Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 20

Hello, hello, hello! We are live. Um, I was on the computer earlier and someone said that the audio on my live streams was terrible. Um, so I hope it isn't too bad. I had to go back and check some of the live streams after that because I thought, oh no, don't tell me I've been doing live streams and the audio has been terrible. And I kind of thought, well, yeah, it's not, it's not the best. So I bought myself a new microphone comes tomorrow. So I'm very, very excited about my new microphone. And as I said on the Facebook post, I do not need a second invitation to buy new stuff, especially audiovisual equipment. But I thought it had been a little bit of time since I did a last— my last Q&A. So I have got 7— only got 7 questions on the Ask Me a Question on the website. So I will answer a lot of questions, uh, in the chat. So I see Tim Treaby has answered Has asked a question even. This is like my favorite feature in the world, putting up the questions. So let's go, let's jump straight into it then. How long can a nuc survive without a queen? So that question there is a little bit difficult because you could have a nuc, say like a 6-frame nuc, absolutely jam-packed full of bees— my favorite saying— with 6 frames of brood, and then if you took the queen out, you could have that colony, that nuc, lasting like 6 weeks without a queen easily. The, the thing in terms of the issues that could go wrong with that is that you could end up going kind of like a laying worker. If they can't produce their own queen, they will eventually turn into laying workers. Chances are they will anyway. But if you've got a nuc that's kind of already on like just a couple of frames of bees and then you take a queen out, it's not going to last that long. And then the added Bit on top of that question there is how quickly can you build that nuc back up? Because if you leave a nuc, one of those, say, a 6-frame nuc full of bees, you take out the queen and it dwindles down to say like a 2-frame nuc, and then you try and add a queen in thinking, I've added my queen in, that's going to fix all of the problems here, the age of the bees that are left is going to be quite old and it's going to take a long time for that nuc to be built back up. But I get this with the queens that we sell. There's a question later on about queens and timings and people saying, well, the queen didn't turn up on day 8, so it's going to be day 9 and the whole process is messed up now. And the important thing with that process— and I will, I'll recap the process in a minute, in a minute— but the important thing is that you don't introduce or open the tabs of the cage before day 8. Now, if you do it on day 9, that's fine. If you do it on day 20, that's fine. The colony can be hopelessly queenless for quite a while. Uh, it makes very, very little difference to the success. If anything, I find it's better. Uh, Claire has just said she thinks the audio is fine, so thank you, Claire. Right, let's answer some more of these questions on here then. Right, so Ned Taylor has asked, what was your final opinion on the fully plastic frames and feeders frame? So in, in principle, I really like the idea, especially for my heather extraction. In terms of the touch and the feel and looking at them, I really like them. In terms of any longevity, I just can't give an opinion on it yet because I've not really had— I've not had a full season, but I barely had like a month of the season last year actually looking at them, and they definitely took much longer to draw out than the wax frames, quite a, quite a bit longer. But for my process and for what I'm going to use them for in terms of heather extraction, it's not an issue. I'm going to have really strong heather flows, so I think that'd be all right. But I'll give you a more detailed update later on in the year. So that's— I'm up to date with questions on the chat already. That was quick. So I'll jump back into the ask a question ones So I've had a question coming from someone, and I have to say I'm a little bit concerned about this question. So the question says, let me put it over here so you can see it. We have 2 queens coming on Saturday from you to split our existing colony. Would you leave the queen in the hive or move to move her to a nuc? And when I read that, I thought, oh dear, this, this could end badly. So I won't, I won't say the person's name. But the process that you need to do is you definitely need to take the queen out. So when you're requeening a colony, the process that I use— and I've used this process hundreds, if not definitely thousands of times when they're making up nucs, and it works, and I never ever get a single failure— some people say it's overkill, some people say you definitely don't need to do that and they have success doing it in 2 or 3 days. I could only talk about my own experience, which is I've done it over 1,000 times and I can't think of a single time where they've killed the queen. Not one. So my process is you, you take out the queen, you kill the queen, or you move the queen to a nuc so the colony is queenless, and then you leave it 8 days. And on the 8th day you go back in and they've drawn out loads of emergency queen cells. So at that point they're still queenless, but they're not hopelessly queenless. They have the resources. to make themselves a new queen, either capped queen cells or eggs or larva, anything like that that they can turn into a queen cell. And on day 8, if you go back in on day 8, take down all of those queen cells, then all you're left with is capped brood and empty cells. So at that point, they're hopelessly queenless. It's at that point that— that's the time that you should put your queen into the colony. I leave it 48 hours after that, and then I pop the tabs on the queen, and then I leave them for a week and don't go back in and look. And that's the process that I always use. There's a slight tweak to that process which I do, which pretty much what I always use now, which is the day that I take the queen out, day 0, I put the new queen in and I leave the queen in that, like, caged in the colony, sealed up for the full 8 days. And again, some people say no, I don't like doing that, and it adds no benefit, but it just means I don't have to have 2 separate visits. So to answer your question, you have 2 queens coming on Saturday from— to, uh, that you want to split your existing colony. Would you leave the old queen in the hive or move her to a nuc? If you left the old queen in the hive, what would happen is the second that you open the fondant tab, the existing queen would just go in and kill the new queen, guaranteed. Doesn't matter if it's a virgin or a drone-laying queen, or a fully mated queen, or an F0 breeder queen, the existing queen will always win. So you need to move her to a nuc, or you need to kill her, and then you need to wait 8 days to take down the emergency cells, leave them to be hopelessly queenless, and then pop the tab. I hope that was clear. Um, I love this, I love putting on the, the questions from people. So Hello, he says, hey Lawrence, foundation for supers, wired or unwired? Will unwired get many blowouts? So I, I've, I've had— I've tried all variations on this, literally every single variation. And I started off, and I remember going through the process of working out how expensive foundation was and thinking, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go foundationless and put it in place. I tried doing it first just starter strips and getting them to draw it out, and they drew it all, they drew it all out as drone brood which in supers doesn't make a massive difference, but I do find they're still a bit reluctant to put a lot of honey in the drone cells before they filled up all of the worker cells. But I find without any wire in there or any support, they do blow out, especially in the first year. If you can get them through like a few years without them blowing out, you're probably okay. But then wired or unwired? Yeah, I would just definitely go with wired. it makes it so much easier in the supers, especially considering with supers that you're not, you're not having to go through that cycle, that process in terms of brood frames where they get a little bit dark, they get a little bit rubbish, you need to melt them out. And then you've got the question as to whether you want the frame wired or you want the foundation wired. And, and my view on that now in brood frames is I much prefer to have the frames wired and then melt them down and be able to clean them and then embed the a new piece of foundation as opposed to having the foundation wired. But in supers, you're pretty much putting it in kind of like once, and it should like last, it's going to last you at least like 10 or 15 years. You never need to replace the wax in supers unless you get blowouts. So I would say definitely go with wired worker cell foundation in supers. That'd be my choice. Right, I'm putting up questions now before I've even read them, so hopefully there's nothing too obscene. Mem says he's got a hive inspection, found a queen cell that was half open with a pure black queen in it, dead. Did not find the original queen, but it doesn't look like they had swarmed. What is the best way forward? It first sounded like something was like horribly wrong there, right? So let me read it again. You've got a hive, you've done an inspection, found a queen cell that was half open the pure black queen in it, dead. Did not find the original queen, but doesn't look like they have swarmed. What is the best way forward? So you can answer this a little bit further down. Did they kind of go in from the bottom, or was this like— had, had she tried to emerge and then maybe she's been killed as she was coming out? Because that is, is slightly different. If they're starting to gnaw down on the sides, they're probably just not, not wanting to swarm. And that, that could have happened at this, at this point of the year. You could get that where The colony's so cramped, and then they're putting up swarm cells, and then they just look outside, they're like, oh my God. And I've had it on a colony before where they've taken— they started taking their own swarm cells down. They've run out of food and they just thought, yeah, maybe the decision was wrong. But it might not be that. It's always difficult with these ones here where it could be a multitude of things. But the fact that you didn't find the original queen, I would say if there's still eggs in there and there's no other swarm cells present, I would just carry on, carry on as normal. They might have had a go at superseding if there's just a single cell. So if there's one single cell, I always think that's supersedure. Anything more than one cell, and I think they're having a go at swarming. I'm interested to, interested to know how that goes. Right, let's see some more questions. Hey, you know, you know me, we talk about the difficult, the difficult topics here. So did you ever get any recurrences of EFB after your incident, or did you eradicate it successfully? So no, I didn't get any further recurrences, and it was, it was only isolated in one