Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 56

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. Let me tell you what is going on. Every single week in the season, I do 2 live streams a month. I'll do a new live stream on a Friday night at 7:30 PM every other week. Now I think that's not enough live streams for everyone because I get so many questions coming in and I don't want to leave people 2 weeks without answering questions. So I have negotiated with my wonderful wife an extra 1-hour slot per week on a Saturday morning at quarter past 10. So going forward, we're going to have 2 live streams now every fortnight. That makes no sense. We're going to have in the season from the beginning of April all the way through to the end of August, we are going to have 1 live stream per week. It's either going to be on a Friday night at 7:30 PM or it's going to be on a Saturday morning at 10:15 AM. So 2 different slots, and you know, that's like, well confusing, isn't it? And people are thinking, oh, that's really confusing, we don't know when to go in and get the live stream. So I will show you now how to do that. If you bear with me one second, let me just take this screen off here. And if I go to share screen and then take a look at the Black Mountain Honey website here. So if you go onto the Black Mountain Honey website and click in the top right-hand corner and go to learning, and then go down to questions, I've created a new page. So let's have a look at this page. Um, I can see that I've already messed up a little bit. I think it's because I'm compressing it here. Let's have a look. Nope, that just needs a tweak, right? So YouTube channel sign up here. Every other Friday at 7:30, every other Saturday at 10:15 AM. You don't even need to actually come and ask the questions now. I will clear this list on every single stream. So just put your first name in there and your second name and your email. Answer your questions there, but then I've put this in here as well, which has not worked. That could not have gone much worse. There is a calendar on this page. I will fix it after this stream, which shows you the exact dates of every single live stream that I am doing. There we go. Brilliant use of technology there by me. It just did not work. It was working before I did that. Very annoying. Right, let's stop sharing that. Let's get back to StreamYard. Which I think I'm on. I think I've broken something there, but there we go. Simple as that. There's only a few people on here. I just wanted to do that introduction as to what is changing because I know some people can't do 7:30 on a Friday night, and I thought quarter past 10 on a Saturday morning could be like quite a nice chilled out time to answer some questions. So I will be here once a week, and as always, I'll clear out as many comments as I can in the comment section on a Friday night one. I'll I'll stay until it's done. On the Saturday one, I've got to go at quarter past 11, no questions asked. So, uh, it might be a quicker one. And once I fill and answer all those questions, either in the comments or on the form, which I'll send you a link for, then I will call it a day. And that is as simple as that. So Dave Squires is here. He says looks good. Glad you like it, Dave. Um, Arctic Beekeeper, uh, still, still plugging away in the Arctic Circle. I love it. Early stream this weekend. So yes, we are changing it up, trying to kind of give some some different people some access to the streams, and I just thought I got, I got a spare hour slot, so why not answer some questions? Daniel says good morning from Canada. Hello to you too. Gary Wheeler says, hi Lawrence, just been out and my bees are doing some lovely orientation. So many new bees, I'm super happy. Excellent, I'm really, really glad about that, Gary. We've sent out so many nucs this week, um, and lots of, lots of happy new beekeepers it seems, and I just thought can't, can't leave it a week until giving everyone all of the kind of answers to the questions. So here we go, every single week now. Nigel Lavender says, good afternoon, Lawrence. Happy accident I found this. I will listen on my way to West Norfolk, King's Lynn, April, in half an hour, and looking forward to my nuc arriving on Thursday. Excellent. Well, thanks, thanks for dialing in, Nigel, and I hope everything goes well with your nuc this week. It's going to be a quick stream, this one, because I've reached the bottom already. So let me, let me tell you about kind of what's going on at Black Mountain Honey, and if anyone has any comments, stick it in the live stream, in the comments on the right-hand side, or wherever it is depending on whether you're on YouTube and or Facebook, and I will do my very best to answer you. So let's talk about exclusive VIP mentoring programs. Wow, the take-up of these programs is, uh, quite unprecedented, I have to say, both on Facebook and on YouTube. So we offer the same system and the same kind of benefits on both platforms. You sign up, it's, it's about $9.99 a month for the exclusive VIP mentoring one. You get all of the exclusive videos. I think there's like 76 or 77, maybe even 80 now, exclusive videos. So as soon as you sign up, you get access to all of last year's exclusive videos, which is really good for kind of like trying to plan your season, just to understand like when the bees are going to produce honey, when the bees are going to swarm, when they need to be treated, when they need to be looked after. Kind of every little bit of the