Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 66

This is fun. I went to go and set up my livestream and I realized that I've not got my camera kit with me. What a nightmare. So I'm freestyling on my phone. I don't even know if I am talking to anyone at the moment because I can't see the screen. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and log in as I talk. Us men, I don't know about you, are very, very bad at this, but I think we are live. And there we go. I turned down all of the mess. That's worked quite well. So I'm going to put the tablet there and see how ridiculous I look in my new position here. Actually, that's not too bad, right? So I'm going to answer the questions up here. So any questions, stick it in the comments, whether you're on YouTube or Facebook or Twitch. They are the 3 platforms I'm streaming to tonight. First up though, a massive shout out. We've got some queens left over, few queens left over, and I'm going to go on a massive, a mega nuc-making spree next week. But I just thought I'd give people the option. £32 queens, Monday Madness. for dispatch this Monday only, and they're available on the website. So where are we here? Let me get the chat up here. Thomas L says good evening. Hello to you, Thomas. I kind of want to move the tablet somewhere else, but I think it's better up here. So let me just change that over. You can see I do not know what I'm doing here. Chat filter is all messages. There we go. Right, I've got everyone in. So we've got Thomas L, Tony and Liz, and Cub Rider straight in. What do you think of Richard's tropical collapse talk? Oh, Richard's proper laylapse talk. Interesting. I, I would say whatever I said, I'm kind of like damned if I do, damned if I don't here, so I've not said anything. But we import queens and we take the transport of pests and disease so seriously. Everything we do, completely above board, and every single queen is inspected by the National Bee Unit they come into the United Kingdom. Richard's talk really overdramatized, I think, the impact of Tropilaelaps. It's a really small subset of bees in Georgia, but there's no denying it, it is definitely something that we do not want here. It is a major, major issue for UK beekeepers if it comes over here, so we do not want it. They need to stop any imports from Ukraine, from Georgia, from any potentially adjacent countries. Have a look at a map. We're in Malta where our queens are mated. It's 4 seas away. So it's like Ukraine, a sea, another country, a sea. Like, it's gonna take a long, long time to get there. But people say, yeah, but all imports are bad, surely. You know, there's a pest, there's a parasite, you do not want that there. And all I would say to them is, that's not the way you go about that. Like, we don't want drugs in our country. Drugs are banned, drugs are illegal, um, because we know that the impact and the damage that they can have. And our streets are rife with drugs. Like, banning stuff is not the way forward here, because what happens— and you can see, you can see why I've not said anything on this already, because people are going to say, yeah, of course you're going to say that because you import queens. But this is my genuine, honest view on the subject. If you banned imports overnight, you'd have proper laylapse here within 12 months, because it just sends it underground. People need queens. There's big demand for queens. And if they banned it, people would just bring them in illegally. So the problem doesn't go away. So what I think— this is a much better way of doing it— is really like tighten up the controls, ban the countries where Tropilaelapsis is in, do increased monitoring, make the flow of queens like bring that into the 21st century, maybe have like individual circuits like discs or something that you put on the back of the queen and they're traced through the trace system kind of on an individual level like that. Loads of real positive things that you can do. it isn't just a case of ban imports, because banning imports just takes away any control that anybody has. Like, for example, our queens, they're signed off by— I think it's, it's either 4 or 5 independent vets and inspectors, like, all the way along. They're signed off to say there's no European foulbrood in the area, no American foulbrood, there's no pests, there's no known pests of anything like that kind of in the region even. So the controls on that are so much tighter than the controls on, say, just like shipping queens within the UK. Anyone can set up in the UK, you can ship queens out to everyone like that. And if you'd had an EFB issue, no one would know, and you'd be this massive super spreader of EFB. No control there whatsoever. But it's easy to point the fingers and say, no, it's the imports. So you can see, very, very passionate about that one. And I've not come out and said anything about that because obviously people are going to say, well, you will say that because you import queens. And what I can say is that if we didn't import queens, our business would be Absolutely fine, and we would continue doing all of the other stuff that we do. So we're not reliant on the imports, but we don't think that the way to manage it is to block the imports. We think kind of like the opposite— try and work with these people and stem the flow and educate. And even kind of, you could go as far as to say, right, any queens coming into the United Kingdom need to go through this process. I don't know, put them through a freezer. I don't know, I'm completely speculating and guessing here. I, I don't know, but but put them in a freezer for 2 minutes, or put them down to a certain temperature, and maybe like the Tropilaelaps mite just says— or just dies because it's so cold. No one's talking about that. No one's trying these different things because they're just saying ban the imports, and ban the imports doesn't solve the issue. So I've given you a lot of talk there. Tropilaelaps. Um, right, next up, Mark Buchanan says hi from Northern Ireland. Keith Jenkins, hello to you too. Hi, Mark. says hair's looking good. Oh, the hair. Hi Lawrence, you said on a video about double brooding over winter at the end of the season, do you double Apivar both boxes when you add the second brood box after taking off the super? So Apivar is dead easy to remember what you need to do with it. When you put it into your colonies as a treatment at any point in the year, you just take the number of brood frames and you times it— I know you divide it, I get it wrong. That was going to be the simplest advice ever. So every 5 frames of brood, 1 strip of Apivar. So it doesn't matter whether it's a single brood or a double brood or a treble brood, you just count up the frames of brood and you can kind of make an educated guess. You know, if you're going in at this time of the year and you're on double brood, it's gonna be highly unlikely that you're gonna see 22 frames of brood, probably gonna be more likely 8 to 10 frames. So I always round it up, so if there's 8 frames I would treat with 2 strips, if there's 5 frames I'll treat with 1 strip, 10 frames I'll treat with 2 strips. So double brood, don't think it means double Apivar, you're still just treating the brood nest. Uh, Walkerbee Honey says, hi, good evening. Hello to you too. He's not against imports, let's face it, a swarm could come on a boat. A swarm could come on a boat, exactly. Uh, I, I feel like I, like I don't really want to say anything about the topic because I know that people are going to look at this and say, ah yeah, well, that's what we kind of thought he was going to say. But I do, I do fear the worst when it comes to Tropilaelaps, and I don't want to make the whole talk about Uh, like imports. So imports are obviously an important part to us and a bit that we are kind of concerned over the future with. But Tropilaelaps in itself, I don't know, like I'm naturally really pessimistic with things like to the nth degree. But when it comes to things like this, I don't— I think it will be worse than varroa just because of the way that it moves, the speed in which it multiplies. But ultimately it just carries the same or similar viruses. And I do think over time we will just come up with mechanisms and ways of dealing with it. And it might not just be like caging queens on its own, it might be caging queens for an extended period and then doing some sort of gaseous treatment or some temperature treatment or doing something like that. And then I think it will become like a bit of a nuisance rather than the catastrophic nature of what Richard's talk was about. And you know what, I'll just throw this one straight out there, yeah, and this is the thing, I'm going to get hounded for this, whatever anyone says. But the research is sponsored by Biba, is sponsored by an organization whose prime objective— and not only sponsored, funded, they paid for the research to happen in Thailand by Biba, or in part by Biba, whose prime objective is to ban imports. Like, so I kind of take it with a little pinch of salt as well. I think if, if the company that did the research wanted people to take them serious about the research, it should have probably been independently funded as opposed to being funded by kind of local beekeeping associations or people with a really strong anti-import agenda. So there you go, I've said it, I'm in trouble now, but let's go. Right, Mark Buchanan said, I had a hive that had quite a few mites on the floor. I cleaned the board and checked 24 hours later, a good few on the board, still some living. Hive seems to be thriving. Are the bees sorting it? So mites are Subjective kind of to the beekeeper when it comes to like numbers, seeing numbers on the board. In the UK, you're always going to have varroa kind of on the bees, inside the brood, on the, on the boards, and if you clear out the board, you know, you come back the next day and you're likely to see a few more mites on the board. It's all about the number, and then it's all about determining kind of like the trigger points for you. I find though, with the way that I deal with my bees, and some people would say that's, that's not a good way to deal with bees, but I know if I cut my season short enough, treat with Apivar at that point and then kind of go in at some point in November or December depending on what the weather's looking like for this year and go in with like Apibioxal or an oxalic acid-based treatment. I know from my own experience that the mite load never gets to a point where it's really damaging the bees, it's setting the bees back, it's always at a point where it's manageable. The time where varroa becomes really, really