apiary. And the MBU came back at the end of the year and did a full inspection, a very Detailed lengthy inspection and didn't find any EFB. So did you eradicate it successfully? I'm not going to base that on one single inspection that didn't find it, but you, you've seen from the videos, like, I'm taking it very seriously, incredibly seriously, and it's changed my mindset and my philosophy and everything that I do in terms of beekeeping going forward. So if I do get EFB again, or if a colony that I've got, um, which has EFB now but isn't showing it kind of tests positive for EFB, then you'll see it on the videos. There's— I've got nothing to hide. If there's, if there's EFB there, we will do more than we did last time, which was kind of get like really worried and scared. I will hopefully, with the permission of the NBU, do some live videos, show you what it's all about. But fingers crossed that never happens. It was horrible. Do you know, there's like, there's a smell of disinfectant, and when it gets into your like heart, it's literally heartbreaking. It is the worst smell in the world because it just reminds me of death. Killing bees is not nice. I saw, um, I saw a picture on the beekeeping forum. If anyone saw the pictures on the beekeeping forum and I didn't want to say at the time, but I thought that does look a lot like EFB. And if you're— if you go and have a look on the beekeeping forum, there's 3 pictures, and the 3rd one down, there's one cell. And I just felt— I just wanted to say that bloody hell, that looks— that's exactly what EFB looks like. And it's just— it didn't have the twisted larvae, but had the sunken larvae. So where they're sitting kind of like a half-moon shape at the bottom. It didn't look nice. But to answer your question, no, I didn't get any recurrences, and I did have a full, um, kind of every single apiary got checked, and I didn't have any further occurrences of it. But have I eradicated it? Hopefully, but I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna count my chickens at all. I'm on the DASH course this year as well, so I've done my first, uh, introduction to DASH training, and then I've got another 2 days coming up in May. And I've got loads of test kits, and I've done— I've had a couple so far where I've kind of thought, oh, I don't like the look of that. And I— but I'm so over the top with it now, so paranoid with everything. And on both of those ones, I've done tests and they've come back negative. So it is me, it is me being paranoid. I think about things, but no, no further recurrences. Uh, what, Weiger? Is it Weiger? Sorry if I've completely butchered your name. So, do bees move sealed sugar syrup into a honey super? Good question. So I would say yes, they will move it because you're restricting them in terms of where the bees can— sorry, you're restricting them in terms of where the queen can lay eggs. So if you're saying like this is the brood box here and it's full of sealed sugar syrup or honey and the queen can only lay down there, if you bruised it they would definitely move it up because they want to create space. But I reckon they probably have a go at moving it up anyway just to create space for the queen. I think they did some tests and I think there's some advice out there which is that you should tint or put food coloring in your stores to, to track it around the frames. And I might do that. Maybe that's, that's a good idea for a video, isn't it? Have a look and we'll see whether they move it around if it's not uncapped. So if it's just sealed, and then we'll see if they move it around if you bruise it as well. Definitely an idea for a video, that one. So, uh, let's do that on my list. So I'll add this one in here as well, Joe. So you were saying you're speaking to a bee inspector today that told me the NBU did studies on bee farmers' cars that had cases of EFB and found spores on the steering wheel and gear stick. Shows how easy it is to reinfect. So yeah, so it's— so I know, pedantic— EFB is not spore-forming. So AFB is spore-forming, but EFB is bacterial. But the same principle applies, which is, yeah, you'll get it on the steering wheel, you get it on the gear stick. And I remember when I had mine diagnosed, the bee inspector just— he popped his head into my car and just looked around and just said, let's clean your car. And I've kept it a lot cleaner ever since. It was really, it was really bad. And I do— I look back on my old videos and I think, like, telling people to put old black combs in trees and having a a retractable hive tool that rarely got cleaned, and not cleaning my suit, and not having a separate suit for each apiary, and not cleaning my hands and my gloves and my hive tools between inspections. Like, it was a, it was a kind of perfect lesson on how to, like, not manage disease effectively. So I hold my hands up and say all of that was wrong. And you will see, and you can see from the latest and most recent videos, like, a lot I'm not doing that anymore. Not got my black bee suit, I've not got my retractable hive tool, and everything's being cleaned. But you do, you, you need to be on top of it. And my advice to anybody here who's not got EFB, like, believe me, take it from me, the worst sound in the world is taking a litre or a pint of petrol and pouring it over a colony of 20 or 30,000 bees. And you hear the sound, and this is the sound, they go Just dead. They just die from the fumes. 30,000 bees instantly. And it kind of— it lives with you a little bit. Um, so hopefully that like made you feel a little bit uneasy, and it was designed to, which is just treat your colonies as if there, there's a disease risk and don't go around catching swarms and try and put yourself in a good position to never get it in the first place, and, and then you've never got to deal with it. Because it is pretty horrific. Right, let's have a look at some more videos. Right, some more videos, some more questions. Right, Jack says, how, how many stings have I got so far this season? So not, not that many. I find bees at the beginning of the year are pretty chilled out. I did go on a huge purge at the back end of last year as well, killing lots of queens. Anything that was like well techie got killed. But I've had a couple— I found a couple already where they didn't accept the queen. So there's some further purging that needs to happen, but it is noticeable how much more chilled out they are now. And also at this time of the year, they're a lot more chilled out. I think it's when they start getting— it's when you get into June is when you get battered, because they're at full strength, full size, and then they've not got any flow coming in. So you just got loads of bees just hanging around thinking, right, that guy comes and messes around with us every week. We're gonna nail him, right? Leo, who has a very fancy channel membership badge— hi, Leo— he says, one of my two— so one of my hives has 2 marked overwintered queens. Thought one had died, so requeened. What would you suggest doing? So I know me and Griff did the same video, didn't we, within about an hour of each other, on something that's, that's very rare, and then People have said it's not rare, and it's— you know what, it's not that rare. And you do have to take some of my video thumbnails and descriptions with a little pinch of salt. Um, I know some people get really angry if I go like, do a face like that, but it's not that— it's not that rare. And especially with the F0 queens that I put in, it is a well-known trait of an F0 queen that when you introduce an F0 queen, they don't quite have the same level of pheromone as a normally mated queen. So until there's some of that F0 queen's daughters in the hive, they do try and supersede her even if there's nothing wrong with the queen. So I introduced— I think I had 60 or 70 F0 queens went into all of my colonies last year. I spent loads of money on queens, and oh, it was a nightmare because normally my process is get to August, middle of August, back end of August, take all the honey off, stick your Apivar strips in, feed them and leave them. It's great, it's like the best thing in the world. And then I put all these F0 queens in, so they were just trying to— they were just constantly superseding them. So it wasn't even like a light touch inspection that I needed to do, it was going through and like constantly stopping these bees superseding. So I think I've got— it's either 2 or 3 now where there's definitely 2 queens knocking around in there, and they're probably both okay. I've not, I've not done anything further than that video where one of them was definitely drone-laying, and I think the other one's okay. I've not gone back to check on the other one. So what you've got now, you've got 2 marked overwintered queens. You thought one had died, so you requeened. What would you suggest doing? They will kill one of those queens eventually. They will have a fight, or you'll just come back one day and one of those queens will be gone. And whether that's just a random fight between the queens sparked by something, or the colony just decides to get rid of one of the queens, I don't know what it is. But you'll come, you'll come back one day and one of them will be gone. So I would suggest just make a split. Be the easiest split in the world if you've got 2 overwintered queens that are both laying eggs. Just make sure, just do like a classic artificial swarm. Just split them 50/50, put them next to each other, and just put one queen in one and one one queen in the other before the bees make the decision for you. Uh, Geister, I think, is it Geister or Geester? Says queen has filled the brood box and a super. I put an extra super on top last week, but I couldn't find the queen until today. Should I move her down a floor and use excluder to isolate the new super? So really simple answer to that is yes. I really— I don't like brood in a half. I don't like any brood brood ever being reared in any of my super frames. So saying it before, if you've got super frames and you're, you're just exclusively using them for honey, pretty, pretty much last forever. But you never need to recycle out the wax unless it gets— I don't know, I've never ever cycled out wax from a super frame because they're never putting any brood in it, so it is just wax. But if they start putting brood in it, and I've had a couple where the queen's got up there, you could see it immediately, it becomes so much more attractive to wax moth And then you have to go through cycling it out. So I don't like ever having queens laying up in the supers. But the fix, yeah, the fix is really easy, which is just find a queen, take her downstairs, put her underneath the queen excluder, and then they will just sort that out very, very quickly. You might, if there's any drone brood above the queen— or pardon me, above the queen excluder, then you will need to either put in another entrance for the drones to get out or just go back every other day and just let the drones out. That's definitely what I would do. Right, let's have a look at some of these more— these questions. Uh, so Peter says he split an overwintered hive, took the queen and some brood and put into a nuc, no problem. The