Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with The Beekeeping Show DEMO TABLE - Episode 30

Hi everyone, this is great. We are doing a live demonstration today showing you how to build some beehives amongst other things. We're also doing a live stream on YouTube at the same time. There's going to be carnage in the middle, so when we're doing the changeovers, other people are going to be coming in and the people here are going to be going out. But what I'm going to do is I have to run the live stream at exactly the same time. So throughout the whole of the session, from literally now until the very end of the session, if you want to ask a question, just put your hands up. We'll take questions the whole time.

Hi everyone.

I think we've got a couple of like roving mics. Who's doing the roving mics? Is that organized? Yeah, we've got roving mics. I can see Damien in the background. Can Damien just check the stream's working and that the sound's working good? If that's good, that'd be great. I'm Laurence Edwards. I own a company called Black Mountain Honey, and if you've not subscribed, hit the subscribe button on the videos, and I'll hand it over to you now to introduce yourself.

Okay, my name is Richard Rickett. I'm the co-editor of BeeCraft, which is the national beekeeping magazine. The last issue looks like that. We've been going for over 100 years now. We've got a stand here, and if you don't subscribe and you'd like to have a look, pop along to the stand, you can pick up a free copy. But more importantly, the things that I'm going to be talking about, there is actually an article about how to build a flat-pack hive, and you can pick that up at our stand while you're here. The other thing I'd like to say is we're doing this in aid of Bees for Development. I don't know if you know about them, but a very worthy charity, help people in developing nations to learn how to keep bees as a sustainable way of making an income. And this hive, which has been donated by Thorns, completely with all the frames and everything you need, dummy boards, etc., the kit is worth £375. Jane's been around and put a slip of paper on your chair. Please put in a generous bid if you'd like a complete National Hive with your telephone number, and we'll be drawing those at 2:30. You'll still need to be here because you need to take it home with you, but you've got a good chance of getting yourself a nice National Hive.

Thank you.

Excellent. So before I forget, the first thing I have to do is I have to wave to my daughter and say hello, Ivy, because she always watches the live stream. She said, Dad, you're on the TV, it's great! And I always forget to say hello to her, so we've done that bit. Hi, Ivy. Right, let's go on with it. I'm going to build some beehives. I'll show us how you're putting together these beehives to not make any mistakes. And believe me, I have made a huge amount of mistakes.

Yeah, hopefully there won't be any blood this afternoon, which is quite possible. Um, if you're new to this, of course, the first thing you need to do is decide what kind of hive you want. If you're like most beekeepers, you'll probably go for some sort of vertical hive like a National, most typically. It could be a Langstroth or a Smith. There's lots of reasons why people go for certain hives. It's an important decision to make first off because the kit you start off with is what you'll probably end up with for many years, and it's quite difficult to make a change once you've got all the associated bits of equipment and what have you. So you want to make a good decision. Most people in the UK go for a National. But it's a good idea to talk to people in your local association, local beekeepers, find out what people local to you keep. Nationals are very popular because they're relatively cheap, they're quite effective as a hive. Most people in the UK, about 80% of beekeepers, use these, and it means it's easy to get parts for them, and it means it's easy to buy things like queens, or if you're buying in a nuc and so on, the frames are all going to be the right size. But do, do your homework about what kind of hive to get.

Let's have a show of hands quickly to see what people are like, because there is a transition at the moment. So if you're, if you're a National guy, kind of, or lady, put your hand Hand up. So that's, that's the majority there. You got any Langstroth? Right, so that completely kind of correctly points out what you were saying.

You are right, there are a few more people around now switching over to Langstroth. It's becoming more popular, those people who are conventional beekeepers using conventional hives, certainly. But the guy that was here just now doing the Nucci hive, there's the Hyde hive, which I think you've got one of, I think I've seen. Yeah, so there are long hive options, but which use sort of national frames and techniques, so you don't You can use national frames, but not necessarily in a vertical type of hive.

Has anybody got a hive that isn't a national hive? Anything else other than a national? Oh, we've got 2 going, one in the back going big, big shout out. WBC, excellent. And then you there going big shout out. WBC as well, okay, we've got WBC people in here.

Yeah, top bar hives.

Top bar hives, very nice. And do you like your top bar hives? They're good fun?

Yeah.

Excellent.

Yeah, it's a lot to do with your personality and how you want to keep your bees as well. And I've got a few WBCs I keep for some clients that pay me to keep bees for them, and they like them because they look nice, but I get really frustrated by them because it's just so much more work and all the bits and pieces. But WBCs are great if you've got 2 or 3 at the end of the garden or what have you. Any more than 2 or 3 hives in terms of time and effort, then I'd go for something simpler like this, but it's down to you. Once you've decided on your hive, you need to decide how you're going to acquire it. You can buy a ready-made one, and any of the companies that are out there will happily buy you— sell you a ready-made hive. where everything's nice and square and absolutely beautiful, but of course you're going to pay for it because they've built it and it has to be delivered to you. The most common way is to buy a flat pack. Lots of people who will buy you— who sell you a flat pack, and they come in slightly different configurations. So sometimes you'll buy a flat pack as a kit and it will come with the roof already made, but all the other bits you have to make. Sometimes you have to make every part, so it kind of depends on the kit that you buy. But once you've got it, they're nearly all exactly the same, give or take a few minor differences. Always look at the instructions first, but the most The important thing is to really familiarize yourself with how a hive goes together, because they're— although they're quite simple, there's a few places where you can go a little bit wrong, and it's very difficult to rectify anything that you get wrong. So what I'm going to show you today is how to make a national super. And in the case of a national, this is a brood box. This is what's called a national deep. There's also a 14 by 12, same size but a little bit higher. And in a National, the brood box is basically exactly the same as a Super. The Super is just a little bit shorter. So this is the way it comes. So that is a Super. It will come in a flat pack like that, nicely done up with Sellotape, and hopefully it comes with all the bits you need in it. So this is a Thorns first quality Super. So a little bit of a word about that. Most people offer first and second qualities, and the main difference is in the timber that they use. Your first quality will use really nice close-grained timber, it's Western red cedar, and depending on where it's come from and how it's grown, that will affect the type of timber and how many knots there are in it and things like that. I always buy second grade, they're perfectly fine, seconds are fine, but a first is always beautifully finished. One of the differences can be With a second, because of the way the wood is grained, where there are a few fiddly places where you've got to put a nail through it, you're more likely to get a split, which can be, you know, a real downer if you've just been building a hive and you've got a great big split in the side of it. And the other thing is some of the machining is not quite so good, so it's always worth having a little bit of sandpaper, coarse sandpaper, just to sand down some of the joints if they're not fitting quite as well.

Is it worth saying at that point, in terms of like the cedar versus pine debate, Like, what are your thoughts on pine? Yeah, so anyone here got pine beehives before we—

Pine or deal basically is cheaper than Western red cedar, but it's heavier. This, you can build this as it is now, put it outside, and it will probably outlive any of us here. A cedar hive will go on and on and on, and really it doesn't need any maintenance at all. There's a few things you can do, but basically these, these last almost forever if you look after them. Pine is much heavier, Which makes a real difference when you're carrying lovely heavy supers full of honey around. And pine also needs to be maintained, it'll need some kind of wood finisher or painting and what have you. With cedar, as I said, you can finish this and you can go straight outside, that's it, good for years. Or you can finish it off with a little bit of raw linseed oil just to give it a nice finish and a little bit of extra weather protection, and you can top that up every few years. The other thing you can do is you can paint them. If you want to paint them, get a specialist hive paint because it's breathable paint and it's designed to go on beehives. It does come in a range now of really nice different colours, so make sure you use hive paint, and I'll tell you a little bit about how to finish off your box if you want to paint it when I get to that stage. So you unpack your hive. I'll get rid of this. Now I should mention that to start off with you need a floor. And there are choices there as to whether or not you have open mesh floors or solid floors. You'll need a brood box, you'll need a queen excluder, you'll need supers. Always start off with 2 supers at least. A crown board, and then a roof. And then with roofs, I would recommend— this is a 4-inch roof. They come in slightly different depths. So this is a 4-inch, which is about the shortest that you'll get. They also come in—

6-inch.

6 and 8 inch. I always buy a good heavy roof, they're much more likely to blow off and they do a good job of keeping the hive weighted down if you're in a sort of breezy area or something. Some of my hives are in quite exposed conditions, I make sure they have good heavy roofs on them, but they're much heavier to lift off the hive. So those are the bits that you'll need. So here are all our components, they're quite straightforward, but it can look a little bit daunting when you first unpack it. You'll have 2 end panels and these have these rebates in them and those are there for your side panels to slot into. Can you all see this all right? Oh, it's up on the screen, I didn't realize, that's good. Then you will have these things, some people call them locking bars, some people call them fillets. There are 4 of these and they're of 2 types. You get what they call filleted ones, and these go at the top of the box. And that fillet that you can see there, that's the ledge that your frames are going to sit on in the finished hive. So there's 2 of those, they're identical. And then you'll have 2 of these. These go at the bottom, and these have this sloping part on them, and that's there to help water run off and away from the hive. And it has a rebate on the bottom, and that forms the bee space on the finished hive. And that's quite important.

It's really important, and I'll jump in there, and that's probably one of the most common mistakes that I see with these, are put together the wrong way. And believe me, I've put so many of these together the wrong way. Bee space is probably number one, and then that's number two, which is that the chamfer's the wrong way, so it's kind of leading the water into the hive, which does loads of damage. Just make sure that chamfer's always going away to shed that water off.

So you'll come, you'll get a little pack of nails. Don't use whatever nails you've already got lying around. These are the right size, they're the right length, but also they'll be stainless steel or galvanized because they will help to protect the wood in the long run. So it's a good idea to count those and make sure you've got the right number. Now the first thing to do is make sure you've got all your tools. So you need a hammer, a small hammer. Not strictly necessary but useful if you go a little bit wrong, a pair, a small pair of pliers. Get rid of that. Pencil. A square is a useful thing, but you can get away without one. But it's very important that when you make this hive, it ends up nice and square, so it's useful to have one of these. But as I said, you can get away without one.

If you haven't got a square, all the joiners out there will know that if you— once you configure it and put it into a square, if you measure the diagonals, if the diagonals are the same length, it's square. So that's always a good check.

There's an even simpler way of doing it, which is if you've bought a hive from a decent place, The crown board will be dead square, so you use this as you go along to make sure each box is nice and square. You also need some wood, some exterior-grade wood glue. With this Thorns pack, it comes with it, but you've probably got some of that in the shed already. I think that's everything. So where do we begin? What I always do is I make it very loosely to start off with, just to remind myself that everything's in the right place and I've got all the the right bits. So we start assembling these. So I'll start off with these bottom bars. Remember what Laurence was saying about the angle of that? I'll slip that in there just like that, just make sure it's fine. This is a top one that slots in there. That one goes in that way around.

So while these are going in, this is what I thought we might do, a little bit of a Q&A. So if anyone's got a question, kind of anything that's like relevant to building hives or mistakes that you've made, feel free to kind of put your hands up while we've got these bits where the hive is being built.

And that goes on there. So I'm happy that I've got all the bits and pieces, so then I— and that these are going to fit together because this is a nicely produced hive. I know I've not got to do any little bits of sanding or what have you. So then what I'll start doing is gluing these parts. So you get your wood glue and just a small amount on all the inside Surfaces. You don't want very much because you push them together and it all squeezes out, makes a horrible mess. Um, fortunately Mrs. Rickett isn't here to see that I've bought the sponge from the sink this morning, but it's useful having a damp sponge with you that you can just wipe off any excess glue that comes out. So I've pushed that into there and I'm not going to bother putting it all the way in because I'm going to do a sort of quite loose assembly to start with.

