Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 34

So welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees, and I'm looking at the comments on here and Liam G is the winner. A big bucket of chamomile tea, that is what I've got this evening. So I drink tea all the time, I have a lot of teas in the day, and I do love my herbal teas. First and foremost, last week's competition was you had to post a specific link which was a link to my How to Start Beekeeping video on either Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any social media, and tag me in it to win a hat. And only one person did it. So I'm kind of giving that away a little bit because if you are the person that did it and successfully tagged me in it, then you've won the hat. And that person is Aaron Cornish. So well done, Aaron. Um, I think I do have your address knocking around somewhere, but send me your address again to blackmountainhoney@gmail.com. And I will send you out your free hat. So you're probably all wondering, hmm, what original competition is he going to come up with this week? And considering that only Aaron did that one last week, we're going to run the exact same competition again. So if you want to win a Black Mountain Honey hat, all you have to do is tag me in a social media post sharing my How to Start Beekeeping video, which I stuck in the comments for you there. So there you go, that's the link. got to tag me in it, and I'll pick someone at random, uh, for next week to win the hat. I've got loads of hats, so until all of those hats are gone, uh, they will be continued to be given out on my YouTube live streams for people who want to come along and watch. Um, I'm also going to give a special hat prize to JK Photography because he's given like a crazy amount of tips over the past few weeks, so you definitely paid for a hat already, mate. Um, so if you also want to drop me your email, uh, drop me your address on email@blackmountainhoney@gmail.com, I'll I'll send you a hat as well. Thanks for the support. So, uh, for anybody who is a channel member, you'll be kind of thinking, why is he so chipper this evening after what I posted today? And if you're not a channel member, you will kind of get that at 8 o'clock tomorrow. So what's happened is one of my colonies has died, which sounds a bit weird because obviously, like, you've got hundreds of colonies, so of course some of them are going to die. But this one's Dung, and it was bad because it was my fault. So a pure Buckfast breeder queen nuc, jam-packed full of bees, tons of bees in there, uh, starved. And I let it go a week too long and it's completely starved, and I'm gutted. I'm really, really annoyed with myself. So that is the video coming out tomorrow. So let's get on with some questions then. I'm going to run through any questions that are on the chat. I've not got any agenda. I'm happy to talk about anything. Definitely happy to talk about Arsenal's latest win. Definitely happy to talk about England nicking it from the Irish. Um, but I think we probably best stick to bees. So let me run through, uh, and see what we've got on here. So I don't see many questions up here yet. Oh, here we go. So first question says, hi Lawrence, I checked my hive today and fondant seems uneaten and could see no bees, but the weather is cold. Am I right to fear the worst? Hive arms lightish. I get that's like hive feels lightish. So it's a strange one that whenever I'm going out and hefting, like, the 2 things that I'm really, really worried about are feeling a hive that is dangerously light and feeling a hive that is dangerously heavy. And it's the 2 extremes that are both really, really worrying. Obviously, the light one is either that they've kind of absconded or they've been robbed or there's no bees there and all of the stores are gone and the bees are starved and you've got a big dead pile of bees. Tune in at 8 o'clock tomorrow night to see that one. But the equally annoying one is that the colony's dwindled and they've just not eaten any of their stores, and it's ridiculously heavy. So you've got the middle of March coming up to the middle of March now. If your colonies are still weighing like 30, 40 kilos, feel like they're nailed to the floor, not the best sign either. And it's generally drone-laying queens. And I think you can't be too hard on yourself for the drone-laying queen ones because you're never going to get 100% of your queens through kind of successfully into the new year. with 100% mating success, and the drone-laying queens will show themselves over winter. Jasper behind is a little, little friend today. Um, but also it's been very, very cold, really has been cold, so I wouldn't read too much into the fact that the bees aren't going onto the fondant. If they've got sufficient stores, that should be fine. And then if they're not coming up onto the frames, it might be that they've got sufficient stores and they just don't need to come up. So I wouldn't— I wouldn't worry too much about it. I certainly wouldn't be going in like checking and prodding them and doing stuff though. Like, if they're dead, then you know there's not a huge amount that you can do. And if they get through, then great. Uh, next question. Channel member Peter says, hi Lawrence, loads of pollen being brought in today but don't think much nectar about yet. So yeah, depending on where you are, I would have to agree. Like, for us, there's literally no nectar coming in at all. I've gone in, looked at a couple after what happened yesterday. I found it kind of about 4 o'clock on Friday afternoon. I went around and did check a couple, and you could see like the very occasional cell of nectar was there. But apart from that, it's effectively zero incoming nectar and a bit of pollen. It is the perfect storm. It is the perfect storm for colonies to starve, which is— it's getting close. You know, getting close to the start of the season, the days are getting longer, the colonies feel like they should be producing brood. Like the bees that you'll see tomorrow, there are 4 frames of brood in there, 4 frames of capped brood, and it takes an incredible amount of energy and resources in order to rear that brood and to kind of feed it and get it going. And if there's no incoming nectar, then the bees are just relying on the stores or the beekeeper to feed them, and if it's not there, they can fail within hours. it really is quite quick. So my warning for everyone tonight is just go to your aprons tomorrow and give them a good heft, and if any of them are feeling borderline light, just get a big slab of fondant on there. The thing with fondant is it's so easy to clear it up, so it is a good insurance policy. And this is why I'm kicking myself, because it would have just been really easy to slap some fondant on, and the only reason I didn't was because I thought, well, you know what, it's probably going to get a little bit better and it's not feeling that light. It's— but that's— this is the problem with pure Buckfast breeder queens. I probably didn't expect that there was going to be 4, maybe 4 and a half frames of brood in there, so I didn't think that they were gonna sink so drastically. It's, uh, yeah, really frustrating. Um, sorry, right, I think I'll think about that next time. Marcus says no social media for him either, so no hat. So I'll have a think how I can do the competition next week that does not involve social media. Right, let's have a look. Um, so yeah, did you know this week has been shocking? I've had such a bad week. It's like bad news left, right, and center. And then people hassling me on the beekeeping forum as well, kind of just throwing insults for no reason. So, um, what happened to all of my equipment? So that apiary there is in, in the middle of a forest. It's a Beautiful location. My dog going a bit crazy there. And it's not been touched, and nobody's touched that forest for years, like 30, 40 years. Really, really big forest, and there's tons of fallen trees in there. So the owner had been planning for like 2 or 3 years to have a proper, proper clear-up. So I moved all of my bees out of there saying, well, like, There's no way I'm keeping my peace when there's big forestry work going on like that. But I do, I keep some equipment there. So all of those pieces of equipment were stacked up. We kind of kept them well out of the way of any, any trees. Like, there were, there were literally no real trees that I thought were going to fall down on top of them. And then where he's done loads of this kind of felling of the trees, it's obviously meant that the wind's getting in a lot more than it did before. And and it did. It turns out that it was two trees that fell over and snapped. But what what really threw me, and this so the backstory for anyone following it going clicking on the forum now to see what what's kicking off over there. People are annoyed and saying, oh, it's just clickbait. He wants people to click on his videos, and it's like, well, that's kind of the idea with YouTube, isn't it? And it's not clickbait because I felt sick. I did feel sick. I didn't know that. A tree had come down and smashed up all of my hives. And then when I got up there, I just didn't know what had gone on because I drove up and I'm just seeing crushed concrete beehives and nice cedar long hives that are in bits on the floor and thinking, what's gone on here? Like, it looks like a tree's fallen down on them, but there's no tree. There's no trees any— like, there's no trees anywhere near any of it. But I can see snapped branches, and I, I kind of had to go back and double, double take and check on the video and say, well, why are people angry about this video? Like, my suspicion was it was a tree. But anyway, I rang up the landowner and said, what's, what's gone on here? Like, I've just gone up to the, to the apiary and there's loads of crushed beehives. And he was obviously, well, I don't know what's— I don't know what's happened. So he spoke to the contractors and the contractors said, yeah, yeah, we, we cleared loads of trees off all of those crushed beehives. Like, you, you hired us to go and clear up all of the fallen trees in the forest and We found loads of fallen trees on some beehives, so we just cleared them up and didn't tell you. Makes sense, doesn't it? If I was the contractor, I'd probably have done exactly the same thing. But I didn't know, he didn't know, so I've just gone up there, just, what's going on? Like, all of my beehives that I've left out in a perfectly safe place are completely crushed. But anyway, a few people on the beekeeping forum didn't like that for some reason, um, and I'm left with kind of like £2,500 worth of crushed beekeeping equipment. But nobody's taken me up on the offer of restoring that yet, which is— I'm quite surprised. So I don't think you'd be restoring much of the concrete ones, but the, the lay-on hive, like, it's like if I had to give it a rating out of 100, I'd give it like a 60 out of— I was gonna say 60 out of 10 there— 60 out of 100 for the lay-on hive. It's not got a roof. And then the 8, the 8-nuc long hive, again, like, if I was to give that a rating without the roof, it would be like a 90. There's just a bit chipped off that one, but the roof's gone, so it needs a new roof. And then the full 14 by 12 long hive Like, that's probably like a 90 out of 100, and that's got most of the roof still on it. So they're going for free. If someone wants some freebies, you can have them if you're any good at restoring stuff and sticking things together. I've not got the time or the space or the energy to do it, unfortunately. I, I'd like to do it, but I've not got the time. Um, but yeah, there we go. Harry says the video is a bit unclear as well. I didn't know at the time what had happened. That's why it was unclear, but I might do a follow-up on it. I'll go up there and do a follow-up and clear it up, but people on the live stream can get the inside story. Right, next question from Ben Davis. He says, when should I start inspecting my beehives? So I would say definitely be going out at the moment weekly hefting. That's all you need to be doing at the moment is just hefting them still, but do it weekly. Don't think I hefted them 3 weeks ago. I'll double down on this numerous times throughout this evening. Go out and heft your bees. But in terms of inspecting, like, I, I don't even think about inspecting until, until we get into April, and then probably realistically it's like middle of April. What I do like to do, like, early-ish on in the season, is just I'll crack them open on like a nice day, maybe 14 degrees, and I'll just, I'll kind of like loosen up all the frames and take my time. And all I really want to see, I like to see the queen. It's nice to see the queen, it's nice to see like a good shape brood pattern, and it's nice to see some eggs. But then I'm not gonna— I'm not gonna go through and break everything else open just for the sake of it because it's very rare that you're going to see swarm cells at this point in the year. However, you do see it every year. Someone's hive swarms in March, like every year, last week of March. Someone says, oh well, you know, my hive swarmed. But that's probably the one hive in the whole country that goes. If you want me to kind of like give you a date, I would go Like seventh of April. There we go. That's my, my in the middle date. Seventh of April. Lee says just a quick one. Watched a video of drones already in the Box Burnley area. I think yeah, I wouldn't be. I wouldn't be surprised that they're starting to kind of just about put drones in there now. If you think if they've just started to do the drones, probably talking like just under four weeks until they emerge. So that's middle of April. That is, that is quite early. Yeah, I've not seen any with any drone brood at all yet, but I've not gone through them like in depth, so there could be some drones knocking around. Am I doing a video on the Thermomite? So he's saying he's just bought one but waiting for slightly warmer weather. Um, the owner of Thermomite has emailed me again. I did say I would do a video on that, but I'm I'm slightly reluctant to go ahead with it. I've seen quite a lot of bad press about queen fertility using thermomite, and I probably will still give it a go because I do like to disprove things without— I like to disprove things by doing it myself as opposed to listening to what other people said. But I have seen quite a lot of people saying it, that it can impact the queen fertility. For anyone who's not aware, thermomite is like a supposedly organic way of treating for varroa. By using these heated pads that heat the temperature of the hive up to— I think it's, I think it's around like 40 degrees, so it's like 2 degrees C maybe above what it would normally be, or 3 degrees C, something like that. And apparently is good for varroa, but also apparently is very bad for the queen fertility. So I've not tested it, I've not done a video on it yet. I do have an offer to do a video on it, um, but it's like the first time I've ever kind of thought, do I want to subject my bees to something that's potentially gonna um, impact on the fertility of the queen. Uh, so I'm not sure about that one. What is your opinion on the product Hive Alive? It is very expensive. I really do like Hive Alive, I have to say. I use a lot of it. They send me quite a bit of it as well, so it's not like I pay for what I use, but I really do like the product. And I never say that I like a— I really like a product unless I genuinely do like the product. The reason that I like it is for a very simple reason, that is A legitimate way to get some thymol into your bees and for for nacema, which is the not the reason that I use it. I have to say it's definitely not the reason that I use it. The reason that I use it is that it gives the bees like a boost, a health boost, but it does stop nacema as well. But I definitely do not use it to stop nacema. But the other reason that I really do like it is that adding the thymol to your syrup means that the syrup. Very, very slow to go molding. Um, so you can reach the exact same outcome there if you just put thymol crystals in your feed. And genuinely something I do not do because you're not allowed to do it, and the, the VMD would be all over you if you did do it. So it's not one to be done. Outside of the UK, I think you are allowed to add thymol to your feed as well. But I, I tend to move away from mixing my own feed now anyway and just use a 2:1 invert syrup, or just an inverted syrup that's kind of similar density to 2:1, but that means that it never ferments, so it's great. So I just buy loads of little jerry cans of that and then always have some on standby, so when all hell breaks loose like it did on Friday and all the bees need emergency feeding, then they can have some syrup. And it brings me on to another point with the syrup, is that I know people say just to feed fondant, but I had a About three weeks ago, some of my Italian colonies were very, very light, and I had them in the pain snooks. And I really don't like feeding fondant in the pain snooks because it is it's a pain. Sorry, I didn't mean that was a shocking