remaining hive produced queen cells and the hive is now nasty. Any advice? So it, it can easily happen when you take a queen away from a colony, they go nasty. So there's a number of things that make colonies go horrible. One is like lack of income, so lack of any food, or basically a stress on the colony. So lack of protein, lack of nectar, and lots of bees. But the other one is taking away their queen. So if you're taking away their queen, they can get angry. If they produce queen cells, you can either take down the queen cells and add a mated queen in, or you can just let them reproduce. But I would say if they've gone nasty, then don't really want those genetics anyway. So you probably want to take down the queen cells and requeen. And you will find that once that queen has settled in and she's got some of her daughters there and you're back on a flow, you should back— should be back with a nice colony of bees. Hayden says, I split a hive and they started to raise their own queen from the brood, and now there are 2 capped Queen cells. Should I take one out and try and split another hive? What do you suggest I do? I've done this before. This was when bee math was great at the beginning of my beekeeping journey, which was if you, if you do what you said there and you make a split or you take the queen out and they produced a few different queen cells on, on different frames, you think definitely going to split them, aren't I? Because I've got maybe 3 or 4 queen cells on different frames. That means 3 or 4 colonies. I wouldn't do that anymore. I would always just— if you're gonna, if you're gonna do any sort of walkaway split like that, I would say just, just do it into 2, knock it down, find the best queen cell, single queen cell, and leave it at that. You— I'd say you're chancing, chancing your luck doing it any other way, and it's a pain. I'll tell you what the pain is, is when you have to come and put them back together again once they've failed mating, or once the bees have just thought there's enough bees here, I'm off. And they just go back and join the other hive. It's annoying over— sorry, it's annoying putting them back together. And yeah, I would leave it, just keep it at one split with one queen cell. What are the merits of a purebred queen over a natural queen? So the ones that we have, we'll have like purebred, either artificially inseminated queen where you're completely controlling the, the mother line is going to be controlled because it is, and then the drone line is going to be controlled through artificial insemination. You can also get pure breed like island-mated queens where they're controlling the drones through— it's like a naturally mated queen, but you're still controlling the drones, and, and that is still classed as like an F0 queen, believe it or not, or a pure queen, which is what it it should be called. Where— so I'm putting the distinction in there because it's a pure breed queen that is naturally mated, whereas like an F1 queen is taking a pure mother and then you're just like, it's wild drones. So you could, you could put as many drones as you want into the air, but I can't control what my neighbor's doing, I can't control what the wild population of bees is doing, and then that's what you get as an F1. So I think that's kind of the difference between the pure breed and, uh, like a naturally mated F1 queen. But the merits of a pure breed is that it's— you're fully controlling both elements, like the mother and the father side. So you are— you're creating a pure pedigree queen, like, that's fully controlled. Um, I've got— I've got quite a lot of them at the moment, and, and they're good, but they're not It's not really something that should— it's quite difficult to explain. It's not something you should really be using and judging as itself. What, what you should really judge is those F0 queens' daughters that are reared with drones, wild drones, and then you get the F1 queen, and then you can judge the offspring. And then that's the best way of doing it. So, so I've got some that, uh, they're a bit like— they're a bit dopey. Do you know when you get like a really inbred dog? and they're just— it's a bit dopey and it doesn't really know what's going on. It's quite cute. And that's what these F0 queens are like. And the daughters, uh, like the, the actual worker bees are like— they're just so incredibly placid, but they just, they just seem like a bit stupid. They don't really have like the vigor that you'd get of a kind of like a wild-crossed bee. But some of the F1 daughters are fantastic. You get like a— they're a little bit more feisty and feisty is not the right word. Like, a bee— bees will sting and bees will fly, but they're so prolific, it's unreal. Like, I've got one of the nucs at the moment, and even going in like first week of April, it was on— it was on an 18-frame configuration at 16 frames of brood, first week of April. Insane. And that was the F1, and the F0s were— were no— like, they were miles behind. So hope— hopefully that explains it a little bit. You are struggling to get your head around a demerare, so you move the old brood frames, presumably from last season, on top. They backfill with honey, but isn't that tainted with a varroa treatment? So it is tainted with varroa treatment if you've used a varroa treatment, but the way that I always explain this is that if you Lost my track completely. So if you, if you've got a colony of bees and you go into the winter and you put your Apivar strips in there, that those brood frames are tainted— apparently tainted. They're not tainted, you can't extract honey from them, but they've been exposed to Amitraz. So then fast forward to the next summer or the next spring, the bees bring in nectar and they store the nectar in those frames, in those brood frames. Bring it into the colony, store it in the brood frames, and then overnight they lift it up and it goes up. So it's exactly the same process. So all it means is that you can't end that Demaray configuration with a Demaray— sorry, with an Apivar-tainted box at the top as a honey super. That's the only constraint that you'll put— you're kind of putting on yourself there. You can't finish in that configuration. Doesn't matter where— what where you are throughout the season, whether that Apivar-tainted box is at the top or the bottom or wherever, just can't finish in that configuration. So all I ever do is that I know which ones are my Apivar-tainted boxes, and at the end of the year, that Apivar-tainted box goes back underneath the brood configuration, and then the bees just move all the honey back out of it. And then it— I know it seems like, well, you've got honey coming out of an Apivar-tainted frame, but it's exactly the same as any other one of my colonies, which is the honey goes into an Apivar-tainted frame and then gets stored back up in the supers. And I, I'm being kind of like incredibly overcautious, but that is a, that's a fully tested legal product. There's nothing wrong with doing that. If you speak to the, the people who make Apivar, they say that it's not tainted at all, but it's just kind of the legislation that says that. So all it means is that you cannot finish, um, you cannot finish the season with an Apivar-tainted box at the top as a honey super. Kind of all else goes. Um, Walker Bee Ranch, you're very generous with your tips, a $20 tip, that's very kind. Good to see you too. Right, next question. Uh, Tom HD Gaming 1996 says he just started beekeeping this week and got 2 hives. Is there anything I should be aware of, and what advice would you give to people who just started beekeeping? So good luck in your beekeeping journey, you're gonna absolutely love it. Uh, 1996, so you must be like kind of 20-something, I don't know, trying to work that out, as bad my maths is, right? So advice that I would give to people who just started beekeeping, so it is now the 27th of April, so the, the most, the 2 most difficult months of the year are going to be kind of like May and like the beginning of June because the bees are going to swarm. So don't think that you can kind of shirk off the responsibilities of going in and doing your inspections, but also don't feel that you need to go in there every single day. You need to go in once a week, every 7 days, every 7 days. Don't miss them, and most importantly, give them a enough space throughout May. And if you see them building queen cells, you know you have to take action. Whatever you do, don't just think, oh, I'll take down all of the queen cells and close it back up again, and then everything will be fine, because it won't. They will just swarm. Once you get through that period of May and kind of into the beginning of June, the chances of them swarming are considerably less. They still do swarm back then, but no way near as much as they do in May. And then next advice is just kind of enjoy it, have fun, do your varroa treatment early. If you're kind of on the fence about whether you should treat for varroa or not, I would say definitely treat for varroa, do it early, and just enjoy the honey and enjoy the bees. It's great fun. Uh, My Way to Be says, what do you think about Randy Oliver extended release oxalic acid method? Have you used it? So no, I think it's a great method. I know a number of people who use kind of similar methods in terms of oxalic acid towels, um, but it's not legal in the UK. And it's really annoying that it's not legal because it's, it's quite clearly safe. They've tested it in America and you can use it, you can use it in America even with supers on. And it shows that it's a very effective method, like long, like you say, extended release method, which is what you need for varroa. You need that long kind of extended method to get a drop so you're constantly targeting the phoretic mites. It's proven, it works, it's simple, it's cheap, and because it's the UK, it's not legal, so we can't use it. So not bitter at all, but a little bit gutted. I love, uh, I love all these questions coming out like that. Loads of questions coming in tonight. If you're enjoying the stream, uh, please do give it a thumbs up. Thumbs up always help. Thank you very much. Uh, right, so Julian says all 15 colonies overwintered well, but one has bad dysentery, possibly the Cima 2022 queen. 