If your wood glue doesn't come with it and you're wondering what wood glue to use, PVA is what you want, but you want like an exterior grade PVA. If you use like an internal grade and you put it out, it's just going to come apart. The one that I use is Titebond II. Titebond II or Titebond III is really, really good and it doesn't go off very quickly as well.

Another one which is good, but it's, um, a bit more expensive and you have to mix it up from water, is Cascomite.

Okay.

That's a nice one. If you're a sort of serious carpenter, you'll know about that already and its benefits.

So then the, the other debate that people have about putting these together is, like, like you said before, you've got the galvanized versus stainless debate for nails. But what a lot of people do is they like to screw them, so they kind of chuck the nails away and then they'll drill pilot holes in and then they'll screw them all together. So the glue and screw And that's probably like the most belt and braces way that you do it. But if you, if you do it, make sure that you pre-drill because it will split quite easily. But also make sure that you do use stainless fittings because the screws, for some reason, they corrode a lot easier than the nails. So definitely stainless.

It's useful to have a spare scrap of wood to help you knocking things together so you don't mark your wood. So this is just a little bit of ply. So I'm going to give that a tap down like that, make sure it's nice and tight. Same here, and then we'll, we'll do it from the other angles as we go around, and then I'll do the same on the top. This is one of the more fiddly parts because I'm going to put the other end on here. Now what was just being said about pilot holes, if you've got a good quality hive, it's not really very likely that the wood will split, but there are a few places where it can happen, and so actually I pre-drilled before I came today a couple of the places such as here, I've put some very small holes in, pre-drilled them so that I won't get any splits there.

It's the number one place, isn't it, that will split on that top thing there.

That's right, and you can't ever really repair it. I mean, you can glue it, but it's always going to be a little bit dodgy, and over the years you'll see that's where it splits and then the split grows and then you've got somewhere where wasps are getting in and all that sort of thing. So what you just have to do now is line this up so that all of those are fitting in.

It's funny, I was doing a video at Thorns of them putting together a beehive and he was doing this bit here and then he was like banging it in and just the whole hive just split in half there and he was like, no! But it will, the wood can go kind of at any point. He fixed it back together, it was fine.

So now I'm just going to go around, knock all these joints clean, make sure they're in. You could use a mallet for this if you've got a Decent wooden mallet. Now at this point it's not going to be square, that doesn't really matter. We've got the basis of the box there and we need to get these panels in and they slot into these rebates which you can probably just about see here and you slot them down from the top, so This is the top of our box because we've got these chamfers sloping out here, and I put a little bit of glue in, but only put some at the top of that rebate because if you run it all the way down, as you slide the bits of wood down, they'll just take the glue with them and it all comes squeezing out at the bottom.

And if you're doing it like me, it comes squeezing out kind of on like the wife's oak work surfaces in the kitchen and you get really told off, so you've got to—

Yeah, it's just sounding quite familiar.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah.

So they just slot into here. Now they don't normally slide straight down because they're a very tight fit, and normally you have to sort of give it a little bit of a jiggle on either side like that. And what you're actually going to do is push them all the way down and then turn the box over. I've put that one upside down. Now the reason that this is upside down is because being a Thorns super, this is slightly different from most other people's supers. Because what Thorns do, which I think is very nice, is they include a slot along there that you can put your castellations in like that without them having to be nailed into the hive.

Really?

So you can just take them out if you're going to switch over from using, using normal runners to castellations, which allows you to put fewer frames in the box if you want wider frames when it comes to harvesting. So take 2.

And while you're putting that back in, it's worth mentioning on the castellations as well, I love castellations in the supers, but also like having removable ones makes it so much easier because what I like to do, I'll buy SN4 frames, which is a self-spacing shallow frame, I'll put 11 or 12, you can get 12 into a box like that, let the bees draw it out. And then once they've drawn it out, I'll pop the frames out, put my castellations in. You can either have like 9s or 10s. I like to go for 9s and then pop the drawn frames back in. And then the bees, when they draw them out, you get nice big chubby frames that you can extract easily and uncap. If you just go straight to 9s castellations, they can go a little bit wild. So it's a good tip. And the Thorns boxes do make that so much easier, having a removable castellation on them.

As a new beekeeper, this won't seem like it makes much of a difference, but if you're extracting 9 frames instead of 12, by the time you've got 4 or 5 supers or you get up to several hives, it makes a massive difference in the time it takes to uncap and extract your honey.

And even just with the reduction in frames, it makes a massive improvement. But the bigger one is when you're trying to uncap a frame, if you've got them close You try and uncap it and you just can't get the knife in, whereas if you've got nice big chubby frames, it's just one job straight down, really speeds up the operation.

We've been so busy chatting that I've done the same thing on the other side.

I know.

So, so you can imagine when you're doing this, I've sat there and done like 300 of these and said, I've got 300 to do. And you're just thinking, this is going to take me literally weeks and weeks on end. So it does, it does take a long time, but I curse back because when I did my first one I did them wrong and you'll see the main mistake that I made in a little bit, it's kind of like irreversible, you can't go back on it.

No, that is a problem and even, I mean, I've done dozens and dozens and dozens of these, you do get a bit blasé and you put something in the wrong way around and you realize it when you come to put the frames in. So those side pieces, I put them in and I tap them down Until they're level with this rebate on the inside, so it goes smoothly across there and you've got your B space is consistent across the bottom. So each of those needs tapping down just a little bit more.

And this is the mistake I made. This bit here is crucial. Yeah, like a couple of millimeters out here can cause you real issues, and 6 to 8 millimeters out like almost renders the box like unusable in a system. So it's a bottom B space And you'll see that when you put the frames in now.

So here you can see that bottom bee space. I've put those 2 pieces in and I can run my finger along there and the join between those 2 pieces of wood is nice and flat, so we know we've got a consistent bee space there. And what that means then is that when you put the frame in—

Need the runners. Runners, yeah.

Once the runners are in here, which we'll nail in in a minute, If you put the top bar of a frame in there, that should be nice and flush all the way across the box, giving us, uh, bottom bee space. And of course, then there'll be a space above that if you've got another box on top of this.

And that's the test, and that's the advice. Make sure you've got some frames, build a couple of frames before you do your boxes, and then just run that test to make sure that the top of the frame is flush with the top of the box on a bottom bee base. hive like a national, and then everything works out well.

So next it comes to nailing. I'm just going to run around and make sure that all of these joints are where they should be. Right, first place to put some nails. How are we doing?

10-2, so we're pretty good. Okay, we'll do the changeover quickly.

So first of all, you want to put some nails through the sides here which will go into those bits of wood that we slotted in just a second ago, and the trick to doing that is you can see where that rebate is, just run your pencil up there, make a little mark at the top here, do the same at the bottom, and then use your runner there to draw a line, and now I know exactly where I can put the nails. I can put nails through there and they're going to go straight into there. Usually it's 3 nails for a super and 4 For a brood box, or possibly 5 if it's a 14 by 12 brood box, and they go under in between these joints here because we don't want to split any of the wood. Talk amongst yourselves.

It's almost a game here to see how many nails he gets in without bending them over, because if it's me, it's 50% of them, they just get like whacked in. But you've definitely been practicing, that's very good.

Now you can, you can put those in so they're flush, or if you've got a punch, you can just punch them below the surface. If you're really fastidious, you can punch your nails below the surface and then go around and fill those with a bit of wood filler and sand them off, which you certainly would want to do if you were going to be painting this and making it a pretty color.

That's loud.

I was gonna say, I've got a sense that I would hate doing this.

I would be under so much pressure. They literally— 50% of them, I think, I'd be whacking the corners and everything.

Doing a good job.

I've done this. So who here, who here has not built their first beehive? Has everyone here built one? We got anybody here? Put your hands up if you've never built a beehive before.

Okay, good.

So you should hopefully make some— avoid making some of the, the rookie errors. Because there's nothing more frustrating than kind of making them and they being wrong. But also, like, the comparison here between buying a fully assembled hive and buying, like, in the sales, like, some of the shows and in the sales during the winter, buying the seconds quality. Like, the seconds quality UK stuff is just as good. The only difference is that you might have the odd knot, but it's a perfectly usable knot. It just doesn't look quite as nice. So you can save a huge, huge amount of money by buying seconds kit in the sales, making it up yourself.

Yeah, it's the same with frames, but with frames you're more likely to get the odd unusable bit. You'll get a knot in the wrong place. But if you bought a pack of 50 and you've made a big saving, it's not the end of the world just to throw away the old top bar or what have you, is it?

Makes good kindling as well, doesn't it? It does.

Yeah.

So while he's doing that, has anyone got any questions? We've got about 5 minutes left of this one and then there'll be a quick changeover and you can ask questions there. But again, if anyone— you've got a question here.

There's a second door up there.

Do you nail from the outside or do you nail down from the top? You know, okay, so nail down at the top and then you can—

when you pry it open, you can pull it apart.

It's funny you're going— do you want to repeat it there just so everyone, everyone can hear it there?

Yeah, when you're nailing the hole, when you put the nail in for the bars, do you go in from the outside or do you go down from the top? Which bars are you talking about?

So basically saying that, do you go in here? You go in at that point there?

Yeah, okay. Okay, um, I tend to— well, it depends on the length of nails because if you're going to go down like that, you're going to— the chances are you might hit your nail there, whereas if you're going from the side, that's not going to happen. So I don't—

I just know to stay careful.

Yeah, no, I wouldn't do that. So the next bit is to nail in these bars, and you can see in the top here I have actually pre-drilled these ones here Just to demonstrate really that it is worth doing that because certainly if it's less good quality wood, this is really where you get your splits in these little parts here, so I've pre-drilled.

I would say in answer to that question as well there, so he's going in down that way, you go in from the top. The reason that I go in that way as well is because you've got like the wood compressing both sides of it, so it's far less likely to split, whereas on the top it's only restrained on one side. Yeah, so you can go in, but if you pile up drill it, you can go in from the top, it's not an issue. Do it either way. Like everything in beekeeping, people have their own preferences.

Yeah, I mean, I know people that never glue just in case they need to take them apart. I suppose if you screwed them, you wouldn't necessarily need to glue, but I've never had to take a box apart, apart from when I messed up building it. I mean, you know, I've got boxes that are 25 years old. Well, they'll outlive me. I keep telling my children You're very lucky because when I'm gone you'll still have all of these beehives. Yeah, we're nearly there.

Any more questions while we wait for this to be finished? Just— I'll just start talking about stuff if no one's got any questions, that's fine. So how many more we got to go?

This is the— that's the last of the nail— of those nails. So that's it. Now you can put nails in Down through here. I don't do that.

No.

That's a real risk. You usually get enough to do that, but you're really asking for trouble if you want to, if you want to nail these little bits top and bottom or what have you, that's likely to split. So the next bit is we need to make sure that it is square. So luckily that is. If that wasn't quite square, you'd just put it on end or on a corner and give it a A bit of a push, you'll hear it creaking, the glue's not set yet. Check again that it's square, and then you might want to go around and just tap the nails again in case they come slightly loose in the squaring up process. So next thing is to add your runners. They just sit in there like that, but remember what you're thinking about here is your bee space. They might need to have to come up just a little bit, possibly, if there's a little bit— it doesn't matter if you've got a millimeter or so there, but you want to make sure that they're as flush as you can with the top there. I'm quite happy with the way that side is there. Let's check it on this side. Yeah, that's okay as well. So these just tap in with some very tiny pins. This is normally where you whack your fingers.

