick. I was wondering whether I should extract at the end of this week after the good weather or wait for more possible nectar. I don't want the bees to eat And I also need to put in apical strips in soon. So, so you're probably not that far away. Like, you're quite, you're quite far south where you are. So like, for me, my rule is 15th of August because I know that works for me. I always say to people, just like, judge, judge where you are. You look at Chris Manton, they'll be extracting pretty much now, and they'll say there's nothing. I think he's like further south, kind of, um, Worcestershire way, and he He'll have his own separate cutoff, which is we don't go any further than that, and you get diminishing returns. So definitely give them another week, but I would say another couple of weeks should be, should be good for you. The earlier the better for the bees. It really is. The earlier you can take the honey off and get your Apivar strips in, or whatever, ApiStrips or Amitraz strips you're going to use, it just helps the bees get into a better position to raise nice healthy winter bees, which means you get better Overwintering success, so I'd get on with it. I thought I thought it was happy, but I think it was apical. So using some weird like Romanian strips I've never heard of. Jojo says hello from Georgia. I'm glad I didn't say weird Georgian strips there. I wasn't saying they were weird. I just mean like strips that I hadn't heard of. Jojo says hello from Georgia. How many acres of land do you suggest for a single several hives? So I think like in open countryside. you can just get away with as many as you can get on there really. What we like to do though is have between 6 to 8 hives per site, and then our sites are like just dotted around all over the place. They're not, they don't really overlap with each other, they're at least 3 or 4 miles away from each other. So you don't really need a huge amount of land, you know, like 6 to 8 hives, you can get away with 5 meters by 5 meters of land and they'll just forage all around. And I think in Georgia you'll probably— you won't have a very high hive density as well, so I think you should be pretty good. I wouldn't worry too much about in terms of acres of land, just don't keep too many in a single location. Uh, Happy Hounds in Ireland says, are you still using the Keeper's Hive, and if so, how's it going? So I am still using it and it's really, really good and I'm very much enjoying it, but I did have an issue requeening a queen in there a number of times. So it's not very big, so I'm just building them up, getting them nice and strong, and then we'll have a proper go with it next year. Um, White Smoke Honey says, hey, what's up Lawrence? I love your channel and I tagged you in my Instagram story. Thank you very much. Uh, Chrissy says, I don't think this year I can stretch to getting a honey spinner. How would you process any honey without a spinner? I've got buckets and I'll get a strainer. I do have a triple Pot, crock pot. Um, so I would just do crush and strain. Crush and strain is really, really easy. And if you knew you were going to use crush and strain at the beginning of the year, I would have recommended an unwired foundation. Much easier with unwired foundation. But basically all you want to do is get the super frame. I'll draw this for you because this is a good one to draw. I've not drawn anything for ages. All right, so this is a cross-section of a frame. Yeah, so you've not got the end bar on that yet. So that's the top bar, and then that's the frame of— that's the foundation. So the bees will kind of like draw the foundation out like this, both sides, and then they'll cap it over. So that's what you're ending up with. So if you're using the crush and strain method, you basically want to just take off that And it kind of like ends up down there, and take off that. You're just like scraping it off with the back of a spoon, but you want to leave the foundation there. And it's— you need like, you need to finesse this a bit. It's not easy to do, but you can, you can basically get a super frame or a honey frame and scrape all the honey off it into a sieve, um, and keep the foundation like that. And then that could just go straight back onto the bees. And then once you've, once you've got the honey, you just let it drain through a sieve. And then anything that's left over in terms of wax, if you get one of those potato ricers and put all of the old like gummy wax with honey and put in the potato ricer and do that, squeeze it all out and then put that through a sieve. Great, really good method, dead cheap and works like surprisingly well. Messy, time-consuming, but, but works. It's good. Uh, Chrissy says I should contact my YouTube friends and then let them know and see if this is something that they would be interested in. Hopefully I can get in on that collab too and we could do a video together. 