Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 55

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. Firstly, I apologize for last week when I was supposed to do a live stream. I had my— people, people are calling it a holiday, definitely wasn't a holiday. I had my trip to kind of went to Malta and through Italy to learn all about bees because you can never stop learning about bees. And my flight was due back at Manchester at like half 6, 7 o'clock, and I thought I reckon I can get back for that. If not, I'll do it in the car park. And then my flight from Milan was, uh, postponed by like 3 hours, so it completely wiped it out. So last week didn't happen, but you can, you can put it in your calendar now. Every other week I will be here Friday night, half past 7. Apologies that it coincides with the football tonight. I definitely wouldn't have done it, uh, to try to coincide with the football deliberately, but I just want to keep it every Friday. So it will be Friday now, no matter what it clashes with. Friday night. Every other week, 7:30 PM. Let's talk bees. There is lots and lots and lots to talk about. Oh man, there is so much going on. The bee season has definitely started, but maybe not completely started for everyone, and hopefully we'll answer some of those questions today. So I will do as many questions as I possibly can. I'll try to get through to the end. Disclaimer: I am not very well. I have come back with a serious illness, and I should really be in bed recuperating. So if you if you kind of see me nodding off at any point, just. Give me a nudge. Maybe hit the like button. That should wake me up. But I will do my very best to stay. I'll stay for at least a couple of hours. I'll probably answer the questions quite quickly this evening though. But if you want your question answered, just stick it in the comments. You only have to stick it in there once. I will get all the way through to the bottom before we stop. What else are we going to talk about? I say I've been booking everyone's nucs in at the moment. So if you've ordered a nuc and you're wondering what's going on, the overwintered nucs are now We're sending emails out to people, and then we'll be moving on to the kind of like May delivery ones. So if you've not had an email through yet with your date, you will get one through in the next 2 to 3 weeks. If you want any further info, just drop me an email, blackmountainhoney@gmail.com, and I can tell you exactly what's going on. If you got an email today saying we had some overwintered nucs available for sending out next week, so Wednesday the 26th of March, and then you logged in to find that they had gone, they had sold out— they sold out in 45 minutes. And there was 30 of them. So I just, I can't get over that. Thank you so much, incredible support. It makes my life so much easier being able to balance stuff like that. Um, but we had, we had a lot of cancellations for overwintered nucs and we, we sold them back out in 45 minutes. So huge support and, uh, my, my thanks. Let's get in, answer some questions then. Uh, there we go. Right, Stealth Number One, he says, hi, I went to the hives yesterday, a couple of light ones, previously double underbrooded a few weeks ago, the foundation fondant on as bees will like, but wondering about 1:1, planning expansion from 4 hives to 12. So I've done a few channel member exclusive videos today, so if you're a channel member like Stealth, there are some— there's some videos coming out. They're uploaded and I'll fancy them up, uh, this evening after the live stream and get them out to you. But I spoke a little bit about this there as well in terms of forward planning, knowing what you want to do, and being decisive with your actions. So it's really good that you've got a plan. You want to go from 4 hives to 12, which means that for me, for feeding 1:1 at this time of the year really is a no-brainer, but it's not a case of just going out and sticking some 1:1 on 14-litre, fill the polyashworth feeder up with 1:1 and let the bees get on with it, because you'll do a lot of damage at this point in the year. So you've got fondant on at the moment, and I look outside for the weather for where we are for the next few days, and I would be feeding fondant as well. And it might not stimulate the colony to grow quite as much, but it does what it needs to do, which is, you know, gives them sustained carbohydrates which they need to live. But then what I'd be doing is any day, say you get a weekend, say next weekend it's going to be like 20 degrees for 2 days, which is kind of what we're getting at the moment. I think last week it was 24 degrees, we had a day of 24 degrees here, and then the next day was 4 degrees, like literally overnight, and it started snowing. And I thought, wow, the 2, the 2 different, um, scenarios for your bees there. But what I say to people is if you want to start feeding 1:1 sugar syrup, you can start feeding it, but feed it in very, very small amounts feed it only when the bees are really flying well, and they'll clear out a litre or 2 of syrup in a day, and they'll process it down before it gets cold again, and you're not like saturating the hives down. So if that was me, I'd keep the fondant on there, let the bees go on, and then maybe add a frame feeder or exchange the fondant for polyashworth feeder, flip it over if it's already flipped over, and