It is the most difficult bit I think, this one. It's so, so difficult, isn't it? Like they're tiny pins and you just, yeah, you'll hit your fingers on them every time. I'm glad you're doing it. And this is where I tend to bend them over as well. If no one's going to ask any questions, I'm going to come round halfway through and start asking people what they've got in their bags. Okay, we've got a question here.

My granddad used to keep bees.

Yeah.

And he got rid of stuff, but he gave me a skep That he had.

Oh cool.

And he also gave me an observation hive. Lovely. 19-something.

Wow.

Yeah, his friend made it.

Amazing. And what's it made of? Do you know? Is it like— I guess it's wooden, but it probably is wood and some— oh wow. And are you gonna— you're gonna adopt it and use it yourself? I'll definitely do that. Observation hives are brilliant, like taking them out to markets and kind of showing people the bees in a really nice safe way. And you can play like competitions like spot the queen and different things like that, and it really gets people like engaged in the honey. You sell a lot more honey at the markets if you bring an observation hive.

Is it a—

I would recommend though, it's a good point to bring up, kind of old and used kits, you need to make sure that you clean and sterilize it before you put bees in it because EFB, it can linger in there for kind of like a couple of years. AFB will be there indefinitely. So you need to make sure that you're scorching all of the boxes. If you've seen the videos, you know, get a good blowtorch, scrape it all down so it's nice and clean, get the blowtorch on and really go for it. You want to get the wood like relatively dark without burning it. Give it a good clean and a good scorch before you put any new colonies in there.

My granddad said he never used it.

Oh yeah, but he probably did secretly use it. Yeah, he put it into like secret markets. But it's good advice, you don't want to be spreading any disease around, and secondhand kit is the number one way to do it.

I just wouldn't risk it. If you're a new beekeeper, for the sake of a few quid, it's just not worth buying secondhand gear, unless you know and trust the person you're buying it from, and you know they're the only person that's had it before you. Because as he said, I mean, AFB in particular can be there for, you know, decades and decades, and it's a terrible way way to start. Get yourself some good sound kit, even if it's seconds or what have you, to start off with, and that will see you through for years and years and years and years, all your beekeeping career. So that's a finished, um, super. So you'll be making 2 of those. The brood box, um, is essentially exactly the same, just a little bit, um, deeper. I think we're done.

Yeah, we're done. Thanks very much, really good, appreciate that. So while you clean up, there's going to be a little bit of a transition here, so I will, I will come around and look what in your bags if people don't ask questions. I can just talk, you know, I can just talk about stuff. So has anybody got any questions? Over here, right? We'll wait, we'll wait to get the mics on while you clear up.

Oh, can I just say, fill in your bit of paper, do it now. Um, there's a bucket over there and we'll draw it shortly, and you can get this hive, uh, everything you need, complete hive along with all the frames, brood frames, all the wax, the foundation, everything you need to get up and running with your first colony.

And remember, that is for— it's Bees for Development, isn't it, you're auctioning it, so it's charitable.

If you don't know anything about Bees Who Don't Look Up, because it's a brilliant charity.

So brilliant. While this is cleared up, Becky, you just come in, just pretend I'm not here. We'll just do everything, and then we got a question over there, so if we can get the mic over to this— oh, you got it! Wow, excellent.

Go ahead.

Just wondering, uh, did you use a nail gun rather than—

Yeah, so, so you definitely can use a nail gun. I, I use a nail gun for making up frames as well, so I've got a pin nailer, a 23-gauge pin nailer that I use for frames, and that's fine. And then I've got an 18-gauge brad nailer that I use for my frames as well. If you're making up a lot of these boxes, you probably want to go with a 16-gauge nailer and make sure that you're using the stainless steel brads that go with it. But yeah, it saves tons of time. You know, you don't get any of them that are kind of boxed like that, so, uh, it's really good. Yeah, definitely recommend it, and for frames as well. Any other questions? I like that people have got hats.

Brilliant.

I feel great. People have got my hats on.

Yeah.

Where can we get them? Where can you get the hats? There's a few left at the Abello store if anyone wants to buy a hat, and I'm not making a penny on them, so there you get them for what I get them for. Sorry, I'll come back to you. Was there someone over there that you gave a mic to? Who was it?

No.

Oh, there was. Sorry. So we'll come back to you. We'll get you a mic. I thought they had a mic ready to go. using your supers?

Do you use castellations or do you just have them free spacing?

So, so I buy all of my frames as self-spacing frames, so I just buy like DN4s and SM4s. I think it's a really good habit to get into because it gives you the flexibility. Like I said, whenever I'm starting the boxes off, I always use just the self-spacing element and make sure that they're like put together, let the bees draw them out, and then I do— I jump onto castellations. I'm still not 100% sure with what number I like.

I've got 10s and I've got 9s.

If 9s work well and you can get them working well, then they are brilliant and a lot better and a lot easier. If 9s aren't working well, go to 10s. Don't, don't get 12s, don't get 11s. There's no point in doing it. It does, it makes, it makes like extracting your honey so, so much easier. But what I would say is don't, don't think that you're just going to use Castellations and use like an SN1, so like a shallow one without the sidebar, without the self-spacers because they're not that much cheaper and you lose a lot of the flexibility that comes with that. We'll come to you again, you've got another question. Where are we, mic? Hello? Oh, there we go.

So we've got one mic.

Great, thank you very much. Talking about the hats, would you consider a bigger size?

Consider a bigger size? You know what, I got— what is it, mine's too small? Everybody said, this is the thing, I've got a massive head, and the problem that I've had the whole time with these hats, I can't get them to fit. But these fit really well. You try one on. Yeah, look, try this one on, see if it fits you. Because that was like the main reason, innit?

It will fit you.

You're right, you've got a big head as well. But yeah, you probably can loosen it there. If you loosen it a bit more, you would, you would get that on. I reckon we get it to fit. Can I have a try-on at the end? Sorry, excuse, excuse the hair, it's shocking. That's why I have to wear a hat. Any more questions? Here we go.

Old frames, or disused, or die-out hives, do you sterilize, reboil the frames?

So I have like a zero tolerance on old Friends now, so if I've got like any colony that fails, that they all—I basically—I burn a lot of mine. But you can recycle them. What I would say is whatever you do, do not just reuse them. It's a surefire way to spread disease. So if you go in and you've got a colony, you go into a colony saying kind of like March or April, and there's just like loads of dead bees, or even like they've just absconded, and there's literally nothing there, and there's loads of frames of stores, and you're thinking, I'm going to use those stores. I'm just going to feed them back to my bees, it's a good resource. I highly recommend you not to do that. The cost of everything then comes into it, whether you want to kind of like try and save some money by boiling those frames down and rewaxing them. But like with the cost of energy at the moment, it's probably not economical to actually boil it up and retrieve the wax. So what a lot of people do is like you can buy a pack of like 50 frames now for £30, That's what I do, and I just burn them. And then just replace them with brand new seconds, knowing that, you know, I don't need to make sure that I'm sterilizing them completely correctly. I know that they just, they go away. It eliminates any disease if there was any disease in there. I definitely don't reuse them in my colonies, but I think on a small scale, if you wanted to recycle them and you wanted to heat them up and maybe cut out the honey, And then like render the wax down. Like the wax is a very usable product. So I think if you've got the time and the kind of energy to do that, it's definitely a good thing to do. Thank you. All right. Are you whenever you're ready, Becky? We will start. Are you good to go? Ready. Yeah. Excellent. I've just realized that the previous gentleman took the mic. So someone needs to go and find him and get my mic back. while we, while we start. He's gone, so it's fine. I'll just stand near you because this mic is for the stream. Oh yeah, we've got 2 mics. We've got too much. Yeah, it's fine, it's fine. We will, um, it's fine. We carry on as normal and we'll fix the stream as we go.

Hi, I'm Becky from Becky's Beans. I've been asked to, um, do a quick demonstration. Um, thank you. Um, a quick demonstration I'm going to do a demonstration to show you how you may do your very first honey extraction. Judging by the amount of hands that went up when Laurence asked if any of you built your first beehive, I'm guessing that a lot of you haven't extracted honey. Would that be right? Show of hands? Right, okay. I will do the best that I can then. So we don't sell extraction equipment ourselves, So my good friends at Bellow have lent me an entry-level extractor. We'll talk a little bit about that when we start to show you how it all works. So your bees are going really well, bringing in the honey, you're putting your supers on, and we're getting to that point where we've now got to take these supers off. If you're— most of you are running nationals, your supers are going to be heavy. First thing you need to think about when you're coming to do your honey extraction This could weigh between 20 and 30 pounds, possibly even more, depending on whether you use the castellations that Laurence was talking about earlier, and Richard, where you're using less frames by making the gaps wider. So do bear that in mind. When you come to take your honey off, there are a few methods that you can use. All your hives— whoopsie, thanks, Laurence— will come with a crown board, and a lot of people make the mistake of leaving these port-a-bee escapes in their crown board while their hive is— their colony is growing. These are purely for using as a clearer board, which means that you can put your board in between. If this is my brood box and my full super was on top, which I wanted to take off, I I could put this board in between with the porta-bee escapes in, and the bees will come down through and they cannot get back up. So that is the only time that these should be in your crown board, when you're using it as a clearer board. Okay, you can buy what we call a clearer board, which is essentially a crown board with a single hole, and it's got a rhombus bee escape on the top. Exactly the same thing. The supers that I want to take off, I will put to one side. I'll put this board on, put the supers back on top, put my crown board on top, my roof on top, come back either a few hours later or the next day depending on when you've done this, and all the bees should have gone down through here and they can't get back up. So essentially the top boxes will be empty, but that's not always Not always the case.

Do you have a preference between like the Rhombus Clearer boards or the Portabee Escapes?

Well, I prefer these because we can look at a site, we know we've got 20 there, we can put 20 boards on or 40 if we're doing 2 sites, and we can go in and put them on and we haven't got to worry about taking away kit that we might accidentally take away that we need. So this is my preference.

It's definitely my preference as well. I'm not a massive fan of the Portabee Escapes. So as Becky said, when you buy your beehives likely to come like that, and you'll think, oh, it's annoying because it comes with this bit, but you've got to buy that bit now. But if you just take the portafilter scopes out and just chuck them away, you can buy just that yellow element of it there, and they're only about £2. And then you can just modify your crown board here, block that hole over, just put the rhombus over the top, and you basically turn it into that. Um, and then all you do is you just unscrew it when you want to turn it back to a crown board again. There's a really cheap way to get like a Our superior clearing board.

Yeah, definitely, definitely works for me. So if you don't have one of those methods, if you've gone to get your honey off and you don't have a clearer board and you can't find these, because we, as Laurence said, we chuck them away, we forget where they are, you could use a bee brush. It's a bit harder because you're brushing the bees off, and as you can appreciate, although I've brushed the bees off there and I've put this in a super here, there are bees flying around, so you you are going to bring more bees into your honey extraction room. But even if you've used a clearer board, you are likely to bring a few bees home, so just be cautious. If you are really sensitive to bees, there wouldn't be any harm in having your bee suit on with your hood so you can bring that up if you get yourself into trouble. And when they asked me to do this demonstration, the first thing that sprung to my mind was when I went to a hobby beekeeper to see how this was done for the first time, and I stood there like this thinking, please don't sting me, because there were bees and wasps everywhere, absolutely everywhere.