pun, but it is a real pain to feed fondant in them because the only way that you can do it is by slotting it in the feeder, and if it's too cold, the bees just ignore it. They just don't even know it's there. And then the other way is you need. You either need an eke or you need an empty extension box, and you have to start cutting holes in the crown board. So you can do it, but you need extra equipment, which I didn't have. So I fed them about 3 weeks ago, so this would have been middle of February, and I fed them. I gave them each a full feeder, Payne's feeder, of 2:1 syrup. And when I went back up there yesterday, uh, yeah, yesterday, to check them again, they were really heavy and all of the syrup had been taken down. So you can feed syrup very early in the season, as long as it's above 12 degrees and the bees have got access to it, they will take syrup. And syrup is always preferential, I would say, to fondant. It's easily easier for the bees to kind of access it, to digest it. They don't need to water it down or anything. It's just like readily available for them to eat. So as long as you're getting kind of like very small snaps of warm weather, you can feed your bees syrup. Just for anyone wondering about that. Oh, What is your view on slugs in hives? It's never really mentioned. Oh, and good evening all. It's annoying, isn't it? I have a few colonies— slugs and worms and all sorts. But you know what, give it 4 weeks, they'll all be gone. The bees do clear them out eventually. They tolerate them at this point in the year because they're just a bit cold and they're just thinking, I can't really be bothered to break cluster at the moment to deal with all of these slugs and worms. But yeah, it's annoying. I don't like opening them up, and you find it in the colonies where there's a bit more condensation. Maybe there's a bit more space in there, and it's— yeah, slugs, not good. Don't like them. I forget to say this on every single stream, so if you enjoy the streams, please do give it the thumbs up. Be much appreciated. Right, next question from John Hayes says, hi, I want to make a split soon with an F1 Buckfast queen hive to create a virgin from a queen cell. What's the truth about F2 Buckfast Anger? Should I avoid? So it's an interesting point, that one, because, you know, you never hear this myth about F2 Buckfast Anger from anybody who actually keeps Buckfast bees. It's only from people who have never kept Buckfast bees, um, who, who like to perpetuate that myth. And it definitely, definitely is a myth. Um, now that doesn't mean that all F2 charming and calm and passive. They're definitely not. You get some horrible F2s, but you get some— you get horrible native bees at whatever F mongrel generation they are. So it's much more to do with the kind of drones that are in the area, and I've got a couple of apiaries, or one apiary now, that's like really— it's quite well isolated. Obviously there's going to be other bees around, but it's in a place where there's not that many other bees. knocking around. So they're probably forced to go and mate with some of the drones that are from my other satellite apiaries as well. And my— I have F2s there, I have F3s there, and they're dead calm, really nice. And you speak to other people in that situation who actually do keep Buckfast bees, and America is a really good place to test this out because you have this huge landmass with like nobody— like someone keeping bees and there's just nobody around them, and they'll have Buckfast bees at F1, F2, F3, and they're just absolutely fine. So It really is a myth, and it's— I understand why they keep the myth going because it suits their agenda. Um, but no, it's nothing to do with Buckfast bees are creating angry bees at F2. It's all to do just with the drones that are in the air, and I doubt it's the Buckfast drones that are causing the anger. It's probably the local feral bees that are just angry in their nature anyway. So I won't sit on the fence on that one. Good question though. How often should I keep feeding fondant? Long hives are hard to heft. They have some stores, but they are taking a packet of api-pasta in less than a week. Do I keep feeding until they stop taking it? So it's a difficult one to have. What I would say in that situation with a long hive is that it's not, it's not too cold to get in and just have a little bit of a peek. You really can. You can get in, you can have a look Like if you've got 20 frames of stores in there and full frames of stores and the bees are just choosing to go with the api-pasta, you could be setting yourself up for a little bit of a problem later on in the year. But if they are genuinely like starving and they're surviving on that api-pasta, then you need to keep feeding them. And the only real way in a hive where you can't heft, but you could do this on like a standard hive as well, is just to get in there and have a little bit of a look. I would maybe just crack one of the outer frames out. If the bees are on, say, I don't know, say the bees are on 6 frames out of the 10, I would just take one of the outer frames out where you've not got the bees on, crack it open, and if you pull it out and it's a big massive frame full of stores, like the bees in this temperature, they will find that. You're not going to get any sort of isolation starvation in 12 degrees weather in the UK. They'll go and find it if they want it. But if you're cracking that frame and there's literally nothing on it, and then you crack the one next to it and there's literally nothing on it, then you kind of My mind would be made up that I would keep on feeding it. But also what I would say, if you take the money element out of it, okay, it's not nice to spend money where you don't need to spend it, but feeding standard fondant or api-pasta or any kind of basic carbohydrate fondant is just not the end of the world. If the bees keep taking it down, fine. If the bees leave it, fine. Like, all you do is that when you come to do your first inspection, you just take it off. scrape off the tops of the frames and the bees just clean it up and it's all good. Very different from feeding protein patties where it causes like a huge mess, but also like the bees definitely start ignoring it and you're taking off all of this stuff and it starts to go mouldy. I'm really not a fan of protein patties in the UK, don't see a need for them at all. But I would, I would get inside, I'd have a look. It's definitely not too cold to be going in and just having a little bit of a nosy. Oh, I'm gonna have a sip of my tea. That was quite a lot of questions there. There we go, very nice. Liam G says, hi Lawrence, should I leave a few empty nucs around my apiary to catch swarms or your hive swarming? Is there any point in doing this in case I miss the signs of them swarming? So absolutely nothing to lose by doing it, but my word for warning would be don't put used beehives around. They need to be either new or they need to be sterile. So you can sterilize them by— if they're poly, you can dip them in a sodium hypochlorite mixture, or if they're wood, you can scorch them down. And then definitely don't leave the frames in there as well. You just can't be doing that. It's really, really bad practice. The NBU will not be happy with you at all, and it's just a really surefire way to spread disease around your apiary. So as long as the nucs are sterile and as long as they've not got any frames in them, then I don't see any, any issue with, with hanging them around. What I would say though is generally what happens with swarms in apiaries is that the colony will swarm and they'll go on like a hedge or a tree or something nearby, or hopefully into one of your nucs. And then what they do is they just, they cluster up there for maybe an hour, half an hour, and then they go and find somewhere else. So it's never really like a full-time place for them to go. However, having said that, like, I've, I've had if you've just got like a box of supers in your apiary and you think they're tight but there's a little hole in them, and then you go in there and then you just, you find a swarm of bees. So it's not to say that they won't swarm in your apiary and stick around in your apiary. It definitely does happen as well. But there's no— yeah, so there's no harm whatsoever leaving some clean sterile nucs around, but don't spread disease because it's not good. What kind of dog is that behind you? It is a Jasper. Jazz, Jasper. He's greyhound. It's kind of like he's he's a ninety percent greyhound. He is a lurcher, but he's uh he's very lazy, really lazy. Steve's Honeybee says he's seen a social media post today about feeding rotten bananas to bees. Have you heard this before, and what's your thoughts? So I did. I saw the post doing the rounds a few weeks back, and what were they saying? It was was it like a Jamaican post or something, or so it was somewhere maybe. Costa Rica, and I've never experienced it. It's not something I would feed to my bees other than in an absolute emergency situation, but I have to say, I don't— it could be good, could be good for them. I don't have any experience, but I would take it with a pinch of salt, that one. Ed, I did email you on this one, Ed. Um, so Ed says, hi, I was going to follow your series on how many splits I could— can I do in one session this year? When do you think would be the best time to start that first step? So if anyone's going for like maximum splits this year, my— I always say the same to people, which is you have to learn. You've got to kind of like— not, not learn, but you've got to walk before you can run. And it's like this exponential curve. I've done it the wrong way there. The exponential curve like that of splits. So don't, don't— as soon as you can make a split, don't say, right, I'm going to go from 1 colony to 2 colonies and then go like 1, 2, 4, 8. It's nowhere near as quick doing it like that. So what you want to do is you take your 1 colony. So you've got a colony of bees, national bees, on 10 frames, single brood box. The first thing that I would do is probably, probably at this point in the year, actually, I would take another brood box with foundation in, or if you've got drawn-out frames, even better. And take that and put it underneath the brood box. Yeah, so you basically double brooding, but you're not putting it on top, putting it underneath. And you're doing it early, so you're doing it like now. I would, I would have probably even done it a little bit earlier than now, but 1st of March I would have done it. And I would have immediately put in my polyash forth feeder a couple of litres of 2:1 syrup. Um, now you could use 1:1, but if they don't eat it and it goes mouldy, it's annoying having to take it off and clean it out. 2:1 shouldn't shouldn't, shouldn't go mouldy. Invert is what I would use, definitely wouldn't go mouldy. And then I'd be feeding them, constantly feeding them, and then trying to build them up into like a mega double brood colony as early as possible. And then I would say, as long as you keep them topped up with feed, you should reach in with a good colony, good strong colony, you reach double brood, like maximum double brood around, depending on your bees, depending where you are, maybe middle of April, back end of April. 1st of May, say. And then once you get to that point, I'd split that into 10 nucs. And that's the way to do it— split that into 10 nucs. And you have to buy mated queens in. Like, you can do this without mated queens, but you're never gonna— you're never gonna make mega splits. You might do like 10 in a year, but this way you can go from 1 colony to 100 in a year, no problem. So once you've got that split, you do your splits— 1 frame of brood, 1 frame of stores, add in a mated queen— and then you take them all to separate sites so they're fully balanced. And then you constantly feed in them 1:1 sugar syrup, little and often. Talking like half a liter a day, something like that. Don't just glug them out with like 6 liters of syrup. You just really want to trickle it in, trickle it in, trickle it in. And then, then the idea from there is, is that you're splitting each one of those nucs in half as many times as you possibly can. So I think realistically you get to 80. So you go from 1 colony, split it out into 10, and then you go from 10 to 20 to 40 to 80. And I think you could get to 80 in a season. I'm definitely going to do that series again when I've got less things to do because it would have been a cool series, that one. Obviously you need mated queens to do it, but in answer to your question, now that's when you've got to start that one. So Harry says, "Do you think pollen patties would be beneficial for this time of year? I'm using Honeybee Pro Pollen." So sorry, I've. Already started slating pollen patties before I read your comment there. I'm really not a fan of pollen patties, and the reason is, is that in the UK, you— the colonies will go out and forage pollen at most temperatures. So if it's like you're way further south than me, so the bees will be out going out and getting natural pollen. And I find that the bees will take pollen substitute very, very early on in the season, but it's, it's like a gamble. So the only time that I would have fed them or would feed them is like January, back end of January, and I'd feed them up to get them strong for maybe an oilseed rape crop or something like that. But for us up here, and it'll be the same for you, like, come, come back into January, early February, you've got crocus, you've got snowdrops, you've got all these things that are coming out, flowers that are coming out, and the bees will just go out and prioritize the natural pollen. As soon as the natural pollen's available, they shun the protein patties. So I'm kind of thinking it's a very niche part of the year. It only really works for a couple of years. Different in other countries that don't have that availability of pollen so early, and obviously if you're going for almond crop or something like that, you've got no other option other than to kind of stimulate your bees by very, very early feeding, but I'm not a massive fan. So it was the same question from Ed there, when do you think it is best? I wouldn't bother putting it on now if you've got it and you've not put it on already, and it'd be interesting if anyone says they've put it on what the bees are doing to it, if they're eating it or not. So Heaven Chip says, watching the bees go nuts today, Southeast England, dandelions are popping. So it's so like they shun protein patties for, for crocus and snowdrops, they're definitely going to shun them for dandelions. Absolute favorite of the bee. I love it when the dandelions come out. Uh, so Jan, I will do an update on that video. Jan says, any update on the damaged apiary and what caused the damage? So it was 2 massive conifer trunks that snapped it down, and then the contractors cleaned it up up, I will follow it up with a video. Hi, have you ever used an empty brood box and divided the box to make 2 nuc spaces? I have 7 hives all on commercial setup and was thinking this could work. Any thoughts? So yes, I've done loads of these before and had varying degrees of success with it. So I'm shocking at DIY, and I converted maybe 4, 4 boxes, and I did them into like queen castles. So I split them out into 2-frame Splits with 4 entrances, so 2 on kind of like on all different sides of a box, and, and they were okay, but I don't think the bees particularly like all of the entrances facing out like that. But it did, it did work. My idea was that I was going to overwinter and have a go at overwintering 2-frame splits, and that didn't, that didn't work. Just didn't work at all. None of them survived. I think 2 frames is just about pushing it. I think with 3 frames you might have a chance. But I think with an empty brood box, like a commercial brood box split down the middle, that'll work fine. That'll work really, really well. And then all you need to do is make sure that when you're putting your, like, what crown board you're going to put on it, just making sure that everything you do keeps those 2 splits separate. You get yourself caught up quite quickly in, like, the dilemma of bee space, but you can do it. It's quite easy to do it. Like, the way that I would do it again is I would just modify a crown board and just put a rim down the middle to stop the bees getting over the top. That would be the simplest way to do it. And then keep the split, the divider down the middle, flush with the top of the box, and then it should keep it all separate. And then the way that I did it as well is I put a solid crown board on the bottom and just did away with like a separate floor because that was kind of complicating things a little bit for me. But I would, I would give it a go, especially if you've got spare boxes. It, it can work quite well, but just don't go too adventurous with the amount of kind of frames that you're going to put into it. Right, David McDowell says, got a swarm last year, opened the hive two weeks ago, 15 degrees C, found old queen plus two supercedure cells, capped brood, some drone brood, no eggs. What's the outcome? New