put some syrup in, but put a small amount in, and that will help the bees drawing it out when they can. But do not go over the top, and 2:1 is fine, will do exactly the same thing. as well. Also says living in the Southeast, so yeah, you are, you are good to go because the weather will be much, much better for you down there. John has very kindly collated some questions that have come in, I think on the No Nonsense Beekeeping group. Thank you for that, John, and thank you for everything you do. You're brilliant. So, lovely, uh, lover, a lover wintered. I'm assuming that says an overwintered nuc, plenty of bees on 5 to 6 frames. However, the queen has turned drone laying. Is there any chance of saving the nuc by introducing a frame or 2 of brood in all stages to see if they can make some queen cells, or is it too early? So 100%, it's too early. Just completely disregard that as an idea. I said I'm going to be quick on the questions today, but it's a really bad idea. What would happen there is you'll give them, give them a couple of frames, they'll make queen cells, the virgins might emerge, and they will not get mated because there's not going to be any drones, sexually mature drones, in the air by the time they emerge. But I'd still probably do the same thing, which is add a couple of frames, preferably capped brood. That will keep the colony going. What you've got at the moment is lots of old winter bees with no young bees coming through to replenish them, which means that those old bees will live quite long. It's not really got a huge amount to do. They've not had to rear any brood, which extends their life, but then all of a sudden they'll just all die and be left with nothing. But by adding in frames of brood, you're going to prolong that. You're giving them brood in all stages, or like I say, best capped brood if you can do it, emerging brood. So that's the least amount of work that those bees need to do for the young bees to come out. And then that will just prolong the life of that nuc. And then, but what I would suggest doing is every 8 days after you add the new frame in, going down and taking down the emergency cells. You don't want virgins coming out because it complicates things. There's no way they can go out and mate. And then what you could do is you could do that, maybe like add a frame of brood a week or kind of every 10 days or something like that. And then after 10 days, go in and take the cells down and then add another frame in, and you'll get the colony back up to a point where if you added a frame of brood in all stages in middle of March— sorry, middle of May— then you could do that. If you wanted to do an emergency impulse queen, then at that point, you know, after like 3 or 4 frames of brood have gone in and emerged, then you could add your frame of brood in, let them build emergency cells, and then let those cells emerge. And then fingers crossed you get a mating and you'll have mature drones at that point. Hopefully that answers the question. Good luck with it. Uh, Danny Bees. Mark says good evening. Good evening to you too, Mark. Uh, John also says, Mark Blaze question, Black Mountain Honey sells queens with VSH traits, which is Varroa Sensitive Hygiene. In the last live chat, Lawrence did not exactly extol the explanation. Love it. So, uh, we did, we did have a very in-detail chat about this one, Mark. Um, and what Mark was, was not entirely happy with what I said last time. Let's try and be, um, non-controversial here in any way. I've got my PC hat on here, definitely. Right, so what Mark was not happy about was what, what I said last week was that a lot of treatment-free beekeepers will let their colonies die, and then the colonies that don't die, they'll requeen, they'll kind of like use those genetics to make splits, and then that's the way that they propagate the VSH tendency. What Mark said a lot of beekeepers do is, instead of letting the colonies die, is that they'll do some sort of assessment on the colony, and there's loads of different ways that you can do it. There's the Harbo assay, there's the frozen brood evaluation, there's tons of different ways that you can evaluate the Varroa-sensitive hygiene. Characteristics of the bees without letting them die. And I fully agree with what Mark is saying there. A lot of people do that, and a lot more experienced beekeepers will do that assessment, and they'll requeen or like proactively requeen colonies that they know aren't going to do quite well, or they're checking for mite drops and they're saying, well, there's a lot of varroa on this, they're not coping with it very well, so let's requeen everything and no colonies have to die. And I completely 100% agree with that, Mark. Some beekeepers do not do that. I went on an Irish beekeeping page the other day and they were talking about how they happily cull colonies kind of early on in the year if they're angry, which fair enough, or if they're banded, so if they've got the wrong color, and if they've got really high varroa. So they just go in and just kill the colonies. I didn't even bother reading that far down to see how they did it because I just, having had to kill colonies myself for disease reasons, it is the worst possible thing in the entire world to do and it is horrible. And I'll be controversial again, Mark. I don't like to see any colony of bees ever die, and I can't like have