Do you have a problem with your—

in your extraction room? Yours looks pretty kitted out.

It's very difficult. They find their way in, and you know what, I've had it badly with wasps before where there's like one or two wasps, you think that's only one or two wasps, and then you come back the next day and there's thousands So if you see one, you deal with it straight away, because as soon as they get in, it's carnage.

Once they know where that honey is, bees or wasps, they'll go back, tell their brothers, sisters, you know, whatever, and they will all come in. And, um, yeah, you'll just have them over. So just bear that in mind if you're sensitive. If you're not sensitive, you're not bothered, you know, you're fine without your kit.

A good tip on that, just quickly though, if you find where they're going in, kind of step back a meter and Then you can put a wasp trap up, because they will just like— they won't stop until they've taken all of your honey. If you put it like a meter away on their flight path, they'll go for the trap first, and then they stop messing around with the extraction room.

Okay, so this— I bought this. This is actually a frame of heather honey, so I'm not going to really take the cappings off. But for those of you who haven't, you know, been this far with your bees, I wanted you to see what a full capped frame looks like. And that's heavy. Okay, if that was a full super, that's going to be 40 pounds of honey in there. And you can— this is a serrated uncapping knife specifically for beekeeping. You don't need one that's specifically for beekeeping, you could just get a kitchen knife out, it doesn't even have to be serrated. Just bear in mind that whatever you use will get a residue of wax on. It's only a small amount, it's not going to ruin So if you can't have a knife, if you don't have a knife, if you're not allowed knives in your house for whatever reason, you can use an uncapping fork. It's not going to be as neat. With this, you are literally going to saw down into a vessel. You don't have to have any special kit. You could just use a bucket. Saw down to take the cappings off both sides. You can use a knife. You can get lovely uncapping trays, big plastic trays with like a metal frame that you can sit this on, and you know, you could spend hundreds or thousands on some elaborate steam-driven uncapping tray, couldn't you? There's lots. You can start right at budget, you can go right up high. So we're cutting the cappings off these, and then we're going to go into our extractor.

But before we jump into that, It's worth just noticing on this frame here, so this frame is full, it's really well capped, but you can see the spacing on that frame there, that would have been pretty much drawn out on these kind of like wide, like a manly spacing, this one.

Yeah, this is actually for cut combs.

So this is for cut combs. The only reason it's worth noting is that when you put them in castellations, they draw them out thicker than this, so they're thicker on both sides, and it really is nothing— there's nothing more annoying than Going in and getting like is a beautiful frame like that, and you could just about do it. But as Becky said, you go and get the knife, and what you want to do is just go done. But if it's not drawn out wide enough, you can spend ages, can't you?

Yeah, which is where this comes into hand actually. Yeah. But but doing it on castellations and getting them on knives completely eliminates that. Yeah. So I didn't think to point that out. Some of you might have actually looked at that and wondered what was going on here. This is a special frame. which we use for cut comb. And this is unwired, that's another thing to mention.

Yep.

You can only extract— well, not only, you could extract if it wasn't unwired, but you're likely to burst the frame out. So if you're going to be going down the extraction route, put wired foundation in. Okay, so we've, we've uncapped this now, and what we're going to do is— now extractors come, you can get plastic extractors You can get metal extractors like this one, you can get 2-frame ones like this, and this is called a radial— tangential.

That's tangential, yeah.

This is a tangential one, which means that the frames are going to drop in this way. This only holds 2, one this side and one that side. With a radial one, the frames go in like this. Around, and you can usually— would buy one that was 4 or 6. So this only holds 2. Put a frame in either side, and then we turn the handle. And by turning the handle as fast as we can, the honey is going to be drawn. With this one, you've got a brake element on it. You will draw the honey out of the cells, and you can see it splattering on the walls. Once you see that slowing down or stop, you would then need to take the frame out and turn it the other way and go through the process again. With a radial one, you don't need to turn the frame around. Some people like to rotate with the radial one way, and then when all the honey's sort of stopped coming out, they— This is supposed to have a break. There we go. They go the other way. I don't think this one actually goes the other way, no. Some of the motorized ones will have a reverse mode so you can reverse it around, but actually you don't need to do that, but I think sometimes when we're taught to do things, we, for whatever reason, we just carry on doing them whether it's needed to or not. So put our 2 frames in, we're spinning that all around, and then when the frames are all done, we've got 12 in this box, it's going to take me quite a little while, you're going to see all the honey in the bottom, but it's going to have bits of wax in it. If we use the knife, we're not going to have so much wax in it, but if we're using a fork, because we're just breaking these cells open, you're going to get quite a lot more wax in there. So that's where our double strainer comes in to the next part of the extraction process. You've got a fine, relatively fine mesh on the top and then an ultra-fine mesh at the bottom. And even with all the honey that we do, all our honey goes through one of these, believe it or not. So, you know, you don't need any special kit.

So before, before you get to that bit, Becky, one thing to mention again is when you're extracting the honey, the first time you extract it, even if they're wired, they're liable to blow out. So the very first time, you're much better off just doing a lighter one. Yes, leaving a bit of honey in the frames because they will blow.

You wouldn't have trouble with a manual one, but if you've got a motorised extractor, yes, you need to start it slow and then build up the speed. Again, when I was asked to do this, I had a vision of my son and I literally hugging an extractor in our shed trying to stop it bouncing around the shed. That's the best! Because no one told us that, and we just put it on and turned it up and this thing was going loopy. So yeah, start slow. If you turn the motor up and it starts to jig and jostle, turn it down again and just let it spin for a few more minutes. And would you say the main thing is do not rush the job?

Yeah, do not rush the job. You need to— not so much on the little ones— you need to balance the extractor though. So all the frames need to be the same size and they kind of need to have roughly the same amount of honey in. So if it's shaking, it's probably that it's not balanced correctly. But the other really big tip that I would give, especially for people who've just got a couple of beehives, don't extract your honey and then leave it somewhere and then do the extraction tomorrow. So don't— sorry, don't like harvest the honey, leave it somewhere, and then do the extraction the next day. Take it off the hives and it's at the correct temperature, it's really warm, it makes the uncapping, it makes the extraction, it makes the filtering so, so much easier to do it while it's still warm on the hive.

Okay, I think we might be getting quite short on time, Laurence, so I'm just going to speed this bit up and then we can do some questions at a minute and we must talk about Oily Break.

Excellent.

Okay, so underneath your tap, put your double strainer on there, open this tap up and keep an eye on it. You'll need to close the tap off because the top strainer will fill up quite quickly. You'll need to let it seep through again. This is not a quick, I've got an hour, I'm going to go and do a couple of supers, you know, you need to really make sure you've got your time for your extraction. And essentially, if you've got that bit right, the honey that comes into that bucket should be ready for, um, for jarring. Okay, there hopefully will be little bits of pollen in there because that's what we want, that's what real honey is all about. But all your wax should be contained into this bit here. I know we're short on time.

We're fine. I think Angaraz is going to come next and do the candles that we've got.

Just wanted to talk— Laurence said about taking your honey off and, and not leaving leaving it for a few days. If you are, you could say, fortunate or unfortunate enough to have oilseed rape fields near you, you need to make sure that you get your honey off pronto, as soon as it's tapped and extracted. If you don't, you won't be able to extract it because it will set really, really hard. So if you went through this super and some of it was granulated, you are not going to get your 20, 30 pounds of honey out of it with this extractor. You're going to have to tackle it in a slightly different way. I did bring a mesh bag with me as well because some people won't have access to an extractor, they won't have access to an association that has an extractor that they can borrow, but they still want to get their honey off and they don't want the wax in there. A bit rudimentary, but you could cut, you could uncap this the same way that we showed you, using maybe a hive tool or a wooden spatula or something, you could take this honey, being quite gentle, back to the rib cage and scrape the honey off, so you leave that middle part of the foundation strip on the frame, and you could scrape it into a mesh bag like this, which you can have in your bucket or any vessel at all, And then you could hang that up. So long as it's liquid honey, it will drip through. You could squish it, you could even press it onto something to help get it out. So that's another really sort of simple way if you don't have access to this equipment that you can get your lovely honey out.

Excellent. A couple of things I've just thought of. So, so you're kind of thinking, when is the honey ready? So that frame there is perfect, it's completely capped. Like, the best way to do it is use what's called a refractometer. Take a little bit of the honey. We have one there, and you can test it, but you, you know, you don't really need to do that. If your frame looks like that and it's not oilseed rape, it's good to go. My rule is if 80% of the box looks like that, even the ones that don't look like that, it's good to go. So you can kind of take it on the cappings.

What about the shake test?

So the shake test for me is really valid for oilseed rape, because when we have oilseed rape, we don't wait for it to be capped. We do a shake test, which is you're looking at it, you're thinking, right, all of the cells are full of honey, there's no capping whatsoever. If you shake it like that and nothing comes out, you can extract it.

But at least the water content is low enough for your honey not to ferment. That's the important thing.

If you shake it and loads of nectar comes out, it's nowhere near ready. It's a good test, especially for oilseed rape. Final one that I was going to mention as well is once you've got your honey into a bucket from the extractor, you want to leave it to settle. Leave it to settle for about 24 hours, and what's going to happen is any kind of tiny little wax particles will come to the top. And then a really good way to get rid of those particles is get a piece of cling film and you just rest it on the top, leave it there for a couple of minutes, and you just pull it off and you lose a tiny little bit of honey, but basically all of those particles cling to the cling film. That's why it's called cling film, and it's a really good way of kind of like filtering it and making it nice pure clean honey.

That's a good tip, didn't know about that one. Okay, even I've learned something today. So brilliant, thank you Becky, that was amazing.

We'll do the same as next time. I'm going to take the mic quickly because I just realized the last time he was probably going out and like saying bad things about me and it would have been on the live stream, so I'll watch that back later. So we've got Angadab coming next. There's my best Welsh accent there to do. It's quite— it's not, not too bad to talk about candles. Everything good, Rob? You're good, I'm just helping do the swap over. Excellent, right, so again we're going to do the swap over and there might not be as many questions, but I will come out and look in people's bags if there aren't any questions. So has anybody got— and you've got a question here, can we get a mic over here please?

So will that type of extractor work with heather honey? Because I've heard that it's thicker or dense rather than—

Yeah, so heather honey, we should have mentioned that, that is the kind of the honey that just takes all of that and you just forget about it all. So it's thixotropic, which means that you cannot extract it in an extractor without Loosening it first. So what they use is these big, really, really expensive machines that kind of prick it, put all of these different needles into it, and then it goes into one of those honey extractors, but a different honey extractor, which is like a swing cage, effectively a fancy version of the tangential. Everything good?

Yeah, I was just going to say, with the heather honey, that's where if you know you're going to the heather, don't put wide foundation in and have it as cut comb.

Cut comb is a really, really good way to deal with it.

Yeah, yeah.