7 frames of brood on 14 by 12, small clumps of bees outside No poo on frames, frame tops, requeen. So I'd love to see a picture of this bad dysentery site. So I did a video recently with one where it looks like it's— it looks really bad, and the colony was fine. But it's all just when it gets cold and the bees can't get out, and especially once they've started bringing in protein and they've started rearing brood and their guts are going and they need to go out and go to the toilet, but it's cold and it's 7 or 8 degrees, they just go out and just do it all over the hive. And some colonies are definitely worse than others. So I'd say you've got 7 frames of brood on 14 by 12, that's a big, strong, healthy colony. Small clumps of bees outside the hive, nothing that's kind of not normal for this time of year. No poo on the frames or the frame tops. I wouldn't be requeening that, I would just be seeing how they get on. And if you wanted to do a test for Nosema, a test for Nosema is really easy. You just kind of take like a handful of bees and do some samples under a microscope and then just get some pictures and you can see the Nosema spores. And it is quite a simple one to do. I have actually had a go at doing that and I couldn't find any Nosema spores, but it is a very simple check. There are a couple of kind of homemade remedies for possible Nosema, which I probably can't tell you. I don't use them because they're, again, they're illegal. But I have heard that if you take thymolated sugar syrup and spray that on the colony like that, it can be used to combat Nosema. But I will caveat that, Julian, with the recommendation that you shouldn't be doing because it is illegal, um, and there's been no tests to say that it actually works. So it is, it's anecdotal, but I heard it does work. Also, I think, I think Hive Alive as well, giving them, giving them like a feed of Hive Alive is supposed to, again anecdotally, give them a boost against Nosema, um, and that is kind of doing it when there is an eczema problem as well. But it's not a treatment for eczema. It doesn't say that on the tin. It just supposedly helps them. So hopefully, hopefully you read between the lines there. You can't do, you can't do either of those 2 things. They are illegal. Uh, right, Joy says, I had some honey left over from last autumn which was stored in plastic 20-liter buckets. Put it in the new Abello honey warming cabinet. It's softened but looks like creamed honey, fermented maybe. So first off, how good are the Abello honey warming cabinets? Like, I know I do their social media, it's not a shameless plug, but they are the best things in the world. Oh man, I remember I built, um, my own warming cabinets with like long house and heating tubes and like a controller, and it was just— I'd always get it wrong, and it would just— I'd go back like 24 hours later and something had tripped out, or the temperature hadn't been working, or the fans hadn't worked, and half of it had like liquefied and the other half hadn't. And then since I got my 2 kind of big cabinet Abello warming cabinets, just every single time nailed it really good. Right, so your honey though, it's softened but looks like creamed honey. So fermented? I don't know, it sounds like maybe they've just not— you've not heated them thoroughly. So what temperature do you have it on? I would suggest with that one, just put the temperature up higher for a short amount of time. But it shouldn't— if it's just softened but looks like creamed honey, I wouldn't say it's fermented. I would just say maybe you haven't turned the cabinet up high enough or left the honey to warm through. You need to give it like a good amount of time. It should be going back to fully liquid. If it's fermented, it's not like it doesn't go viscous if it's fermented. It's really kind of— you'll smell it as soon as you get it. It's like a real alcohol smell, and you'll see the bubbles going through it, and it gets like a frothy, scummy kind of thing on it. And if it's like consistent like that, it looks like creamed honey. I wouldn't say so. And even all-seed whey, it sets in the bucket like rock solid, like white concrete, but when you put it through the warming cabinet, it comes out like Just runny honey, completely normal dark runny honey. So it's creamed honey; it doesn't make a difference once it's heated up. So I reckon that is just not heated properly. Mish says hi, Mish. By the way, nice to meet you at the beekeeping conference. I need to speak to you about code. Hi, Lawrence. When will your UK mated queens be ready to buy? So. I normally say middle of June, but I reckon it's going to be back end of June this year. It is just too cold, and the colonies are in a good place in terms of brood. I could, I could easily get my starters going now, and I think in terms of like drone maturity, the colonies are great. We've got like 2 frames of drone brood in most of them. So I think if we had the weather, the bees would be in a good position, but the weather's just shocking. even like the next 2 weeks, just like 12 degrees, rain, and I don't want to put all my resources in and just to be like a washout. I want to wait until the weather's nice, so I will end up knocking it on a little bit. So I reckon back into June. Uh, John says he has a hive that still has 10 frames of stores from last year. Can you remove and keep for winter, and if so, what's the best way of storing? So yeah, can you do that? Definitely. You could just, you could just keep them in the house, keep them away from any vermin, but they will crystallize. But the best way of keeping it is put them in the freezer. That is by far the best way of just— you can just freeze honey and then come back like, come on, 6 months later, defrost them, and then it just goes back to runny in the frame again. So that, that would be how— if you've only got 10 frames and that's all you want to stores, just speak to your— speak to your wife and see if you can get permission slip to get some honey in the freezer. That's what I would do. Gundogs— I'm not even attempting the first one, I get it wrong every week. So Gundogs says, hello, Nick here. What are your thoughts on F2 aggression? Going to try and raise a couple of colonies this year from an F1 to see for yourself. So you, you hear there's a lot, there's a lot being said Uh, about bees and queens, and everyone's got their own agenda. Everyone has got their own agenda. But this is something that it definitely exists, and it also definitely doesn't exist. And for the people who have the agenda that they want to not have imported bees or not have Buckfast bees, they play on this and say F2 aggression, you'll get them, you have to constantly requeen. I've had colonies that have gone down to F2 and they've been horrible, and I've had colonies that have gone down to like F2, F3, and they've been the calmest, gentlest bees in the world. It is completely dependent on the drones in your local area. So if you've got, if you've got an F— if you've got like 10 F1 colonies of Buckfast in a really nice isolated area, and then one of them tries to swarm and they leave behind a queen cell, and then that mates in this apiary with all of your nice F1 Buckfast queens. And your F1 Buckfast carry the pure drone from the F0 upwards, so you've effectively got pure drones going around in that apiary. And if you're in an isolated area, the F2 are going to be lovely, going to be really nice, calm, gentle bees. But if you're in an area that you've got one F1 Buckfast queens and you've just got like wild, feral, horrible, angry bees, and then they're— they come together with some crazy mix, then yeah, you could get horrible F2 aggression. So all I would say is just, yeah, right, raise a couple and, and see for yourself. You might be surprised for the better, you might be surprised for the worse, or worst, um, but give it a go, see what it says. Uh, Matt says His partner thinks the bee inspector is a wind-up. You know it isn't. Please, can you say something to convince her? So no, it's definitely not a wind-up, but you know what, sometimes I wish it was a wind-up. But no, there are seasonal bee inspectors, there are regional bee inspectors, there's head bee inspectors, and they are out there to protect the welfare of bees, and they do absolutely everything they can to do that, but they are very real. Loads of questions coming in. This is great. I've nearly got down to the bottom, so if you've got any more questions, stick them in. I do have a couple of backup questions in my spreadsheet that I can go into. So Hayden says he split a hive and they raised their own queens from the brood, and now there are two capped queen cells. Should you should take one out and try and split another hive? I think I answered that one before. Have I gone back on myself? So yeah, I said that one. Yeah, split it out, but just limit it to one. Chris says he had EFB in 1999 and he still remembers the noise when the petrol went in and the fire from all that wax and wood coated in petrol was pretty scary. It's grim, isn't it? I'll give you a tip though, for anybody who's doing this, and I didn't— yeah, it's a good tip if you ever have to murder hundreds of thousands of bees, and you have a mesh floor, which is— I've said this on another stream previously, which is what they recommend you do is you wait until it's nighttime, you go into your colony of bees, and you take the roof off, and then you pour petrol in over the top, and then it kills everything. You put the lid back on. But when I did that, I opened the roof and all the bees flew out, and I thought, okay, So I've opened the roof and I poured the petrol in, but there were some bees that flew out and then like they could have just gone into other colonies. So someone gave me a good bit of advice, which is don't do that. No, no, no, that's stupid. You wait until the bees are completely sealed in for the night, seal the entrance up, strap the hive up completely with like a ratchet strap, turn the whole thing upside down. You might need someone else to give you a hand doing it. and then you pour the petrol in through the mesh screen, and then not a single bee can escape. And then you just— if you do what I did, you just chuck the whole thing on the fire, which is a bit extreme, I know. You could have kept all of those wooden supers, but I didn't want to take any risks, so I burnt a lot of bees. But that's a good tip, and one that you wouldn't know, I don't think, unless someone told you. Brian. Hello, Brian. He enjoys the vids, especially when I get stung. So thanks very much. Uh, Pete says, have you run any supers with drone-based foundation? Use it all the time. The bees don't sport any pollen in the drone cells and the honey extracts easier. So yes, I have. I would say maybe 10% of my supers are drone-based, and I understand all the arguments for it in terms of the they're not putting the pollen in, which is definitely a real benefit. They're not putting the pollen in, um, and, and you get like slightly marginally more honey due to the, the amount of wax that's there. So there's nothing, there's nothing really I dislike about it. The one thing I would say though, and it'd be interesting if you find the same, is that if you put like 3, say you put 3 supers on at once, they always leave the drone foundation. Drone-based foundation won't last. They just, they do not like storing honey in drone-based foundation. But I guess if all of your supers are on it and they've got no choice, then they will do that. But I do like it. Yeah, it's good. What should you do if there are 2 queen cells on one frame? It's plastic foundation. So whenever I'm doing any kind of walkaway split or leaving the bees, and if you go into your colony and you see 10 swarm cells, always take it down to one. I know there is a school of thought which is Leave 2, leave 2 on a frame or 2 in a colony just in case one fails. My experience is if you leave 2, one, they're going to swarm, they're going to swarm with one of them, whereas if you leave one, they don't swarm. So my advice is always only leave one. I just say