difficult is kind of like now onwards, and the longer you leave it now, the worse it becomes. So if you, if you've got a colony, all colonies in the UK are probably going to be exhibiting signs of varroa impact now. You might see some varroa, but you're definitely going to see like little holes, little cappings, holes in the cappings, and then potentially some deformed wing virus as well. And at the moment, the colonies are still big and strong, and the brood nests are strong, and the bees are being replaced, and that will change soon. As I've said in the emails that are going out, like, the season really is coming to a very fast and abrupt end, and then when that happens, the number of bees just dramatically drops, and the varroa seems to kind of lag by a few weeks, so you get this huge increase in the ratio between the number of varroa per number of bees. So the impact starts to come in now, but as you go into August, as you go into September, it gets worse and worse, and then if you don't treat your bees, like, that late part of the season is where the real damage is done, and a lot of colonies do not get through. But by bringing it back and doing that treatment really early, taking the honey off nice and early, and then leaving the bees just to sort themselves out in that double brood configuration is a really nice— I don't want to say halfway house because obviously they've completely managed colonies of bees, but you're stepping back quite early and saying, right, I've done everything, you've done everything you can do for me, so I'm going to do something for you now, which is like, I'm just going to leave you alone and let you sort yourself out. We're going to do checks, we're going to make sure there's a good mated queen, we've given you Apivar really early on in the year, we've given you space, we've given you a nice insulated feeder, we've given you a roof, we've made sure everything's completely watertight and above board, and now we're just going to make sure that you've got enough food, but we're not going to come inside anymore, we're not going to crack open the seals, we're not going to take frames out, and you leave the bees just to get themselves ready, ready for winter in the configuration that they want, with the food that they want, and kind of set up how they want, and I do find that that way of stepping back quite early on in the season really does the very best for the bees for the following year. Now Jasper, my dog, is knocking around somewhere. Jas, come on, and he's whimpering. Right, next question. Hi Lawrence, honey production has slowed right down here, is it too late in the year to double brood? Whoa, yes, it is definitely too late to double brood. So I'm finishing off doing the final few videos for 14 Day Beekeeper at the moment, and I'm just going to close this door here. But the interesting thing is that I did a video about single versus double brood, and I do appreciate that the advice that I give is quite difficult for some people to interpret throughout the year. So I'm doing this video at the moment for 14 Day Beekeeper, which is when should you have single brood and when should you have double brood, and like, do you even need double brood? But so in answer for your question here, absolutely, I would say it's too late to switch a colony at the moment that's on single brood into double brood. However, if you've got a colony that's on a single brood and 6 or 7 supers on, and you're going to take those supers off, there doesn't come really a much better time to go from single to double brood, but it's the reasons for doing so. And a lot of people think, oh, the honey production's really slowed down, so I'm gonna boost the colony, boost that brood nest up by kind of double brood, and all that will happen if you do that at this time of the year is they'll just say, yep, thanks very much, that's just extra place to put honey. And I'll just put honey up there. So there's no, no need or no reason for ever doing that to expand the bees at this time of the year. Like, the days are getting shorter, the bees are contracting, and there is nothing that you can do to stop them. However, going from that single brood to double brood at this time of the year, for the benefit of the bees and to make your life easier and to make sure that the bees have got sufficient space to gather all of that late season nectar for themselves to overwinter on, is really good. It's a really good time to do it. So it's As long as your objective is right and you're not trying to kind of like increase that colony or expand it and try and push honey production, double brood won't do anything to help you there, but to ease the burden on you and to increase the buffer of stores that they're going to carry throughout the winter, double brood is very good at this time of year. Okay, so I do have to finish exactly in 1 hour, so where are we? We are 15 minutes in, right, I've got to be quicker now. Right, no, here we go. Sorry, Martin says, if you had zero mite count, would you treat regardless before wintering as a precaution? It doesn't seem worth it. I'm isolated here, confident my count is zero. Any harm with oxalic acid drip anyway? So there's nothing to gain by saying this, I promise you. You will have varroa in your colonies, and it will start impacting the colonies. Even if the count is zero, I would question the count. If it's like counting on a board, I would I would say let's do like an alcohol wash, or you could do a sugar roll and do like a real, you know, determine how many varroa are in that colony. It will not be zero. They will be having an impact in there even if you cannot see them. So 100%, I would treat as a precaution. That's just the way that I do it. You see a lot of other people who go the complete opposite way and say if the bees are not showing signs of varroa or they have low counts, don't treat them because they're the ones that you want to promote. And I could agree with that as well. I can get behind both sides here. I sit on one side of the fence with this one though, which is I just want my bees to be as healthy as they possibly can, and if I've got something that can keep my bees healthy, then I will do everything to keep those bees healthy. So that is where I sit on that one. Right, let's have a look at other ones. I'm using strips every other year and oxalic acid the others, but what sort of knockdown would you expect on 5 times 5-day vapor treatment? So I'm not going to say numbers because I've never looked at the numbers. I've never said, right, my drop is this, therefore I'm going to treat, and my new results, like my new drop is this, therefore the treatment was effective. I don't look at it like that. And I think on a— I look at it on a whole apiary level. Hopefully no one can hear Jasper. Maybe Jasper can go into the kitchen if anyone's watching downstairs. He is whimpering very loudly indeed. But what I would say is what I monitor for more is my overwintering success. Have I got a 30% loss over winter, or is it 5%, or is it kind of reducing down and getting into the 2% or 3%? Because if you're bringing forward your varroa treatment to try and target it at the most potent point of the year, got to be doing it for a reason. And for me, I wanted healthier bees. And I find the barometer for success of that one is how many bees can I get successfully through the winter? you look at, you look in the USA and you look across Europe and you look at the overwintering success rates, and then I kind of compare that to ours and I think, wow, we're like, we're doing something right. Like, we have healthy bees, we keep our bees really, really good, and we're not fudging the numbers there. Like, we obviously have quite a severe purge early on before we do that, and I think that helps explain why the numbers are so good. And what that means is that you, I just think you get a sixth sense when it comes to being a beekeeper, because you get to this time of the year and you can look at a colony and say, Absolutely fine, we will see you again in the spring, no problem at all. And you can kind of look at a colony, and, and I would say I'm probably still in the point where I look at that colony and say, like, let's, let's see what it's like, and let's see what it's like in March, April, like, it might get through. And Richard's not like that. Richard will look at the good ones and say, yeah, absolutely fine. And then look at the kind of average ones and he'll just say, no, shake them out. And I say, really? Like, they don't look that bad. Why not just wait? And he says, because why am I wasting my time? Why am I wasting my Apivar treatments? Why am I wasting my feed? Why am I wasting all of the, like, effort I'm going to put into it when I'm pretty confident that it's not going to live? So I have to follow my own advice. You still end up with the same amount of bees in the apiary at the end of the day when you shake out those duds. You don't kill the bees. No bees are lost in the making of this video. They're just, like, distributed in— Different boxes. And he says, you know, you've got really good strong colony of bees in there, but he's betting— he's hedging his bets that that colony is not going to make it through the year. So he uses those resources very effectively by shaking them out into the apiary. They beg their way into the adjacent beehives, boosting the good ones. So he's kind of like doubling down on the good, saying, right, you're definitely good, and to make you even better, I'm going to give you some of the kind of mediocre. The ones that, you know, the duds are obvious when you pull them out and they're drone layers straight away, but it's the ones that you can't really tell that they're going to fail. As you get better at beekeeping, you start to notice them. Like, I notice them now, and I still kind of— I still take the ones that I take through, and then Richard laughs at me in the spring and says, I told you. But I am getting better at it. But I do think with that one, you just, you need to know where to put your resources and your efforts. And I completely forgot what the question was, so wait, what was the question? I was talking about something like that, it's gone down quite a lot. Ah, we were talking, that's what we were talking about, the varroa mite drop, so it's not a case of what I would do for certain kind of levels, it's more holistic than that, and trying to do everything that I possibly can and get incremental gain, like at a higher level. There we go. Hi Lawrence, do you think the 41-degree cooking for 2 hours will kill the Tropilaela mite? Any research on this do you know of? This is the thing, there's