The, the other way of doing it, and what I do with all of mine now, is I put it onto plastic foundation. I know not everyone's a fan of plastic foundation, but then I scrape it all back from the plastic foundation and I put it into a hydro press. So a hydro press is like a stainless steel metal press that has an inflatable bladder in the middle, and all you do is you connect a water hose to it and it just pushes it out like that, and the The beauty of that is that not only does it extract it really efficiently, it filters it at the same time. And filtering heather honey is an absolute nightmare. And they're not, they're not that expensive. You can do all of your honey extraction like that if you wanted to. Like, you can buy a hydropress for maybe like £300, not dissimilar to like a cheaper extractor, and you could just scrape it back. The only like disadvantage of doing that is that you don't, you don't keep your comb. So you're not keeping your comb, you're scraping it back each year, but it's not, it's not the end of the world. But it's a really good question. Yeah, any other questions? We've got 5 minutes before we start the candle-making exercise. This is my favourite one. We promise not to set the building on fire, I think, is the point here. Yeah, we might not. Any more questions? Here we go. How many jars of honey would you get out of the frame when you showed us that? Oh, it's, it's a good question. So all of the frames are different, and if you use castellations, you'll get slightly more And if you don't use castellation, you'll get slightly less. But on average, like, £4 is probably like the very, very top-end best frame. I would say £3. So if you've got pound jars, it can be 3 jars. But I use half-pound jars, so I get like 6 jars per frame, something like that. Any other questions? Oh, we've got a question over there in the corner. This is good. We love the questions. Keep them coming.

Hi, once you've extracted the honey, can you then reintroduce things back into the hive?

Yeah, so definitely, and the bees absolutely love that. Yeah, so what I would recommend doing is kind of like numbering up your brood boxes, numbering up your supers, and if you're just taking off like one super, extract it, go and make sure you put it back onto the same hive, and you can just put it back into the exact space that it was before. And the bees love it, they really do. They will be straight up there, they'll clean out all of the combs. If you've caused any damage while you've been doing that extraction as well, the bees will go straight in there, they'll use the remnants of the honey to repair the combs, but you go back in 48 hours after and they just look brand new. So yeah, definitely reuse them.

Does it have to go back into the same hive?

Yeah, it does. So, so it's unlikely that you're going to transfer disease between kind of like Supers like that, but it is possible. If you've got if you've got a colony that's got EFB and you don't know, and you take a super from one hive and extract it and go and put it on another one, you you will want like you guaranteed to spread kind of EFB or AFB that way. So make sure you're always putting the same back the same boxes back on. And I think at like a kind of beginner and intermediate level, it's it's much easier to manage that process when you start getting hundreds of hives. You maybe manage it more on like an acre. So you say, right, as long as they're going back to the same a priori, then that's okay. I think that's good, and we're ready to go.

Yes, we are.

I need to give you your mic. I nearly forgot that. I kept on doing this in America, just like doing— we did like a 40-minute talk with someone, and I didn't put the mic on. So can we do that again? And they said yeah, so there we go. Welcome.

Thank you very much. Jochen Bauer, thank you. I wasn't expecting to see so many of you here this afternoon, I have to admit. I thought we be half a dozen people in the room, but yeah, thank you all for coming. So, um, yes, so today really I'm just going to show you, um, briefly, um, you know, how to make candles at beginner level really. Um, and just to emphasize, you know, a lot of people come to me to say that, oh, I'm scared of making candles, I, I'm scared of spoiling the beeswax, etc. But just have fun with it, you know. Um, beeswax is a fantastic natural buy product from producing, honey. And, um, yeah, there's something really special about making your own candles. They make fantastic gifts for friends and family, and also if you're a business, then also it adds value to your products and you can make up little gift sets as well. So, um, I'm just going to run through quickly with you this afternoon, um, the types of different candles that you can make, and then I'll do a little demo of how to make a little, um, skep candle. As I said, this is very much sort of a beginner level that I'm going to be sort of covering this afternoon. So yes, so you can make rolled candles. These are probably one of the oldest types of beeswax candles. You've got, you know, your traditional wax foundation sheets, you've got sort of a wick, and then you just roll the foundation. So those are your rolled candles. You can have dipped candles, which is where you need quite a deep container and you dip the wick repeatedly over a prolonged time to get a dipped candle. Or these days you can buy silicone moulds and you can have the same effect, like a tapered candle, but using a mould rather than dipping, which is far faster than using, you know, the dipping method. There's also hundreds of shapes moulds available on the market, silicone moulds these days. I've just got 3 examples, a couple of examples here. We've got these little skep-shaped candles. You can have flowers, bees, you name it really. There's so many different shapes available on the market and they're really fun. So you can do the shaped candles and also you can do beeswax candles in containers like glass or like a tin container. So there's lots of different ways to do the candles. So I've got my crib sheet here so I don't forget to mention anything. So those are the different types of candles. Now to make candles you don't need to buy expensive equipment. A lot of people will come, oh my gosh, I fancy making candles but I've seen you on YouTube with your fancy clarifying tank and it costs hundreds of pounds. You don't need that basically to make your own candles. at home. That's all you need is something like a bain-marie, which is, um, a double boiler like the Americans like to call them. It's basically a saucepan. You can have 2 saucepans, um, one with water in the— on the bottom and another saucepan suspended on top. Or you can buy one of these. They're inexpensive, £20, £25. And basically it's got a sort of a, um, a cavity in there which you fill with water, and you pop that whistle back on there, and then you You can pop your clean beeswax in there to melt. So you definitely need one of those.

Oh, right, so that's really nice. I've not actually seen that. So it's like double-walled with water inside?

It's double-walled, yeah. So basically, when you're melting beeswax, you absolutely don't want to be melting it directly on heat because of the flammable and fire risks. So with that, then you've got the water in there, so it gently melts the beeswax down then.

And do you know where to buy these?

We sell them. Right, okay.

Just to plug in a plug.

Yeah, but we sell them, and Thorns are— a lot of the main brands sell them.

So how much one of those?

Uh, £25. There's different sizes. That particular one I think is £25. But yeah, you know, um, excellent and really, um, easy to use.

So let's— sorry, let's just backtrack a tiny bit from that. So it's gonna be clean beeswax going in?

Clean beeswax, yeah.

So if people want to collect some beeswax, like, what's the— just run through the process.

So basically, um, obviously, um, you can have different types of beeswax from your honey production. You've got your cappings, which is the best beeswax, it's the lighter colored beeswax, but you also might be melting down some brood frames over a couple of years and you'll have some darker beeswax. I use it all, I mix it all together so you do have then a nice golden beeswax at the end. With a darker brood beeswax, if it's too dark, then you can use natural dyes. You know, the quality of the beeswax is not not as good as the cappings wax, yes, but, you know, I don't like to waste anything. So if it's too dark and it doesn't look aesthetically pleasing, then Thorns, for example, sell a lot of natural dyes. You can make dark candles, dark green candles, maybe Christmas trees, or dark red, so you can hide the fact that the wax is darker. So yeah, I should have mentioned, thank you for pointing out. So when I clean the beeswax, I like to sort of melt them down into manageable blocks. So we've got half a kilo here, which is okay for this sort of container, but if you've got a smaller container, then it's quite handy having a stash of the 1-ounce bars as well. So this is about 28 grams, and a little skep candle is about 30 grams, so a couple of these would do, you know, one candle. So you can buy these trays again with the major suppliers, and you can keep stash then of your clean beeswax. So as I said, when you, when you've got your wax, you need to filter it and strain it to make sure it's clean. If the wax isn't clean, then it's going to clog up your wick, the candle isn't going to burn properly, and obviously you're going to have unsightly debris in your candle as well. So we use a steam melter at home for the first stage, then we've got the clarifying tank that I mentioned, which has 2 taps. So the, the top tap is about halfway up the tank, and I sort of remove the liquid wax from that tank down to, well, the top of the bottom tap, and only the clean wax comes out. I then store those in sort of a kilo, or more than kilos, in quite large blocks. And then what I do for the final stage, I use a muslin cloth. So if you've got babies, then you've probably seen muslin cloths and they're fantastic. So I buy a massive roll of this and I use it, triple layer, and that's my final filter. I put this in a sieve and then out of my Abella tank goes the cleanish wax, but after it goes through that, it's perfect for using to make candles, and this is what these are.

And that's the big key there, the muslin cloth makes it really, really clean. Really clean, yes. I hate wasting money. A great use for that— you can use it a number of times, can't you? But once it gets a bit gunky, it does clog up. You cut it up into strips and it's just like the perfect firelighter.

Oh, it's amazing firelighters. Yeah, that's so funny.

Don't chuck them out once they've done a good firelighter.

So, um, so yeah, so filter your wax for the last time through a muslin cloth. Very inexpensive and easy. But, um, I was using other stuff before. Um, a lot of people have used tights in the past, which, you know, they work fine, but yeah. muslin for me, that's what I use. So we now got clean wax, you pop it into your melter, you melt it down. Really important, you don't want to be overheating your wax because you'll spoil it. If the wax is exposed to too much heat for too long, then you risk cooking your wax and spoiling it. It'll go darker and the quality will decrease. So the optimum temperature for a beeswax candle is sort of 68 to 71 degrees. You don't want to be melting it, heating it more than that. So once you've reached that temperature, it's time to decant it into a jug. I've got 2 jugs here. This is my favourite one. Even though I do thousands of candles every year, I still use this because it's my favourite. It's got this tiny little spout on the end, and I bought this from Sheriff— was it Sheriff?

Yes.

Years ago. Yeah, and it's amazing. larger candles in, I've got a sort of larger jug. And what I would say as well is if you're a hobby, um, sort of wanting to do candles, don't be tempted to use the utensils you have in your kitchen. Just have designated utensils because once they get dirty with beeswax, it's a blinking job to get them clean again. So you just— if you decide to use a sieve for filtering and a jug, just keep those for your beeswax candle making projects because it's hard to get them clean. So So yeah, you need one of those, you need a jug, you need a thermometer to keep an eye on the temperature. I've mentioned the muslin cloth, the sieve. The other things that you will need then, obviously, then is the wick and a wicking needle. Wicking needle is quite important, so you'll thread the wick through the needle and then through the hole in the bottom of the moulds. Now, The other question that leads us nicely on to, what wick do I use? Well, luckily most of the main manufacturers of candle moulds, I'm thinking specifically Abello and Thorns, they've actually got a manufacturer's guide on what wick to use with each mould, so that's a huge help. But what I would say is, if you're intending on selling them, you'd still still have to test, test, test to make sure that the wick isn't too big, or if your candle burns down too quickly, or if there's too much carbon deposit. Or likewise, if the wick is too thin, then it'll drown itself in the molten wax and you'll have lots of excess beeswax. So even though it's really helpful, it is wise to test what— when you're making candles, test them first before giving them as gifts or selling them.

I think it would be the ones that are defective, they're the ones you give away as gifts.

And keep the good ones for yourself.

Sell the good ones.