again, Walker Bee Wives, thanks very much, $20 tip, much appreciated. When you perform a demerite, do you treat the top box as a straight super when the brood pops, or do you do a rolling one where you swap the frames about? Cheers. So I, I don't, I don't do a rolling one where I move the frames, but I do like a— mine's like a rolling one where I continually do it with the boxes. So I'm moving the boxes around in a rolling fashion, but you can do a rolling demerite where you're doing it where you're rolling the frames individually. But for me, it's just, it's just too much work to do that kind of with any number of colonies. If you're rolling frames in each of them, it becomes very laborious. So I don't do that, but I do, I do roll the boxes. Uh, I'm gonna have a bit— I've got a chamomile tea today. I'm gonna have some chamomile tea. Tom says, when, when all you have is new foundation and we want bees to draw on comb, what's the best ways to encourage or Promote that. I've been recommended sugar syrup, one part sugar, two parts water. Any advice? So yeah, that is that is the standard advice: one to one sugar syrup. You've got one part, you've got one part sugar, one part water, two parts water. Okay, that's kind of like not again my maths is going wrong. That's like 0.5 to one. So so in the UK, the standard ratio for that is one to one. Which is a kilogram of sugar and a liter of water, but it makes no difference. Just, it— as long as they've got food coming in, they will draw wax. That's just— it's as simple as that. Doesn't matter if it's 2:1, 3:1, 1:1, or just nectar coming in. So if you've only got, say, like 2:1 invert sugar syrup, then that's fine, you won't get as much of it. But definitely feeding really does help them drawing out wax foundation. They need they need the energy in order to do it, and they won't do it unless there is like a flow on or a simulated flow by feeding them. So yeah, get them fed. Mike, another channel member, says colony hived up from overwintered nuc 2021 queen. This week there's very little brood and a few. Scattered capped brood on three frames. Fourth frame is better. Little drone brood. It's a case to requeen. Yeah, it doesn't sound very good. The few scattered capped brood on the three frames is that worker brood, but it is when it when it's scattered like that. You you have to send me a picture. Now I'm getting worried. It doesn't. Yeah, you need to send me a picture of that one because. because it could, it could be fine, or it could be like, oh, you might have an issue there. Little drone brood, you're saying though. So I would just— the scattered capped brood always gives me like a nervous feeling now that there's something up. Um, it could be that you're not seeing the eggs that are being kind of backfilled in there. If you want to, if you want to send me an email, uh, my email's on the website, I will take a look for you. How does varroa first enter the hive? Are they attracted to the hive and crawl in or latch onto bees whilst they're foraging? So they're just there. They're like, in the UK, there is not a single colony of bees in the UK that's not got varroa in it. Not one. Like, they're just there. So then they just transfer transfer from hive to hive through swarms. I don't think the varroa are kind of like jumping on the back of one bee and then going onto a flower and then getting onto another bee, although that could happen. But I just, I just think they're there. How they got there is another argument. But I guess, yeah, I don't think they enter the hive any other way than On bees, but it's a good question. It's made me thinking. I'm talking as I'm thinking now, and thinking how did they get there in the first place? I don't know, but they're there now. They're in everyone's hives now, and you can see how they spread so easily, which is you they kind of like decimate a colony and get it down, and then you just get this like boom varroa bomb in the colony as a last gasp. attempt to kind of not suffer the consequences of the diseases that Varroa carry. They, they either swarm or they go out and they get robbed out, and then just— it gets, it gets transferred around that way. Uh, a good question. I'm gonna have to have a look in that one. Did you ever seen up an honest box to sell honey? Uh, so we have an honesty box and it does remarkably well, really good. Um, it's cash only. I saw on the beekeeping forum this week that they were saying about putting like a little QR code on there. I love stuff like that. Definitely putting a QR code for payment on my one as well because we're on, we're on like a loop in terms of the videos. You get loads of people walking past and everyone's like, oh, I want to buy some honey, I've not got any cash. And I'm like that, I don't get— I don't carry Carries cash nowadays, but I'd like to buy honey. So I'm going to put a QR code up on my honesty box and see see how many people buy honey because I kind of never know how much how much money's in the honesty box or how well it does apart from when I go out and empty it and I'm always surprised when I empty it. Loads of money in there. But yeah, honesty boxes are great. Stick them up. And Peter, the next question that people always ask is, do you get many thefts? And I would say no idea, absolutely no idea. I could just be funding local honey thieves left, right, and center, but I don't track it, to be honest. I just put the honey out there, I put the sign up, I go out there like, I don't know, once a month, once every 3 weeks to collect the money, and I don't do any— I don't count the money. I don't kind of count the jars that are going out there, so I don't know if people are stealing from it. I don't think, I don't think many people are, um, but Honesty Box is— Honesty Box is a good farm. So Joe says, have you started supering colonies yet? How did your colonies come through the winter on the whole? So I, I was holding off and holding off and holding off, and I'm— I've still held off, so I've not supered any colonies yet. And with the weather that we've got at the moment, I'm so glad. It would have been like 2019 all over again, which was so many supers, and then I had to take them all off. And it's the most painful thing, taking the supers back off, because it's not as simple as just going, you know, getting into the truck and taking your supers off. You've got to, like, blow them all back out again and get the beat. It's really disruptive. And Why are you going and taking the supers off? Because generally the weather's not good, which means you're getting stuck in fields. It is not good fun. So no, I've not supered up yet, and I'm really glad that I haven't. But I'll just caveat that kind of with that doesn't apply to anywhere. Like, there'll be people down south that probably on their like third super full of honey by now. The weather in North Wales has been shocking, absolutely shocking. In terms of how my colonies came through, they came through okay. Not great. We had a few like overwinter wintering issues in terms of drone laying queens. I've found quite a lot of drone laying queens this year, more than normal I would say, which is odd because I always do like, like late checks, um, into the back end of the year, and there was no sign of any colonies really where there were suspect queens in them. Now they all looked good, um, but I've had, yeah, quite a few go drone layer. So nothing out of the ordinary, we're still probably like 10-15% in terms of colonies that haven't made it through, which is about average. It's never nice to see drone loss. Joe says he's tight, but any competitions soon? Get Damien to sponsor one with one of those warming cabinets. It would be nice. I've stopped asking for stuff like this because there's only so many people that I can go and ask and kind of bend their arm for a bit of generosity. But like, to put that example in there, is Damien going to get enough out of it for giving a £600 honey warming cabinet away? Probably not. So I'll have to have a think about the competition, see what we can do. So is it Vink or Vince? I did answer a similar question to this before. So hi, do be Bees move sugar winter stores from the brood box into the honey box to make space for the queens to lay eggs? So I think they do to a certain extent, even if it's capped. If you bruise the stores, like the honey stores in the brood box, and put it in between the brood, they do it overnight. They do it so quickly. So if you want them to do that, then it's really easy. You just take the frames out, bruise the stores, so just run your hive tool over the top So you're just kind of like gently bruising that wax cappings, put it in between 2 brood frames, and it'll be gone the next day. They will move it up. With no queen, no eggs, little larva and capped brood, and one single open queen cup, when should I go in? Weather in North— weather in South Wales is awful. What are my options if they fail to make a queen? Um, Doesn't sound good. So no queen, no eggs, little larva and capped brood, and one single open queen cup. So do they only make one? Is that what you're saying? If they've only made one and it's a big strong colony, then I always say don't go in for 4 weeks. That's kind of my rule of thumb for walkaway splits, is that you don't want to be going in when that virgin's running around because she just, she could just fly off and then never come back. But with the weather being so rubbish, oh, I wouldn't want to. I, I've got a couple of colonies like that that are trying to requeen at the moment and got no chance. I'll be going in, killing, killing the virgins and just adding in a new queen because they have got no chance of getting mated in this. Uh, Robert says he's got an F0 queen coming beginning of May. Do you try and keep your breeder queen hives smaller to slow the queens down? So yeah, definitely do that, but don't do it to the extent that they swarm because you're trying to keep them small. What I found with this one as well is that it's not just— what I kept on doing was thinking, what I'll do is I'll take the brood out. So if you take all of the nice capped brood out, you're knocking the colony back sufficiently. But what I found is that all that does is kind of like counterintuitive or counterproductive in that You're taking the brood out to knock the colony down, to keep the queen small, to limit the amount of eggs that she's laying. All, all my F0 queens, when I've done that, they've taken that as license to just lay 3 more frames of eggs. So you do the wrong thing. So the way that I found a much better way of doing it is when you're taking out the frames to try and keep them small, don't just take out the frames of capped brood, take out the frames of capped brood and the bees that are on the frames of capped brood. So you're kind of almost making like constant splits out of it, and then that way you're knocking them back to a point that you're taking all of the, the flying worker bees away, which limits the queen's ability to lay up loads more eggs, which gives you what you want, which is limiting the amount of eggs that she can lay. Took me about a season to work that out. I'm thinking, what am I doing wrong here? I'm just taking