100% up for that. Let's do it. Uh, Robert Thomas says, I used 3 of my supers last year as extensions to apply Apiguard last year with no frames in the box. I scorched them at the start of the season, but I'm afraid to use them this year. They should be fine. Um, it's one of the reasons I don't like thymol-based treatments though, because it is very, very pungent. It really is. It gets in stuff. and it's like, oh, it, it sticks around. But I think if you scrape them and scorch them, give them, give them a Lawrence Edwards scorch, proper scorch, and I reckon they'll be fine. I don't reckon, I don't reckon that will contaminate the honey that's in them if you've scorched them well. Um, definitely wouldn't scrap them. Can you give me more info on the petrol Azer blower, please? The one that I use, I use the Makita 4-stroke But if I was buying one again, I'd get the backpack steel version because loads better, because it is hard holding the other one up, um, whereas the other one's on your backpack and you've just got a hose. And it's, and it's, uh, I think it's 4-stroke as well, that one. Yeah, I think they're both 4-stroke. Uh, new poly nuc, I don't know, I don't know if it's got a name. It's from Old Castle Farm Hives. Are you going to the beekeeping show in Telford next February? Not, not sure, not sure if I'm going to that one. Might do. It is the closest one, but I'm not, I'm not 100% yet. Uh, Ben Davis says, wanted to meet you at Abello and try one of your pizzas, but don't think I can make it. Haven't taken a picture of the amazing brood frame, so no hat for me unfortunately. It's a good reminder, we've not, we've not done that. It's 10 to 11, gonna win a hat. Um, loads of people have sent those through, so let me get to the bottom. How many more have we got? Yeah, loads. Okay, let me get through quickly. What is the easiest way to tell if your bees are going to swarm? So if they've not got enough space, they're going to swarm. But what you're looking for is the beginnings of swarm cells. So play cups with eggs in, and then play cups with larvae charged with royal jelly. And then when they draw them down and start capping them, then by that time they're swarmed. So you're just, you're looking for the very early signs of swarm cells. cells. But look out for congestion in the hive as well. Hi Lawrence, how often do you requeen your hives? Also, how do you stop your bees from building brace comb on top of the frames? My hives keep doing this, it's becoming difficult to remove the boxes. So we requeen every 2 years, that's our— for us we go every 2 years. And then brace comb on top of boxes is a bee space issue, so you need to fix the bee space issue. If your bee space is correct and both boxes are either top bee space or bottom bee space and correctly they shouldn't build brace comb on the top because they should just respect the space. So have a look at your hive config. Hi Lawrence from Loch Lomond, great chat. 10:33, off to my kip, up early for work in the morning. Watch rest tomorrow. See you there. Would banking virgin queen cells in a queen-right hive cause swarming or any problems above brood in feeder. Um, so I don't think unless they emerge— I think only if they emerge. I don't think like above brood in feeder, I don't think would be an issue anyway. But, um, I don't, I don't think you'd have swarming problems unless they emerged, which obviously you wouldn't let them emerge, so you should be good. Says congratulations on the arrival of your daughter. Thank you very much. Says I have one of your queens that has had the tabs on the cage open for a week now. How long would you expect to wait before she comes out? So very much like related to the strength of your colony. So the bees, my queen and my attendants, don't eat their way out. Your bees eat their way in. So if you've got like a weak small split, they could take ages to come in, but a big strong split, do it in 24 hours. So what I would do, after a week she should be accepted, so I would just, um, I'd dunk the cage in water, wet the queen, open it up, and just let the queen walk into the colony. Should be fine. Uh, Johanna says, hi Lawrence, I split a colony after I introduced a Black Mountain honey buttfast queen and they grew fast. The nuc, 6 weeks old now, is very full. How do I prepare them for overwintering as I want to avoid the nuc from swarming? So if— follow the same advice that I gave before. I'll recap now, but if you want them to not swarm, you need to make sure they've got enough space. So you can't just leave them in the nuc if they're 6 frames in this— if you've got a 6-frame nuc now, in a 6-frame nuc, you can't just leave them in there. So you need to upgrade them to a full hive or get an extension box for them. Um, and I think, I think that's it really. Get, get your Apivar strips on and get your mite treatments on early. Make sure they've got enough feed to get through the winter. You should be good. Hi, when in the year would you stop doing weekly inspections? Thanks Thanks for the live