surely, that's, we should do some research on that and heat the hives up or cool the hives down, It's a tropical mite, so I'm thinking like cold could be very, very good here, and caging a queen, making all of the brood go phoretic, they've got nowhere to go, and then you'd have to probably do something to split up a cluster so that you couldn't just have a really tight cluster and holding them in, and then freeze them for, I don't know, like a week or something like that, because bees, bees will be fine. You just need to make sure that the cluster isn't that tight that it keeps them right there, but there must be, there must be ways of— doing stuff like that, and I'm sure someone will come up with something. Right, let's go. I lose where I am over here, we have to change it up a little bit. I keep 4 completely feral hives to collect swarms from, and the bees are resistant to mites. Excellent, it's good. You hear a lot of people saying that the bees are resistant, and I never want to like put it down because I do think it's a really, really good thing, and Tropilaelus might kind of come and completely wipe that out, and you have to go back to a real heavy treatment regime in order to treat the Tropilaelaps, and it's like gonna be similar treatments. The treatments are probably going to be effective on both. And I know they said like the current treatments aren't effective on them, but like, who's funded the research? Come on, who's funded the research, right? So next question, what, uh, Ian says, what's your view on the risk of varroa becoming immune to the apiary? Um, I'm not, I'm not 100% sure on what that question is. The varroa becoming resistant or immune to the apiary? I'm thinking like the bees, you're talking about the bees becoming like resistant to varroa, I don't know, Ian, I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to do that one again. David says, hi Laurence, I found a suspected Asian hornet nest in Gatesstone, Essex, definitely looked like Asian hornets, I reported the sighting but I've not heard anything back yet. Oh, I would say that they will have to be like categorizing stuff at the moment, so like all of the alerts come in and then they'll probably go out to the highest priority ones. It might be a case that they know like in that area that it's an Asian hornet hotspot, so the reporting of a nest isn't anything to write home about. I don't know, I can't comment on their behalf, but I'm sure that reporting them is definitely the way forward, and fingers crossed it's not an Asian hornet's nest. I'd always take some pictures though, feel free to send me any pictures if you want to send me pictures of Asian hornets. How far apart would you recommend spacing apiaries? So I would say a minimum 3 miles because it just makes your life so much easier and you don't get any kind of drift between apiaries or 2 separate apiaries, you know, like the Venn diagram overlapping, and it just makes it so much easier when you come to move bees, having them all at least 3 miles apart. The flow's pretty much finished here in Cumbria, no signs of balsam yet, but I am hopeful. See, I love the balsam and I love the ivy and I love all of those really late season flows, but I just leave them for the bees now because chasing the balsam into that last frost and trying to kind of keep any chemicals off the hive that's treating the varroa and make the honey harvestable, for me, is just very, very difficult. But I do, I really like the Himalayan balsam honey, but I just, I don't ever get to harvest it anymore because I just leave it all for the bees, and they do really do like it. The VSH Buckfast queens I got from you 4 months ago and 2 months ago are doing really well. They found lots of Himalayan balsam today, so they've all got mite. That's excellent. I love the VSH ones. Some of my favorite VSH lines, or the colonies I've got, are the VSH Buckfast lines. Really big queens, like particularly big queens with a little like black tip, and they have like some of them are really dark as well. So there's an orange line and a very very dark line. I do. I like the VSH Buckfast. And a question that a number of people have asked this year is like is is the VSH Buckfast as calm as the F1? And I say well it is an F1. It's an F1 Buckfast queen. It just comes from a mother who whose daughters have been specifically tested for resistance to the mite. So It's kind of like an over— like an added extra on top of the very already calm nature of our F1 Buckfast queens. When merging 2 weak colonies, only one has a queen, using the newspaper method, do they move up or down into one box? I don't know. I would say it just depends where you put all of the brood. If you did it and put all of the brood at the bottom, or just the hive that kind of has all of the brood is at the bottom, and then you put newspaper and then the one at the top, they'll all just end up at the bottom. and flip it around the other way, they'll probably just end up the other way as well, so I don't think it— it's not a top or bottom, it's just kind of where you put the brood. Hi Lawrence, we have honey in brood boxes, have bruised it 2 or 3 times and they just recap it. If we bruise it and spray it with water, will they move it up to the super? Thanks, I've got my tea. It's an interesting one that, a few people say that they won't move it, and I think it comes down to the configuration of the beehive, so my next step After, and I've had it where they don't move it, and it is— you want to get it on sooner rather than later, like getting it on before they cap it, getting it on when it's nectar makes it so much easier. So you kind of want to do the manipulation like 3 or 4 weeks, maybe 5 weeks after the demerite, so that as soon as all of that brood has emerged, you can get it out underneath and they move just open stores, open nectar upwards. I still haven't had a sip of tea. But if they're being really stubborn and you've got like a whole box full of stores, the way that I would do it is I would just take the box off, Keep it somewhere like room temperature but well sealed, put it in like a plastic box or something, and go down to single brood, but make sure there's tons of space, so make sure there's like an empty super above it, and then take each individual frame and then make a space in between 2 frames of brood in the single brood box, so you have like a frame of emerging brood, a frame of emerging brood, it can be eggs as well, it doesn't matter, just open brood, and then put that bruised frame in the middle, and then you just have to do it slowly then. But if you've only got a couple of hives, it didn't take that long. They move it within about a day, a couple of days. You've got to be quick though, because they will just relay eggs into it using that method, but you can cycle stuff out. But the other way of doing it is just to use it to make up some splits. That is a really easy way of kind of avoiding all of that faff and just add some frames of brood and take some frames of stores, take them off to another apiary, mate a queen, and you'll make some brilliant, brilliant overwintered nucs. I do get some very, very good feedback about some of the things we do, and I do occasionally get like bad feedback on some of things we do. And they say some of the— I had one, one particular one this week of someone saying, um, you, you're just trying to sell queens. And I said, kind of is our business to sell queens. You say, yeah, but you're like, you're, you're telling us all the opportunities to buy queens and like we don't need that many queens. And I say, yeah, but it's— I also get the opposite, which is kind of come September people ring up and say, can I buy queens? And I say, no, we've finished. We do finish quite early. There's only 4 weeks left of the season. Because we don't really think it's a good idea to be making up splits kind of like back end of September, early October. Just too late, way past the end of the season. And like the emails that I send out to people saying, you know, the flow's coming to an end and it's a really good time to use all of those resources to make queens, people say, well, you're just trying to sell queens. And well, okay, we've got some queens to sell, but it's honest advice, it's good advice, and it's advice that kind of we built our business on, which is doing the right thing at the right time for both you and the bees. And by bringing honey harvest forward and bringing your varroa treatments forward and getting your bees ready, it gives you this really beautiful window kind of in August where you've got varroa treatments on, which is fine, you're feeding your bees, which is fine, they kind of calm right down as soon as you get them into that state, you've got copious amounts of brood, just unlimited amounts of brood, and because you're feeding all of the colonies in the apiary, like making splits is very, very easy if you just add in mated queens. So It's good advice, and some people sometimes don't like the additional emails. I do take it on board, but I also need to sell our queens. Right, so going off, I'm going off on one. I need to see the screen, otherwise I just like start waffling. Right, where are we going next? Uh, Cup Rider says, do you fix your spinner to the ground in any way? Because I tried to balance, but that frame with pollen in can really make my Velo 20 frame shake at high speeds to the point I obviously at times— it's one of those things. If you nail it down or like bolt it down or whatever, you're putting loads of tension into the legs and kind of like torsional twist twisting and they'll just break eventually. So you do need to balance the frames quite well. If you've got frames that have got pollen in, just put them off onto one side, and then when you find you're back to unbalanced, just pop one of the pollen frames back in and it can help balance it out. But sometimes I do find myself lying across a lot of mine. But also another way of doing it is just leaving, you know, anytime you find yourself unbalanced, identify the frame, take it out, put it off to one side, just keep on doing that. until you get a whole box of heavier frames, and then you can extract those as well, and it's much easier to balance. Right, we're halfway through. I've got one, one half hour to go. I was gonna say one hour to go. I'm so bad, like the camera's there, I'm reading here and trying to waffle. Right, where are we going? Cub Rider said that, right. We're back. We started with a summer nuc from you and we should have a full super of honey. We double brooded the hive and made 2 splits from it with the premium queens checked today and they've started to