that on my conscience. So I, whilst on the one hand I have respect for people who are going down this treatment-free route, and not necessarily your route, I have respect for your route as well, and your route I think is like a notch up and it's much more advanced, but at that beginner level where people are saying, if my bees die from varroa, they're not the bees for me and I don't want them. Personally, I think everyone should be entitled to kind of keep bees in their own way, so there's no judgment here. I can't do that. It's like— and this will rile some people, it really will— but it's like saying, my dog's got fleas and I'm not going to treat the fleas because I want a dog that can just tolerate fleas, so I'll just let it die. and then I'll get another dog and then maybe he'll tolerate the fleas better. And I know people say that's a real kind of brash generalization, but it's not. It's a case of you're letting like a living thing die because of some traits that you're not entirely happy with. And this isn't— I'm not like talking to you, Mark. I know you don't do that, and I know that was the issue that you had last week, which was saying that all people who are treatment-free go through that kind of selection process of just doing nothing, letting the bees die, and if they get any survivors, they breed from them. And you didn't like that, you didn't like me saying all treatment-free beekeepers were like that, which is fine, and I agree and accept that not all treatment-free beekeepers are like that. And at that medium to kind of like intermediate and advanced level, they're definitely not going to do that because you can fast-track things, like you say, in a different way by finding the ones with the best VSH tendencies and then requeening, proactively requeening the ones where you think it's maybe not quite as good. But like I said in the messages to you, I know at least 5 beekeepers who are kind of like public on social media who actively say we don't treat our colonies and if they die we don't want those bees. So it definitely does happen and I personally don't agree with it and couldn't do it to my own bees. So there we go, not gone off on one in there at all and hopefully not caused a huge amount of offense to anyone there, but I've kind of got to the point where I think I'll just say how I feel. Julian Martin says, nice bobble hat. It's actually a really old bobble hat, this one. This is my Dirt Rooster one. And do you want to see why I'm wearing a bobble hat? It's just gone— it's just gone a bit ridiculous, isn't it, the hair? So we wear a hat now to kind of just keep it out the way. Um, but it's my midlife crisis haircut and it's— it's here to stay. Oh, I'm just looking through all the comments here. Right, I spent way too much time on that question, so we're going to be a bit quicker. Lynette, good evening to you. Good evening to Robert Bone, 2 channel members there. John says, don't forget to hit the like button before you leave. Very, very good. Thank you very much, John. Um, I'll chuck that one up there as well. Facebook just automatically populates this for me now. If you want to join our exclusive VIP mentoring program, all you have to do is go over to either Facebook or YouTube and join as a channel member or a subscriber. Loads of videos coming your way, and you can drop a video— sorry, you can drop a comment on any video at all, and I will pick it up and I will answer it. And that can just be like a completely irrelevant question about something, nothing to do with that video, but that's the way to get the communication going if anyone is interested. Okay, Stuart Henderson says, in Scottish Central Belt, middle of 1,000 acres of oilseed rape, thinking of feeding syrup. Yesterday my hives looked strong but not even opened the crown board yet for fear of disrupting the syrup? So it's, it is difficult for me to give advice kind of like depending on where you are in the country, but I would say for anyone considering feeding bees in the spring, do you need to feed your bees in the spring? Like, what's the reason? So are you looking to expand your colonies to make splits? Are you looking to build up nice strong colonies for the oilseed rate, which I think perfect justification for your scenario there, Stuart? Or are you just wanting to have like an easy life and try and minimize swarming and get through to September without any major dramas? And then I'd be like, oh, if you're that last one, definitely don't feed syrup. So I think The next thing you need to establish is, does the colony— is the colony actually able to take syrup? So is it in a 12-frame hive and it's just a little 3-frame cluster there doing not much? And they'll be like, well, syrup's not going to make a huge amount of difference. You can't— I don't want to say you can't polish a turd, but you can't polish a turd. You only really want to feed colonies where it's going to be beneficial for that colony to achieve your goals. So you need to get in there really and have a look because the colony might be honey-bound. They might, you know, you open them up and you see like a big cluster, 10 frames of bees and everything's good, and then you go in and there's just 9 frames of honey stores. So you need to make sure there is plenty of space for the bees to expand the brood nest, actually use that syrup in a good way. And then also what I would say