queens won't be able to mate. So if that if that was me, all I would be doing, I'd just be leaving, just be leaving them to it. I really would because in that situation there, the you you need to trust that the colony. Will do the right thing. And they're producing supersedure cells because they're not comfortable that the queen's there. I'm always skeptical with 2 supersedure cells. I— it's a unique case because it's so early on in the year. For me, I treat 2 supersedure cells as swarming, but it's quite clearly not swarming because it's so early on in the year. But if those queens— those 2 supersedure cells turn into queens and then the queens don't mate, you've got to trust that the colony will do the right thing and kill the supersedure queens. They're not going to kill the old failing queen in favor of a virgin running around. And it's weird why this— why the supersedure queens don't kill the other queen. They're obviously getting some sort of protection from the colony. I just, I don't like to dabble too much and interfere when you've got supersedure going on like that. I like to let the bees just get on with it. The other option is kill the supersedure queens. Go in there, kill them both. and then just as soon as you get a mated queen early on in the year, it's not that far, like we've only got 3 weeks until our first batch of mated queens comes in, then just kill the queen. You know that she's going to be a dud. I, um, when I was going through the colonies yesterday, I found a colony, a breeder queen from, um, I won't say his name, uh, from someone who I've done videos on that's gone droney again. So I've only— all of the breeder queens that I've had Have either died or gone drone laying, and I've had loads of him, so I'm not getting any more. Right, Jonathan Pets says, "When is it okay to swap from fondant to syrup?" So I would say you can do that now. Don't don't put loads in. Don't put one to one in. Stick stick to two to one when it's so early on in the season. But you can you can feed it to them now, and it gets them really going well. Says, I gave dry sugar and one of the hives ate 1 kilogram of sugar in 3 days. That was quick. Well, that's good. You can feed dry sugar. The only problem with feeding dry sugar is that the bees need to go out and forage the equivalent amount of water. So I just think you might as well just give them syrup. Saves them loads of hassle going out, especially if it's cold. Like, I see it at the moment, bees going out, like they go out, fly, and they're just thinking it's too cold. They go out, get some pollen, and they just don't make it back. Because it's just too cold. So this is the problem with—I'm not a massive fan of feeding dry sugar in in the UK. It's obviously fine elsewhere, but in the UK at this time of the year, maybe setting the colonies up to fail a little bit. But good good that yours ate it. It shows that they had no problem processing it, which is good. June says she bought too much fondant for this year. Can you freeze it? So I've just used some fondant that's two years old. Uh, that just was— just left it out, it's fine. And it, it wouldn't be great for like human consumption because it goes like a weird like plasticine texture. And I ate a bit and it's a bit like, it's not nice, you know. Fondant's like nice and soft and smooth, so it's gone a bit plasticine. But the bees, bees just process it fine, no problem. But you can freeze it as well, so if you want to keep it in tip-top condition, you can just, yeah, freeze it. Make sure it's all well wrapped. can get— you'll get freezer burn on it unless it's well wrapped, but you can definitely freeze it. Uh, channel member says, newbie here, got my first nuc on order with me. Thank you very much, Peter. Silly question from a novice, I'm sure, but what determines when the nucs are okay, ready to ship out? So for us, like, we won't ship them out unless we're 100% happy with them. And obviously, you— if we have hundreds and hundreds of nucs going out, then there's going to be some that we're not happy with. So we Quality control is the big one, making sure that we're happy with what we're sending out, making sure the queen's properly mated, making sure that she's remarked because the markings can come off the previous year, making sure they've got enough food, making sure they're in a suitable box, making sure there's enough frames of brood. So the quality side of it is a big one. And then the next, the next one is logistics. So I'd love just to say, right, like our first batch goes out on the— looking at my calendar there— 19th of March for delivery on the 20th of March. I'd love to just send them all on the 20th of March. It would make my life so much easier, but it's just impossible. Like, we're sending out— first batch is 75, second batch the week after is 75. So we're sending— we're doing about 75 a week, and that is really, really hard work to keep up at that pace. So it's the logistics really for us that's the bigger one and keeping making sure that what we send out we're happy with and that we've done the quality checks that we need to do. Uh, the, the current target at the moment is to get it all done by the middle of May. So if you've ordered a Nook, you will receive it by the middle of May. If you've ordered a National Nook, you'll almost certainly receive it by the end of April. And then the Langstroth ones are the ones that we're looking to straddle over last week of April, first week of May. But we have also stopped taking any orders for any Nooks now. So even summer nucs, we are sold out, fully sold out. What I don't want to do is overcommit. So we— if— so if you've got a nuc on order, we're fulfilling that, and that's it, we're done. We've got taken no more orders for the season. We need to make sure that we can supply people in 2025 with nucs. There's only a finite amount of bees there, and if we take any more orders for summer nucs, we're going to leave ourselves like really short to build them up in time. So I think it's the right thing to do. This time last year, all my hives had survived the winter. The temperature dropped and I lost a lot. Wow, that's, that's really annoying. And I bet you, you can, you can put it further down in the comments, I bet you they starved, didn't they? Because it looks like that. You'd open the box and there's tons of bees there, and then if you get a cold snap and you think, well, they were heavy the last week that I went out there and then you get the cold snap, they can just, they can just go. It is really, really frustrating. There's nothing worse than killing your bees. When do you normally start putting on supers? So I'd say like sit on your hands for the time being. Definitely not yet. If you're going to double brood your colonies, do that first. Under, under, kind of box them. So put your double brood box underneath. You could do that now. because that has no impact on how well the bees can keep themselves warm, especially if you've got a nice polyasphalte feeder on keeping them toasty above. If anyone's not noticed the one kind of going like this on my nose constantly, I've got a really bad cold, so I've got a very itchy nose and a bad cold coming through, so it's going to be fun tomorrow after doing lots of talking tonight, but I do like doing these streams. But then I would be looking at early April. I've I've done it a couple of times now where I've gone out and put the supers on too early and then it's just got cold. Beast from the East was one of those years. And when you put the supers on and then you need to feed, oh, it's a massive pain because you can't really do anything. Like, you don't— you can't contaminate your supers with sugar, so you can't just top feed. And then you can't feed fondant because you've taken away all access to the fondant. So the only option that you've really got is to like start like rolling up fondant and stuffing it down into the brood box, which I really don't like doing. Just creates a massive mess and you're just asking to squish and mush up your queen. Or you do what I had to do, which was you go back around, towel between your legs, and you take the supers back off, which is a lot more difficult than putting the supers on because they're full of bees. So you're kind of blowing them out again. So I'm always like really reluctant to put my supers on now. Like, the bees will fill the supers really quickly, so err on the side of caution and don't put them on too early. Like, for me, I wouldn't be putting them on— North Wales, middle of April is roughly when we do it, but the further south you go, the earlier that's going to be. So I'd say maybe first or second week of April is a good average for the UK. So lots of questions about pollen patties at the moment. So when is the right time to feed pollen patties? asks Steve's Honeybees. I really, really, for me, I would never feed pollen patties. I don't think they're a suitable product to use in the UK. I never use them. I have used them before, I didn't get on with them. I've tried Ultra Bee, I've tried Honeybee Pro, I've tried proprietary bee pollen patties, and for me, I always go back to just standard baker's fondant, and the bees are never ever short of natural pollen. Uh, I just saw— I just flicking through the questions, I was trying to not answer the same questions again. Um, so right, here we go. Wants to try a demure split this season but worried about it falling over or blowing down even if strapped down. So I've never, I've never had one blow over or fall down. The straps that I use, I use big proper solid ratchet straps, but I've never ever had one blow down. I do strap them to the pallets though. So I have like big wide pallets, and then because the demure is very tall, if you strap it down to the pallet, you're essentially lowering the center of gravity of the whole object. I do have a degree in structural engineering, for people who don't know, but that's about the extent of my structural engineering, which is I know how to lower the center of gravity a tiny little bit, which is have a massive heavy wide base. But I've never had one blow over. But what I have had blow over recently, which was I had a stack of 9-pains nukes, empty 9-pains nukes strapped to 2 plastic pallets and that tipped the plastic pallets right over, which I was surprised at. But I think with the weight of a Demerare, you think once you've got all of the bees in there, you're probably talking like, oh, got to be at least 100-odd kilos, something like that, maybe more, maybe more with all of the bees and the weight of the hives. It's pretty solid unless you're in like incredibly exposed location and you get a very unseasonable monsoon or or typhoon or hurricane, I don't think they're going to blow over. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Aha, Marcus Bug says he'll take up the offer of repairing your hives, so let me know how to grab them off you. So that's fine, they are yours, you have first dibs on them, but I would like to get rid of them quite quick. So drop me an email, blackmountainhoney@gmail.com, and I will fetch them from the apiary. You can come and collect them from my house. Just give me a shout. I'm really excited about that. I was, I was, I was going to give it like a couple more weeks and I was just gonna— when I tidy it, I was probably just gonna burn them, which I really didn't want to do, but I've got to do something with them. I can't just leave them in the state that they're in. I'm really excited that someone's going to take them off my hands. Excellent. Our Black Mountain honey nuc arrives end of March. Should we leave it in the nuc until the weather improves, or should we move them into their new 12-frame polyhive straight away? When should we switch from fondant to syrup? So they're really good questions, and I would definitely give people who have bought nucs more advice. So if you're getting it end of March, you've probably received an email saying they're coming on 27th. I guess you're in the 27th batch, but we will probably like a week before send you like a long, big, long detailed email telling you exactly what to do, like step by step, which is the postman comes to your door, hands you a box, you take that box, you go and put it onto the stand, and then put your bee suit on like your smoker Let the bees calm down for 10 minutes, open the entrance disc, blah blah blah blah blah. So we give you, we give you that checklist, uh, to-do list of exactly what to do. In terms of your question though, do you leave it in, in the nuc until the weather improves? Definitely. So what we say to people is leave them in the nuc until you get like a couple of days, or at least one good day of 14 degrees Celsius plus, and if it's below that, just leave them in the nuc. they'll be quite happy in the nuc for a couple of weeks, 2 or 3 weeks. And then all you need is the one, one nice warm day, and then you can switch them over. And especially going to a 12-frame polyhive, like, there's no issue with them keeping themselves warm once they're into the polyhive. And then in terms of the switch from fondant to syrup, I wouldn't even start them off with fondant. I just go directly to syrup. And that applies even if you feel that it just remains cold for a long time and you want to feed them in the nuc. But you, you'll kind of assess that from the weight. Like, they will be fed before they come out. They'll, they'll have a good amount of weight to them. But we will, we'll provide a lot more information. Oh, I just— that twigged my attention there. Guy Jenkins just says, just come and have a game of golf, always welcome. I'm, I'm well up for a game of golf. Love golf. Where's that? Am I, am I kind of just jumping into a conversation that I'm not supposed to be in here, or Am I being invited to play golf? Well excited. Uh, James Bentham says, hi, great to meet you at Telford. Have you ever considered producing your own breeders? Considering, uh, considering it myself with a course at DS. Um, so no, I, I've— I know, I know a few different breeders of queens who, uh, some are very, very good, some not so good. Um, and I just know that I would be at that end of the spectrum, which is not so good. it's— you need to be meticulous at what you do. And I'd be really interested in the breeding side of it in terms of like what colonies and what traits, because it's not, it's not as simple as it seems like, oh, that one's a good colony, we'll pick that one. I am interested in the science behind it, but then in terms of the, the dexterity required to actually inseminate queens, and then the space that you need to do it justice, and the cleanliness regime. I kind of think I've got, I've got too much going on to even think about doing that. I've been very, very close to buying the kit and I've never bought it, and I'm, I'm really glad that I've done that now because, uh, I've got good contacts, know good breeders, and get provided with very, very good pure Buckfast queens to use. So I just think, well, what benefit do I really get by doing it myself? Because all I'm going to do is end up with a far inferior product to what I've got already. And it's not about saving a little bit of money. I prefer to spend the money and get the absolute best that I can get, which I think we do at the moment. Um, Lee and Harry both saying about drones being in the boxes again. So, so I would say if you're seeing drones in your colonies already, you've got really nice healthy colonies. Um, Harry makes a very good point there. It could be a drone laying queen. So if it's, if it's, if it's good healthy drone brood alongside another 80% of good worker brood, then that's good. If you're seeing lots of drones flying at the entrance, then that's definitely not good. I'd be getting inside and having a look and, and probably just closing them up if it is a drone laying queen. Drone laying queens are so annoying at this time of the year because you put all of your effort, all of the expense, all of the Your patience and time into these colonies, and then the queen just goes, and that's it. She's drone layer. Very frustrating. Thanks, Alan. You did send me a message. Sorry, I've had I've had a huge amount of messages about coming and helping and doing stuff. Sorry, I've missed that one. It was very kind of you. It's I'll give you a shout if I if I plan to take you up on it. But at the moment, I think I'm good. Uh, I've got a plan in terms of what I'm going to do, but thank you. Um, says, when can I expect my Beast to arrive? I'm looking forward to watching the postman's face. So it does depend whether it's National or Langstroth and where, where you sit kind of like on the priority list. So in terms of where you placed your order, so some people ordered in like August like it was crazy, and we'll do the same again this year. We open up orders for next year very, very early. Um, So we'll just fulfill them in priority order, and then it does change around. Like, we offered loads of early dates to people who had ordered early on, and they said no, they want them a bit later, or they couldn't— they weren't in to sign for them. So we do a lot of juggling, but we will be in contact, and we'll be in contact at least 