Yeah, exactly, yeah, absolutely. So as I said, the wick that we use for beeswax candles is a square braided beeswax wick. That's the best one because of the temperature and all the other sort of factors around beeswax. So, but yeah, all these are available from Thorns and Abellas and a lot of other suppliers as well. So what else now then? So we've talked about melting the beeswax. So we've put the beeswax in here, we've reached the temperature of 68 to 71 degrees. We're now going to wick the candle. So this is a Thorns mould. I can't speak. Thorns mould. a little skep, and these are quite popular. And to make a candle, I'm gonna use an elastic band because basically it's got a slit down the side there to enable you to release the candle once it's set. So when we're pouring the molten wax, we don't want to spill any of that and we don't want any of that leaking out. So we're going to use elastic bands, and you don't want to tie elastic bands too tight around the mould or it'll pinch the mould inwards. And you'll get a kink in your candle. So you only want to just hold the mold shut without excessive pressure on the sides. 2 should be sufficient for this particular one. This mold is number 4 wick, so I know that off the top of my head. So I'm going to just wick this now using my wicking needle, and I'm literally going to pop it through at the bottom there, and you'll see there's a channel there. I'll tell you in a minute why there's a channel at the bottom there. So thread it through. Now we need to hold this wick in place because if we leave it like that, when we've poured the wax in, you know, that's not central. The candle won't burn down properly. So we need something to hold that centralized. For that, we'll use wick holders. Now there's loads of different wick holders on the market. My favourite for sort of medium to large sized candles are these metal wick holders. There's 3 holes in the centre, you've got a hole and a little sort of slot which holds the wick in place. So I'm just going to pull that in and slide it over and it'll hold the wick in place. Pull it tight so that there's tension because if the wick is too sort of, if there's a snag in it or if it's not tight The candle's not going to burn down evenly and it's going to— yeah, you're not going to be pleased with the results. So I've now cut just a little bit off there. I've got a little tail at the end. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to fold this into the channel there and using— well, it's not Blu Tack, it's White Tack, because I was using Blu Tack years ago and I was finding the Blu Tack was staining the wick, which was driving me mad. So I sourced White Tack. Which is working good. So I'm just going to pop this now into the channel to hold the wick in place and also plug the gap so that no wax escapes through the hole in the bottom. So there we have it. So that's ready now. I'll reposition that in the center, make sure the wick is tight and good tension. So that's it, that's ready now to pour. So the temperature of the wax is good, we've poured it into here, and now we're going to fill the wax— fill the mould with the molten wax. And we're going to leave that now for an hour or 2, depending on the size of your mould. Like, I've got this big pine cone here. This is one of the biggest— well, this is the biggest pine cone candles that we do, and this mould is from Abello. That would take several hours to cure. So So yeah, this particular one, a couple of hours, and then once the candle is set— here's one I made earlier, slightly larger candle— I'm going to be removing the—

Proper Blue Peter.

Remove the elastic bands, and then we're going to carefully— where is the slit now? Let me find it. There we are. So we're gonna just peel that gently, and then we're gonna gently yank that out, and ta-da, we've got a beeswax candle. So you'll see now that we've got wick on top and the bottom. So that's too long. We ideally only want about, um, I don't know, half an inch on the top there. So I'm going to trim the top. That's sufficient to, um, have on the top. And then we need to cut the excess wick on the bottom flush with a candle. If we can't cut it flush with a candle, I mean, your candle is going to be rocking and won't sit properly. Sometimes because of the way the wax has set, it's really difficult to get a clean cut. That's why I use a clothes iron. I've got a clothes iron dedicated to making candles, and if there's a lump there at the end that you can't quite get flush, just melt that on the hot iron just to get it nice and flat so that your candle sits as it should on the table. So, so that's that really. What I haven't mentioned is with the silicone moulds, like for the little skep candle, because it's not a complicated shape, the candle releases from the mould fairly easy. It's not complicated. But for complex designs like this pinecone, which has all these little— well, not branches, I don't know what you call them—

Nooks and crannies.

Yeah, all the nooks and crannies. It's really hard to get this out without breaking the branches, and that's when I deal with a silicone lubricant. Then I would just give this a light spray before pouring in the wax, and that will help release the candle then at the end. So, so yeah, the other thing I haven't mentioned as well is the room temperature when you're making candles, because troubleshooting really— I'm just going to cover briefly before we come to a close.

Take your time.

I'm conscious of time. If your room is too cold when you're pouring candles, the candles are going to set too fast and it's going to leave you with undesirable results. You'll have lines on your candles, so your room temperature needs to be nice and warm, so 20 degrees minimum. Also, your moulds, so whether it's glass containers, tins, or silicone moulds, if you're keeping them in the garage and you thought, I'm going to do candles, bring them into the house on warm them up before you pour the mold— the candle— pour the wax into them. Because again, if the molds are too cold, the wax is going to cool too quick— cool too quickly, and you're going to have lines and stuff on your candles. The other thing I didn't mention as well, when you're pouring the wax, don't pour it too fast or you'll introduce air bubbles into your candle. So nice and steady when you're pouring in, or you'll have trapped air and bubbles in your candle and it's not going to give you even results when the candle is burning down. Yeah, I think that's it then really. I didn't mention that, you know, you can have these hard sort of plastic moulds as well for nice tapered candles, but I think that's it really. I'm sure there's questions, but that's it, that in a nutshell. is the basic, um, sort of candle-making process if you're making candles at home.

There we go. So yeah, any, any candle-related questions, and then when Angela's changing over, we'll do some more questions. So there we go.

Yeah, we actually attempted our first go at doing that. Yeah, we obviously didn't have clean wax, so we had to use the stuff direct from the frame. Okay, straight into your, um, wreathing. We've got that as well. So you put, um, Foundation sheets into the bain-marie. Oh right, okay, just the cuttings. Yeah, okay.

So we put that in there and it melted down perfectly.

Yeah. We then strained it, but obviously didn't get all the debris out. Okay. To reheat again. Yeah. Now the only problem we did have is because the bain-marie has water in it anyway. Yeah. It was transferring that hot wax out without spilling it. Yeah. Can you lift that once it's hot? Well, you can't— there's the plastic handle on there, and obviously there is the outlet there where the steam escapes, so you do have to be mindful of the water there because I— you're quite right, I didn't point out you, you can't contaminate the beeswax with water because if there's water in the molten wax when you're pouring it into the candle, what will happen then? The water will remain inside the candle. When you're burning that candle, then it'll spit And you don't want your candle spitting. So basically, um, what you can do is make sure that this is on the opposite side of the jug and carefully pour the molten wax into the jug. But obviously don't pour it too high or that water will escape. So I, I do use it that way. Just, you just got to be mindful of how far up you, you pour it in, um, you know, how far up you lift that. So the jug that you're pouring it into?

Yeah.

Yeah, they would be warm, yeah, not hot but definitely warm. I've got a hot plate in the candle-making room and it's on a constant, you know, sort of low heat, so these are always warm with me.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

And I guess if there's any more questions— oh, you've got another one there. I guess you could just leave a little bit of beeswax in that one at the bottom if you don't want to get it all out.

Exactly, yeah, just leave it next time, yeah, exactly. Hi.

Hi.

Can you recommend which essential oils to use with beeswax candles, or maybe not? Because I know beeswax does have its own subtle scent.

It does.

If you want to produce an aromatherapy candle, which ones would you recommend? Does it affect the burning?

I have to admit I haven't got much experience of using essential oils with candles. I like— I tend to— well, I turn all my candles— I just pure beeswax and cotton wick because I think it's a lovely way to enjoy a natural product without messing around with it. But I do know that adding essential oils does add something different to the candle. I've got no experience of adding essential oils to the mix and making candles with the oils. However, I do know that the temperature when you combine the essential oils and the wax together is quite crucial because there's obviously chemical reaction happening there. So, um, I'm afraid I can't answer your question more than that because I've got no experience of using essential oils with the candles. But I'd definitely keep an eye on temperature because I know it's important, um, that the temperature of the wax when you're adding the oils is really important for how strong the candle will burn afterwards, and also the curing time. If you make a candle with essential oils and burn it straight away It's not going to smell the same today as it will in two weeks because of the curing process. So there's quite a lot of science behind it, but I haven't got much experience in that section. Sorry.

Any more candle questions?

Oh, there's one. No. Yeah. Another question. Oh, I thought it was done then.

Get away that easy.

Yeah.

How do you stop the? What do you call candle? How do you stop the bottom?

Concaving in?

Once you've let it cool down, there's a big dip in the bottom of the—

Yes, so for larger moulds it can happen. So what you can do once you've poured the wax in, wait a minute and then top it up because you'll see that the wax— if your wick hasn't been pre-dipped, basically it's soaking up some of your wax. So even though if you fill the wax up to the top level, in a couple of minutes the level will sink because the wax is drinking some of that wax. So you'll need to top up that mold before it's completely set. So that's probably why you've got that concave at the bottom then. So once you've poured, wait a couple of minutes and then top it up again. The other option is to pre-wax your wicks. Which would eliminate that problem. Yeah, that's a mouthful there.

Any more candle questions? I've got some more. Excellent.

If I can interrupt a little bit, a good tip for cleaning small quantities of wax is get yourself a slow cooker, put some rainwater or soft water in the bowl, put a net curtain panel across the top, Top with the dip in it, put some kitchen roll on the top, or cloth, put the wax you want to clean on top of that, get a cheap meat thermometer, you know, these little radio ones you can get on eBay, put that in, set it at 85, turn it up to high when it hits 85 or 83 if you prefer, turn it down to low and it will just drip through.

You get a Reasonable cleanliness the first time you do it. Second time, clean water, clean neck curtain, clean filter cloth, and it will clean up small quantities of wax quite easily.

And with your temperature kept in check.

Yeah, temperature is really important. Yeah, I, I've, you know, I'll put my hands up, I've done it several times where the phone has gone or I've left something unattended and Yeah, your beautiful light-colored beeswax is no more. So keep an eye on that temperature.

Yeah.

Excellent. That was a great tip. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So just had a question about colored candles. Yeah.

Is there a specific type of dye that you should use, or can you use any color?

I would probably stick to the natural dyes that a company like Thorn supply, because you don't really want to be adding chemicals to sort of synthetic stuff to your beeswax candles, because at the end of the day it's a fantastic natural product with no chemicals or nasties in it. So I personally, I wouldn't want to be adding anything that's not natural to it, because that's maybe one of the reasons why you would want to make candles and burn it, so you know you're not releasing any toxins or nasties into the air. So there are natural dyes available with thorns in powder form, I think they are, and you add a tiny, tiny amount then to your mix then to get the desired colour.

Any more candle questions? No? Well, thank you very much. That was really good. I really enjoyed that.

Thank you for listening. I hope it was of some value anyway.

We will do the same again while the final changeover happens. We'll do any questions, and it can be questions about anything. You know, not Arsenal though. We can't talk about Arsenal. But any questions, I'm happy to answer them. And if there's no questions, we'll just come and look at people's bags. So there we go.

I've got questions. Oh, please, King Carl. Is it Sheriff, isn't it? The suit company.

Yeah, BJ Sheriff. Yeah.

Hiya. What's the best way when you start out with foundation to get bees to start drawing out a swarm?

So my advice would be you just, you can't rush it. If you try rushing it and trying to get the bees forced into doing that, it can be a little bit of a— you run into like a little bit of difficulty there. So what I would suggest is that the bees will do it when they want to do it. You can feed, you can feed them at the same time, but all I would recommend What I recommend is just doing it kind of— is waiting until you get a good flow and just putting them on at a good flow, and then the bees will take care of it.

Any more questions?

Well, I'm going to come around and see what people have bought. What have people bought today from the show? Has anyone bought anything like really cool or fun? What have you got? Excellent. Did you go for the standard model or the new model?

The old one.

The old one. Okay, I like the old one. It's got the screen and yeah, it kind of tells you a little bit more, doesn't it? Anybody else bought anything fun? What have you come here for? You definitely bought something. What have you bought? A small extractor. What size did you go for? A manual 4-frame extractor. Excellent. Where did you buy that from? Bought it from Abello. Very nice. Anybody else buy anything fun? You bought a warming cabinet last week from Abello as well? Excellent. That's my number one favourite product, my warming cabinet. It's really, really good. What's that you've got? You've got a big bag of stuff there. What have you bought there? Oh nice, like a little mini— is it like a— oh, the expandable, like the foldable mini mating hives. Very nice. Where did you get that from? Which one? Sorry, Simon the Beekeeper. Excellent, that's cool. I like those ones because they come down like proper flat pack, don't they? I'm going to come and look at some other bags. Anyone else buy anything? Did you buy anything? Oh, you didn't get free hats? No free hats. Yeah, you can pay for the hats. You are doing them at exactly the same price that I paid for them. But yeah, I wish, I wish I could do free hats. It would be nice, wouldn't it, to give everyone free hats? Anybody else buy anything? Come on. Okay, here we go. What did you buy?