for you, like central belt of Scotland, is do the temperatures allow it? So syrup feeding really shouldn't start until you have, you know, consistent 14, 15 degrees, but not cold overnight as well. If it's dipping down to 3 or 4 overnight, I'd I wouldn't really be feeding syrup in any quantities at all. You want it kind of like a little bit higher than that to not disrupt the bees and kind of like create a really cold, moist environment for them to cluster up overnight. So in terms of like the question syrup question mark, I think it's on a case-by-case basis. If you're going into those colonies there, they're really nice big strong colonies, the temperature's 14, 15 degrees kind of like a few days in on a run, it's not dropping down to 3 or 4 degrees, you know, it's like 7 or 8 degrees overnight, you go into the colonies, you open them up, they're big strong colonies, they've got space to expand, then yes, I'd be feeding 1:1 sugar syrup at this point, just to boost them, but only if they need boosting. So it depends kind of what your strategy is. If you're looking to like maybe build them up and go double brood to really like take advantage of that oilseed rape, then great, I'd go for it. But personally for me, like, the oilseed rape tends to hit at a very strange time. It's definitely like a new variety, not as easy to build up for, and it seems to like— it comes a bit too quick. So for me, I use the oilseed rape for building up colonies, for feeding my colonies. I don't get a massive crop of honey on it, but every single colony that comes out of the oilseed rape comes out 10 out of 10, full of pollen, full of lots of nice young nurse bees, and great for making splits. So It's what you think. For me, if I was doing oilseed rape on like a honey production basis, I wouldn't be building them up onto double brood because I think it's not very efficient for, you know, honey production. I'd be forcing them on a single brood and just crossing my fingers that they don't swarm. So I probably wouldn't even feed syrup unless the bees needed like a little bit of— a little bit, and I wouldn't say like a kickstart, not even a kickstart, if they just needed some food to keep going, to kind of keep that brood rearing. So case by case. I know that's a very fluffy answer. Hopefully there was some use in there. Denby Honey says hello. Hello, Paul. Wonder where you're off to this week. New place each week, Paul. Castle Hive says hello. Hi, Brian. How are you? Margaret says hello, Lawrence, from rainy northern Spain. Hope all is well. It's a change, isn't it? Because we've had nice weather here this week and then the rain comes back next week. James says good evening. Hello, James. The Arctic Beekeeper says hello from Norway. Do you make queens nowadays? Saw your reel on Instagram. So we've always done queens, UK mated queens. I just, you know, you get to the point in the season and I can't, I can't keep up with everything in terms of the filming. The ones that you're seeing at the moment, for anyone who's confused and thinking what's going on, like there's drones, there's queens, all sorts kicking off on the channel, I have been away. So I've been on tour with Melitta Bees who produce all of our queen bees, learning more about queen rearing, got some brilliant tips, got loads of videos. I think I filmed 40 long-form videos when I was out there, and as you can see, hundreds and hundreds of shorts. So we'll keep, we'll keep those, uh, coming out to you regularly, and you will be very excited with the videos we have coming up. Some brilliant videos. Uh, channel member, says hello. Hello to you too, Richard. says, hi Lawrence, how would you advise me to transfer my existing colonies from National to Langstroth? Thanks, Ed. I don't know why I read that in such a weird Way, Ed. Apologies for that. How would I advise you to transfer from National to Langstroth? So National to Langstroth is a really, really easy conversion, and there's loads and loads and loads of different ways of doing it. My daughter popped her head around the door there, I think. So you, if you take, if you go, ah, here we go, you can do this now, add that on. Brilliant, right? So I've got my new drawing app on here, and it's Brilliant because it kind of snaps onto here, right? So imagine that is a Langstroth frame. How cool! That is pretty cool, isn't it? Come on, let's give a round of applause for that because I'm so proud that I managed to get it to snap onto the lines. It makes my six-year-old drawings look so much better, right? So imagine that is a Langstroth frame like that, and I'm just going to take that back and I'm going to draw it again in a slightly different way. And then you'll see why I've drawn it in a different way in a second. Right, so what I've done there, that is a Langstroth frame as well, but we've not got the bottom bars on. So if you, if you make up Langstroth frames like that, what you can do is you can just take— I know, I know Langstroth lugs aren't that big. Langstroth lugs are kind of more here like that. I don't— I've not got a rubber, or at least I've not worked out how to use the rubber on here yet. I won't draw it again. So I will draw it again. Go on. I'll just quickly draw it again for you. Sorry to anyone who— ah, right, I take back the round of applause. Sorry to anyone who's listening to this as a podcast, I am currently just trying to draw