2 weeks before they plan to go out. And we are flexible with the dates as well, so if we give you a date that's not suitable, we can switch it around. says, hi Lawrence, I have my national on brood and a half. How do I reduce it back to brood only? So I'm assuming that you have it on brood and a half as in the brood box underneath and then the super on top, which is the, which is the slightly more difficult way of changing it back round. So what a lot of people do on brood and a half is that they nadir their supers late on in the year. So if you are keen on brood and a half— not, I'm not a massive fan of it personally— but if you are keen on brood and a half next year, what I would do is take the last super, the super that you don't want to keep And at the end of the year, take that super and put it underneath the brood box. So that manipulation is called a nadir, and then what that means is that you still get the benefit of the stores being there, the bees rejig everything around, and then come back in the spring and the bees are just in the brood box and the super underneath is like 9 times out of 10 empty. But if the super is on the top, then what you will find if you took the queen excluder out, which is what you're supposed to do, then you'll find all the bees are up in the super. So the easiest way to fix that is when you go in and do your first inspection, you need to find the queen, put the queen downstairs, back down into the brood box, and just put the queen excluder back in. That's the simplest way to fix it. All of the brood in the, the top super, the only super, will emerge, and then, and then the queen will just start laying downstairs. But don't do that until, like, if all of the bees are in the super and all of the brood's up there and then the brood box is literally empty, I would wait until they naturally build back down into the brood box. and then do that manipulation at that point. But yeah, not a fan of brood and a half, but it's quite an easy one to fix. The only word of warning would be keep an eye on that super, and if you're ever storing it, that's the one that the wax moths will go for. They love those. If you split a colony around April or May, does that then minimize your honey production, or shall I just add supers instead? So this is one of my favorite beekeeping kind of mythbusters, because if you split a colony around April, May, what you're doing is you're pretty much guaranteeing that the bees aren't going to swarm that year. And I know that's famous last words, they can of course swarm at any time. Sorry, terribly itchy nose talking. I've not spoken so much and I've got really bad cold. But what it does is it stops the bees swarming, which means that you've managed to keep like that critical mass of bees, which later on in the year can go on and produce a huge, huge amount of honey. If you go the other way around and just say, well, I'm not going to make a split because I want to maximize my honey, so I'm just going to put loads of supers on, the bees still go and swarm, and then they don't fill the supers because they've gone. So the, the way to maximize honey production is to stop your bees swarming. And that doesn't matter if your bees are in 1 box, 2 boxes, 4 boxes, if you're doing horizontal splits, if you're doing a vertical split like a Demaray. If you can master the art of working out the likelihood of when your bees are going to swarm and doing something to stop them swarming and keeping all of those bees there, the honey will follow and you'll be blessed with huge, huge amounts of honey if you, if you get the flows and the weather to accompany that. So like I say, don't don't focus on when to add the supers or how many supers to add. Tackle the swarming issue. I want to say Paulius. I think it is Paulius, not not Paulius. Paulius sounds like too English. So I go with Paulius says, "What do you think about clipping queen's wings?" So when people say to me, "What's the number one piece of advice that you would give to someone in beekeeping?" I say, "Clip your queen's wing." Clip one queen's wing, and it's the easiest way to stop your bees swarming. So they will still swarm. You can't just clip the queen and then not do your inspections, because what happens if you do that is the first queen, the clipped queen, tries to swarm, she falls out the hive, generally kind of like clambers back up somehow and sits like underneath or gets back into the hive, and then the bees swarm with the first virgin that goes out there. But if you're doing regular inspections, what it means is that you you generally don't lose that many bees through swarming because you either find them when they're producing swarm cells or you find them afterwards with swarm cells that are emerged, but you still got your clipped queen and the bees haven't swarmed yet. So you kind of basically giving yourself an extra like 3 or 4 days on the inspection cycle. But I find it really good. I clip all of my queen's wings. Don't do them in the nucs, and we don't do them in the nucs for a very specific reason because Not everyone wants their queen clipped, and I really don't like clipping them early on in the year. We've had it before, we've clipped them early on in the year, and then the bees, for some reason, they don't like clipped queens in the post. And we just had a couple that got bald in the post, and the only explanation that I could put was that they were clipped. But I just, yeah, I stopped doing it after that. So we don't, we don't clip any of the nucs, but all of my other colonies are clipped. I really do like clipped queens. Hi, Aiden, how you doing? We met at the show, didn't we? He says, hey Lawrence, what are your goals for this year? For example, expanding or doing the mini mating nucs? And what was your percentage loss rate over winter? So it's really interesting, percentage loss rate at the moment, from what I've seen, I've lost one nuc, and it's the nuc that's on the video tomorrow. It really is. Like, and I, I don't keep as many of the nucs with me. Like, Richard keeps the majority of the nucs that we do together. kind of his apiaries. But from mine, out of like 120, 130, I've only lost one and it starved. I gutted. But that doesn't mean like we're, we're so not out of the woods yet, so I'm not counting my eggs. Like, if I, if I finish the spring and get out around 5% loss, I'll be really, really happy. That's— 5% is a very, very good rate. I'd probably take 10% as a loss rate as well. Anything over 10% and I'd be a bit not overly happy with that. But at the moment, I've only got one that's dead, and then the rest look all right. But I've not gone in— that's not, that's not factoring in drone-laying queens. Some of them could look amazing, and then there's just loads of drones in the middle. Um, and then in terms of goals for this year, uh, I just like— I'm the most risk-averse person in the world, so I'm not setting ridiculous goals. My goals for this year was to sell all the nucs. which we did in January, which is amazing. Thank you everyone who bought Nuke. And then my goal for this year is just to get through it and not crash again. So my wife's— my wife's pregnant, so we've got another baby due in June. So that's probably— my goals are more around just keeping, keeping things going and watching my new baby girl grow up, I think. Oh, Shane. Oh no, I feel bad now. Shane Hamilton, I just sent you an email about the long hive, mate. I feel— I do feel a bit bad. I, I've said first come, first serve to, um, who did I say it to? Marcus. Maybe you can discuss whether you want to share them because there is— there's like 3 hives there. Um, but as always with these things like Facebook Marketplace, I don't do holding. I don't do like, oh yeah, can you hold it for me for 6 weeks? So, um, I'm happy to give both of you a hive each if you can, if you can work that out. I don't want to have caused issues there. Um, right, let's have some more questions. I hope I don't go further down. There's more people who have said it as well. Uh, Adam, how's it going, Adam? Adam sent me a very nice jar of honey. I did taste your honey, it was lovely. And, uh, a very cool thing that I won't, I won't break the news about now. I'm going to do a video on that. And a bunch of your lavender that's going in my smoker, which is really cool. I wasn't quite prepared for that bunch of lavender for the smoker to be like so big and so dense. I reckon it'd be really good. I think you're on to a winner there. Good evening, how soon can we double brood for making splits? Will this be different if between drawn comb and foundation? So no, so I'd get it in straight away. I'd go now, first thing tomorrow, but you underbox it, so you're putting the the brood box underneath the original brood box and lifting the other one up. And then as long as you've got like a nice warm insulated roof or polyash forth feeder or something like that on it, it makes zero difference to the bees in terms of heat retention or expansion. If anything, it's kind of like a little bit better for them because they're way away from the entrance, so it's like a little bit cozier. They've not got to deal with the wind. And then doing it that way around, you can still feed, so that's the big benefit. Is you can put the feeder on at the top and then the bees expand downwards. So you can do that really, really early, which is good. Uh, Ben Davis says, hi Lawrence, I recently got a nuc last year in August from Abello and I haven't treated them since. Will that put them at risk? Um, yeah, so that's not ideal at all. So if you got them in August, I'm suspecting that Abello didn't treat them. No, they wouldn't have treated them in August. So you've probably got a whole year, like a whole season without any treatment. So I would seriously consider putting some treatment on them now. It's a bit late for a spring Apivar treatment, but it's like probably what I would suggest doing, you know. An Apivar treatment at this point of the year is very, very effective, but it— you need an 8-week treatment. So if you— what date are we on now? The 9th? 9th of March? 8th of March? So you've got 8 weeks, it will take you through to like the 8th of May. So I wouldn't want to be keeping them on a single box that long. But what you could do is what I just suggested to Adam there, which is get another brood box, put another brood box underneath, and then put your Apivar strips in now. And then the bees have got plenty of space to expand into whilst that treatment is on. And then when you— when they finish that treatment, which would be like 10th of May, you'll probably have a really nice big double brood colony, which at that point you could split into 2 colonies and then go straight onto the supers. That's, that's probably what I would do there. I would definitely do something. So the other way of doing it is you could cage the queen. I wouldn't cage the queen at this point in the year though, and then do some oxalic acid sublimation, but you'd have to wait for a broodless period. Or you could do multiple blasts 5 days apart using like an Instant Vap or any sort of oxalic acid sublimation device, but I would go for like 5 or 6 treatments spread over like 5 days in between. I would really definitely need to do something there. Uh, next question. Stuart Henderson says, Lawrence, I'm in Scotland, Central Belt. When should mouse guards be removed? Don't want to leave them on too long in case it causes issues. So I don't, I don't use any mouse guards with the underfloor entrances because you don't need them because the mice can't get in. Very, very rarely get a mouse getting into underfloor entrances, but I understand the risk is that if you leave them on too long, then the bees, they— it knocks the pollen off their back legs, don't it? So I would have a look and see how much pollen is getting in, but I would say what you potentially could do, and this is quite a good way of doing it if you are worried about it, if it goes like hot then cold, is that bees on a really nice warm sunny day early on in the spring, Like, the amount of pollen that they collect in a day is astonishing, absolutely astonishing. So if you've got like a weekend that's really nice and warm, and assuming you've not got like hundreds of colonies, you could just take the mouse guards off for the weekend, and then if it gets cold again, like, put them back on, like, to and fro a little bit like that. And then that way you're making sure that they've always got sufficient amount of protein in the form of pollen going in. But it's like my colonies, if I had a big strong colony now and it was on a standard floor and I took the mouse guards off, I'd be very surprised if the bees didn't take action. But it is slightly different temperature, I know. But it— I, I would say, I would say you're safe kind of middle of March, middle to back end of March. I'd say you're safe taking them off. That'd be my opinion. Channel member says, good evening, I'm not thinking of going over 6 hives in the future, Buckfast of course. Would it be beneficial to swap my wooden brood boxes for poly brood boxes over winter to give them extra warmth? So if you, if you didn't have any hives, I would say yeah, probably poly is— poly is going to be like a bit better in terms of insulation. Would I suggest you swapping decent wooden boxes that you've got for polybrood boxes? Definitely not. Like, wooden boxes are fine. What I would suggest is a really nice happy medium there, which is keep your wooden boxes but upgrade the roofs. Or even better than that, keep your roofs and add in poly Ashworth feeder from Abello, because what that gives you there is the perfect way to feed your bees at pretty much any point throughout the season, whether it's feeding them syrup or turning it upside down and feeding fondant. But then it also gives you like perfect insulation above the cluster. So like, it's like in the house, you know, when— what's the first thing they come and do in the house when you're trying to insulate? They say, right, have you got your roof sorted? Because your roof is where you need to get the most insulation. And then once you've got your roof sorted, they say, right, we'll do the walls next. And it's exactly the same with the bees, which is focus on the insulation in the roof first, and then once you've got that sorted, you can worry about the box, uh, the, the walls. But for your specific question there, I definitely wouldn't, I wouldn't upgrade. I'd stick with what you've got, put your money in a polyashworth feeder. Uh, Frollies Bee says, hi, have you got any tips on how to increase your viewing base on YouTube? Just trying to increase mine. I wish I knew that one, I really do. We've slowed right down. Um, but I've It's a difficult one because I don't, I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think I'm particularly well placed to answer that. But I would just say, for me, you've got to do what you enjoy doing, and you've got to try to not look so much at the numbers and try and just improve on every single video. And I always think the biggest tip that you can get in terms of YouTube is, would you watch your own videos and I sometimes, I sit there, I edit a full video, and then I think I've got to watch that all the way through now to make sure that I've edited it correctly. I think I've not done a very good job if I get bored of my own videos. I can't be doing a very good job. But then the final thing is to make sure that you're kind of like, you're adding value. Is there a reason for someone to watch your video? Are you helping someone? Are you solving a problem? Or are you entertaining them? Or very occasionally, Maybe doing both depending on when the bees want to sting you in the face. But yeah, focus on adding value and the subscribers should come. Uh, Jan says, in your latest videos there seems to be a lot of Langstroth hives. Are you making the change as so many commercial beekeepers seem to do? So I am making a very strategic change to moving like and supplying a lot more bees on Langstroth frames. I am doing that. So it's not so much for the honey production, which is not— 99% of people will switch to Langstroth for kind of the fact that it's better format, the fact that the boxes are cheaper to make, the fact that they stack better, the fact that the lugs don't break, the fact that the bees probably make a bit more honey, the fact that the bees are easier to manage, the fact that it's not bottom bee space, it's top bee space. I could go on and on and on. Langstroth are far, far superior format to the national format. But I'm not going over for any of those reasons. I'm going over for one very specific reason, which is David Beckham keeps Flow Hives. Simple as that. And he's doing a great job at marketing Langstroth nucs. He really is, because people want Flow Hives because that's what David Beckham has. So I, I've made the decision a couple of years ago to try and move over, supply a lot more bees on Langstroth. And it's nice. I really enjoy using them. They are They are loads more fun. Not more fun, that's the wrong word. They're just a lot easier to use. And it's great as well with the pains. Langstroth nucs, loads