lay. It's one of my favourite times of the year when I start to see people on social media say, bought a nuc and we did this and we got this much honey. And do you know what the best one— and I've not got back to the guy yet, I will get back to you, I got to do all my WhatsApp for today— but somebody said, we bought a nuc off you, like not this, not beginning of this year, beginning of last year, so 2024, bought a nuc off you, and we've kind of like expanded and we've got some honey and we've made some splits and we've been to some beekeeping shows and we've met some friends and we really enjoyed it. You know, just thanks because it's a really like fun hobby and we're having a great time. And I just think, oh, that is like really nice because that is what is important to me is making— it's kind of like giving some value to people, giving them what they pay for. If they buy a nice calm nuc of bees, give them a nice calm nuc of bees. If they pay for some queens to arrive on a certain date, like we send you the queens and they arrive on a certain date, And we do, we try our best to go above and beyond to make like every customer happy, and inevitably you're always going to get the odd customer who's not happy, but I think we've nailed it this year. We got to the point where the majority of people are happy, and hopefully we can kind of continue that into future years as well. Good evening, Lawrence, I hope you're doing well. Hello to you too, Gene, from California. Opinion on the Instant Vap, even if you do only have a small number of colonies, is the convenience worth the price tag? Do they last any of the if it's necessary. So I am a real big fan of the Instant Vap. It is a superb piece of kit, it's made very, very well, but there's no denying it is quite a niche product. And if you've just got one or two colonies in your back garden, I would— you could do a dribble. I don't think a dribble is that much worse. I think the sublimation is a little bit easier on the bees, but I know people who manage thousands of colonies of bees and they do a dribble by choice because they know that's kind of what works for them. A dribble is cheap. You probably get the equipment to do the dribble for like £5 or £10. So I'd hate to ever sell someone a tool that isn't necessary. What I will say though, as soon as you kind of get past maybe 6 to 8 to 10 colonies, it comes into its own because it's very convenient just to go up to each one and zap them. And I like the fact that you can do it multiple times as well if you're in a country that allows multiple oxalic acid-based treatments. But I do like it, it's very well made. I don't think you really need any of the extra bits. The only one that I would definitely get is the cleaning one, the cleaning cap, because there's no real way to clean it without that cleaning cap. You have to kind of like fill it with— fill it half with water, put the Instant Vap on it upside down, and then go— just like creates this massive pipe bomb. But if you've done it right, it just blows all the pressure out and really cleans the tube out, and cleaning it is very important. So that's enough about the Instant Vap. Thomas— oh no, sorry, let me go back up. I'm missing people out. Right, so I have a bike frost screen for me on the 9th of May. Last 2 weeks bees have been chasing us back to my back door, a little concerned as in my garden. Oh brilliant, that's excellent feedback. So I'm very sorry about that. What I would always say with F1 Buckfast queens is that they are open mated. They are not a uniform product that the characteristics are exactly the same each time. The vast majority, I would say upwards of 99%, are super, super calm. And you can see on our reviews and across everything we sell, really nice calm gentle bees. Occasionally you will get the odd one that does this where it just goes a little bit rogue. But also at this time of the year, like, you couldn't really get a worse 4 weeks of year because you've got wasps, you've got robbing bees, you've got lack of flow, you've got beekeepers taking honey off, and it just triggers colonies to go wild like that. What I will always say is we will stand by our queens, so if there is an issue, please do email me, blackmountainhoney@gmail.com. I will reply to you personally, and if it is one of our queens that is causing the colony to go angry like that, we will replace it, absolutely no problem and free of charge. Right, where we go? I have a polyashworth feeder my son painted my hive, but Painted the inside of the feeder. The paint is from Abello, so it's bee-friendly. Will this be a serious problem if you want to use the feeder? So you do need to paint the inside of poly feeders as well. Normally the paint that you're supposed to use is an exterior-grade masonry paint. That's the best one to use. You can also use an exterior-grade gloss paint, that works well as well. Most spray paint works on the inside as well. The exterior-grade— the Abello bee paint, I'm pretty sure, is based on like a water-based exterior masonry formula, so I think it's like the exact right paint to use. But don't worry, all interiors should be painted before use, and if you don't, the syrup just sinks in, it goes mouldy, and then it just looks mouldy and disgusting and minging forever. There's nothing you can do. So well done for painting it. Right, there's a lot of questions to get through. I'm not going to get through everyone's questions, so I will— I might skip a question or two, try and kind of answer the ones that I've not answered already. So kind of unique questions, right? So Simon says— oh, so it's good advice, just Simon. Thomas says, gotta love Richard, proper no-nonsense, must be an interesting guy to chat bees with. We have very good chats. I did a brilliant video with Richard earlier on this year. Uh, I went down to— I said this is like the— I said I'm going to skip some questions out and then not go and waffle, and the first one you got me talking about Richard, but I will say it. I went down to Richard just to— I wanted to document the whole process of how Richard makes the queens for the overwintered nucs. So all of our overwintered nucs come with mated queens, kind of either in the UK or the Welsh apiary. I love the Welsh apiary. Well, we did the video in the Welsh apiary, so showing everything, showing the breeder queen, showing the production colony, showing how the splits are made, but with a real focus on queen rearing. So showing the eggs, showing the larvae, showing how he grafts, showing the timing, showing how he sets up these starter finishers kind of like on a rotational basis, how he gets the queens mated, how the apiary is flooded. We do all these videos, and we're getting into arguments left, right, and center because Richard has a very, very particular— not particular, but very like He knows how he likes to do things, Richard. And what I wanted for this video was a very sequential, right? Day 0, we start here, right? What'd you do on day 0? What'd you do on day 1? What'd you do on day 2? And he'd got everything set up perfectly to start on day 1. And we kind of like started doing it. And I said, this is day 1. He said, yeah, you said start on day 1. And I said, I definitely did not say start on day 1. I said start on day 0, because I always call it day 0 because it's kind of like the commencement. And he said, oh, but we, we can't do that because day zero was yesterday. And I said, oh no, Richard, like, this is it. Like, we're set up for the day. Like, the videographer and everyone is here. We need to get this right. So then we spent like an hour trying to simulate day one. When the video comes out, see if you can spot, see if you can spot what we did. But day zero doesn't exist on the video. We had to, we had to make it up. And I think we did it, but it was, it was all good fun. But Richard is a very, very good guy to chat bees with. And Rich, I will always like bow down to Richard's superior bee knowledge, he knows what he's doing. Right, let's go. Laurence, what is the best way to help my bees draw out more comb in my honey supers? I'm using a queen excluder between the super and lower brood box. So my advice to people whenever they ask that question is, the bees will go at their own pace. Sometimes it appears very fast, sometimes, more often than not, it appears very, very slow, but there is nothing that you can do to influence it. that wouldn't ruin your honey harvest, so you could put a feeder on, you could just stick a feeder on and feed them 1:1 syrup, and they'd draw as much comb as you wanted them to draw, but you kind of contaminated all of your supers. So as a beekeeper who's been keeping bees for quite a long time, I love that period where the bees aren't drawing out the comb, or drawing it out really, really slowly and just keeping themselves busy, because when they're doing that, they are not swarming, and that is a much nicer place to be in. So I quite like the period where they don't draw it out, but also like this time of the year, Really, really bad for getting comb drawn out because there's no flows, or the flows are kind of so stop and start that the bees just don't, don't really want to know about it. And then the colony is getting smaller and smaller, so there's this heat to go around, and unless the box where the foundation is at the correct temperature and you've got the flow and you've got the expansion, there's no chance of it drawing out. Uh, right, Charlotte says, would you ever consider doing a video on different nuc wasp protection? I have seen so many different designs, ideas on different groups using takeaway lids, cheese Etc. So I do it, I could do a video on it, and I am designing a slightly cool amendment to the underfloor entrance. But the advice that I give to people when it comes to wasps is, if you're trying to think about how you can tackle the wasp problem now, you've left it about 4 months too late, I would say. You can't be reactive when it comes to wasps. You can't say, right, there is like, it's wasp Armageddon, what am I going to do to protect the small splits that I've made, or what am I going to do to protect the colonies where there's a drone-laying queen and they're dwindling, or the laying worker colony that I've not got around to fixing? The wasps are just going to wipe them out. So you need to, you need to plan it kind of like, okay, 4 months is maybe a bit tongue-in-cheek, but a good couple of months. You need to make sure that all of your splits are made. Make them really, really early. Like now is probably, I would say, a 3-frame— you need 3 brood frames, a frame of stores, and a good shake of bees taken off to a new apiary. To