a Langstroth frame. Right, so there we go, Langstroth frame with the correct lugs. What you can do with a national frame if you don't have this bottom bit here— take that away— is you can just put the frame in. So this one here that I'm drawing now is a national And it fits like perfectly. You'll have like this space here that the bees will fill out with wild comb, and this space here the bees will fill out with wild comb. And in terms of, in terms of connecting it, all you do is you just get kind of like ratchets, uh, not ratchets, uh, zip ties, and you just zip tie the frame in across here like that. Really, really easy way of doing it. Um, another way of doing it Is go back. So that that's an easy way of doing it. That's probably a way that I would recommend. Another way of doing it is if you can imagine that this is a cross section of ah right. It's the only thing that annoys me with this. Well, imagine that's a cross section of a Langstroth box and the frames like you have to you just have to use a little bit of common sense with how the lugs are looking here. Right. So that's that's a Langstroth frame. In a Langstroth box. If you take that Langstroth box and you put a couple of screws in like that, then what you can do is you can take a national frame with its big chunky lugs. Ah, annoying, isn't it? Again, so like I get so far, it's like, it's like, um, like Pac-Man or something. You get so far and then you mess it all up and you get really annoying. And you can see that I can't talk properly when I do it either. So maybe we've— maybe this experiment has failed already. But you can see here, so you've got 2 screws and then you can balance a National frame in a box like that. Both of those systems work very, very well. So let me remove that and I will just clear the screen for the next time. I love doing the drawings there. So that is how I would do it, simple as that. Just either zip tie them in or balance them in like that, and then you can just exchange them out as you need. Good evening. Hello to you too, Graham. Uh, David says he's watching this while giving blood. Respect, good work. What what blood type are you? Feel free to not answer that if you're worried about anyone cloning you. Mohan says this is my first time starting beekeeping. Any advice, sir? I so what I would say whenever I get that question is go onto the channel and have a look at how to start beekeeping in 2025. It goes on for about half an hour, but gives you like my top 30 points on how to start beekeeping, and it just gives you way more information that I could give you on the live stream. So I would give you that one. If you want my one bit of advice though, is don't take it too seriously and have fun. Fun, and that is two bits of advice. Cub Rider says, "Don't get too excited just yet, people. There's a whole lot of 2025 to come." Oh, I get excited about the future. I do. I also get slightly overwhelmed. Dominican Beekeeper says, "Greetings from the Caribbean." Greetings to you too. Graham Astor says, "Is Black Mountain Honey going to be at the Welsh Beekeepers Association spring event in Porthcawl tomorrow?" I can't talk. No, I'm afraid I'm not going to be. I'm not going to be there. Surprisingly, I'm not— unsurprisingly, I don't get invited to any events, none at all, and you'd never guess why, but there is a very straightforward reason why, and I think it might have something to do with the bees that we sell. But hey ho. Good evening. Good evening to you too, Harry. Channel member says, is there a way to split but still have a good honey crop? Trying to balance expanding and paying off the initial costs. So if you're talking about kind of going from 1 hive to 2 to 4 to 8 and to get a honey crop, it's like probably the best piece of advice that you see handed down the generations, which is you can't make bees and make honey. You just can't do both at once, and trying to do both generally ends up with both of those things performing worse than if you just chose one. So say for example you've got 1 hive you're starting off with and you want to do bee— you want to make splits and honey, you'll probably end up at the end of the year with 3 colonies of bees and and let's say £50 of honey, something like that. Making up the figures, so don't take those seriously. Whereas if you went like just for honey, you might get £100 of honey, and if you went just for splits, you might get up to 6 colonies. So you kind of get more value out of doing like choosing one or the other. Expanding is way easier as well, like making splits and just adding in good quality queens, Black Mountain honey if you need them, and then feeding the bees they never swarm because they're just little small splits, and you can kind of like learn the beekeeping as you're expanding upwards like that. When you get to the point you're like, right, I've got 20 hives and I just want honey now, that's when it gets really fun, and that's when it gets really difficult as well. But good luck, good luck trying to do it, trying to balance expanding and paying off the initial costs. Very, very good point. But the way that I would see that is that if you've got one colony, say you buy a nuc from us, £350, and you put it into a colony this year, put it into a beehive, and you're thinking about like trying to balance expanding and paying off the initial costs— I said this on the channel members