better than the national one. And it's specifically like the first inspection of the year is the best to have the Langstroth nucs because on the national ones you go in and you're thinking, right, how am I not going to kill this queen? And you're trying to like get the hive tool in and like wiggle it around a little bit and you get the first frame, you think, oh, I can't get it out, it's stuck. And you're trying to just pull it out and you're just thinking, please don't be on this first frame. Like, if she's on the first frame, she's dead because I've squished her already. Uh, and then once you get the first frame out, it's fine. And then with the Langstroth ones, all you do is you just like wiggle the hive tool around the back of the removable feeder, the removable feeder just pops out, and then you've got like 2 frames of space to work. Brilliant, I love it. I spoke to Roger and it's never coming to the National apparently because some beekeepers prefer it to be fixed in, which I have to say, Roger, I'm not, I'm not buying. I just, I don't— I, I know, I know the reason, but if I was in Roger's shoes, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change it as well, which is the molds are incredibly expensive to change. So I can't see it coming anytime soon, which is a shame. And my, my, also my, my other challenge to that would be, why have you made the— if, if people liked it fixed, why did you make the Langstroth removable then? Because you designed that after the National with loads of other really cool improvements. Um, sorry, Roger, you know, you know I like you, we do lots of business. Hey there, Lawrence, did you find anything on the scum who trashed your apiary? So no, it turned out that it was 2 conifers. If you rewind back to the beginning, I went into it in a bit of detail, but it was 2 massive conifers smashed into all of them, and then the contractor that was working there cleaned them up and thought he didn't— thought he shouldn't tell anyone, which was correct. He shouldn't or didn't need to tell anyone. I keep on seeing pollen collectors for sale. Why collect pollen? Surely are you are robbing Peter to pay Paul. So no, pollen collecting is, is really good, and it's a surprisingly good thing to do. And people, a lot of people here have mentioned about pollen patties, and like, not so much pollen patties, but like pollen sub, so substitute pollen. The one thing that I would feed my bees is pollen that I've collected myself. And if you, if you put a pollen, if you put a pollen collector or a pollen trap on a colony and just left it on there for a couple of weeks like the colony would be knackered, absolutely knackered. But the amount of pollen that bees collect in a day, like, I was astounded by the amount that they collected. One, one big strong Buckfast colony on 2 brood boxes collected— I don't want to say in weight because they didn't weigh it, but like, imagine like a jar like that, like full in a day. Probably, probably more, probably more than that. I better drink some of this as well. So if you've got lots of them, if you've got like 10 pollen traps and they're collecting this jar here full each and you leave it on for a weekend, you've probably collected enough pollen that you need for the whole season. But so leaving them on, yep, it's not really— it's really not that good. But putting them on for a short amount of time and collecting the pollen does kind of negligible effect. John is commenting here on the. It is a thermal cup. You can hear me getting my cold back now. It's a thermal cup, but it's getting pretty cold. I'm not gonna lie. Drast One Cone, this cool name, says, "Have you ever fed your bees one to one with two percent salt?" So I think is it John said that earlier on? There you go. Said before Hive Alive, I used to add a small amount of sea salt and homemade apple cider vinegar and syrup never got moldy, and the bees lapped it up. It's interesting that that's come up twice today. So Drast One Cone says, have you ever fed your bees 1:1 with 2% salt? I gave my hive a quart of 1:1 and 1:1 with 2% salt added. The salt quart they emptied in a day was in mid-July. They barely touched the 1:1 afterwards. Really interesting. I've never, never heard of salt being added to it at all, but I can, I can see why it potentially nice for bees. What's really interesting is you see People— I'll tell you another funny story about people in a minute as well. But you see people, like, they go in their garden and they'll build like a lovely, a bee waterer, and they'll put like lovely pebbles in it and make it all nice, and they'll top the water up every day. And then the bees just go and drink out the puddles, the dirty puddles, or they go and drink out of the hot tub, or they go and drink out of the swimming pool. So they just go with the one that's got loads of chemicals or the really dirty ones. But there's obviously something behind it. Like, they've obviously chosen that for a reason. So maybe they're getting something that they need. And then the salt could be— could, could be there's some minerals or something in that salt that they, that they need. Interesting. I've never heard of that, and I've never seen it, John, used as a way to stop it going mouldy. Um, interesting to see what the VMD would say about that in terms of like honey sampling. I'm always like really careful as commercial bee farmer to make sure that I'm not feeding my bees anything that's not legitimate Um, but in terms of like hobby beekeepers, I don't see it being an issue. In terms of, in terms of people, like, I get, I get a lot of messages and I get a lot of emails. So like, if you've messaged me or emailed me, I've not got back, like, I do— I get quite a lot of messages, especially as like the beekeeping season gets going. I also get a lot of phone calls as well. So I had a phone call, I can see now, I signed up to Air Landline. There we go, sponsored by Air Landline. I wish. But how good, how good are the Air Landline adverts? Absolutely brilliant. If you've not seen them, just Google Air Landline adverts. They are hilarious. But the company as well and the service that they provide is brilliant. And it means now I can see when people are calling for the business. So I had a call last night at— no, last night, about 3 nights ago at like half 10 at night from the business. And I thought, I can't believe someone's calling that late. And I can turn it off on Air Landline, but I just think, you know what, if someone, if someone's going to call me at half half 10. It's gonna be a pretty good reason to call at half 10, isn't it? Like, what could it be? So the guy answered the— I answered the phone and the guy said, oh, hi, is that— are you a beekeeper? I said, yeah. He said, oh, I've got a really urgent question for you that I just can't find the answer to anywhere. So I said, I'll go ahead. And he said, I've got a queen bee in my house and Every time I let it outside, it just stops moving and just tries to like—it's basically dying. So I bring it back into the house, and then it's fine again. I feed it a little bit of honey and a little bit of sugar syrup, and I'm just like thinking, oh bloody hell! But he said, "What should I be doing here?" And I said to him, "Well, I just think you shouldn't really be bringing queen bumblebees into your house. What have you done that for?" He said, "Oh yeah, but it just looked like all lethargic, so I brought it in to kind of like." Get it back up to health. I kind of think, okay, he's, he's trying to do the right thing, isn't he? He's not, he's not doing anything deliberately here. Um, but every time he takes it back outside, it's just, it's just not moving. And I said, well, it is like basically winter still. What should I do with it? I said, just go and take it back outside. Just go put it somewhere. Just go and find like a little pile of leaves or something and just go and put it underneath it. But anyway, they're the kind of phone calls, and it's only the 7th of March, so you can imagine how my beekeeping season is going to turn out, but it's fine. I do, I enjoy the, the variety of phone calls and emails and text messages that I do get. I found the BS Honeybees feeder for the nuc to be more annoying and they tended to take it down slower than in the Paynes. That's interesting. I found that they really quickly take down the BS Honeybees one, but I also find the Paynes one like incredibly quick. Like they they find the pains ones like that because it's on like the same level as them. If if you go back and watch like any of the old videos, I used to really not like the pains feed like the pains feeder or the pains hive. It was probably my least favorite hive, and then having worked with them as a result of the fact that they that they they send really well in the post, I really do like I really do like them a lot more now, and especially since they've upgraded the roof. So the roof. Now that they've upgraded the roof, like, it's a— I think it's a really nice cozy place for the bees to live, and I do like the feeders a lot more. One tip, this is a quick one, just that somebody will make this mistake because I definitely made this mistake, which is when you leave the— if you've got a Payne's nuc and you leave the wooden float in the bottom, when you feed them for the first time in the year, the bees sometimes propolise it down to the bottom. So you put the sugar syrup in thinking that the float's going to come up to the top, And it doesn't because it's stuck. So you need to just like wiggle it out before you put the syrup in. Otherwise, you can kill a lot of bees. Right, jumping down here. Oh, so Claire H says 125 watching and only 42 likes. I I really do want to get more likes on my videos. Any ideas on how I can get more likes on my videos would be very much appreciated because it's something I really struggle with. I kind of think I'm not doing. Not doing well enough if only that few amount of people with poor English likes the video. So I would appreciate if if you would like the video. Thank you very much. Ben, I think I answered that one, Ben, about the nuke that was needed to be treated. J.K. Photography says, "Hi Lawrence, I have a large hive. Queen is crazy laying. The hive is double brood, ten over ten Langstroth. Had a look today. Top four box." Top box, 4 frames honey, 4 frames brood, super heavy. How can I slow the hive down? Oh, slowing hives down is not something that I would ever want to do, but I can see why you might want to do it if you don't want to make a split. So my advice would be don't slow it down and make the split. Split it into 2, run it as 2 hives, and then combine them back together. But I appreciate that's not for everyone, and you probably don't want to do that. So in terms of slowing it down, you— what you can do, if you're happy to— if you've got other hives and you're happy to share the brood out, and you're treating your apiary as like one apiary, like, in itself for hygiene purposes, then you can just share the brood out and maybe support some of the hives that aren't going as quick. That'd be a good way of doing it. You could potentially— oh, you— if you really wanted to, like sounds horrific, but you could just get rid of some of the brood. Really bad, I know it's not what people want to hear, and it's not something that I would do, but chickens love brood. They really do. They will peck every single little pupa and larva out of that frame. I would not recommend it. I don't like doing that. I don't like seeing bees die, but you could destroy some of the brood. That would slow them right down. Good rule of thumb, and a good way of like learning how your bees work, is that for each frame of brood that you've got, in 3 weeks' time after you've seen that capped frame of brood, that frame of brood will be the equivalent of 3 frames of bees. So if you've got 4 frames of— you say you got there 6 frames of brood, so 3 weeks' time you're going to have 18 frames of bees there. So you need to do something. You either need to put more boxes on, put more supers on. You're gonna have a huge, huge amount of bees on your hands. So for each frame of brood that you take away, you're effectively taking away 3 weeks later 3 frames of bees, which like not many people would want to do. But it's a good way of kind of working out what is best for you. So a few, few options there. Um, the other option is make a split, and, and not a split as in like splitting it to keep another hive. You could just take a nuc out, take a nuc out, take the queen out, um, put it in a little 3-frame nuc or a 6-frame nuc and then let the original hive attempt to requeen itself. But then on day 8, take down all of the queen cells and just let them go queenless for 3 weeks. And then after that 3-week period, buy a queen. We've got queens coming in then, so you're at the point where you can start doing things like that now. And then, or another way of doing it is to take the 3-frame split out and then let the original hive requeen itself and then after 8 days take the queen cell down and then just leave both of them for 3 weeks and then merge them back together. And then that way you're effectively stopping the queen laying for 3 weeks. You'll still end up with loads of bees, but that will definitely slow them down as well. Good question though. May I suggest a Q&A with Stu Walsh, Simply Beautifully Honey? So yes, you can suggest that. I'd have him on, happy. We had a good chat at the show. He's a really nice guy. telling me about his twins. Um, it's, it's strange, you know, some of the chats that I do get— no, not, not many people watch them. Um, and I always thought like the ones with me chatting to other people would do loads better than me just talking, but it seems the ones just like me talking seems to do quite well. But I'm more than happy to have, to have chats with people. Yes, Stu Walsh, he'd be, he'd be a good person to chat with. Seen he's doing well. If you've not subscribed, definitely subscribe. It's good, good channel. Hi Lawrence, I put a pollen patty on my bees yesterday and they are all over it. There are loads of Crocus daffodil and snowdrop out, so I think mine are taking advantage of the best of both. That's really interesting. Is it definitely a pollen substitute patty, or is it like a, like a pollen patty? Because some of them are made with like real pollen. They use like irradiated pollen, um, which is just pollen that's been blitzed by, I think, gamma radiation or something crazy. that takes out any of the AFB or AFB spores or any EFB bacteria. Um, and then, and then they would just, they just see that as pollen as well. I think the, the Lysan one, they do like a yellow one that's definitely pollen. And then I think, I'm pretty sure the new Candipoline Premium, they do like a premium one, I'm pretty sure that's pollen as well and not pollen sub. So I would double-check on that. But if not and it is a sub, that's good, good to see that they're taking it down. definitely not the experience that I've had. Um, so, so well done, that's good. Um, hi, so, uh, is it ALJ says, hi, how do you get the purity of AMMBs tested please? Um, definitely can't answer that one because I've never ever got any of my bees tested for purity because we don't keep AMMBs. Um, so yeah, not sure. In regards to the question about max number of splits, would it get cold in the lower brood box and how heavily would you feed the inverted syrup? So no, it doesn't. It might get cold in the lower brood box, but it's— there's no bees in it, and that's the beauty of it, is that the bees will just stay where the brood is. So if you put it up the other way, like, the bees will naturally tend to go upwards, and then if you put the box with the empty frames on top, then you've got nowhere to feed. So doing it the other way around, which is like your original brood box at the top, the feeder above it, and then the new brood box underneath, the bees just like, yeah, whatever. Just basically the same for us, we've got the feeder above and we go out down below. It's just a bit further to get out now, so they don't go and loiter in the bottom brood box. And then how heavily will I feed the inverted syrup? I wouldn't, I wouldn't go wild. I'd never feed like crazy at this point of year. I'd go maybe like Half a litre a day-ish, something like that. And then the bees will just take it down. And the reason for not feeding so heavily is like twofold. One, you don't want the bees just to store loads of syrup, but two, you want it to be like a trickle feed. You want to trick the queen into thinking that there's regular amounts of pollen— sorry, regular amounts of nectar coming in. And then combined with the long days, she kicks in, starts laying loads of brood. And if that's not working, you go to go to Jay and you ask for some of his extra brood, and then he'll share it out with everyone. Danielle says, "Hi, I only have one hive at present and was looking at apivar strips, but I could only purchase ten strips at a time. Have you ever seen them sold in smaller packs? It seems such a waste for one hive." Do you know what? It's a really good point. I'm I'm absolutely surprised that none of the vendors. none of