A multi-tool.

A multi-tool? What's that for? Yeah, let's get that out and have a look. Like a like a multi hive tool kind of thing. Oh wow, look at that! That's probably the best thing I've ever seen. No one, no one. What's your name? Maria. No one mess with Maria on the way out. She's come armed. That's cool. So it's just for like hammering frames and whoa. Genuinely, no one mess with Maria. Look at that knives and saws and everything. That's cool. Love it. Did buy a hat. You bought a hat as well?

Yeah, I've arranged to collect it from you later on.

Oh, you arranged to collect it from me later on? Okay, well, I can just— I can grab that for you. Are you waiting to get the hat and you're just desperate to go home and you're listening here, you're under duress? Let me get the hat before we do that. It feels so weird for me, people wearing my hats, you know. Has someone else got a hat as well?

Yeah, there we go.

I'll tick them off the list. Let me know when you're ready, Andy. I was wondering, no one came to collect their hats, but they're all waiting here. Here we go, right, hats. Oh, you like it? Yeah, not everyone liked it. The people kicking off saying, oh, it doesn't look like a bee or anything. It's a question. Yeah, what's your optimal number of hives per apiary? Oh, that's a good question. I'll just, I'll say it again just What's the optimum number of hives per apiary? So I started and I really wanted to make life easy for myself. So I've gone from like having 100 hives in one apiary down to 4 hives in one apiary and pretty much everywhere in between. And by far and away the easiest— it's more easy to manage with more hives in the apiary. And I find that the bees do far better and I find it far more enjoyable. enjoyable having fewer hives in the apiary. So I would say it's completely dependent on the amount of forage that's there. I'm aware Andy's here, so we'll finish in a sec. But I would say roughly between maybe like 4 to 8, I would say, is the optimum, and that keeps it nice for the bees. And you maybe can go a little bit more if you've got good forage. I think it's 12. 12, yeah, 12's fine. Somewhere around that. I definitely wouldn't go any further over 12. What I would say though, Good tip, and I've got the NBU in here, so I'll pass on some good NBU advice here, which is don't just have them in a big row next to each other, because you get drifting and you get issues with kind of like kind of drifting between the hives that could spread diseases. Try and dot them around as much as you can. Try and face the entrances off in completely different directions, and it means that if you kind of keep that spacing between the hives, you won't have any drifting. It's good, it's good for disease. So go, go with 12, and then yeah, keep them. Keep him faced the other way. Right, so we've got Andy to talk about like the, the big hot topic. I need to put this mic on. Asian hornets.

Absolutely.

Welcome. I'm going to put that somewhere else so it's a little bit higher. There we go.

Please bear with me if the voice disappears. I have some Victory V's in my pocket and I'll try and bring it back again. It's nothing new, it happens quite often. Okay, happy?

Happy. Yeah, there's just— there's a little bit of feedback. I don't I don't know if that's— yeah, we should be good.

Okay. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Andy Watton. I'm Regional Bee Inspector for Western England. I actually live in Lincolnshire and cover the west of England, so not always ideal, but—

Yeah, the mic's not working. Sorry, Andy, the mic's not working for in here. I thought it was me going deaf there. I'm definitely going deaf. You try talking again, it might see if it's working now.

How does that sound?

No, no, it's fine. He's gonna, he's gonna re-mic you up at the moment. Um, I, I will talk on. You've got a quick question while we wait for the mics to go?

So if you have 12 hives in the navelery, how long would that take each hive?

So, so I've kind of got it down to about 5 minutes per hive at the moment. But you do, you spend like, you can spend half an hour going through one hive. But for me, like, I'm looking for kind of the same thing every time. I like to see the queen, but if I don't see the queen, I'm not fussed. I like to see eggs. If I see eggs, I don't worry about looking for the queen. I'm always looking for swarm cells. I always shake every single frame off, 'cause it means that it's easier to see the swarm cells. But most importantly, again, look at the NBU in here, and this genuinely is true, looking for diseased or deformed or strange looking cells. If you see any, any kind of odd things in your lava, then speak to the NVU because it might be something sinister, but that's really important. Right, I think we've got Andy all set up now.

Does that sound any better? Even I can hear that. Yeah, yeah, how awful. Okay, Andy Watton, Regional Beer Inspector for the west of England, although I actually live in the east of England and cover some of my inspection area there. I've been given a very interesting topic in that it's interesting because it's developing so much all the time. The subject of traps for yellow-legged hornets or Asian hornets, it's evolving all the time. Our knowledge is evolving all the time. I'll be completely honest with you, a year ago I was not that clued up on Asian hornets. I certainly I'm a lot more knowledgeable about them now. They're an insect that I've got a tremendous amount of respect for. They're very, very resilient and they're very good at what they do. I'm one of the few inspectors that have worked in Kent with them and also in Hull and Yarmouth to see the different incursions. But we're here to look at traps. Traps are a very important part of our pest control programme. There are many, many traps about, and if you venture onto the internet, you will see that what 10 years ago was described as a wasp trap is now described as an Asian hornet and wasp trap. They don't need to be complicated, but what they do need to be is selective, and a lot of the traps that are out there without modification are not selective. They're straightforward, kill traps. I've got a variety, as you can see, of traps that you can use your own baits with. A lot of them come with baits. As bee inspectors, when we're tracking Asian hornets, we use Trapit. We have used the Vespa Catch as well in the past, but certainly if you look at the experience of what's happening in France and in the Channel Islands, they have various different ingredients that they use in baits. What I would say to you is that we're not reinventing the wheel. We're talking a lot to colleagues in France, we're talking a lot to colleagues in the Channel Islands, and if you get the chance to look at some of the information that's available from the Channel Islands government, they have some very good handouts, much like we do. Quite a lot of the traps that you see on the table in front of you here are available here today, and I'll try and remember to mention the particular companies as we go. Some of you may well be familiar with this. This was the original National Bee Unit trap that was suggested that beekeepers use. This is one which hasn't been altered to remove or to allow Bycatch to escape. Are you all familiar with the term bycatch? Yeah. Anybody that isn't? Brilliant. Why are we—

I think there were a couple of hands went up there. Let's say what bycatch is.

Bycatch is things that you are trying not to catch and not to kill. What we don't want is for our traps that we're going to use for monitoring for Asian hornets to be killing everything else in the district. There's a reason for that. You know, as beekeepers, we're all, I think, fairly ecologically sound. If we look at what the scientists tell us, they say that an average Asian hornet's nest will remove somewhere in the region of 11 to 12 kilograms of insects throughout the season. That's the amount of insects they will predate, and that comes out about 100,000 insects. So you can see we don't want to add to that by having traps which indiscriminately kill other insects. So we've got traps like these which can be altered, and you may notice that that one there has got foam in the bottom. One of the problems that you see with a lot of insect traps is that the bait in the trap isn't protected, so you end up with this soup in the bottom that the insects have died in, and we want to protect. And you'll notice that the Bee Unit one actually has a mesh in the bottom to protect where the bait is in the bottom of the trap. Andermatt trap. This is one that's available here today. Again, this is a selective trap because it will allow hornets in, but it will also allow bycatch or other insects to exit from the trap. Same with the Guard Apis. Again, another Andermatt product. These are cones that can be fitted into plastic boxes to make a trap. And we've got other manufacturers here working on much bigger size traps, looking possibly ahead to the future. We don't know where the future lies. We had a substantial increase in the number of Asian hornet nests last year. From 2016 up to last year, it had been small numbers each year, and that really took off in 2023. 72 nests on 54 sites. We can be hopeful that they were as a result mostly of the 6 weeks of easterly winds that we had blowing across the Channel bringing hornets with them, but until we see what the season brings, we, we won't know that. There's lots of traps on the market which will say they are suitable for hornets, and I picked a couple out at random here, and as you can see, they're quite a small trap in size. This one actually is a solar-powered trap which has a blue light inside to draw insects in. Well, Asian hornets don't fly at night like European hornets do, so maybe it isn't such an appropriate trap. So we've tended to stick with using the Beta Farmer trap. And again, these, these are here today. They're the most popular across Europe. They're a very versatile, easily available trap which you can open up and you can use for kill trapping, for monitoring. And again, we've looked at these traps and we can see that as they come, they come straightforward There's your access holes, and they tend to come with bait either like this, or they come with sachets of bait like that.

I understand the blackness of the tops of those is like an important part as well in, in terms of attracting the Asian hornets.

It is, but the color of traps is really important, and certainly traps that display yellow are particularly attractive. To Asian hornets. But if you're positioning a trap, it's got to be in a place where insects would be visiting anyway. It needs to be somewhere where there is fauna that's already drawing insects. It needs to be in the sunlight so that the bait warms and the smell of it is given off. Certainly where we've been working with Asian hornets and tracking and tracing, We'll have garden sprayers with some of this bait in to actually spray the area, some foliage around where the trap is, to increase the smell and bring the hornets in.

I also hear as well that it's not best to place them like near the colonies, because you think, well, I want to protect my colonies, I'm going to place the traps near the colonies, like maybe trapping queens. But no, that's not right, is it?

I think that there's always a tendency with beekeepers want to do things within their apiaries. In the case of this, particularly if we're looking at spring monitoring, and I use the word spring monitoring rather than trapping, because what we're looking at, we're looking at monitoring to see what comes up. Your apiaries are probably not the best place to put these. You want them at home where you're there all the time to be able to check them. If there is any bycatch that gets into a trap, you can release it. So having it 5 miles down the road, Isn't necessarily the best thing, and you don't want to be luring Asian hornets into your apiary sites anywhere. So there's lots of places where they're better off-sited. Quite a few beekeepers who are in risk areas, and we've identified where there are risk areas, they tell me that the best place to have it is near the dustbin because they go there every day and it reminds them to look at the trap as well. So So I'm sure we've all got places like that where we can put these traps.

A really good tip and a little bit of a strategy is, well, if you're going to buy one of these, they're not that expensive, but buy 4 and give them to your neighbors or give them to your friends or give them to your family and tell them exactly what they are and why it's so important and what they should do and where they should put them. And say to them, if you want to tell some other people as well and try and spread it, this isn't just beekeepers against this. This is absolutely everyone in the UK. UK. Like, if the Asian hornet takes hold, it is not good for anybody, especially not good for kind of our food production and pollination. So this is, this is a problem that extends far outside of beekeeping. So you really do need to kind of like talk to people and try and get as many people to kind of put those traps out as possible.

Okay, so I spoke a little bit earlier about putting foam in the bottoms of traps. There is a tendency sometimes times, in some respects, for beekeepers to be generous. Not always. I do realize that they can very often be very, very careful. But certainly in the case of Asian hornet traps, you don't need there to be a great body of the bait in the bottom of the trap. And you'll see this again is one of the Vita Farmer traps. This is one that we've modified, ready for potentially using for some spring monitoring. You'll see again it's got the sophistication of a washing-up foam in the bottom. This one has had holes put in. There's the original, and there's the one that we've modified. So this would allow Asian hornet queens to enter through the top, but— and They would remain in there, and this would allow other insects to exit through those holes on the side. There are about 6.

So if people are buying them and they want to modify them themselves, do we have a dimension for the hole?

Yeah, if you look on the internet, I mean, I can tell you, you know, it's— these are— we're using a 6mm hole, and I'm glancing at my colleague here. Is that correct? 6mm?