be, to like, to be a banker of a cohesive unit. You can maybe get away with 2 frames of brood if you put more bees in, but the longer you leave it, the more difficult it becomes. So if you, if you just kind of like take that advice now, back into July, and, and remember that when it comes to kind of April and May next year and everything's easy and you get to the June gap, making your splits back then, you could do 1 frame of brood, you could do 1 frame of stores, shake the bees, put a queen in, feed them because there's no robbing bees, and just take them off to another apiary and leave them. and by the time everyone else is panicking about wasp Armageddon, you just say, I've done the one thing that is the most important thing in the world, I've just got really big strong colonies of bees with an easily defendable entrance, and then the wasps are no problem, like just no problem, they just kind of like move on or they'll just target the weak ones. So the best, best defense is a really good attack with lots and lots of bees. I'm not one for gizmos when it comes to wasps. I was planning to extract next week but having looked at the bees today, only about 20 5% of the frames are below 20% water content. Should I take off the individual frames that are ready and set aside? So I would say if your frames are not shown, the frames aren't ready yet, and you're testing them individually like that, you need to make sure that the water content is correct. There's no point taking it off early to try and kind of like circumnavigate or whatever, or change the season or alter your strategy if it's just going to end up fermenting in the bucket. If my wife heard that bit there, she would have said you have to stop saying words when you don't know the right word, but I just, I try and fill the gap sometimes. So She would, she would laugh. I'll send that bit to Helen later on because she will laugh. Right, who's next? So David says, what's the smallest size split you would make at this time of the year? I just answered that one, so I would say 3 frames of brood and a frame of stores. It feels like the season is over for nectar, but still loads of bees in the box. Seems like they're eating as much as they're bringing in. Should we remove supers and close down for winter? So I gave this advice on the channel members section about a week ago, 100%, and you'll see that like I'll name him Aaron Cornish because it always sticks in my mind, this advice. So I gave this advice, I give this advice every year, same advice, different season, but it does change when I give it. Like last year it was middle of August, this year it was kind of middle of July, it was 4 weeks earlier. But the advice I gave was the season's coming to an end, like you need to get your bees ready for winter, you do it now because if you leave it too late, blah blah blah. And I did all of that, got all my bees ready for winter, and Aaron did it as well, and then we got a really, really nice spell of weather after that. And this is where the outlook bit comes on, and I know, I know Aaron is happy for me to talk about this, and I think, I think his view is it's better for the bees but you do lose out on a bit of honey, and I agree with it, it's better for the bees and you do lose out on a bit of honey. But in that season he got it all ready and obviously felt really, really proud and like did the right thing, and then got this mega amazing weather and all of this honey just kept on coming back in, and Aaron was annoyed that he, he missed out on that bumper harvest. and I felt a bit bad, didn't I, because the feed or the advice that I'd given had resulted in him losing him that honey. But his bees did really well, and his bees came through the winter really, really well. And I don't know, we'll have to talk about it maybe at the Abelo Open Show, uh, the Abelo Open Day, Aaron, but do you think your bees gave you more the following season? Because that's the advice that I give to people. Don't worry about the half a super or the additional super that you lose out in that season, you make it back next year because you've got big, strong, healthy colonies that you can split early on in the year and still have 2 cohesive units that are going to go out and gather a lot of honey. So I keep on doing that, I answer the question in too much detail that I forget where we started. So it was Ian for extraction later on in the summer, there we go. I can't connect the 2, sorry. Right, we've got 18 minutes left. No, we did that one, right, so Cub Rider says, out of my 18 hives, I demerared 2 for the first time this year, and while the honey crop was outstanding, I'm dropping to 12 and demerare the lot next year, plus only those 2 didn't produce queen cells. Pete, I— we get loads of, we get loads of really good feedback. We do get some negative feedback as well, and some— we get some tongue-in-cheek feedback. And with the tongue-in-cheek feedback that I always get is, you are just like one-trick pony, all you ever talk about is the demerare, as if it's just this brilliant method that solves everyone's problems when it comes to swarming. And I always sit there and kind of think Like it is, it's brilliant if you use it properly, the Demaray. It buys you a little bit of time. It doesn't buy you much time, buys you a couple of weeks, maybe 3 weeks, but the chances of your bees— if you do the Demaray correctly on a colony that can handle it preemptively before the colony has any like signal or intent to go and swarm, it buys you 2 weeks as a minimum, and it probably buys you up to 3 weeks. So that's like 14 to 21 days it's bought you. And if you do that 2 times throughout the season, you potentially get 6 weeks where you know your bees aren't going to swarm. So that is the reason that I do it. I don't do it to manipulate my bees to make me more honey. Some people will tell you that he's doing it to exploit the bees. I honestly don't do that. I do that for me, to make my life a little bit easier, but also to try and be a responsible beekeeper and try and keep my bees in my boxes and not in my neighbor's chimneys. So there is genuine intent to be responsible by doing that, and I like the economies of scale that come with it as well, and it really is for me a byproduct. It's a very welcome byproduct, don't get me wrong, but it is a byproduct. I'm not doing it to get more honey, I'm doing it to be responsible, make my life more easy, and just kind of identify and mitigate the known risks of the bees are likely to swarm during kind periods throughout the year, and if I can do something just to reduce that down, that costs me like— whoa, when I put that on there, I thought, I thought I'm gonna break that at some point today. Um, it costs one box, it's one additional box, and you can do a demerose split. Right, 16 minutes left. How many more? We've got a lot more questions, right? Uh, here we go. Uh, so Ian says, mist type, varroa resistance to Apivar. So it could— they could become resistant to Apivar. And you look at that recent study in the US and they say it was caused by the kind of viruses that have been transmitted by the varroa mite, and a lot of the colonies showed significant resistance to Apivar. But I don't— I think what's important with an integrated pest management plan is that you know what works and you know what doesn't work, and you have a backup, and you're using like 2 kind of like chemically different treatments. So luckily for me, I know that for my bees Apivar is highly effective, and I see it across the whole of the UK. People wouldn't use Apivar the way that they use it, they wouldn't consume it if it wasn't effective. Now that doesn't— I'm not sponsored by the company who creates Apivar, I recommend it because it's a very effective product that's good at what it does. Now that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate and understand the risks of using it, like I really do, and there is no doubt that over time the bees probably will build resistance to Apivar, so it's up to us as beekeepers and scientists to develop new treatments, and hopefully kind of less chemical-based treatments, and move towards something that works. Like, I love that. I'm really not a believer in ever standing still on anything. I hate the mantra that's, um, you've been doing it like this for 30 years, um, there's no need to change, and it's just like, that's the reason you've been doing it like that for 30 years, because your attitude like stinks. So I love going forward. So yes, likelihood is they will be resistant to Apivar at some point. They will also probably be at that point a lot of funding goes in to try and find new treatments or new methods for controlling varroa, and hopefully not Tropilaelaps or other mites or pests or parasites at that point. And it's just gonna keep on going on and on and on. Do I think in that time frame treatment-free beekeeping is gonna become powerful enough to combat those viruses? Absolutely not. I do not think it is. And that's, that's kind of like my opinion, which I think I am entitled to. And I respect the opinion of people who think that it is making a difference, and I can understand and appreciate the logic of it as well. I just think in over that time frame, I think it's, it's highly optimistic. I don't know why I look— I don't know why I do answer the questions way longer when I'm not looking Kind of like at myself or the video, I don't know why that is. Right, No Life Beekeeper James Noel says hello, says he's at the market, tongues out. Bree says, oi, have some yellow queens, and we like yellow queens. Simon G, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, here in Birmingham balsam has been out for over a week already. I love the bees going on that. Scout About says, on your channel membership you said about double brooding now, will you be taking those colonies into winter on double brood, or will you be compressing in August? So if I had a colony now where, say, it was on a single brood, 4 supers, I took the supers off and I felt I couldn't compress it into a single brood box then, and I double brooded. I'd leave them like that for the entire winter. Have to remember as well that this is— I do understand and I can see where people get confused on the advice, because the advice that I give to channel members is probably tailored more towards the beginner, the novice, someone who is at risk of killing their bees, someone who is at risk of not doing the varroa treatments at all or at the right time, or feeding them too much or feeding them too little. So I would always give advice that makes the life easier for that beekeeper. It's not necessarily going to be the best