like the stockists have just started splitting them out. I wonder whether there's restrictions from, um, whoever it is that makes Apivar, because that does seem really strange because a lot of people just have 1 or 2 hives and they're not going to want to buy 10 strips at a time. So a couple of options. One, speak to Abelo, speak to Thorne, speak to Simon the Beekeeper, whoever's selling it, and ask them have they thought about splitting it out, because there'll be tons of people in that same situation there. And then the other option is join local beekeeping association, and they're the kind of organization that could, you know, buy in bulk and split them out individually for their members. David Bailey says, evening, what is the best way to load up Abello mating hives for the first time? So their, their Mini Plus system, Abello mating hive. So it's interesting, I've seen a couple of things recently. So I've done a video on the Techniset Q8, which has a very unique way of stocking little mini mating boxes using like a foldable frame, but you— that video will be out in a couple of weeks. It is on the channel membership section for anyone who's channel member. But in terms of any mating nuc, the only real way to stock them is to just fill them up with loads of young bees. And all of the mini mating boxes are kind of designed so you've got like removable bottoms in order to make that easier. But the best way I found to do it is you, you basically get a bucket, you shake loads of bees into a bucket, and then you get a big scoop. They sell these scoops, you just scoop out the bees, chuck them in, and then go and take them to the apiary. Do it at night, and then the bees don't like to abscond, and then you, you hope that they stay put. It's hard. Mini mating nucs is hard to keep them going. This is why we don't, we don't use them. We use the BS Honeybees 3-frame splits for our UK-mated queens because it's so much easier to stop them absconding once you've got some brood in there. Definitely not the most efficient way to mate as many queens as possible. The smaller it is, the more efficient it becomes, but the more difficult it becomes as well. But yeah, you basically— it's essentially a shook swarm. You're shaking loads of bees in, closing them up, feeding them, hoping that they stay put. Shocking cold. Um, so Ed says, hi, have you ever tried Protec paint? So no, I've not tried Protec paint, but I am— I've just recently done a video. Channel membership, uh, section has got one on how to paint poly hives. So for poly, I recommend Valspar, which is an external-grade masonry paint from B&Q, which is very, very good paint. And then for, for wood, I'm doing a collaboration with Osmo Basically, if you look around my house, everything is painted with Osmo. Absolutely love Osmo Oil and love their products. And they have sent me some of their really cool, uh, Country Shades and Garden Shades products, which are child safe. So not only bee safe, they're like child safe. You can basically like chew them when you're a child, uh, and they're made like 100% natural oils. And they are— I've done a couple of test things as well, they look really good. So I'm going to give those a go this year on some of my cedar boxes, but I've not tried Protect Paint. But I've heard good things about Protect Paint though. I know Griff sells that. Uh, Ed also says, hi, what do you think the best way to make the most amount of splits a year with a 14x12 hive is? So exactly the same process as I mentioned before. Making like 14x12s hugely restricts the amount of splits that you can make because the frame is so big, but it is exactly the same process. Stein. I would say, is it Stein or Steen? I get it wrong. I'm going to say it's Stein. Says, hi Lawrence, good to see you at the bee show. I have some honey that's about 21-22%. What would you do with it? Make mead, or could you give it to the bees later in the year? Um, so difficult one because it might be all right at 21-22%. Like, heather is allowed to be heather honey at 23%, I think, is the upper limit for heather. Like, 21-22% probably will ferment relatively quickly. So I would, I would go with mead. I definitely wouldn't feed it to the bees. I really wouldn't. Feeding honey to bees is not a good idea at all, even if you're like 100% certain it's come from one hive and you're giving it back to that hive. It's— I would never ever feed the bees honey. Got the issue with HMF building up if it's been heated, if it's been stored, which is kind of like toxic and poisonous to bees in, in high quantities, but it's probably not going to be that high, but It's the disease risk. The EFB, AFB risk for me is way too high. I would— mead could be fun, or make like some apple cider or something with it. You could definitely use it for something. It'd be cool. Uh, Frollies Bee says, doing splits with the 2 brood boxes method, you just said it would be okay to split them in normal hives, or is it better to use 2 6-frame nucs? Depends on the time of the year. So I would say early in the year and late in the year, it's better to use the 6-frame nucs. And then pretty much any other point apart from that in the season is fine for them to go in their normal hives. Insulated dummy frames are really good. So I would, I would try and make some. I'm going to do another video making more of those because they are really, really handy. So you can make follower boards, which are like completely seal it, or you can make dummy boards, which is effectively a frame with an insulation board in the middle, and then you could just use that to like dummy down any size box to make it nice and warm for the bees. They're very, very handy, very useful, and very cheap. You basically just use— make a frame and then just cut out a piece of Celotex and pop it in, and then you've got an insulated dummy board. Hi, how do you know if your frames of honey are fermented? So first thing I would look for or smell for is the smell. can smell it a mile off. Like, it smells yeasty, it smells like beer. The next one is I'll be looking for kind of like sliminess on the surface. And then the next one is I'll be looking for like signs of bubbles coming through. Uh, it's quite, it's quite easy to see if you've got fermented honey in the frames. Says started his own YouTube channel about a month ago. What's the best way to promote it? So I've done a little bit of that for you. I'll come over later on and I will subscribe, and I suggest other people should do the same. Um, the, the YouTube algorithm is like the most powerful algorithm in the world, or maybe the second one, uh, versus the, the Google algorithm. But just produce good content and it will— if you produce good content, then it will do the hard work for you. I wouldn't force people to watch it. Like, I see, like, I did it, I did it hard at the beginning and I cringe. I wouldn't go on like the beekeeping Facebook pages and say, "Oh, I've started a new Facebook. I started a new YouTube channel. Please subscribe to my channel," and then not produce good videos because it's a bit like I don't know. I did it. Like it was embarrassing because I look back at it and kind of think, why should anyone subscribe? You need to give them a reason to subscribe by producing good videos, and then the people will come. My my daughter's crying in the background. I'm not sure. why. Uh, says, this is our first year, currently doing a beginner's course. How quickly would a 5-frame nuc fill a 12-frame Abello brood box, and can this be split so I go into winter '24 with 2 colonies? So I always like to use Rob Tallis as, as the benchmark for this. So we sold Rob an overwintered nuc. I think it arrived with him middle, middle of April, maybe a little bit earlier than that, say, say 10th of April, 6-frame nuc. And he messaged me in August and sent me a picture, and it was on double brood with 7 full supers of honey. That was in year 1, so he could have easily split that into 8 nucs, easily 8 nucs, and got 7 supers of honey, which is like £200 worth of honey. And that was year 1. Equally, some people get their colonies and then they, you know, they swarm in year 1 and then they don't make it through the following year. So Rob clearly managed his bees very well. And it's how long is a piece of string. If you get good forage, if you get good weather, if your bees don't swarm, there's so many factors and so many variables that come into play. How quickly would a 5-frame nuc fill? It depends. And I say this to people as well, the difference between a 5-frame nuc and a 6-frame nuc is significant. Generally, that additional frame is a frame of brood, and as I said before, frame of brood 3 weeks later is 3 frames of bees. So if you're looking between like a 5-frame nuc or a 6-frame nuc, you're essentially giving up 3 frames of bees 3 weeks later. So I always say go for 6 frames. We only sell 6 frames now. But how quickly would it fill it? I would reckon that you could definitely get that filled in the first year, a decent honey crop off it, and split going into the next year. Yeah, it should be— if you get a good quality nuc from a reputable person, that should be achievable. When is the earliest time of the year you can move bees to a new apiary site? So as long as it's 3 miles away, anytime. They can go whenever. If it's less than 3 miles away, the best time to do it is kind of 2 months ago. Do it in the middle of the winter because you've got the 3-foot or 3-mile rule, which means that you can move a beehive any direction up to 3 feet, but if you go over 3 feet, you have to go 3 miles away. otherwise the bees lose their orientation and they start going back to the wrong place. But that rule doesn't apply when it's cold in the middle of winter because the bees aren't flying, so you can just do— you can move bees like 50 meters, like from one side of the garden to another, but you can't do that now. So question, when is the earliest time of the year you can move bees to a new apiary site? As long as it's 3 miles, you can do it at any point. So this goes back on to Stephen who said that Looking at his hives early on in the year, they all got through, and then a couple of weeks later they'd all gone. And his response is, last year's losses did appear to be starvation following early spring buildup. They are better prepared this year and all have fondant. I will double down, I will treble down on it. Bees starve in March. March is the month where you need to go out 4 times at least, once a week, and heft your hives and make sure they've got enough food. Feed them fondant, feed them syrup, do whatever you possibly can, but make sure you go and check on them. And don't think, I checked them in February, they were really heavy. They motor through their stores at this point in the year. Go out and check again. Um, I'm thinking of supplying some nucs for the first time. Can I ask, how do you time it right to sell, or if not selling, manage them? So that is a really difficult one to do, and luckily, like, we've always sold all of ours way in advance, but we don't really have like a contingency plan for what do we do if we don't sell them. Um, I, I, you, you're gonna have to make up some frames pretty quickly and make up some boxes. It's what I always say to Richard is we do it at a point where if it happens that we can't sell any of them, we can take 50% each and we can run them throughout the year. And as long as you're not producing any more nucs than that, then it doesn't matter if you don't sell them because you turn them into your production colonies. Um, I know a few people this year that have not been able to sell anywhere near as many nucs, and I know some people that have sold out way in advance of when they thought they were going to sell out. So it's— you'll get regional variations on nucs as well. But I would suggest to anybody who keeps bees though, selling nucs is a good thing. Like, get into the habit of selling nucs for a couple of reasons. One, it teaches you so much about like how to manage bees. Producing like good quality nucs is difficult, getting them through winter in numbers is difficult, so you get that constant learning as well. But also you get like, surprisingly, you get like a bump in honey production because you're managing your bees in such a way that you're not losing anywhere near as many bees through swarms, so then you get more honey, which is totally counterintuitive. You think, well, if you're making nucs, you're not going to get as much honey, but if you're So you've got 10 hives and you just take a 2-frame split out at the right time of the year, you stop the bees from swarming, you build up each one of those nucs into a nuc to overwinter, and then the colony thanks you by making them not swarm by giving you loads of honey. So it's, uh, it is, it is really good, definitely something people should do. Do I need to start feeding syrup instead of fondant? So both are perfectly valid. at this point in the year. For me now, I've moved over to feeding invert syrup. Does a demaray stay in place until the end of the season? So you can do a demaray in loads of different ways. So for anybody who doesn't know what demaray is, if you've got your single brood box— I need some hands to explain this— you've got a single brood box, get your 2 supers on and they're full of bees, you take the original brood boxes at the bottom, you lift it up to the top, you find the queen on a frame of brood, and you take that back down to the bottom, and in its place you put a new brood box full of foundation with the queen and a single frame of brood. 8 days later, you go back to the top brood box and knock down all of the queen cells. That's a demaray. And then what happens is that all of the brood at the top box emerges, transitions downstairs to where the queen is because they're attracted by her pheromone, and that top box becomes a super So they fill it with honey. So if you've not treated your bees in that, in those frames with Apivar, you can just harvest that and that can just remain there all year round and that could just be another super and you can do it again. So you can just the next box from the bottom, shift it up to the top, put a new box in, just keep on doing it. If you have treated your bees with Apivar in those frames, you do need to recycle it. So the way that I would do that is you take the top box down once it's full of honey, bruise all of the frames, put it down underneath right at the very bottom of the stack and then put supers on the top, and the bees will lift all of that honey up, and then you can just start the process again. You can do that process probably 2 or 3 times in a season, and you'll be amazed just how many bees it creates and how much honey it produces. Steve wants to buy a hat. Yep, you can buy a hat. I'm not getting any more of them made because people moan how much they cost. and, uh, basically selling them for like what I bought them for. So kind of thing, I'm not really putting loads of effort in, not really making any money, not making a penny, just giving away stuff for free. But you can buy them. I've got about 10 left. They're £25 each including the VAT plus delivery. But if you want one, you can email me blackmountainhoney@gmail.com. Sorry, Lawrence, just to clarify, if I'm looking to make splits as soon as possible, it's okay to put an empty brood box under the existing brood box? I'm thinking of doing it tomorrow. If so, that's exactly right, you can do that. That's fine. Jordan says, certainly no drone brood in the nuc I removed from a hive on the 24th of Feb in Aberdeen to be returned to the owner in Kent. Sent Royal Mail next day on the 26th with the solid roof and no casualties. Good to hear. Uh, Patrick says, I've got a new Anel hive. Anel Beehive. Sorry, Griff. Griff does a good impression of me as well. Um, I've got a new Anel hive on the way. Have you done a review yet? So I have done a review actually. I can't remember what it's called, but there's— I have reviewed it and it's on the, uh, the site somewhere. I called it an anal hive, um, which got a few laughs. But yeah, it's good. I think they're good, good hives. Ben Davis says, I bought my first nuc last year in August. Do you think they will expand enough for me to do a split this year? And if so, when do you think I should split? So yeah, should do. Should be a good like if you bought a nuc and it's got through the year, like you should be able to split it middle of April, back end of April. I would do it earlier rather than later because they'll just probably swarm otherwise. What time of the year should we clip our queen? So the same as what time of the year should you mark your queen— as early as you possibly can. But there is a caveat with that. The reason I say as early as possible is that it's just much, much easier to find queens early on in the year to clip them or mark them. But I like— if— I'm not sure. I know you've got a nuc on order, but I don't know your experience with bees. I've had it a number of times where people have bought a nuc and then they've messaged me and said, I killed the queen. And you say, what? And they said, I tried to clip the wing, I just killed it. I was like, basically cut