whole season is documented in the previous videos, and I will re-document them in kind of videos coming up and give you a heads up to see if there's something that you need to be doing. It's a valuable program for you because it will get the very, very best out of your bees. So we've got, I think, 26, 27 people signed up for that now on Facebook, and then there's about, I think it's 230 or 240 people have signed up on YouTube for that one. So really, really good support. So thank you for everyone for supporting that, and I will do my best to make it as valuable as I possibly can. We might even introduce some Or maybe some exclusive Q&A sessions if I can't keep up with the questions that are coming in in the 2 kind of general ones. I'm hoping that we can manage, manage it with just 2 sessions there, but I just wanted to give a shout out to kind of all of the members and the subscribers because there's a lot of people that are joining now. If there's anything I can do, if you, if you kind of join and think, yeah, well, that was, that was okay, but you could do something better, please do let me know. I want to make that program as best as it possibly can be, and if there's something that I can do that I'm not already doing, just give me a shout and I'll do my very, very best to accommodate it. So we take that off. Let's talk about queens. You might have seen a post that I did today saying about not doing discounted queens until May at the earliest. And, and the reason is, is that I increased. So in April last year, we got 400 queens a week. That was what we were selling last, last year, 400. And we, we sold out really quickly. Um, so I've upped it this year. 500 queens a week is what we're selling this week. And, and we are basically sold out for week 1. but weeks 2, 3, 4, and 5, so all of the rest of the weeks of April, I've only got like about 50 queens left, which might sound like a lot of queens, but someone will come in and just order 50 queens and then they're gone. So if you want queens for April, you need to get in there and order as soon as possible, or we will just be sold out. Don't worry though, the discount queens will be back. Like, for us, the discounted queens are a management tool in order to make sure that we never have any leftover queens. Like, the worst case scenario for us is we order, I don't know, 1,000 queens, and then we can't sell them. And that's, you know, I would— I'd rather give them away to people for free than, um, or heavily discounted than them just sit there and die. So that's where the discounted queens have come from. But obviously, if we're— if we can't keep up with the sales, like, we'll increase the numbers as best as we possibly can, um, and, and Melitta Bees are good with us. They'll kind of update and say, you know, we've got— we've got an extra 100, 200 queens this week, do you want them? And I'm always like, yes please, we'll take whatever you can give us. But at the moment, we're selling out so quick, so I just— I can't— I can't offer the discounts anymore because it kind of makes my life a bit more difficult trying to offer those discounts so far ahead, and then people can't even get there to order just normal queens regularly. And that's kind of what we want to do, which is provide people obviously good value queens, best quality queens that you can get, but also the ability to actually order them and get them. And if we're, if we're doing discounts that are too low and they sell out too quick, we're not pricing them right. So we need to manage that. Right, let's jump into some of these questions then. Um, so Thomas says, was confused as to why you didn't stream today, but glad you cleared that up. So yeah, so we'll do You can check it now. We've got a calendar. So on that page, I'll fix it after here. If you go on there, you'll be able to see whether it's a long, longer Friday night one or going to be an early Saturday morning one. This isn't going to be the normal time, so I'm only doing this just to just to get into the habit of doing the live stream so people know what is actually going on. Joe Creaser says afternoon weather is great on the Isle today. Can't wait for the next few weeks and the start of the season. Oh, how good does the weather look next week? The weather has been a Godsend for us in terms of kind of getting nucs out and getting stuff ready. It just means that you have the flexibility to actually have access to what you need for those bees, because some of those overwintered colonies that we, that we've sent out, like, they— some of them come from full-size hives that will overwinter X amount of overwintered nucs, and we'll overwinter X amount of full-size hives. And then, like, Richard will go through and he'll take out a good solid 6-frame nuc either from the nuc, just kind of the nuc that it overwintered in, or go into a full-size hive. Some of these are on double brood, some of them even on treble brood at the moment. Take out a proper 6-frame nuc, you know, right from the nucleus of that colony with the brood and the right way and the stores and everything in there, and then pick that out. But having the weather as it is at the moment, having that kind of real good sunshine and incoming pollen and incoming nectar, is just boosting the colonies and speeding things up. So we're about a week and a half, maybe 2 weeks ahead of where we were last season. So we're doing our best to get them, all of the nucs, out as quick as we if you can. What does it mean if I'm seeing drone brood in my