advice for maximizing your honey harvest, and it's not necessarily the advice that I take myself. So the double brood, single brood is a perfect example for that, because there are colonies where they're on double brood, and there are where they're on single brood. At this point in the year, kind of for the last 6 weeks, all of my colonies are on single brood. There is not a single colony after the June gap ever that is on double brood, because For me, it's incredibly wasteful to have so much like a void and a space for honey in the brood nest, and I just, I find it quite difficult to manage the colonies when I come to take the supers off if I don't have that extra brood box as a backup. So everything's on single brood going into the June gap or coming out of the June gap, and then I take my supers off, and if I can compress them down from single brood before supers into single brood around now, then I will. It's optimistic doing that though, and unless you get the good weather, I wouldn't want to risk it because you'd leave the bees out bearding for quite a long time. So the easier thing to do there is just to take all of the supers off, stick another brood box on, stick the feeder on, make sure the bees are accessing the feeder and using it, and then just say, right, that's it, they've got a queen. Check the queen, she's mated, I put my Apivar strips in, I've given them an additional brood box, I've doubled their brood nest, I've given them a feed, they're taking down the feed. Like, I've not got to go back to that colony for weeks now, as long as there's good weather. And then if the weather starts getting a little bit rubbish, you need to go back and start checking for weights and feeding, but you don't need to go into the colony again, like you never need to go back in once you've done your final check. The only time you have to go back now at the end of the year is just to take your Apivar strips out 8 weeks after putting them in. It's a really easy end to the year, I love this time of the year, it's like yes, because everything falls off a cliff edge, just like completely falls off, and it has been very busy, but we do like it. Right, so where are we up to? We've got 11 minutes left. Thank you for the 2 queens delivered today, great service, already in their hives. Thank you very much to you. I did take pics, very clear, but you can see yellow legs. I was told that it is the queen, builds a preliminary nest in a hedge quite low, then moves to a higher one up in a tree. I will send an email. It does, it does sound like it could be an Asian hornet. Laurence, what do you do with beehive comb? Do you melt it and reuse it for foundation? Thank you for answering all of our questions. So all of the wax, literally doesn't matter where it comes from, goes in a bucket. I render it all down at the end of the year, and we trade it in for foundation. So whether it's burr comb, even the cappings wax goes in there, anything beeswax just goes into the beeswax bucket and then we clean it all down. Hi Lawrence, in chat, I think we did that one. Kieran, channel member, says, is it too late to make a split now? So as long as you give them enough bees, I would say it's now 3 frames of brood and a frame of stores and a good shake of bees. So you can always make splits as you kind of get towards the end of the year, you know, if you got to the first week of September and you had a double brood colony that was on 10 frames of brood, You could just, you could split that in half quite easily. You wouldn't make it into 10 nucs because almost certainly they would all die, but you've got the resources there. You could have 2 splits there, both splits have 5 frames of brood, 5 frames of stores. Like, in September, that's more than enough of a unit to get them through the year. So it's never really too late until you get to, I would say, kind of mid to back end of September. But the amount of resources that you have to put into a split kind of goes up exponentially as you move towards Thomas says, hi Lawrence, I have 6 hives, one of them has turned aggressive, they all have eggs and brood, is it normal for this time of year, and how can you go from double brood to brood and a half for winter? So definitely don't go from double brood to brood and a half for winter. Whoever told you to do that, well, don't do that, that's crazy. Just if you're on double brood, just stick on double brood for winter, much easier for you, much easier for the bees, and you'll thank me come winter when you've got a— or come spring when you've got a super that's been tainted with Apivar and you can't use it anymore and you have to melt it all down. And you think, I swapped that for a brood box that I could have just kept as a brood box, it didn't matter that it was tainted by Apivar. So I wouldn't do that. What was the other part of the question? Turned aggressive? It is the time of the year, you couldn't get a worse 4 weeks of the year. Wasps robbing bees, no flow whatsoever, beekeepers taking off honey, it is really, really bad. As soon as everyone takes their honey off, and even as soon as you take your honey off and start feeding them, they are pussycats again, and then it's very, very easy for them, and it makes it a nice easy end to the season for everyone. Right, who is next on here? 8 minutes left. Since looking for eggs on a queenless hive with tons of queen cells, they made more while waiting for them to get queen right. Should I limit total possible queens to protect the one that makes it? So I think it's all or nothing when it comes to that. If they're making queen cells, they're doing it for a reason. If it's emergency cells, I take them all down, add a mated queen. If they're doing it because of swarming, it's up to you, but again, I think it's all or nothing, so you either take all of the cells down, add a mated queen, or you take down all of the cells and just leave one very best cell. They're the only real options I would give for that. Someone's just said take a drink, that's a good shout, but where did we get to? Hi, do you have any advice for when to treat your bees if you want to collect the heather honey? So the heather honey brings in a real awkwardness to my— I say my system, the system of kind of treatment early. And if you're— Murray McGregor is a perfect example of this because that's his crop. Like, Murray McGregor's crop is the Ling heather. Anything else on top of that is a bonus. So for him, that's not going to be the system that he uses. And there's a million and one other treatment systems that you can use and timing your treatments and using different treatments. And obviously Murray's going to know how to keep healthy bees because he's been doing it for decades, but the point is that that treatment and that advice there for kind of early treatment with Apivar is suitable for me because of the system that we have here and where we take our bees. However, we do take our bees to the heather occasionally, but we find that when you get a good bumper heather year, it sees you going for like loads of years because the heather honey that we sell isn't anywhere near as popular as the runny. even though it is very delicious. But when you're— if you're focusing on just heather honey, that's your main crop, I would potentially look at doing something different. And you can use Apivar, you could use Apivar as a spring treatment. Apivar in February, February through to April, that's the 8-week period, and you're doing it when there's brood in there, so there's not— sorry, when there's not that much brood in there, so it should be very, very effective at that time of the year. And then you could potentially extend out your season and go to the heather and then do just a late season oxalic acid treatment. So that there would be the same treatment cycle, it would be Apivar once a year and then apiviroxil once a year, and then you're just doing it at different times of the year. So instead of doing it at the end of the season, you're doing it at the beginning of the season to enable you to not treat while you're at Melba. So you can play around with it a little bit and work out something that's going to suit you. Right, taking that drink, I'm definitely, definitely going to drop this tablet. I had to catch some mated queens and place them in queen cages with attendants to move to a full hive. Do you have any tips on how to catch the attendance to get them engaged? I do, so I'm doing a video, I've completed, I reckon it's about 20 videos that I filmed that have not made it onto YouTube yet, they're with the editors, they've got to film, sorry, they've got to edit like close to 200 videos before the beginning of November, they've got a lot to do, but these 20 videos are all kind of wrapped up with all of the beekeeping course as well, 14-Day Beekeeper, So I'll show you how to do it on the video. There's a couple of ways of doing it. You can pick them up, pick them up by their wings and like slide the entrance of the cage down, just a little clear entrance, like the clear, the top bit, and then put the bees in one by one. Or you can put attendants on the table, put the cage on top of them. Or the way that I generally do it, if I'm doing it just like small scale, a couple at a time, just take the cage and I'll put it directly on the queen with a few attendants on a frame. And I'll get the little bit of plastic and I'll just— you've got to be really gentle and kind of like watch what you're doing, but you just slowly put it underneath like that and all of the bees just walk up on top of it and then you take it and it's done, you clip it all in. Impossible to follow that in text, but I have done a video on that, so you'll see that later on this year. Hi Lawrence, I'll try again, does drought affect the nectar flow? Oh, does drought affect the nectar flow? Yeah, like it's the number one driver. And this, and this is the problem. This is why Wales tends to do really, really well in years where overall rainfall is quite low. Um, they do like the satellite images, and you look at Wales like at the moment, and it's just always green, like just incredibly lush and green. And we don't get many like full flying days, but we get a lot of rain and everything stays nice, so we get a very prolonged flow. But you look at down south where you've not had rain for ages, that's what turns the season off. That's what compresses the season down, because the plants just— they're in a race for survival. They have to go through their life cycle to go from wherever it is where they start to wherever it is that they finish, to fruit and seed and all of that, quicker to make sure that they can survive for