video and you'll see it later on— having that strategy of actually doing something, um, is much better than just kind of like sleepwalking into the season. So what I would suggest doing is you, you take your 6 frames out of the nuc, you put it into your beehive, you let them expand to maybe like 10 frames, and then before you put a super on, you just take a frame with brood, emerging brood, and the queen and a frame of stores, put it back in the nuc, shake some bees in, put some more frames of foundation in, take it off to another site, give it a little bit of feed, let it build up, and then you've still got your nuc, you've still got your colony of bees, your full colony that I would suggest just chucking a mated queen into, and then you've got the nuc, the nuc's there again, you can just sell the nuc, you've kind of got your money back. It's as easy as that. So that is what I would, I kind of recommend doing, and that's probably going to be the best way of trying to expand and keep some honey at the same time, because taking out a frame of brood, a frame of stores, and a shake of bees is not really going to set the colony back that much. Set it back a little bit, but you still get a decent honey crop out of it, and then you've, you've turned one colony into 2. So I hope that's helpful. Good evening, Laurence. Hoping for some help. I have 4 nucs, and I know the saying you can have bees or honey but not both. But I want my cake and eat it. So if I was in his position, queens, is there more, and hive's not an issue, how would you tackle it? I love it because that is exactly what Richard just said, the question before you, and I kind of answered it. And I think it's just, it's wise to think that many people have been through this situation, me included, and everyone wants both. Everyone wants honey and lots of bees and lots of splits, but you can't have both. You just can't have it. So I would just sit down and work out what you want, like what's realistic. If you've got 4 nucs and you're going to put them into hives, I would say a realistic end of season looks like you've still got your 4 nucs and then you've got 4 colonies of bees that have produced a decent amount of honey as well. And if they're well managed and you get good forage and good weather, you know, you could get £100 per hive and the splits. That's £400 of honey and you've doubled colonies. That's realistic, as opposed to thinking that you might be able to split your 4 nucs into, I don't know, 16 colonies and then still get some honey off them, which, which I don't think would be realistic. So if you, if you have an idea of kind of what you want, stick it in the comments and I'll see whether I think it's realistic. But I would say that that first option there would be quite good for you. Brilliant name, channel member, says, I have 2 hives on all 11 frames with 7 frames of brood. Is it too early to add supers? So Channel exclusive member video coming your way straight after this because this is exactly what I answered today. Um, depends where you are, depends where you are in the UK. For some people now it's the right time to be start— to start adding supers. For some people it's way, way too early. So I will draw again because it kind of only came to me this the other night when I was thinking about like double brooding and stuff. A lot of people have underbrooded, which is, which is really good. Like I said when I did that video, if you underbrooded and then you had 2 days of 24 degrees followed by a week of 4 degrees with snow, you couldn't have your bees set up any better in an underbrood configuration. So let me just quickly show you the underbrood configuration again on here. I don't know why it's drawing that like that, uh, it's because that's on, right? So underbrood, uh, so that's your brood box there. Underbrooding is just putting another brood box underneath like that. But in answer to your question here, is it too early to add supers? If you're, if you're worried about the bees having space, what you can do is you can under super as well, yeah, so what you would need to do is add in a queen excluder underneath like that, and then you put your super underneath, and then if I take the snap off here, your bees, if they want to expand, they can just expand downstairs under the super. But what it means is that you know your queen is always going to be in the top like that, so undersupering like that with a queen excluder in place really doesn't give you any further work other than you need at some point to take that super and put it up there. But if you're worried about temperatures, if you're worried about your colony not having enough food, but you're also worried about space, you can undersuper in the same way that you underbrood. And you'll get people saying, that's a stupid thing to do, bees work upwards, what's he talking about putting stuff underneath? And yeah, I understand, I understand the logic, bees do much prefer boxes on top of them and they work up and they have the brood at the bottom. I understand the mechanism of the beehive, but what people also want is they don't want their bees to swarm in April or March. And I think a lot of people got caught out last year. It was just so cold for so long and so wet, and a lot of people went in kind of like April 15th, April 20th, for the first time you were able to get into the hives last year, and