March— sorry, in my hive on March 28th? So if you're seeing just 100% drone brood, there's no worker brood, there's nothing else, it means you've got a drone-laying queen, possibly laying workers. Probably too early for laying workers, you tend to find them kind of later on in the season. If you're just seeing like maybe 10% drone brood and the rest is nice capped worker brood in a good pattern, you've got a very nice healthy colony that is getting ready for the season. So hopefully you fall into the latter. of those 2. If I requeen an angry hive, how long would you say it takes for the hive to calm down? So depending on the time of the year that you do it, uh, it can, it can kind of be shorter or longer. So for example, if you were to do it now, I would say you're probably going to notice, start noticing the difference in maybe like 6 to 8 weeks. If you do it in the middle of the season, if you did it in kind of like early June, I would say you probably wouldn't really see the benefit until the following year. But then the following year, it's like you click your fingers and go in, and there's just a different colony of bees. So you do need to you need to give it a little bit of time to kind of see the effects of that new queen. Daniel says, "What is the cost?" I'm not sure. Oh, we're referring to that one there. So it's it's it's I think it's nine ninety nine a month. It is slightly different on Facebook because it didn't give you the option. It's eight ninety nine or nine ninety nine a month to join the exclusive mentoring program. Lots of people have. Where else are we? Arctic Beekeeper says a buck fast question. So I got Nordic adapted Carniolans. I think that is. that is a very start-stop during the season because of a stop in forage due to weather. How do the Buckfast do? Are they brooding regardless? So the Buckfast will— they'll respond to those changes in weather and they will hold things back. They're nowhere near as kind of brood-intensive and difficult to manage as the Lagustica, which are good if you know how to manage them because all they do is just brood all the time, even in thunderstorms. They just brood, brood, brood, and if you don't feed them, they starve, which is good for building up big strong colonies and making lots of splits. Like, if you want brood factories, lagustica is the way to go. But the, the Buckfast do kind of bring it down a little bit, and they will respond to the weather. I know a few people using Buckfast kind of in that Arctic region, or kind of like Scandinavian region. Like, obviously got a huge, huge following there in Denmark. Denmark uses a lot of Buckfast. It's strange because a lot of the lagustica does come from Finland. They're worked in Finland, the lagustica ones. And I know a lot of the queens and the colonies there are Italian lagusticas. So it's interesting to see kind of the difference there. But I, I think lagusticas would work in those regions where you just have to build them up by feeding and then get them to like max capacity, and then they'll take, take on that forage as best as they possibly can. Uh, John is busy at work. Sorry, John, I know, probably not a good time for you. Ricky Sharp, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, I just checked the bees and found the start of a queen cell, pumped lava royal jelly at the bottom of the frame. There is lots of space in the hive and hundreds of eggs. What do you think? So if it's a single cell, I always say regardless of where it is, it's a single cell in a colony like that that's charged, looks like they're trying to supersede. So whether you want to kind of give them the chance to supersede or kill the queen and take down the supersedger and add a new one in, it's kind of entirely up to you. But a single cell like that is almost certainly supersedger. Channel member says, hi Lawrence, got a full hive of bees 2 weeks ago, so I'm a Beekeeper again. Oh, excellent. Well, best of luck for the season. I hope it goes well. Richard Mallions, channel member again, says, any advice on keeping a smoker going? I use recycled cardboard, but it doesn't seem to last long for me. So it's, it's— I'll give you the advice and hopefully it fixes it for you. I am doing a video on this at the moment. Start it off with cardboard. You want about half of the volume of the smoker full of cardboard. Get it really, really going, the cardboard properly, properly lit. And you see on some of the videos that I do it like this, where they shake it around to really start burning the cardboard. Pop that in, put an inch, maybe an inch and a half of wood pellets in there, and then puff and puff and puff and puff and puff until the whole smoker is just like covered in smoke and everything's really hot. If you've got a burner, you can start burning from the top as well, just to get those, um, those wooden stove pellets like really hot and like actually a bit of an ember going. And then once you've got it going, you just put a little bit of grass in the top to cool down the smoke, close the lid, and just puff. Give it, give it 300 puffs to get it going. and then it should last for at least a couple of hours and you'll be good. Um, cardboard just burns through too quickly. Pine shavings and shavings just burn through too quickly and are quite acrid. But the combination of cardboard, wood pellets, and then something to cool it down is a very, very good combination. Channel member, says, going to double brood so I can split and buy a queen from you for the second hive. Sounds