that season. So just the drought eliminates the flow, and that's the period that a lot of England finds itself in at the moment. So this is my advice to people. It's like you're in an emergency starvation situation, but you've got all of your supers on, so the bees are just going to be eating it. You're much better off just taking all of that off and immediately feeding. And don't be the person that does this, goes and takes all of their honey supers off, takes them back to the honey extraction, extracts them, but don't worry, they've all right, they've looked after the bees, they put the polyashwath feeder on, they filled it all the way up to the top, best syrup for their bees as well, and they've just not double-checked to make sure that the bees are accessing the feeder, and they come back next week and all the bees are dead. Everybody does that. It's the worst thing in the world because you've dotted the i's, you've crossed the t's, you've done everything, and then you kind of think, ah, that's like the system is broken, the product is broken, I put the syrup in and the bees didn't find it. I hate to break it to you, product's not broken, you've got to do the check. So the check is really, really simple. If you're looking at the Abelo or the Abelo polyasteroid feeder, it has like a metal thing, you just take the metal thing out if you want, but you need to open the little hole and just see that the bees are going up like a proper a full-on visual to make sure the bees are taking the syrup out. I take the metal thing away and just chuck a straw in there so you can, you can see it's quite obvious. Do need to check, make sure the bees are feeding. Right, let's have some more tea. What do you think about thymol against varroa? I know it's proven to be an effective treatment, but I've tried all of the different thymol-based treatments— Apiguard, Thymovar— and I don't think they're particularly good. I think they're very, very susceptible to temperature damage, but also they need to be used at the correct temperature, and then you compare their efficacy to Apivar and it's just night and day. So I'm not a fan of thymol-based treatments. My friend found a swarm in his garden and he says he's been there for 10 days now. I've never caught a swarm before, but I think I have everything I need. Is it worth catching a swarm in summer? Yeah, definitely, just even for nothing more than, like, they probably could do with a roof, which would be nice for them, and then there's plenty that you can learn from learn from them, and that's not like a horrible way, like let's exploit the bees and learn from them, but more in a, like, if they're not going anywhere, they're probably going to die unless someone gives them a hive. After 10 days, they're probably not going to go anywhere. After 10 days, they're probably a bit tetchy as well, so make sure you put a suit on. And after 10 days, their stomachs are almost certainly going to be purged, so you can feed them immediately. Bump them into a hive, frames and foundation all close up together, put the feeder on, and fruitfully. There is a mated queen inside. Right, where do we get to? I bought a queen from you and followed your method to introduce her in the hive, but it looks like they've killed her. What might I have done wrong? Thanks, Will. Sorry to hear that, Will. So even with the— this isn't shirking responsibility— even with the best preparation, so perfect preparation, hopelessly queenless, good flow that's going on, no wasps, even with all of that you can get introductions that fail. But at this time of the year, it just gets more difficult and more difficult to successfully introduce a queen because of all of these outside pressures that are going on with the hive. So it could, it could be you set it up perfectly but the colony is just under attack by wasps, there's no way that you could get a successful introduction in that state. Also if you're making splits sometimes that you kind of trigger off robbing yourself, so make a split, put it to the same place or a different stand in the same apiary and then you start getting robbing within the apiary, again very unlikely to be able to get a queen successfully introduced using that method. Or it could be something where you've made a split, you've knocked down all of the queen cells but you've missed one, and then there's a virgin in the hive. So there is, there's quite a long list of reasons as to why it potentially could have failed. What I always say to people in that situation is don't guess for the next one. So take a frame of eggs, add a frame of eggs in, give it 8 days, see what the bees do. Majority of the time they don't do anything, which means that there is a virgin in there. And then before you can add another queen in, you need to go and find that virgin, kill her, very difficult, and then and only then can you get the colony back on track. Regarding wasps, I 3D printed a wasp trap that screws onto the 5-litre containers, one-third filled with water and jam and savoury to stop bees entering. It works very, very well. I do like those very simple kind of bottle stop ones, they're very effective traps. I say they're very effective traps, I'm not sure how good they are at actually containing the problem. They're very, very good at getting filled up with wasps, And from what I understand with wasp traps, that doesn't necessarily kind of like fix the problem, tackle the problem the same way. Maybe I'm just getting suckered in by Wasp Bane's marketing, but Wasp Bane say about like the high efficiency traps as opposed to kind of like high volume, low efficiency traps. I don't know what I'm talking about with that, but I know that my Wasp Bane traps don't have that many wasps in, and the areas where I have them, I don't get hassled by wasps that much. And then conversely, where I have the bottle, the bottle top ones like that, there's loads more wasps in there and probably still like more wasps around as well. So maybe they're getting in, getting out, I don't know. But it's an interesting one. I'd love to do more like videos on that. I say I'd love to do more videos on that. Hmm. So at the moment we are, we're doing a lot of work up at the forest apiary just to make it nice and beautiful and sending down containers and stuff. And up there at the moment there is this huge wasp nest, and I wanted to see how big I could get it before I do the video. And they're like becoming a bit of a nuisance now. We're up there like trying to sand these containers down where the wasps are inside. So I'm kind of thinking, what should I do with this wasp nest now? Like, what am I actually going to do? I've not like got a plan. There's no plan. It was just see how big it was, do a video, and then that was the plan. And now I'm in a bit of a rush to take it down. So I think I'm gonna have to destroy this wasp nest, which I never like doing, but They are becoming a problem within the apiary. So does this sound bad? Like, what I'm thinking of doing is trying to video the disassembly of the wasp's nest and maybe just like set up a vacuum. I saw the Hornet King do this before, set up a vacuum at the entrance and just vacuum out all the wasps. Is that like a bit horrific, or— I don't know, it seems worth documenting. I'm not doing it for kind of like shock factor, I'm doing it for the maybe people would be interested to see, like, how many wasps are there. I don't know, let me know in the comments. Should I do it? Should I not do it? Uh, right, where are we going next? Oh, by the way, I will be giving away some more free queens as well. So we've got this batch going out on Monday, £32 each. I can't believe how many people have bought them already. So that they will sell out probably by, I don't know, Saturday or Sunday they would have been sold out. But I will be giving away some more free queens. So there is a cool video premiere tomorrow. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow, give away some more free Queens, but we will do it. I said I've committed to giving away a free queen per week, and with last week's or the week before's giveaway to ten queens, that got me pretty much back on track. So we'll make sure that we give away. It's 26 weeks of the season. We're giving away 26 queens by the end of the year. Oh, pardon me. Right, where are we going next? I've got three minutes over, but there's not that many questions left. So if you're watching this now, don't don't put any more questions on, please. But I will answer. All the way down to the bottom. Hopefully that is a good deal. Right, Gareth Rose says, "I'm going to buy queen and take some friends from my main hive. It works. Why not do it? It's it's great. It's a brilliant insurance policy." This is the email that I sent out to people the other day, saying, "We sell queens. Yeah, that's our business. We sell queens." But take that take that aside. It's really good advice to give to beginner beekeepers, which is you've got your first let's say you've got your first nuc of bees. and you've had some challenges this year, and maybe the bees have swarmed and you've got yourself a kind of super, 2 supers of honey. Maybe you've done really well, got 6, 7, 8 supers of honey, but you've just got to the point now where the honey's in the buckets, you've still got loads of bees there, and you're thinking, well, same again next year. Like, that was brilliant, really enjoyed it, a few challenges, but it was like, it was challenging, it was nice, we liked it, so we'll do the same again next year, right? We'll pack them all up. And then you go into the winter and you sell all of your honey by October, you think, all right, this is brilliant, next year we're gonna buy another nuc, we're gonna do something else next year, but we're gonna— no, in fact, we're not gonna buy a nuc, we're gonna split our colony into 3, and then that's how we're going to build up our colonies from there. And then you get to spring and the bees die, and you think, oh, that's really annoying because I could have made up some insurance policy nucs for like £40 each. So what people do in this scenario here is they kind of, you know, it's March, April, and they say, ring up and say, can I buy a nuc because like my one colony of bees died? And I say, like, we can probably just about get you onto the first week of June because that's how booked out we get. So it's really good advice to people, and it's advice to give you value for money if you're in that situation. You've got the one colony and you've really enjoyed the beekeeping. Don't think that the split is turning you from one colony into 2. It's your insurance to make sure that nothing goes wrong and you