found their colonies had swarmed. And if they'd underbrooded, or like double brooded underneath, or undersupered with the queen excluder, which does exactly the same thing, but it means that the brood is confined to the top, then the bees wouldn't have swarmed. And it doesn't— there's no negative impact on the bees by putting a box underneath them. I've seen a few people saying, well, it means that the bees have to heat up more space, and it's like, no, the bees don't need to heat up more space because they're living at the top. If they were living at the bottom and I put a box on top, so if I double brooded on the top or I supered up on the top and then it got cold, then definitely, that would really set them back. When people come up with that argument, it's like, that's the exact reason why I do it underneath, so they don't lose the heat upwards like that. But I see a lot of people doing it now, and I see a lot of people having good, good success on it. And if you, if you say you underbrooded in the middle of, under double brood in the middle of Feb, and you get to like the 1st of April and the bees haven't gone down into the box, it really doesn't make a difference. It's okay, just take the box off and carry on a single brood, or you could put the double brood box back on top, you've lost like nothing, you've not set your bees back, whereas if you overbrooded, like double brooded on top, you could really, really set your bees back at that point and lose the ability to feed. So is it too early to add supers? No, if you're down on the south coast and you're getting 15, 16 degrees every day and you're seeing pollen coming in, you're seeing nectar coming in, you're seeing the colony expanding and it's reached the limit of the hive and the bees aren't honey bound and you don't want to double brood or you've kind of gone through all those considerations, then I would say it is about the right time for some people. If you're middle of Scotland and it's kind of like 10, 11 degrees in the day and 2 or 3 degrees overnight and there's no good weather on the out or like kind of coming in and the colony is still quite small and they're clustered up, I'd be like, well, definitely not. I wouldn't even undersuper at that point because the bees quite clearly aren't ready for it. And then you can probably draw a line and extrapolate from the south down, well, from the south all the way up to Scotland, you might be somewhere in the middle. So it does change a lot depending on where you are in the UK. Julian says, nice bob of hair again. I'm sure there's plenty of comments about the shocking hair. Kernophysio says, I'd like to split a hive. Can I move the queen a week before the new queens arrive, keep the original hive together, then split the week-old queenless hive the day the new queens arrives? Right, let me read that again. So can I move the queen a week before the new queens arrive? Where are you moving that queen to? Keep the original hive together then split the week-old queenless hive the day before the new queen arrives. Okay, yeah, so if you're just saying you've got a beehive, you're going to take the queen out, let that colony become queenless by taking it out, 8 days later it's hopelessly queenless, knock down all the queen cells, and then when the new queen arrives you're gonna make a split or 2 splits. Is that what you're doing? I'm confused as to where you're putting the original queen. Um, he says, can I move the queen a week before the new queen arrives, keep the original hive together, then split the week-old queenless hive the day before the new queen arrives. So you can do that, but I don't understand where the original queen is going. Is she going off somewhere on her own, or is she being killed? If she's being killed, then that's fine— not fine, but you know, if that's your process and you're removing a queen and then you're just kind of leaving a hive queenless for 8 days and then taking down all the emergency cells, making it hopelessly queenless, and then when the new queens— I'm assuming you've got 2 queens— come, you split the hive at that point, that's perfectly acceptable. No problem. Good evening, Laurence, wishing you a speedy recovery. What is your 2025 beekeeping season resolution? Any updates on the course? Oh, I like this question. So beekeeping season resolution, so I've got a really good resolution for this year, it's just to get through it. Yeah, it's difficult, it is difficult. There's a lot going on, I'm very, very busy at the moment, so it is a case of just getting through it. I'm on an efficiency drive That's what I'm doing this year. So I'm not taking on any new projects apart from all the new projects I've already taken on. So we draw a line in the sand, no more new projects. In terms of the course, good, good progress on the course, very good progress. So videographer and editors all hired and demo days booked in, and we are, I reckon, pretty good for an October launch. So we are trying to think ahead, gives me a little bit of time to work on stuff as well. But yeah, season resolution is efficiency overdrive, so anything I can do to make things more efficient, I'm going to do that. Hi Lawrence, greetings to you and your family. Will you be doing email discounts on queens soon? I'm looking to purchase some more queens off you. I certainly will, and I've already started doing it, so the first batch