half the bee off. And I just think Oh, it's heartbreaking, that is, when you send— they send you a picture of like a dead queen that they just like massacred with a pair of scissors. Uh, so, so I would say early, as early on in the season as possible. But if you've never really handled bees before, you can manage bees, and this is not specifically for you, this is advice for everyone. If it's your first year, I wouldn't clip the queen straight away. Just get, get used to kind of handling bees first. And then when you do it, the, the tip that I do, the way that I do it, is You can put it down on a cage and you can kind of work it a bit on a cage. But what I like to do is just get 2 fingers and I just pin it down to the ground. So I'm not picking it up. Picking up queens is really difficult if you're not used to it. You need to use like a very specific amount of pressure, so, so much that they don't fly off but not that much that you squish them. Um, so I pin them down onto the frame and then just with a pair of tweezer, a pair of like nail scissors, I just like trim a bit of the wing off. But like I said, don't do it if you've not got the experience. Doing spring splits, do you requeen the nuc or the main hive? Oh, that's a good question. You can do, you can do either. Either is a fair way of doing it. What I would say is it makes a difference whether you're keeping both the split and the main hive in the same apiary. So I always suggest if people are making splits, it's Way, way easier to take the split to a new site. And the reason I say that is that you don't get any robbing, and it means that you can balance the bees really, really well. So much so that all of the bees that you put in the split, when you get to the new site, like, that's it, that's the number of bees in the split. Whereas if you do it in the same apiary, then they just balance themselves, and you find that they all go into one, or they'll just go back to their other one and just abandon the brood. Really annoying. Um, how do I do it? I think it, it does, it does depend actually which way around I do it. If you're, if you're requeening, like if you're doing it for a specific reason, maybe the queen's getting a bit old and you want to like donate the split to someone, then I would be, I'd be putting the queen in the split and saying, there you go, there's, there's the free split if you want to donate it to someone. and then requeening the main hive, or kind of like do it, do it the other way around. I don't think there's really like a convention for which way that you're supposed to do it, but what I would say is that if you're keeping all of the bees in the same apiary, I would put the queen in the split. And the reason being is that all of the bees know how to get back to the original hive, whereas the, the nuc is far more likely to— for the bees just to not pay attention to it and to abscond and leave behind the brood. But if you put the queen in there with them and close the queen excluder setting, basically trap the queen in there, and then the queen's pheromone will attract a lot of those bees over. So I think if you're doing it in the same apiary, I would put the queen in the split. And then if you're splitting them and doing it in a nut, like taking it away to another apiary, I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference. Right, we'll do some more questions. I've nearly got to the bottom, which is quite impressive. I'm not going to stay on all night tonight, um, because I've got a really bad cold and I want to watch Match of the Day, watch Arsenal with their last-minute winner again. Thank you very much. I assume that's for my baby girl. It's cool, thank you. Um, same question from David about mouse guards, so I would say middle of March, back into March is a good time, rough time to remove them, but probably okay taking them off now, to be honest, in Essex. I'm new to beekeeping. Should I set up a nuc with frames to attract potential swarms, or just put an empty brood box out on a stand? So an empty brood box out on a stand definitely won't attract anything, so, but setting up a nuc with frames, brand new nuc or a sterilized nuc with frames with foundation in On maybe like a meter, 2 meters above ground, entrance about the size of a 50p piece facing south, southeast, you stand a good chance of catching a swarm. The other little tip to add on to that is that if you get like a little Jiffy plastic— not a Jiffy bag, a little kind of like a plastic bag with a little sealer on it— and then get some kitchen paper, and then you want some pure lemongrass oil. put a little bit of pure lemongrass oil on the kitchen paper and then seal it in the bag and then pin that inside the Polynuc. Don't get lemongrass oil on the Polynuc because it will melt it, but the, the smell of that is like chemically identical to queen pheromone. So when the scout bees go out, they're like really attracted to it, so they're much more likely to go and like hunt it out and find it. Um, it's good fun. Uh, Aiden says, thank you for answering my questions. My goal this year is expanding to 10 hives from 3 colonies. How many supers and nucs should I have spare for 10 colonies? So it depends on whether you extract once or twice per season. If you extract once per season, I always say— sorry, if you extract twice per season, I say 4 supers as an absolute minimum. If you extract twice— I've done it wrong, done it wrong way around. If you extract twice per season, 4 supers minimum. If you extract once per season, 6 supers minimum, I would say, on each hive. And then nucs, I don't think it matters too much. I wouldn't have like a set number of nucs per colony, but if you— I would run demarays on all of them, so I would have like an additional brood box for each one as well. You'd be amazed how much kit that you need to run 10 full-size colonies. Blue Lab says, my Lagustica queen I got from you is producing so much brood, they're bursting out of my double poly nuc. Very happy with that. Brilliant, that's really good news. I'll just quadruple down on it though. That's probably like the most likely colony to starve if they've not got stuff coming in, so just keep on top of it, give them syrup, and they will— they'll be very happy. But they are good, aren't they? I know the Lagustica, they're, they're very, very prolific. Huge, huge amounts of brood. Really nice. Mick, are you worried now that Griff will be on Starlink soon? You know, I can't, I can't moan about it. I did look at it and thought, oh no, everyone's going to be watching Griff's videos instead. But then Griff's, Griff's like a full-time bee farmer. He's, he's like— I'm an office worker. We sit inside and talk and stuff. So, but yeah, I'm a bit gutted everyone's gonna go and listen to Griff's streams instead. He's, he's a good guy though. I like Griff. Got a lot of time for him. Matt says, kicking myself regarding people asking about mouse guards. I also use underfloor entrances but lost one hive to rats. This one was a National Four, no block, no mouse guard, i.e., my fault. All frames burnt. Oh yeah, that's not good. Anything rats is burn it and start again. There's no, there's no coming back from that. That's really not good. Richard says, good evening, how do you avoid set honey from crystallizing? My bees work great Seed, and last year I thought I'd cracked it, but still a small amount of crystals at the top of each jar. So I've not worked out any way to stop honey from crystallizing. Like, it just crystallizes whether it's in in jars or buckets. It's it's completely down to like the levels of fructose and whatever it is. I always forget the two. I say glucose, not glucose, is it? What's the other tos that's in nectar? It's fructose and something else. I forget. it's getting late, but it's, it's down to the mix, dependent on the mix of the nectar that comes in. And obviously rapeseed honey is very, very high in whatever tos it is that sets very, very quickly. But the only— I've not found a way to stopping it except for warming it, keeping it warm, which you don't really want to do. So we just warm it up whenever it needs warming up. If I double brood when I want to split, could I take one brood box off and use that for my split? Love your videos, looking forward for many videos to come. So yeah, Ben, a lot of people do that, just do a walkaway split. So if you double brood and then once they're both full, you just like split them into 2, and you can just literally split them into 2, put a new roof on each, new floor, walk away and just never come back. Come back after a few weeks and let the bees sort them out. It is called a walkaway split. I've done a video on it somewhere. I'm not a fan of walkaway splits. I don't think the the mechanism for raising the queens under the emergency impulse is the best impulse to use. I much prefer swarming impulse, but it does work if you if you get the good weather. Mick says, "Hey up, lad." I lived in Yorkshire for a bit. I know you sell your lantern queens. However, do you use them yourself? So no, we don't use them ourselves. The reason is simple reason really. It's like it's economics because we can produce we can produce our own really good quality queens for free, and the Atlanta queens are very good, but they're they're not cheap. So and we wouldn't get we wouldn't get like a special discount. We just get them at the price that we get them for. So so no, we don't use them ourselves. I love Ben's tactic. He just keeps on like posting the same comment up, but it's good. I'm answering the questions if you. Do that. It's a good way of doing it. David says, how do you feed bees pollen you collected yourself? So really easy actually. You get told off by your wife or your husband depending on your relationships, but you get a KitchenAid or like a food blender and then you get your baker's fondant and you warm your baker's fondant until it's like, it's not liquid but it's just like soft, and then you put it in there and basically like a whipping function or like a kneading function, then you just sprinkle in all the fondant, all the pollen, blend it for a bit, and then just feed it. So basically just like they get a bit of fondant, get a bit of pollen. Doesn't need to be homogeneous, could be like a bit lumpy, but it's fine. Uh, Demby says, I took your advice 2 years ago, I invested in a bellow, makes life so much easier. So that's good, Damien would be happy to hear that. Uh, so Tyrell's Honey says, Lawrence, please share the secret of balancing beekeeping with busy full-time job and family. So when I Crack that one. I'll let you know. But I just like my wife. She's brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Very forgiving, does everything, and lets me just get on, get on with it. But yeah, she is amazing. To find a good wife. The UK Honey Marketing Board, very formal, says after watching your discussion with Griff regarding honey adulteration, I have formed a new company. Website and public advertising will begin this month. Hope it helps. Excellent, it's very nice. I'm, uh, I've already backed away from, from that, you know, because I, I, before that kind of chat on, on Live Honey, the Raw Wars as it was tagged or termed, I'd gone on back onto the website and put all of my listings back to raw honey. And then straight after that call, I went back on and turned them all off again. So I'm not calling them raw Honey anymore because I just I think like like Griff says we live kind of above radar so like I know for a fact someone would have watched that and they would have just complained to trading standards and then I'll get a call from trading standards saying you can't do that like we don't want you to do that can you take it down and if they'd have said that I'd have just taken it down like I'm not I'm not getting into fights with trading standards like I will just if they if they say jump I'll say how high Simple as that. So I just kind of preempted it and just thought, you know what, for us selling honey isn't the biggest deal, so I'm not going to get into a big fight and an argument about using a word that's probably going to impact our turnover by less than a percent. So you've got to pick your battles. But good, good that you're doing it. I think the UK does need some strong guidance. David Bisco says smash the like button, it costs nothing. That's very good, I like that. And then Liam Jennings is just like, thank you Liam, much appreciated. Uh, I've got— oh no, there's a few more questions, right? Oh, there are a few more questions. I thought, I thought I had 2 more left there. I was gonna go, so I'm gonna do 10 more minutes. So if you've got any more questions, get them in. If you've not hit the like button yet, I do appreciate likes. Hi Lawrence, I'm considering buying a 12-frame electric extractor this year. Are you able to recommend one? So I always get— I always struggle a bit with extractor recommendations because, you know, if someone says, can you recommend a poly hive? I can say yeah because I've tried them all, like got good many years experience of pretty much every single poly hive on the market. I can tell you what I like about them, I can tell you what I don't like about them, I can tell you what one's like best value for money, I can tell you what one's going to last the best, I can tell you don't buy Swienti poly hives. Um, I shouldn't, I shouldn't say that, but they are shocking. But with extractors, it's more difficult because I've only really used Abello extractors, and I, I've been happy with the Abello extractors that I've got. Like, I'm very, very happy with the Abello extractor that I've got at the moment, but it is like a top, top-end premium line with like a heated base, and it's like, it's so stable and it's great. So I've not really— I've never used a 12-frame Abello extractor. So I can say I like Abello extractors, um, but I can't necessarily recommend a 12-frame for you. And likewise with any other company, I can't say, oh, I've tried the Conaghan ones, they're great. I've never tried a Conaghan. I've never tried the Thomas Apiculture. I've never tried the Fritz. What I would say though is, is go— I live my life like this with buying things— is that go with a company or go with a brand of machinery that you know that if something goes wrong, they're going to be there to provide you with the spares And they're going to take you seriously and they're going to fix any problems because extractors do go wrong. Don't buy cheap rubbishy ones off Amazon, especially if you're going for like a 12-frame electric. Like, buy a decent one. Um, I, I, I can give you experience from a 6-frame manual extractor that I bought from Amazon and it was rubbish, really was rubbish, and just started falling apart and started getting like, like shavings and it was not good. I had to get rid of it. pretty quick. So sorry, I sat right on the fence there. I can't, I can't give you a specific, um, recommendation. Um, Liam says, can I put a brood box with new frames on now for them to build out? So I wouldn't do that, um, by putting it on top, but I would— you could do it now putting it underneath. But give it, give it a few more weeks and then you can do it putting it on top. The, the only difference really is whether you're going to continue to feed them If you put it on top now, it's really difficult to feed them because you basically got like— you always get this wrong— brood box there, and you put another brood box on, and then you want to feed like up here, and the bees are down here, and they just ignore it. Whereas if that's your brood area and you put a box underneath, then your feeder kind of goes— what am I doing here? Uh, there you go. Feeders at the top so the bees can still access it. It's difficult to know like what finger's which because it's all reversed. So, so Tyrell says Lawrence will recommend Abello Premium but probably consider 20 Frames. So it's— I, I only recommend that, you know, I do the social media for them, but I'll only give the recommendations for Abello stuff because I know that I have tried it. Um, but there are, there are lots of good manufacturers out there for equipment. Says, greetings from Tennessee. Just found 2 red-marked queens on a frame, apparently having overwintered together. Ever seen that? I made a split with one of them. So yeah, I've seen that, seen that a few times, 2 frames in there, but it is, it is pretty rare. Um, it'd be interesting to see how they both get on because generally you don't get 2 queens in a hive unless there's one, one of them's like defective, or the queens are like, the colony's tried to supersede, so one of them will be the superseder queen. And, but you do at this point of the year, they'll kind of live in peace and harmony for a bit, and then they just have a massive duel, or the colony kills one of them. Strange though, but good, good to see that you've got 2 nice healthy queens. Hey, thanks for sharing your experience. Do you use any automation and sensors to measure progress of your bees in a control hive at the apiary? So no, I'm really like— I, I do like a good gadget and a gizmo, but I've tried a couple of like hive scales and I've seen something, it's just I'm