can continue your hobby into next year. And if you get both of those colonies through, Congratulations, like, that is a very good first season, especially getting the additional nuc through. But you'll be able to sell that nuc, like, for a lot more than it costs you to put it all together. Maybe it costs you £60 or £70 to put it together, but if you bought a nuc from us, you've still got the nuc, you've got the most expensive bit, the poly nuc, an animated queen, Apivar treatment, bit of feed. It's really, really easy to make them at this point in the year, and the biggest resource that you need to add in is the resource that you've got almost unlimited of, which is the bees, the brood. You can make a split. One split's easy, 2 splits is very easy from a big colony at this point of year, and it's such a cheap and effective way to ensure that you've got bees for the following season. Right, I'll jump out of sales mode again. So I do that, people say just back off with the sales, sorry. It's a different camera today, so I'm just, yeah, gotta get to the end, sorry. I'm also quite tired. Right, where did we get to? Mike said— I know, I'm really struggling with this. You talk a lot with your hands. Why Italian? I do talk a lot with my hands. Do you know what? I struggle when people don't talk with their hands. It's a bit like this, and they kind of just talk like that and just don't really move their hands around a bit and just talk. Like, I think I find that as awkward as people who don't talk with their hands maybe find me, but it's just like, it's like an automatic thing. So sorry if it's a bit too much. Uh, Gareth says, are you going to start selling other than just bees? So we sell, we sell nucs, we sell queens, we sell honey, and that is it. We're not selling anything else apart from a rather wonderful course called 14-Day Beekeeper that I'm going to start plugging now. So our course is not that far off being ready, it's about 8 weeks from launch, and we will be doing a very exciting launch come the 1st of November. We'll be doing Black Friday deals, we'll be doing Christmas deals, but we'll also probably be giving away some promos and some like sneak previews to the course as well. So definitely head over to the website blackmountainhoney.co.uk, and in the top right-hand corner there's a little subscribe button, and if you want to be first to know, you need to hit that button there. Uh, Carles says, good evening, Lawrence, I'm expecting to receive breeder queen for the first time in my career. What's your advice and recommendations to avoid unexpected things? So if you're buying like a breeder queen or an artificially inseminated queen, the biggest risk that you're going to have at this point in the year— this is the only advice I'm going to give you— is if she's artificially inseminated They will try to supersede her literally every 7 days up until, for us in the UK, the mid to back end of September, maybe into October. You've got to go in, you've got to continually go in there and take down the supersedure cells. It seems to take much longer than like standard queens. If they're trying to supersede and you knock them down, they stop doing it after the brood emerges. But with artificially inseminated queens, it takes them weeks. and sometimes months to stop doing it. Nothing worse than putting in a really expensive artificially inseminated queen in September and coming back in spring and she's not there and they've superseded her and you just think, oh, that is very annoying. So that is the prime bit of advice that I will give you there. Evening, Laurence, I've got a colony which was 2 I merged, one queenless, the other queenless with a queen cell. It's been about 4 weeks since queen cell emerged and no eggs. Should I shake them out at this point? I think with the kind of time of the year, I would be shaking them out at this point, because if you shake them out, if you do something kind of like now before they become a problem, then you get all of that resource, all of those bees can be used and help the other colonies. If you wait until they're laying workers, then you lose all of the frames, all of the frames become a nuisance and something you have to clean out, and then they become a difficult unit of bees to deal with. As well, so I would check them out. Uh, Simon says Murray's Ling Premium beeswax smells amazing. I definitely agree with that. Gareth Rowe says, when's the cutoff for queens? Oh, so it's probably gonna— it's probably gonna be the last week of October— last week of August, first week of September. It definitely, definitely will not be later than the first week of September. Uh, Jean says, Lawrence, see you on the next live stream, appreciate what you do. Thank you very much, Jean. Gareth says, what's the best dark queens to buy? I like our Obsidian ones, they're definitely the darkest ones that we sell, but do not confuse them, they're not AMM, they're not local Welsh black bees, they are a special Black Mountain Honey Melitta bees mix that we keep top secret, but they are very, very dark and a bit grey fluffy bees, they're nice. I like my Obsidian ones, I nearly said what they actually were there, but there's nothing to hide. Evening Lawrence, what are your thoughts on splits this time of year and do you have any queens left? So yes, we do have queens left. Splits at this time of the year, 3 frames of brood, frame of stores minimum, and a good shake Neil Phillips says, I bought 2 F1 VSH Buckfasts from you at the end of June, 3 weeks later I had one, one had 5 capped, sorry, 5 full capped brood and the other queen has 2 capped brood. Shall I just have patience with the slower queen? So I have this conversation with people a lot and I don't know the circumstances exactly of your situation there, but the queen is very much a servant to the conditions of the hive, so you can put 2 identical, like perfectly mated queens. Let's assume they're just perfectly mated, and you put them into 2 different colony setups, one that's got the right amount of nurse bees, one that's got the right amount of space, one that's got the right amount of nectar coming in, one that's got the right amount of protein, one that's not got old frames in it, one that's got a lot of bees or more bees than the other, and you can see how like these differences will really impact the ability of the queen to lay eggs. Also, you have this delay with the queen, so if you put a queen into a colony, She might lay eggs from day 1, might take her like 3 or 4 weeks to start laying, so you have this lag. So one might have laid straight away, one might have laid like 2 weeks after, so they should balance out. But if you're noticing like differences between the colonies as opposed to just the amount of brood that the queen's creating, then I would say that's probably where I would focus more of my attention. So if the one that's only got 2 frames of brood or 2 frames of eggs is looking much smaller, I'd probably just look to boost the population by adding a frame of emerging brood in, and knowing that you're going to get loads more nurse bees. That'll give the queen, it'll give the queen the ability to lay more eggs because there's more nurse bees there, and then the colony can expand and be a little bit quicker. So I wouldn't worry about it. The bigger thing, more concerning thing, is that she's laying, and that she's laying capped worker brood, and then you can influence her by setting the hive up in different ways. Right, Thomas, you're number 2. of the leaderboard. Who, who won the leaderboard one today? Mark Buchanan was number 1. Well done, Mark. You, you didn't win anything, but I'll maybe remember you for next time when we've got some prizes. We'd love to see the wasp video, but I suspect the comments might be a bit spicy. Very good. Uh, Simon says, where on the website are the £32 queens? So if you just go to the F1 Buckfast listing, and then there's a dispatch day of Monday, I think it's 25th— no, Monday the 28th of July. And if you click on that Monday the 28th of July, it will discount the £40 queens down to £32. Hi Lawrence, what are your thoughts on Tropilaelaps? Presentation from Richard Knowlton and Maggie was very concerning. So if you go back to the beginning, I gave a good, a good 10 minutes. I have no basis for thinking that it's any less concerning than they say. I have addressed some of my points at the beginning though. Ordered my first bees from you for next year, debating on plastic frames as I lack storage for honey extraction equipment. Definitely go with wood. 100% wooden frames, wax foundation. Just got another lot of 10 queens. My husband says I'm mad. Every time I see the orders come through, I think, oh, she is really going for it. It's brilliant. You are so like me. It's like, hmm, should we, should we get like some chickens for the garden? You think, yeah, one chicken, maybe I should get 2 chickens, probably get 2 chickens. And then at the end of the year, it's like 7,000 chickens, and you think, we just like started a chicken farm. Tug in cheek, of course, but that is, that's exactly what I would do, and I'm sure, I'm sure you're the same. It's a baptism of fire. It's the best way of learning though, and you're going to just have so much fun along the way. So anything I can do to help, I do, I do admire your, um, uh, like your vision and your persistence. Very, very good. Uh, Jean says, Lawrence, do you ship to the USA? I'm afraid we do not ship to the USA, and I can't see that changing anytime soon. There might be some developments on something close to that though in the future at some point. Got the last say with the thumbs up. So sorry I didn't have the camera set up. If you want your queens, £32 each, get in there quickly for Monday the 28th of July dispatch only. The only final thing that I was saying on there is I, I can't quite get over the level of support for our nucleus colonies, and I do send reminders out to people saying like 30 or 40 or whatever it's percent gone. We're over 50% sold out for next year's nucs. And it's not even August yet, so there is no way that we're going to get to like September or October this year. The overwinter nucs are going to go, so if you want them, now is the time to go in and reserve them, and you'll be happy kind of getting on the list because it means you get your nucs really early on in the season. All right, that's it, we're done. Hopefully you enjoyed that. Sorry about the, the crazy camera angles and stuff like that, and the hair. I'm gonna go off and drink my tea. I wish you all a very good weekend. It's still on because I have to go back here and turn it off. And there we go, stream is now