stream, very useful. So we, we generally go like 4 weeks after the solstice, so it's kind of like end of July, middle of July, I forget what the dates are, but we go 4 weeks after the solstice for us. A lot of people don't, a lot of people will go all the way through until they harvest their honey, and I don't think that's necessarily wrong if you've only got a couple of hives. Like, it's quite nice to do your inspections every week, isn't it? I, I probably probably would if I only had that many hives. I'd just go in and check on them, see what they're doing. Wouldn't want to lose— if I had 2 hives and one swarmed, I'd be annoyed if I listened to my advice that I didn't have to do inspections. So I would take it with a pinch of salt, uh, and if I had just a few hives, I'd inspect all the way up until my honey extraction. Brooke Lay says, I might have to be in touch next week after Tuesday inspection. No eggs for 4 weeks but 2 queen cells opened but no virgin spotted yet. Maybe a mating flight. Do you have any Italian queens? So there is some Italian queens still left, but you need to order the Italian queens a week in advance. So we cut the orders off. So for next week— so for this week's queens, we can't sell Italian queens now, but for the following week we can still do them. Had my first 4 queen cells of my 6 grafts hatch yesterday, so happy. It's a great feeling. Black Mountain Honey queens are one of the best. 2 perfect queens introduced, tape method, short time, both hopelessly queenless, both accepted and have capped brood 8 days later. Happy days. Really happy with that, Jake. Regarding my question about when to extract, I was cycling around and we have 2 large fields of some sort of field bean in full flower within 1 mile of my heart— my hives. Tons of clover still around. Wow. So yeah, definitely not extracting just yet. You've got loads to go. Do you reckon 1 to 2 weeks from now for extraction? So, so 2 weeks brings you to like, what The the eighth of not further than that was two weeks bring you to where are we now? We're there. Two weeks brings you to like the nine. I can't even do the maths. What day are we now? The tenth of August. So it's not it's not million miles away from my estimate of the fifteenth. But I'd go for that. Chrissy says thank you for the crushing strain advice. Super excited, pun intended. Thank you. I've just got rid of my potato ricer too. Don't. I shall grab a new one. The beeswax will be going into my lip balms and honey into some soap, shampoo bars, and other goodies. Cannot wait. Oh, that'd be nice. Uh, Robert Thomas says Old Castle hives are good. They are based in Neath, South Wales. I bought a bit from them. Michael Critwell says, okay, thank you. It is a weak colony. I will take your advice tomorrow. Oh, I'm down to the bottom. Ben Wong says, thank you for your live stream as always. Gutted I can't make a bellow and pizza this year. So he's definitely going to do it on other years as well. Right, I got to the end. Brilliant. 2 hours 25 minutes. Not that I'm looking to get to the end. I do enjoy these, but I've got sore throat. So let's have a look. Feel free to vote. So go to the top. Oh, someone's given me a video. Let's open a video and have a look at that. Very nice. So it's a— oh, love the thumbs up! Free cap competition, please. Like the BJ Sheriff suit. Should we watch that one again? I like it particularly that someone sent in a video because I just want to check what the buffering's like. Good. I like the pattern. I like the Langstroth frame. Very nice. So I'm just going to go through them all. Hi Lawrence, beehive I made from pallet wood working well. This frame From a Black Mountain Honey Queen after three weeks looking promising. Thanks, Troy. Looking nice. A few gaps still there though, but very nice. Is this end to end? What's that group? Oh, sorry. It's just it's just me. Just me, Jay. Sorry. Nice. Like that one there. Another Langstroth frame. Bit of pollen in there as well. What like what what I what I think on like a nice frame for me is just. I want to see no missed cells. I want to see like literally no missed cells. I quite like a ring of pollen around the edge like that there as well, and I like a ring of stores, capped stores, around the edge as well. But really, like, if there was just a frame that was 100% brood, for me that, that would be the winner. Um, I like a new frame as well. I like, I like a frame to be like relatively new looking. You can see this one here, it's not, not brand new. Um, but it's nice, really nice frame, like it's really good. Uh, so look at that one. See, that's nice. See what I mean about like the new frame, the fact that it's, it's just quite new. I know, like, I should have told you the prerequisites. That, that's a really nice one. I like that one. It's like end-to-end, bit of stores at the top, not that one, not that many gaps. So I like that one. That's probably the leader so far. Oh, do like that one. Where's my control