good, won't be far away if this weather stays as it is. Says, hi Lawrence, new beekeeper-to-be. One of your nukes. How do I sign up for YouTube VIP? Can I find a link on the normal episode live streams? So the way to do it, I'll share my screen again. Where we going here? Right, channel content. Oh no, let's not do that one. Hmm, let me do it a slightly different way. Here we go. Just going to close everything else down because otherwise I start showing stuff that I shouldn't show. There we go. So if you— if I share that now, if you— you can see this here. If you go on to here and it's showing it because I've done that wrong. So let me close that. I need to do— I need to do it as like an incognito tab because it knows who I am. Um, sorry, riveting, riveting. I know for everyone else watching, but it is a— it's a good one because I do get asked this question quite a lot. Uh, right, here we go. So if I jump back to the other tab and share my screen again and go for that one there, right? So you should be able to see this now. So if you log on on a PC, always going to be the easiest way to sign up here. And then you can see you've got the Black Mountain Honey, but you've got the subscribe button and then you've got the join button. So if you hit subscribe, you just kind of want to subscribe. If you hit join, you've got to sign in as well. But if you hit that join button there, that is the way that you access the membership. On YouTube, on Facebook, all you need to do is just go on to any any video, any video at all, and you'll see that that comment there. And then there's a link at the bottom. If you click on that, you can join via Facebook. Hmm, right. Where are we going to next? Right. Rebecca says, "Hi Lawrence." Hello to you too, Rebecca. Bees are coming soon. Jay says, "Hi Lawrence. Not to count my chickens, but all my hives survived the winter. I made a couple of extra nucs as insurance last year, which." which I now don't need. Marketplace, question mark. Um, yeah, Facebook Marketplace, you'll sell them, you'll sell them pretty quickly. Uh, William Sharples, channel member, says, I have a spare Payne's lid. When my nucleus arrives, can I swap the lids, or should I just leave it for 48 hours? So if you've got a spare one, it's great. It just sits directly on top. So all you need to do is to put the nuc in position, open up the entrance, let the bees fly, take your new roof, just put it on top. That's all I would do, and then continue as normal. Landon says, when can I start rearing queens? So it depends, depends where you are in the UK. For us in North Wales, we start taking our first grafts kind of like last week of April, first week of May-ish, something like that. And then that means that we end up with our mated queens towards the back end of May, first week of June. Okay, I think I need to cross some Norwegian Buckfast with my local Carniolan and make better bees, more brood with good overwintering. Actually got this year's first This year's first cleansing fights as we speak. Excellent. It's, it's a nice sunny day. At least it was a sunny day when I went out before. Um, it's a bit cloudier, a bit cloudy now, but there we go. That is it. I've reached the bottom, so we're done. That is how it goes on this short stream. If I get to the bottom, I will, I will just finish. Uh, not as many people on this live stream here, but still, still 50 people. So next live stream is going to be— before I just quickly answer Lynette's question. Oh, there we go. She says, hi Lawrence, I hope you're well. I missed the beginning of the surprise stream, so I'll have to watch it later. There, there wasn't, there wasn't a huge amount you missed there, Lynette, but feel free to watch it later anyway. When you do a demaray, is it essential to have an entrance in the top brood box? I heard you say sometimes that if you don't, the drones can't get out, but if you do, they may make queen cells. So I'm redoing that video, and I, I have slightly changed it. So what I do now is I don't use the second queen excluder. and I put an entrance at the top, and that is definitely the best way of doing it. Um, makes no difference in terms of queen cells, I found. And if you have a top entrance, and the brood— the drones can get in and out without getting squished. That's well done. Uh, Well done, Lawrence, great as always. Thank you very much, Mark. So we're going to call it a day, call it a day there. Live streams now every single week of the season. Nobody else is doing live streams, nobody else is doing question and answers, nobody else is doing it every single week. So if you want your questions answered, come to Black Mansions Honey, and I'll do my very best to give you as detailed an answer as I possibly can. And you never know, I might even draw some things on my little drawing board as well. I'll see you next Friday— well, this coming Friday at 7:30 PM, um, British Summer Time, because the clocks are going forward this weekend, which I love. My favorite day of the year when the clocks go forward. Long days for everyone, long days for beekeeping. Oh, I absolutely love it. The season has without a doubt started. If you've got any questions and you can't attend any of those, click on that link. I'll stick it in the— I'll do a post, I'll do a post on social media about it, and then you can ask questions if you're not going to attend the streams. I hope you all have a brilliant weekend. Get out there on your bees, and I hope you have a brilliant season as well. I'll see you all soon.