There you go, 6mm hole.

About 6.5.

Yeah, yeah, the specification that's given, and I was so confident that this would come up because I did indeed write it all down so I've got the right thing, but 5.5 to 6.5 mm is about the size you're looking at that is going to allow most important bycatch to escape, and hopefully your monitoring trap is going to be in a place where you're able to look at it daily, or at least every other day. That would be really important. So there is lots of other diameters you can look on the internet. There's lots of— like anything that's associated with Asian hornet, if you look in— it's almost like beekeeping. If you look in 6 places, you will get 10 answers and they're all different. There's lots of people looking at this. It's evolving all the time. But certainly for the work that we may potentially do, these alterations— the foam in the bottom, so you're not going to get insects that go in, they're not going to suddenly drop into a soup of bait and dead insects, because in actual fact the bait itself will only come up to just below the level of the foam, so they're not going to be in a drowning situation. And A lot of them will be able to exit from those holes.

So if people go ahead and put these kind of in their gardens and get other people to do it and they find something that they think is an Asian hornet, what should they do?

So the most important thing is to help us is obviously to report it, preferably using the Asian Hornet app. The good thing about the app is that you are able to take a photograph and you can do an identification there and then. That will allow you to, you know, in some cases say whether it is an Asian hornet or it's not. And then the important thing to us is to report it so that we can respond, because we're looking at positive sightings with a sample. It's really important that we retain the sample because down the line, because of the fact that we've been doing DNA genetics throughout all of the nests that have been removed. A mammoth task which the scientists haven't fully reported back yet, but it's really important that we get samples, really important indeed. So what I would say is the important thing, I think, from all our perspectives is that we're not filling the countryside with indiscriminate kill traps that they're going to kill everything in the district. And what we've seen here is that there are ways, that there are traps that are selective. The guard ape is designed to be selective, different sized entrances for the time of year, working on the principle that Asian hornets emerge earlier than European hornets. So there's an opportunity after a period of time to change the width of the entrances. To fit in with the sort of potential insects that are going to go in, because obviously we don't want European hornets going in. So that again, another important selective trap. So you can see where this is, this is leading. Even if it's as simple as the good old pop bottle bee unit one, we can still put holes around there to allow bycatch to escape. It's got the netting in the bottom that protects the bait so you don't end up with that soup.

And if you want to have a go at making one of those, there is on the MBE website, isn't there, there's a demonstration on exactly how to make that one there. It doesn't cost you anything.

Yeah, and it's quite interesting to look at. You know, there's our own stuff, and you'll also see, as I said to you, what goes on in the Channel Islands. They've got really Interesting stuff from Jersey and Guernsey. You'll see our own Asian hornet literature. If you haven't been to our stand, stand 13, drop by before you go home, pick up what you need if there's any left. And as Laurence was saying, there's also comprehensive information on our website on how to turn your favourite water bottle into your favourite Hornet monitoring station. It doesn't have to be complicated. Just one final thing I think that's important to look at is the fact that the equipment manufacturers are looking at this very closely as well, and I've been very fortunate to borrow something that you might have seen from one of the equipment manufacturers, Thorns, who are working on the next stage, and they're looking at what's happening in France with bigger traps where the potential is that things have moved on a stage. We don't know what's going to happen this, this coming season is going to be a very, very interesting season. But certainly the equipment manufacturers are looking ahead. Because we're the last session of the day here, what I will do is I'll leave everything on this table if you want to come forward and look at it and see what modifications can be made, then there's plenty of time if that's okay.

Yeah, plenty of time, that's fine.

Yeah, you'll see there's lots of different traps. There is as many traps as there are on this table, if not more, that you can freely buy on the internet. But what I would say to you is look at what you're buying, think of the scenario, look at what you are actually wanting to achieve, and it really doesn't need to be that technical and that big a trap. It can be really very, very simple.

Excellent. Well, thanks, Andy. I reckon people are going to have questions about Asian hornets. So has anybody got any questions while you pack away? Got one question over here. We've got the roving mic. Got 2 questions. Here we go with it to this gentleman first. Oh, sorry, we're just waiting for the mic.

Sorry, there we go.

The trap that you have right at the front of the table here outside.

This one?

What kind of bait do you use for that? Well, I think it depends on the time of the year and it depends upon what you're looking for, but obviously at the start of the season, if you're monitoring for queens, then it needs to be a sweet sugar-based bait. The protein comes later when the brood rearing has started in nests, so At the start of the season, it's sugary, sweet bait. Certainly in France, they use a lot of their own recipes that involve fruit juices and sugar syrups. And so if you look on the internet, there is dozens of weird and wonderful, but equally the proprietary sugary baits will work as well.

What point in the year Do they flick that switch? I know it's going to change, but roughly when should people start to move away from sweet and go to like a protein-based bait?

I think you would be looking at— and Dan, I'm going to look at my colleague Dan, who is, who is in the audience. I would say probably you'd be looking at July time. Okay. But he may tell me that I'm wrong.

Go on, Dan.

No, that's fine. Is that on?

Yes. Now. Yeah. Go. Yeah. Okay. Sorry.

So yeah, probably sort of gelato time, really, when the brood rearing starts.

But in general, we, we tend to often stick with the sweet baits.

I'm just sort of thinking for simplification, um, the sweet baits do tend to work most of the year round. You might get lulls over periods of brood rearing in the nest, of course, but for the most part, if you've got sugar You know, sweet bait available, which there's some on the table there. I think that's probably the important thing really. So, you know, it's a case of just, you might have the lulls, but yeah, we've had a lot of luck with sweet bait throughout any part of the year really.

I'm going to get brownie points from the NBU here. Do not use honey in your baits. I know it's like a really easy one to do. You think, oh, use honey. Don't Use honey in your baits, the best way of spreading AFB and EFB, isn't it?

Yeah. And what you will see on a lot of the proprietary baits is that they have a repellent in them to repel honeybees. But we have found where monitoring is going on with products like these near to an apiary, it's not long before you get honeybees that come and start sniffing around because they've sussed out There is something sweet and sugary there. So it's really important that whatever you're using is not going to lure honeybees into your traps.

And I think it's just before we come to your question, I think some of the mixtures that they make, they put vinegar in as well, don't they? They put vinegar in to try and deter— Yeah, to detract from honeybees.

Yeah, certainly favorite recipes in Jersey, I understand they like to add some bramble jelly to their mixture.

They go on very well with that. Brewer's yeast, and everyone's got their own recipe, haven't they? Go on, next question please. The smaller trap there that you drilled the 6mm hole into, you talked about the queens and obviously a lot of bycatch to escape. So are we only trying to catch the queens, or are we trying to catch all Asian bees?

Again, this depends upon the time of the year, and what I've tried to focus on And what I've talked about is what we're looking at over the short term, because we're getting lots of questions from beekeepers who are saying, what should I be doing in the next 8, 12 weeks? There's a lot of beekeepers who are saying, well, I've decided I'm going to put up one of these big traps that's going to kill everything in my— you know, I'll let you know. But what we're saying is this is information for short term. And these are a very durable trap. They can fulfill quite a lot of different jobs. But yeah, what you've highlighted is this is something we're looking at short term for Asian hornet queens.

It's probably important saying about the life cycle of the queens in the primary and the secondary nest and why it's so important to trap the queens early in the season.

Yeah. So, I mean, the queens are going to emerge. They are going to be looking for sweet Sweet sugary food because they want to be building their energy to start off primary nests. Now, like I said to you at the beginning, we talk about primary nests and secondary nests. That isn't always the case. These insects are like bees. They don't read the same books that we do. They do things differently. Occasionally they surprise us, but invariably we're looking at the newly emerged queens that have survived the hibernation. Hibernation period, starting to build a small primary nest in a protected area, often low down, and then when they start to outgrow that area, they'll identify a secondary site, often high up, to then build a secondary nest. And that's taking place, you know, to get up and running is a fairly slow process. The first workers to emerge and start that primary nest, you're looking at probably 50 days. Because as you know, insect nests need to thermoregulate, which is involving temperature and humidity. As time goes on and there's more insects in the nest, that incubation period comes down as the nest regulates. The 50 days can drop down to as little as 29. So you've got a lot of variables with these insects.

So yeah, I think, I guess the summary as well, that is it's spring trapping for queens at the moment. That's what these ones are designed for, and that's the focus.

That's the focus of here, because this is the here and now. And you can take this away and think about it and think, am I in a risk area? Am I in an area where there's been no hint of Asian honeybee, nothing has been found? Do I need to be doing the same thing? Well, if it's done sensibly and you're using selective traps, then, you know, it links in with the sort of work that the BBKA is trying to do as well, and it should work, and it's done in a sustainable way.

Excellent. Next question. Hi. Is Asian hornets as a problem in the UK an inevitability, or is it something that we're We need the NBU social media team to answer this one.

Well, the answer is I don't have a crystal ball, and as I've said to you, this coming season is going to be an interesting season. The answer is we don't know, but I think what we shouldn't lose sight of is something that's quite important, and that is there's something we our bees that is equally as important and is there already and will still be there, and that is varroa. And I think we need to keep that in the front of our minds as much as we do Asian hornet. And I know there's always something else on the horizon, but even if Asian hornet was there, varroa will still be there, and that will likely have as big an impact on your colonies, if not bigger.

And I think just to supplement that, indiscriminate trapping of queens is going to cause no issue whatsoever. It's not like you're putting all your eggs in one basket and it's going to damage your bees. Like, if there is going to be an issue with Asian hornets, this is going to help. It's going to help identify where they are. It's going to help reduce the spread of Asian hornets. So we might as well kind of put our best effort into it.

Absolutely. And the really important thing is, if you're unsure what the status of your area is, there's maps on BeeBase. If you go on and do an internet search on BeeBase Asian hornet, maps are being updated all the time. Things are being improved so that the information you see as beekeepers, and I see as a beekeeper as well, is up to date and it's clearly visible. So that information is there. Do go and have a look and you will see where things fit in in your area.

Any final questions? Questions? Another question over there, please.

There's a boy who's going there. First one. Is autumn trapping quite important this year? Well, obviously you're looking at autumn trapping for 2024. If you look at autumn trapping the way that scientists evaluate things, and you look at what happens in the Channel Islands, you'll see there's actually quite a split between how people see how important autumn trapping is. Some people say that they don't feel that it yields that much of a benefit, and that spring trapping is the most beneficial. So I think the jury's out on that, is the simple answer.

Any final questions? Another one here at the front.

If there's a lack of flowers, does that mean that the varroa mites could be transferred from hive to hive more than if there was a lot of flowers?

I can answer that as best as I can. I would say I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference. The spread of varroa will be largely driven by drones from hive to hive because they'll just— they'll go out, the drones go out and they want to mate, and if they don't mate, they come back and they just go to any hive. They genuinely don't care. So it comes back to that high population density in your apiaries, how close you have them together. If you have them like 3 or 4 meters apart facing different directions, you're going to really reduce that spread of transmission of varroa. If you have them all stacked up next to each other, which I've had previously— sorry, I did it wrong— like 12 in a row right next to each other, the drones will just come back in and everything just gets spread in between them. So I'd say it's less to do with the flows but more to do with the drones going out, coming coming back and how close your hives are together. Any more questions? No? Well, I think we're done. Thanks so much, Andy. I really appreciate that. That was great. And thanks everyone for staying kind of until the very end. I think we're done for the stream now. I'll hang around for a bit if anyone's got any other questions, but feel free to come to the front and have a look at the traps and stuff as well. But thank you very much.