up, taking out all of the frames of capped brood, and this queen's just like firing out like it's going out of fashion. And then when I took the frames out with the bees, it slowed them right down. But they can go on for years. I've still got a green-marked one, so what's that, I don't know, 2019 or 2018? I always forget the colours. She's green, so I think she's 4 years old now, and she's just in a little nuc. They are taking the thing off now, I'm gonna have to stop talking. They tried to supersede it last week, last year and I knocked them down and then they gave up. So they're definitely going to supersede this year. Ah, so we're back to the honey question. So Joy says she had it in the warming cabinet for 7 days hoping one more day would help. Temperature set to 37 degrees. Honey's runny-ish, just not clear. It was stored in an unheated room in house. Right, so what I would suggest there is that you're not heating it up hot enough. I know, I know the argument is that you're trying to keep it under hive temperature of 38 degrees. But the reason you're trying to do that— for— you don't want to kill all the good stuff, but you're trying to limit the amount of HMF that's created by heating it. But heating it kind of like at 37 degrees for a long amount of time will produce like the same, if not more, than like heating it up to say 45 degrees for a couple of days. So I reckon bump the temperature up a little bit and that will clear it. Should do anyway. Um, Ned says, is beekeeping your full-time job? If so, how many years/hives did it take you to become profitable? Uh, so no, it's not, it's not my full-time job. It is still very much my hobby, although my wife laughs when I say that. Um, it's weird because it started, it definitely started off as a hobby, and it's like, it's clearly not a hobby now. It's clearly like a full-time business. But for the first few years, I would have never, never wanted to make a profit because I kind of thought, pay tax, make a profit, got to pay tax on it. So I was always doing everything I possibly could to not pay tax. And there's kind of only so many extractors and uncapping machines and cameras and microphones and stuff that you can buy before you're thinking, well, I'm probably gonna have to start paying tax on the profit. And it's nice, it's a good problem to have. Um, but it took maybe, I think, the first 4 years or 4 or 5 years we reported like big losses, big, big losses. And if you're doing it as a second job, and I don't know if you're in like the higher tax bracket, big losses if you're VAT registered in the world, it's, they're quite like I'm gonna say lucrative is not the right word because you're obviously still losing money, but if you're— I'll get the maths wrong now— if you're VAT registered and you buy something for £120 and you're going to calculate it as a loss, so it costs you £120, costs the business £120, you get your £20 VAT back, and then if you're a higher rate taxpayer, you get £42 back on top of that as well. So what was £120 only actually cost you £58. I used to do these maths a lot, and when you're buying big kind of, um, I don't know, £10,000 honey extraction machines and you do those calculations, you're thinking, well, I can buy myself a £12,000 extractor uncapping machine and it's only going to cost me £5,800, or I can, or I can get a profit and I'll pay my corporation tax on it. So I I did that for ages, just bought loads of needless stuff that I didn't need and reported losses for a long time. And then I think after like the 5th year, I realized this is just stupid. I'm buying stuff that I don't need to try and make a loss, and I don't want to make a loss. So I started making a profit from there, and then— and this is quite profitable now. It's good business, but no, still not my full-time job. full-time job. North Carolina Gardener says she's new to beekeeping. Is it easier running a single brood box? So it's definitely simpler, I would say, running a single brood box. I don't know if it's easier though. I do— I've run both, so I have double nationals and 14x12s, which is effectively one's a double And one's a single. And I do— I like the simplicity of the single, and I like the flexibility of the double. And if I had to pick one, I'd go with the double because it, it's so versatile and you can do so many different things with it. And so you can make splits, really easy to make splits, but really easy to do kind of like swarm manipulations, whether you want to do a demeray, like a vertical split, or an artificial swarm as a horizontal split. So if I had to pick one, I would go with the double. Uh, Ken Lutz— I recognize that name. I think you bought some queens recently. Hi, Ken. Uh, he says, when watching USA videos, they keep bees in short sleeves and shorts. I wish, I wish I could keep bees in short sleeves and shorts. I just wish it was warm enough to wear short sleeves and shorts. I think would be the way to go forward. I, uh, some of my colonies this year, you'll see they're so calm, so chilled out. I'm definitely going to get myself just some shorts, um, might take my legs up a bit and a veil and see it. We'll see how we go. We see how many stings I take. I'll just be happy if the weather's nice. Uh, sorry, I'm just, just reading, reading, reading the things to see if I can find Uh, the next one, right? Sean Scargill. Sean has also bought a number of queens this week. Sean, he says, when requeening with a mated caged queen, would you feed the bees with 2:1 or 1:1, or does it matter? So definitely doesn't matter whether it's 2:1 or 1:1. Feeding them when you're requeening is good practice though, especially if like if there's supers on, I wouldn't do it. But it's, um, it definitely helps, keeps the queens in good condition as well because they're getting access to really readily available carbohydrate, and it seems to just make the bees in a much better mood. So I do like to feed. Makes no difference though, 2:1 or 1:1. Great question. Have you seen any hit to nuc, queen, or honey sales due to increases of cost of living, in the cost of living? So I'll answer those 3 separately. So queen sales, absolutely not. Oh man, we cannot keep up with queen sales. That we were not this busy this time last year. So I'm looking up there now, I've got my queen sales up here. We sold so far, we've taken orders for 1,400 queens and it's not even May. Um, and we're, we're working about a week and a half or like, yeah, what's the day today? So pretty much like exactly a week ahead. So we sold out until next Thursday, and we're nearly sold out for next Thursday. I know that's a shameless plug if you need to get your queen orders in, but we are— we're really struggling to keep up. I've boosted the numbers coming in, so next week I've got 400 coming in, and the following week I've got 400 coming in. And like that, they will sell out before they arrive. Crazy. So no, absolutely no hit to, uh, to queen numbers. Um, and I suspect as well the fact that the weather's so bad might be driving that a little bit. But also, like, we've not, we've not put the price up, so the price of everything is going up for, for everything, isn't it? Price of queens not— has not gone up, and the price of nucs is, is still substantial. So I think people are, they're buying queens, making up nucs, selling nucs. So for them, they're probably only paying like 15% of the cost of a nuc. On the cost of a mated queen. Um, in terms of nuc sales, no, we sold out in January and we've done like a lot of nucs. Um, so we've done way more nucs than we did last year and we sold out earlier than we did last year. Honey sales, definitely, it is noticeable how the hit that is that honey sales have taken, which is crazy. Um, but yeah, people are— the people who bought kind of like premium products like honey, I think they are tightening up a little bit and not buying it. And then it's also that I think that's also not helped by competition. So everyone's got honey now, haven't they? And like lots of honey. And even the people who've maybe got like 3 or 4 colonies of bees, they've probably still got honey now, whereas normally they would have run out by September or November because they might not have got that much honey. Everyone got lots and lots of honey last year, so the smaller beekeepers have got a decent amount still. Bee farmers are sitting on tons of honey, and I do— I see it on the Facebook Marketplace where people are selling honey. I don't track the price with the spreadsheet, but you can see like the rough price that people are paying for it, and it's just going down and down and down and down. I saw one the other day Someone's selling it £2.50 a pound for summer honey, like in decent-sized quantities as well. Um, and it was pushing— it was pushing like £3.50 a few years back. So it's really— the overall bulk price for honey is dropping because the demand I don't think is there, which is crazy considering the, the positive press that fake honey is getting at the moment in terms of like the interrogating it and trying to get rid of it, and you think that that would drive up the sales of homegrown honey. But yeah, we're not seeing that. We're seeing the complete opposite. Uh, Joe, I'm gonna— I'm not gonna comment on the football, unfortunately. Not commenting on football. Uh, right, let's see some other ones. So Robert says, when you make up your nucs with either a cell or a virgin, how long do you leave the virgin to get mated before you get her out and replace So we go 3 weeks. It's a little bit cutthroat, but we just— you can't, you can't say, well, I'm going to give that one 2 weeks and I'm going to give another one 4 weeks, because when you're doing it in such big numbers, you just need to say, right, that's the cutoff. And the virgin goes in and 3 weeks later there's no eggs, gotta find that virgin, gotta kill her, and you just start again. So that is, that is our cutoff for virgins. For cells, you could add, you can add a little bit longer if they're unless you're putting them in and they're going to emerge the next day, maybe, maybe 4 weeks max. Hi Lawrence, after doing a split into a nuc, how long do I have to remove the nuc before I can bring it back and transfer it to a hive? I can read that one again. So after doing a split into a nuc, how long do you have to remove the nuc before you can bring it back and transfer it into a hive? I'm not sure I understand the question. I have to read it, read it for a third time. So you've done a split into a nuc Okay, how long do I have to remove the nuc before I can bring it back and transfer it into a hive? So in terms of how long, like, will it build up, just when the nuc's full. So once you've got it on like 6 frames, once it's full, maybe 4 frames of brood, that they can— they last quite well in nucs being compressed for a surprisingly long amount of time. But as soon as the nuc's full, just get it back into a hive and and get it fed. Have you found a lot of drone-laying queens coming out of winter? So I do, I do think there's— we've had a few more than normal, but not anything that's like weird. So like maybe like, I think we're like 10 to 15% losses overall, and most of them have been drone-laying queens. Um, but