really not into it. Like, I don't think it gives you that much benefit at all. And like sensors inside for like humidity and temperature, I just think it's really— tell me anything that kind of I want to know. It's— yeah, it's an odd one. It's just, it's not for me. Like, if, if you could The way that someone tried to sell me this once, which was they could put a sensor in a hive that will basically beep on my phone to say the colony is going to swarm like in a couple of hours, you need to go out and fix it. And I said, how accurate is that? And they said, oh, it's like basically foolproof. So I thought, well, okay, that's— that does sound pretty good. But then like in reality, it doesn't help me at all because I can't just be like sitting at home waiting for the bees to swarm and go out and be reactive. It's a very strange way of beekeeping, especially on a commercial scale. You want to go out and just like manage a whole apiary at once. So pre— pre-active or like preemptive notifications can really help. And the guy kind of like, yeah, I don't think he thought about that before. So for me, it doesn't really make a massive difference. If, if you've got one colony in your garden, I can see how that would Really, really useful. But also, like trying to manage a colony when they're on the brink of swarming is very, very difficult. Like they're almost intent on going out and swarming anyway. So I've not really had a huge amount of experience, but it's not it's not really something for me. I'm just going to jump down to the bottom again. Jay is the most generous person in the world. Thanks, Jay. I really appreciate that ten pound tip. Got hat here. Got hat here for you as well. Drop me drop me a message email blackmountainhoney@gmail.com. And I'll send you a hat. Thank you. Uh, well, I need to go back to— I'll jump on that one there. Can I order queens from you now and then choose the delivery date? So yes, you can. So we're taking all orders now. The early dates are filling up pretty quickly, so if you want like any decent-sized batches of queens, I would get in there relatively quick. But you can, you can order all of them now and choose the specific date that the bees are sent. That is all live, right? I'm going to go into quickfire mode. There's probably about 20— no, there's loads more questions, right? I'm going to go into quickfire mode and answer some final questions before I go and watch Match of the Day, right? Hi Lawrence, when doing a demerare and moving the brood boxes up, if you've been feeding over winter-spring, won't there be syrup stored when it is backfilled as a super? So, so for me, that's the part of the reason why I only do the demerare kind of like towards the middle of May. there's 2 supers full of honey, because if you've got 2 supers full of honey and you've not fixed that problem with stores already, then you kind of— you need to fix that problem first. So demerest should only really be done when you've got 2 supers of like full honey in there. Someone asked earlier about dividing a brood box into 2 sections, maybe as nucs. Could I use OMF correct sheet to divide them, and any idea how to fix crown board to keep sections separate? So I wouldn't use Um, I've not heard of OMF. I've heard of like OSB, orientated strand board, but Correx sheet you could use, but I wouldn't use it. It's just I can't stand Correx, really not massive fan of it at all. It's, uh, it just, it deflects and it just changes and you get gaps in it and it's hard to cut it straight. So I would use like some plywood in the middle. Plywood in the middle is going to be like the easiest thing to use there. Um, the Wellsbourne Honey Company says you can't split Apivar because of the batch numbering and keeping vet records. So I think you probably still could though, couldn't you, if you just bought like one strip where you need 2 strips and then they just wrote down what the batch was? Um, then that would be— I don't know, would that be okay? But it's a good point. You do, you need to be on top of it for your VMD records. Uh, Harry says, I have 10 colonies now and want to make as many splits as as possible and get up to 30 colonies by the end of the year. Regarding the methods of splitting and brooding, etc., how would this be done? So it's— there's tons of different ways to do that, Harry. I, I would say simplest way of doing it is just taking a single nuc, strong nuc, out of each colony early on in the season. If you take a strong, like a, a 5 or a 6-frame nuc, take it out, get a queen into it. Once that queen's been accepted, you can immediately just take those 10 nucs And split them again, and then you're up to 30 already. That's probably how I would do that. It's, uh, like, it's the simplest, safest, and quickest way of doing it, and you've always got nice big strong colonies. So summary, take, take a 5-frame split early on in the season out of your colonies, put a queen in, get them up to fully 6 frames, and then immediately split them back down so you've got 20 3-frame nucs, and then build them up. And then you'll go into— you, you'll easily be hiving those back up into full colonies by the end of the year. Answered that one. Ben with his tactics, good tactics though. So Atlee Copley, he's the same, he's getting an extract, an electric extractor this year if he makes his mind up. That is, haven't decided 12 versus 20 frame yet. Everyone says go bigger, but I've only got 10-ish hives. 20 is over the top. So the bigger the extractor, the much easier the extraction becomes, and the kind of more centrifugal force that you get into it. The wider it becomes as well, so the more stable it is and it doesn't rock as much. So there's like physical benefits to having a bigger extractor more than just future-proofing. Hi, just joined. Apologies if the question was asked previously. Do bees consume crystallized honey? Definitely yes, they do. They might need to go out and get some water to break it down a little bit, but they do. If you don't believe me, take your worst frame of crystallized honey, bruise all of it over like that, take it and put it directly in the middle, split the brood in the middle, and come back one week later and see how much of it's left. Any tips for cleaning polyhives or nucs? So yes, we use a massive tub from Charlie's. They do a 150-liter tub, it's about £20. And then you get sodium hypochlorite. It is properly strong bleach. Make sure you've got eye protection and gloves and clothes that you're happy to get wrecked on. And then follow the MBU guidance on, um, like, uh, how much to put in. And then you just dunk them in it, clean them with, uh, like soda first, washing soda, get all of the gunk off, and then you dip them in there for like 20 minutes, they say, but I just dunk them overnight and they come out like literally like new. My bees didn't swarm last year. I was taking 3 frames from brood and giving it for some swarms and weak hives. For those brood frames, I was making splits and giving for them to later on. So yeah, so that's a good way of doing it, like a bit of balancing. But I don't like balancing anymore just for the fear of spreading any disease around. Uh, Andrew says, I wanted to get a big extractor, however checked the size of your door, that changed my plans. Very, very good advice. Check the size of the door, check the size of the extractor, check the splay of the legs if it's got legs that don't come off. That is a big one. The one that I got, I got a 30 frame, and I got the 30 frame with the heated bottom, but I was going to get the heated sides as well, which meant it was an extra like 50mm on the sides, and I couldn't get it through the door so they only got the heated bottom. But it was— and it was close, it was like 5mm either side to get it through the door. If I do split my hives, I won't be able to take them to a different site. How to tackle this? So I did a video on this, how to split bees in the same apiary site. You can do it, but do it early on in the year and don't feed them like immediately. Leave it like a week That's the biggest mistake that people will make, is feeding their bees too early. You're just asking for robbing, but you can do it. Channel member, says, hi Lawrence, do you have any tips for getting new apiary sites? Do you approach farmers, etc.? Do they typically charge payment in honey? So most of the time they do take payment in honey, but they're not like— there's no contracts or anything that gets set up. I do have lots of tips. I did a video on this one in terms of what to look for But I'll just run through the tips as well on here. So Google Earth, number one, Google Earth. Go and find exactly where you want to keep them first and have that plan in place before you go and approach anyone. You say, I want to keep them here, this is the place that I want to keep them, I need good vehicle access, I need access at all times, I want to keep them completely out the way of anyone, I don't want any people going near them, I want to keep them away from roads. What are my other tips? Obviously you need good forage in this, in the place that you're going to as well. So not, not like a big long list of things, but for me, vehicle access is the big one. But do have that plan in place before you go and speak to people, and like almost like print off the Google Maps and like say with— because otherwise you just end up in the, the bog that no one wants to go to and that you can't get your vehicle down to. John Sylvester says, "Oh man, Lawrence is a gooner. Haha! You need to drink your honey root ginger lemon or lime garlic and blend it all in a paste and leave it in the fridge." That sounds yeah. It sounded really nice until you put garlic in there. That sounds absolutely minging. But I am. I'm a diehard gooner. Absolutely love Arsenal this season. Definitely going to finish third. Melanie said learned quite a few tips listening to the live chat. Thank you. Thanks for listening, Melanie. Chris Lister said, "I shared your video and got kicked off the site." That is that is absolutely brilliant, Chris. I just I'm almost going to give you going to give you a hat for that. I think that's that's brilliant. Send me seriously send me an email. I'll give you a hat for that. I love it. Some of these beekeeping sites is hilarious. They're just like you can't what are you doing sharing sharing a video on a beekeeping site about how to start beekeeping? How dare you, Chris! You're banned permanently from this site, but you've got a hat for your troubles. So there we go. The other -sose was sucrose. Very good, Harry, good point. I can't believe I forgot that. Fructose and sucrose. Good man. Right, jumping down. What ratio syrup should I feed? I did mention brood and a half earlier. Yes, the half is on top of the brood. I initially left a super on to allow extra food for them to overwinter. Okay, so we gave you tips both ways. What ratio of syrup? You can feed either ratio of syrup this point in the year. Still probably safer to feed 2:1 just in case we get any further cold snaps. You can always feed 2:1. 2:1 you can feed at all times. 1:1 I would only ever feed kind of like for spring buildup. I know you like a preemptive demerare. I do. When do you usually start them? them once the bees have started working the supers? So no, I start them once the bees have completely filled 2 supers of bees. So you need to go in and there needs to be a minimum of 2 supers completely full, so like 22 frames of bees in the supers, and then you can start it. And don't do it once they start making queen cells, you need to do it before they even think about that. Hi Lawrence, I left one super of stores this winter, uh, Is it best to still leave them on for the rest of the season and for next year? So yeah, you can, you can leave it on, it's fine. What if it's, if it's crystallized, you're probably not going to want to extract it. So I would do what I said before, which is take the frames out, bash them down, bruise the tops of the frames, and then nadir it. So put it underneath the brood box and then make more space up at the top, and the bees will just consume that honey, and they might move a little bit of it up once it's been kind of watered down a bit as well. The Wellsbourne Honey Company says, we have recently built 24 nucs and have dedicated each one to one of our favorite mentors. You are among them. Oh, that's amazing. Thank you very much. Um, David says, what are your thoughts on the Asian hornet threat? I'm genuinely majorly concerned about the Asian hornet threat, and I'll be watching it with great interest over the coming weeks. And no, I don't think nature will take its course and the bees will not sort it out. Definitely not. The bees have no natural mechanism of defense. It's not like the giant Asian ones that they've, they've grown up and evolved over millions of years to, to cluster up and heat them. There is no defense, and if they, if they're going to work out a defense, it will take them millions of years to do it. So we need something a bit quicker than that. Oh, Ben Davis is only 16. He knows it. But this is why Ben's got the skills with multiple same comments and getting them answered. So it needs accessories such as Apivar and a new brood box and a hive for a split, but can't afford them as I'm only 16. Aha. Um, where do you live, Ben? Mark says, maybe already covered but arrived late. When would you start with syrup if needed? I still have fondant on at the moment. So you could— you can do— you can do syrup now. Start feeding syrup now is fine. And you can do fondant now. You can use them interchangeably for the next four weeks. Richard says, "Big fan here with the plastic warning for people not boycotting plastic hives. Please keep them in the shade to slow chemicals in your wax and honey." Very nice tip. Ah, it's very kind. Heavenship with a ten pound tip as well. It's really kind. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you. You know, people leaving the likes, but people leaving tips is incredibly generous. So thank you for that. Uh, Stuart Henderson says, what is the best source of ratchet straps at a reasonable price? So I used to recommend a company called Handy Straps, and they were brilliant and they were so cheap. But they— the site's still going, but they don't sell the cheap ones anymore. So the ones that I used to use were called— they were 5-meter endless ratchet straps. So if you Google 5-meter endless ratchet straps and then do like times 10 or times 20, there are some on eBay. And they're pretty cheap still on eBay. They come as like a blue strap, and the ones that they sell in tens and twenties are pretty good. They're about three quid each, so I could probably. I don't know. It changes all the time on eBay. Last time I bought them, they were really good and they were cheap from there. Edward says, "When is the best time to make a split to help with swarm control? Like March, June time." So for me, basically last week of April, first week of May. You need to time it so the bees have not started before that. Err on the side of caution and go a week or two in advance. David says, great info tonight, bud. Keep up the great work and come on the villa tomorrow. Oh yes, definitely come on the villa tomorrow. Harry says, thanks so much. Live streams are great. I find them more interesting than the videos, but just my personal. personal opinion. That's good, good to see. I appreciate you, you're here every single time, Harry. You're a good man, appreciate it. Uh, and Ben says, I live an hour away from a Bello beekeeping head store, hence all my equipment is from there. Okay, I was going to say if you were, if you were close by, I could, I could give you a couple of bits. Uh, Peter says, how do you test for varroa? Have you seen the bee scanning app for smartphones? So I, I have seen that app. I'm not 100% sure how accurate it would be, and we don't test So we just treat religiously, which maybe not— it's fully accepted practice, but as commercial bee farmers, you can't be kind of testing every colony and seeing which ones you're just going to treat. Lawrence, you had a very long hive destroyed recently. I think there were 8 nucs in there. I like the look of this and might build one for myself. Is that hive any good? So yeah, that was a Hyde Hives long hive, the nuc version, and it was really good. Like I'm not a huge fan of long hives, horizontal hives, except when they're in like the nucleus format, and then I really like them. They're great. The Rosebourne Honey Company says to get new apiaries, we just wrote a letter with our contact details on asking for space and sellotaped it to a jar of our best honey and left it on the farmer's door. We picked up four new ones in two weeks. Excellent. Love that tactic. Just do it. And that is the last comment of the night. So thank you very much to everybody who has come on. and supported my live stream. Please do hit the like if you're here at the very end. Thank you to the people who have left a tip as well, really appreciate that. I'm over the moon England won the rugby, even happier that Arsenal won the football, and I'm so excited for the season to get started. I'll see you all in a couple of weeks.