button? Yeah, that's, that's definitely overtaken it. That's, that's in the lead. Not many missed cells at all, all the way around. That's really good. Someone's telling me to zoom in here. As I zoom in, let's click on it first. Well, I like that one. It's unconventional. It's like a— when they— a brood frame emerges and then they back fill with— I do, I do like that one. Um, it's that one in the lead. 7825 is in the lead so far. Oh, 7825 is not in the lead anymore. I think that one's got to be it. It's a video as well. Let's have a look at like a freeze frame. Wow, that is a pretty serious frame. Let me see if I can zoom in on it. It's a video. No, you can't. Um, that one's, that one's in the lead. Jeff in Maidstone. Now that, oh, it's close, isn't it? That one between that one. Let's go back to the other one. Oh wait, so he's done the video as well, right? Oh, it's real. This is, this is going to be difficult. I, I love the density there. You look at that area there, isn't not a missed sell. You've got the occasional one, but then if I'm looking at this one, yeah, I think, I think for me Jeff in Maidstone is beating Rob from Stung Honey. But like, that is a really nice frame. So Jeff in Maidstone in the lead so far. Oh, there's some brilliant frames here. Who's this? This is Neil. We compare. Oh, that's a really difficult one. Let me just zoom in on this one. So like it's just this side here is just a bit empty and a bit empty at the top versus oh no that one's got it as well. Oh right am I going to split these two? Or maybe I'll tell you what maybe I won't need to split them. Let me let me carry on. That's a nice frame but I think I think the other two. Are in the lead on that one. Oh, 14 by 12, we like it. You know, it's a bit unfair, 14 by 12, because that's got way more brood in it, but it's a bigger frame. But I think, I think Neil's one is still— you don't know. That's a good frame again. Like, that could be a better frame than it looks because I'm not 100% sure if it's all empty with all the bees on it, but it's a very nice frame. Or is that a foundationless frame? If so, it's— oh no, is it? Or is it beeswax and bits one? Yeah, it's a plastic one, isn't it? Nice, good frame. Like that. Um, or like, got a person in it as well. Very nice, very nice frame. Loads of loads of entries, isn't there? Someone just checking to see if it was correct. Nice frame again. Some great frames, isn't there? I like it. They sent a few extra ones. That was a nice one. Oh, you know what? I didn't say. I didn't say it had to be. Just brewed, did I? I do love a good pollen frame. I like that one. Again, really nice. Oh, again, so that one there, that could be, that could be a belter of a frame. Got Black Mountain Honey Queen as well, but it's, uh, oh yeah, a Yellow Queen. Nice, that's really good. She's doing well. Nice one from John. Oh, I think someone may have just overtaken. Let me go back to Neil's one, the other one. That's Neil. Oh, see, Neil, this one, you've got a few in the middle there. That's versus— sorry if people are listening on the podcast. I'm just aware people on the podcast now thinking, what is this guy talking about? Yeah, I think, I think that one's overtaken Neil. Sorry, Neil, you were, you were top for ages, and then this one— that is a nice one. And that one— yeah, that's my new favorite here at the moment. I love it, I love it that loads of people have got my queens in here, you know. Buckfast Queens from Black Mountain honey, brilliant. Good one, Nick. Nice again, but difficult to see with all the bees on. Nice. I like it. Right, and that's it. So they are all of them. So da da da da da da da da da da da. Is it money or money from the London Alchemists is the winner? That's a belter of a frame. Really like that one. And I'll tell you what I like about it. I'm just zooming in, zooming out. I like that it's like a relatively new frame. I like that the brood is like all the way up to the edges on most of the sides. I like that there's not that many bees on it to be able to show it. Um, it's a new frame, it's relatively clean, and then the density of nice kind of very similar cappings, colored cappings, is good. There's no drone brood on it. And there's just very few missed cells. So you've won a cap. Um, you just got to email me your— I'm not put the pen back up— email me your delivery address and I'll send that to you this week. There we go, we have a winner. We'll do that again because that was quite fun. We'll do like the beekeeping Olympics, I think, or something else cool, maybe like best queen or something. I'm sure I can find some more caps. So 5 past 11, there we go, we are done. Another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I hope you enjoyed it. I am off to bed. I'll probably have some dinner first. I've not had my dinner yet, um, but I really enjoyed that. I hope you found it useful. I hope you all have an excellent end to the beekeeping year, and I'll see you all in a couple of weeks' time.