it's weird, all of the ones that are drone-laying queens, they're still like big colonies over 10, 8 9, 10 frames of bees. Uh, so it's easy fix, just kill the queen, put in a new queen, and away we go, which is much better than opening them up and they're all dead. Um, I'm nearly down to the bottom of this now, right? So Bees Honey says, how do you introduce virgin queens from grafts and nucs? So we don't, we don't do that with virgin queens like that. It's a real tricky art to introduce virgin queens. Some people like just running them in, which is you just got to get them to chuck them in, just say there you go. And some people like to dunk them in honey and chuck them in. I've just gone away from doing it. I much prefer just to put cells in. That's always the way that I do it. So get them, you can put them in an incubator, you can take them directly out of the finishers and just time them from when they're going to go in from a day before. And then we stole the trick from Murray, who I'm sure stole it from Yolanta, who stole it from someone else, which is put the foil around it, leave the little tip open at the top so they can't kind of burrow in. And then we get good emergence rates doing it like that, and we find that's, that's the best way. Making the nucs hopelessly queenless as well, so giving them enough time that they will accept anything and emerging queen cell for them is, is really good. Uh, Tillman says he's going away soon, one colony is busting with bees, no queen cells. Can I split them and let them bring on queen cells from their eggs? The queens are okay. Yeah, it's fine. Good, good way of doing it really. Like, it's— you're kind of hedging your bets a little bit in terms of if you need to go away for a few weeks, just before the colonies swarm, just do an artificial swarm like that or walkaway split. And then you come back and hopefully you'll have 2 colonies with 2 queens and eggs and stuff. And if you come back and one of the colonies has got the original queen and the other one's just kind of gone a bit weird and there's a virgin or a duff queen running around, you just kill the queen and just do like a newspaper, um, combine, and then you're back to normal, and then you've not lost a swarm. Johanna says, what's the difference and when do you feed with fondant versus syrup? So fondant is just like a big slab of candy, the stuff you put— the way that I always remember is if you have like a nice donut, you know, icing on a donut, that is fondant. It is exactly that, and it's nice. I often find myself in the apiary eating fondant. And then syrup is just liquid, liquid feed, 1:1, 2:1. It is effectively just sugar and water mixed together. So they're the 2 differences. You can feed all of them at all times of the year, but the standard way of doing it is that you would feed 1:1 in the spring, you would feed 2:1 in the autumn, and you would feed fondant throughout the winter. But you can feed any of them kind of at any time, apart from you wouldn't feed 1:1 syrup towards the end of the year because you're giving the bees too much work to fan it down, and you wouldn't feed syrup in the winter because the bees can't actually get in and feed on it. Right, so I'm down to the bottom of the questions. If you are enjoying the stream, please do hit the thumbs up. I'm going to answer a couple of the questions from my spreadsheet. So a question from Carl Sims came in saying, hi Lawrence, I was wondering if you always put the same Supers back on the same hive each year to limit the spread of disease, or are they used interchangeably throughout the apiary? So it's a good question, uh, and I would love to be in a position to be able to always put the same supers back on the same hive, but I don't think it's feasible. I don't think it's realistic in any size operation to actually do that. And then I was kind of working it through and chatting it through a bee farmer friend, which was if you did do that, would it actually make any difference? And I think in the apiary, in terms of cross-contamination from the supers to the hive, it would make a difference. But then you're taking those honey supers and you're cutting off the wax and you're putting it in a honey extractor, and then they're kind of like getting wheezed around and everything's kind of getting jumbled up in your honey extraction room. and your extractor anyway. So although you'd go to like huge effort and expense to make sure the same supers— like you have to have enough supers in the first place— the same supers go back on the same hive each year to limit spread of disease, you kind of— there's other ways for that disease to spread anyway. So I just— I don't— yeah, best practice we would do that. That's not something that we do though. And I think with EFB, like, it's not I've not seen conclusive evidence to say that it is spread in that way. Like, we know it's spread between the brood frames and the feed, the food that the bees create, like the royal jelly to feed the larva. Whether it's spread as much through the honey isn't conclusive. I reckon it probably is, but it's not something that we do, and it's something that I don't think would make a huge amount of Right, here we go. James Crawford says, "Is there any advantage or disadvantage?" Let me take sorry. Let me take this question off first. Is there any advantage or disadvantage on adding more than one super at a time? Example, next to acres of oilseed rape, could I add two or three supers at one go? Two drawn comb, one foundation, in the hope they fill two and draw the other. So some people will say, "Do you know?" Definitely shouldn't do that. Wait till one's full and 80% and put the next one on. And I would say that is the best practice. I know so many people that go and stick 4 supers on at once though. Now, if you get the weather right, and sometimes for overseed rape it's like 25 degrees and the weather's really nice, you get 2 weeks of beautiful sunshine, and I would say, yeah, stick loads on. But at the moment it wouldn't be any good, especially around here. you want to put 4 supers on and, and the bees are just losing all that heat upstairs, but they're clustering down because it's freezing cold at nighttime. So I do think it's temperature dependent. I probably wouldn't go with 4, but we, we stick— he's going to stick 2 supers on when we super up. We stick the first 2 supers on just to give the bees additional space, and they tend to fill it pretty quickly. And I would say if you've got 2 drawn comb, 1 foundation as well, just mix it up a little bit. So just don't give them 2 supers of full drawn comb and then 1 super of foundation, just mix it, and the bees seem to do quite well when you mix it like that. How many hives would 20 acres of peas clover support? We currently have 4 hives on the farm but are keen to expand our hobby into a more serious diversification. He also says thanks for all the great content. Thanks, Joe. So, so I would say like in a single location, 20 hives would be fine kind of anywhere. Like, that's even in North Wales without 20 acres of peas and clover on top of that. So the bees will go out and just find all of the natural forage that they want. And then if you've got like clover, it's like the number one— I think it is, it's still number one, maybe number 2 now to bramble. But clover, like, we get tons of clover honey around here. So if you've got like the right type of clover. So I think it's white clover, isn't it? And the right species of white clover, the bees will do really well on it, and it's a very nice honey. So easily, yeah, you easily get 20 hives there, no problem. Right, I'll jump back into the chat. So Joy says she bought a Yolanta queen from me last year. Her hive is the best overwintered colony I have this year. How do you rate Yolanta queens generally for performance. So it's interesting that you say for performance there, so that they are exceptional in terms of performance and in terms of gathering honey. Um, we see like more variation in terms of like temperament, but they're not designed to be like a back garden, um, beginner bee. They're not, they're not designed like that. They're designed for a very specific niche, which is bee farming. Um, and they seem to align to the heather season. I don't know, I don't know whether it's me being kind of sentimental on the fact that I know that Murray's operation is basically heather, but they do, they do do very well on the heather. Um, but the amount of bees, they're so prolific and the buildup is incredible, but the ability that they have to collect honey is unrivaled. They're definitely our biggest croppers that we have. So performance, yeah, I would give them 10 out of 10. Uh, Ted says, how do you think your AMM Queen from Jonathan Getty is getting on, going on so far? So I feel bad about this one. Yeah, because I did the comparison last time in terms of AMM, and I already got it in the neck from people saying, oh, she's just got one colony, you can't, you can't analyze something from one colony. And I kind of think, well, yeah, But I got— I just got a queen, didn't I? I bought a queen, an AMM queen F1 from Jonathan Getty, to see what they were like and compare them to my own bees. And I've been pleasantly surprised in terms of how prolific they are. And I'm not saying they're more prolific than the Buckfast, they're definitely not, but they've overwintered quite well. They got through the winter, which is good, which is what you would expect. They're a little bit, they're a little bit nippy, being perfectly honest, but some of my other bees are. Um, but, but what I really don't like about them, they just got terrible chalkbrood, really, really bad chalkbrood. And that is, they were— they went on new, new frames and everything, so they've kind of like— well, they brought chalkbrood with them, I don't know, or they're just really susceptible water chalk brood. But then, like, it's just covered in mummies. I will do a video as soon as we get any sort of sunshine. I'll do an update on both the AMM queen colony and the small cell ones, and I'll show you the chalk brood because it is quite astounding how much chalk brood is in that colony. And all of the rest of them— there's like another 10 colonies in that apiary— they're all Buckfast, and none of them have had chalk brood ever. And then that one AMM that's in the mix didn't have chalk brood, and then all of a sudden it's got chalk brood, and that's got a really bad chalk brood problem, which I know is— AMM are renowned for having issues with chalk brood, which is not good. But I feel, feel bad now because if I do a video saying I bought one AMM queen, it's got really bad chalk brood, then people are saying, oh well, you just picked a bad one. But I didn't pick it. I just got— I just got— I just bought an AMM queen and it so happens that it's got quite bad chalk brood. So maybe I'll buy— maybe, I don't know, I'll get 5. I'll speak to Jonathan, see if I get 5 queens and do, um, do an experiment. But yes, I'll do more follow-up videos, don't worry. Oh, Bill, right, that makes more sense. So sorry for the confusion. So you want to make a split from a nuc, so you want to make a nuc from a hive, take it 3 miles away, how long can you bring it back to the original apiary, right? So you need to, like, 6 weeks is my rule of thumb for that, 2 cycles of brood. I brought it back before then and you'll get loads of drift back to the original hive, they work it back out when you bring them back. I thought you could kind of take them away for like a day, and then they'd reset and reorientate, and then you could bring them back. But they don't. They, uh, they remember. They're not stupid. So we go for 6 weeks. Alex says, have you seen the Irish bee chap on YouTube who heats his bees up at night in a homemade contraption called a bee sauna to kill varroa? He gets a good drop rate. Seems effective. Yeah, so it's called like thermite or thermon— so I'm thinking of something to do with computer paste here, but I have seen that. It was at the beekeeping show in terms of creating a bee sauna that the bees can tolerate it but the varroa can't. Um, I need to speak to them and get— do a video on that. It sounds really interesting. I love, I love stuff like that, non-chemical approaches to varroa management, but I've not seen, I've not seen the RHB chap, no. What is the best method to treat for roach at this time of year? One hive has a high count, 40+ per day, in spite of winter treatment, oxalic vape. You're considering Varomed. So normally, so normally you would say like a Formic Pro or a Max at this time of year would be a good one. I just, I get scared using any formic-based products because it's— they can— they're queen killers. And then it's a nightmare trying to mop up all of the mess that they make, so I don't use them anymore. But Apivar is a really good spring treatment, but it's a bit late to put it on now. If you go in kind of like middle of Feb and put your Apivar strips in then, then leave them 8 weeks, it's a— you get your colonies amazing. I know it's difficult, it's not as reactive as that there where you found one in April that's got a higher count. Um, but I, I would suggest, yeah, Varimed would be a good one. So that, I think it's, I think it's a mixture, isn't it, of oxalic acid and formic acid, Varimed. So that would be a good one. Or just go with, um, go with an oxalic acid vape and do it like 3 times, 5-day intervals, and that should get them right down again as well. Can't do that with supers on though. Fousey. Fousey says, a fairly new beekeeper, second season, and just had the rare opportunity to recatch one of my own swarms. Was so excited. Now you have a new hive. Catching swarms is great fun, isn't it? I, I, I say it every year, not catching any more swarms, um, but no doubt I, I will catch, catch one or two. They are good fun. Um, have you any experience with Snellgrove boards? So no, I've never got with snail growth boards. It just seems like this almost drives my no-nonsense beekeeping, like snail growth boards and like the bleeding of bees and turning hives and turning the little dials and bleeding them back in. It's never been for me. So I did have one and I just got really bored of messing around with the little switches or dials or whatever it is to let the bees in and out and Yeah, I can see why they would be fun if you had— if I had a colony of bees in my garden, I can see why some of those processes might be like doable. Um, but no, not, not for me. How do you manage the June gap? So my management for the June gap is really easy now, which is I don't take the supers off. So let's get into it. It's great. I used to have to— you should take all the honey off and then the June gap would come and then my bees would starve, and then I'd have to feed them, and then I'd have to worry about the feed going up in the supers. And now I just leave the supers on. I don't take anything off. I just— a week off, it's great. Gundog says, I have a super of crystallized rape honey from last year which I stored wet. What would you do with it? I don't have much drawn comb, so I really don't want to lose it. Thanks. So, so warm it up as best you can. Bruise the cat pings, stick it in the middle of like a really strong colony in between the brood frames for a day. You need to do this just for a day and they will clear it out and they'll probably start trying to lay eggs in it if you leave it any longer than that, but they'll clear that no problem. Love that name. Says, hi, I've got one of your F1 queens coming next week to try and calm down an aggressive hive. How long do you suggest leaving her in the hide before removing the tab cage. So I, I did this at the beginning, which is the process is you knock down the queen, you wait 8 days, you take down all the emergency queen cells. At that point, you put the new queen in, and then you leave it 48 hours, and then you pop the tab and you leave it for a week. And she'll probably come out with that after like 24 hours, but I never check because sometimes you can go Sorry about that. Second time that's happened now. I think my batteries are dying. Can you hear me? I think it said my audio is okay. Can someone just give me a thumbs up and say they can hear? That'd be good. I'll carry on talking. Tell me if you can't hear me. Hello everyone, can everyone hear? You're talking to myself. All good, right? Thanks, Peter. Right, um, so yeah, so on day 8, knock down all the queen cells, put the fondant and tab back in with the queen. After 2 days, then you open the tab, uh, and then I don't go back in for a week. So sorry about that, I keep on charging my camera up. And then, uh, it's like draining the battery. It's not charging up through the USB for some reason, so I have to fix that some other time. That was a quicker turnaround than when I was doing it with the Bush Bee Man. I didn't, I didn't have any other batteries stored. Um, and, and also, we come to the end. Hour and a half I've been doing that now. So if you've got any, if you've got any last-minute questions, stick them in. I will answer them. If you want to give me a thumbs up as well, that'd be good. I think I've answered all of my questions in my In my little spreadsheet as well. So if there are no further questions, I'll give it, I'll give it like a minute for any further questions to come through, and then we'll call it a day. But I can give you an update in terms of like what's going on with me at the moment. I'm off work for like a couple of days this week, and then I've got a week off next week. We're doing nukes. The nukes are going out again. Lots of queens going out. I'd say if you, if you want to, want to order the queens, order them ahead of time. Queens are looking very nice again this year, going out quickly, but people are getting them into their colonies even, even quicker. And I suspect— this is my theory as well— that it's not gonna, it's not gonna end anytime quickly because the poor weather's So many people's colonies are going to swarm. You're going to— swarm season is going to be wild this year. It's going to be like middle of May, back end of May, for like a week, and it's just going to be intense. And then everyone's going to want queens, so it's just going to go on and on, which, which is good. I'm not complaining. Um, right, a couple more questions here then. So Mem says, when buying fondant, is it good to go to a local baker's to buy fondant from them? So, so yeah, people say that, but sometimes they can be a bit awkward. I would just go to either get your local association, um, to go to Baco or go direct to Baco yourself. I think the minimum order is like £150. The price of fondant's gone up loads though, has gone up a lot. But it's, um, they're pretty, they're pretty good, Baco. They deal with anyone. They dealt with me. They're quite happy to deliver. Uh, Damian says, do you pull your honey crop in one hit or bit by bit over the summer. So we used to do a spring crop and a summer crop, and now we just go bang, middle of August, and we just take everything. And it's not— the flow's not finished yet, but that's our, that's our technique now, and it works really well. So I think we're all done. An hour and a half. I really enjoy doing these streams. Thanks everyone for coming and asking so many questions. It makes it really good. Uh, Joe has got me halfway through my end speech, so I'll quickly answer Joe's question. Any idea why my Happy Pasta Plus pollen and ApiPastafondant has suddenly started seeping down the crown board hole and into the hive. Never had that issue with fondant going liquidy. I've always found when fondant goes liquidy, it's more to do with the status of the colony than the status of the fondant, in that there's like, there's not enough bees there, or the bees, there's like something going on with them. So double-check that everything's okay with your bees, they're not like turned drone layer, and you've just put fondant on and not checked them yet. As I said, big strong colonies of bees, I rarely if ever see leaky fondant going down the frame. The bees clean it up instantly. But where I've got like a drone laying queen, um, then, then it just leaks down and they can't clear it up. Uh, Bees Honey says, I heard that the USA made it okay to use oxalic, uh, vaping oxalic with supers. What is your thoughts? So yeah, they have done that, and I'm well jealous. Be great, wouldn't it, if you could do that? Um, it's clearly not an issue, so why can't we do— we can't even do it over here, blocking the supers off. So it's a little bit annoying. It would be any, any kind of tool that we have in our armory to battle Varroa, I think, is a good one. And in the UK, we do seem to be very limited. Tim Gates says, so many bees, can't find the queen. Can you still split? So yeah, you can. If you check out my video, I don't know how to get it on here. Let me see if I can just like search for it on there. You can split without finding the queen. One of my favorite videos, this one, and it's the way that we make our It's like YouTube ad there, right? So I have just tried to post that, but I think it's like blocked me, blocking my own comments on here. You go, that's the link. So it's in the comments. If you watch that one, that that video there is how to make a split without finding the queen. And it's a really good one. So Robert says, will you be borrowing Chris's new mower to cut your site so we can see what's going on? Oh, low blow there. No, I won't, because it's like nice wildflowers and stuff that the bees are making very good use of, so why would I want to knock it back down with a diesel-guzzling mower? There you go, right back at you. Uh, but I've def— I've definitely come to the end now. So then an hour and a half. As I said, I really enjoy doing these streams. I like answering the questions. I'm not like a beekeeping oracle, so I don't know everything. Loads of people know loads more than me, but I do enjoy talking about bees, and I enjoy people coming on here and asking their questions, and I enjoy answering them as well. So for the final time, if you, if you've enjoyed the video, please do give it a thumbs up. It helps with the YouTube algorithm. If you've got any questions for further videos, you can ask me a question at blackmountainhoney.co.uk/askmeaquestion, and I will try and get back here in about a week's time. But good evening everyone, thanks for coming.