of discounted queens are out. So you should— probably gone to your spam, um, if you have a look, it will be there. So the first one is, off top of my head, Thursday, April the 24th, batches of 5 for £170, um, and they're selling very, very quickly. So I'd get in there as soon as possible. You can see them on the website if you just want to go direct on the website, blackmountainhoney.co.uk. Hover over the top where it says shop and then say shop all, and it will bring up those listings because they're kind of hidden everywhere else. Secret access to the, the good discounts there. Frollies Bee says hello from South Wales. The Welsh Bee Show is tomorrow in the Royal Welsh Ground. It certainly is. Anybody who's going, I hope you have a very, very good time. Would you put wet supers on first in spring or save them and use foundation and save the wet supers for the June gap? Oh, that's a good question. I've never really thought of that. For me, it's wet supers all the way. They go straight in because they're potentially like more of a risk for wax moth. Definitely more of a risk for wax moth than, um, than wax foundation. Nowhere near the level of a brood frame, but they will, they will go for them, especially I find if they're wet. So if they get in— and also, I just, I love the effect effect that a wet super has on a colony of bees. If you're trying to get them to grow, trying to get them to expand, and you've kind of got like an instant nectar flow, then it's just great for honey production. But probably what I would do is I would checkerboard them. So if you've got 10 wet frames and 10 foundation frames, I just make all of the supers up checkerboarded, and then you kind of get like the best of both worlds on both of them. That's what I would do. Hi, when do you think we will need to start putting on supers and doing hive inspections? So answered that one a little bit before, and you'll see the channel members video coming out. All down to your kind of first inspection really, and see, see how the bees are. But depending on where you are in the UK, some people are starting putting them on now in the southern UK, and then the further north you go, the later that's going to be. If you want ballpark figure for us, I never put supers on now until kind of like early April at the earliest. I never put them on in March because I just know in North Wales I can get away, I can push the colonies for quite a while without them swarming because it's still quite cold. So, so early to mid-April is when my average, when I put my supers on. Hello. Hello to you too. Good evening everyone, I've started feeding 2:1 syrup to my colonies, but I've heard that 1:1 is better. Is this the case, or will 2:1 work just as well? So if you, you're not a channel member, but if you were, that is, I answered that one exact question today. So the, the standard thinking when it comes to syrup is 1:1 in the spring because it's kind of like nectar, feels like nectar to the bees, and it gets the colony going, turbocharges that colony. Great for drawing out comb, great for building up colonies. 2:1 works just exactly the same. People don't like to hear it, but it does. But it costs more and it has like a similar effect. So for me, like, what am I feeding in the spring? Definitely 1:1, but 2:1 is fine. So if you've got like leftover invert, you've got leftover 2:1 and it's still fine and not fermented, I'd definitely be using that. Or you could even, you could even get your 2:1 and just water it down until it's then 1:1. Go on the calculator to work out what the dilution ratio is, and then you've just got like a little bit more feed that you can use. But don't, don't water it all down and then not need it and then it ferments. You definitely don't want to do that. But, uh, feeding 2:1, you can feed 2:1 interchangeably with 1:1 all the way throughout the season. 1:1 to 2:1, you can't feed it interchangeably. So you can feed it interchangeably, but the last few feeds of the season, always make sure it's 2:1 or invert, preferably invert, because it gives the bees a nightmare storing light syrup going into winter. I found some old hives and frames that I'm starting to clean, currently using the blowtorch on hives. For the frames that have bits of old wax, wires, etc., what would you do to clean them? So if they've been, if they're like used frames, the only thing that you can really do is like boil them. or steam melt them. So you need to get them to a point, you need to get them into something that's going to melt all that wax out. What the kind of best way of doing it is, you want to use like a caustic soda solution, but just be like really, really careful with it because it's very, very alkaline and it can burn you quite badly. But if you get like a hot caustic soda solution, that's the best. But I'm not recommending that because that is quite advanced. I would just go with really, really hot water. Don't use your best kitchen pans because you'll never get the wax off. The other option is just burn them. If it was me, I'd just burn them because it's not worth cleaning up a few frames when new frames are really, really cheap. They're not really cheap, but they're just— you eliminate any of that disease risk and you've got a nice fresh new frame to work with. And hives are pretty easy to scorch. You can, you know, you see my scorching. I like to go in on them. But that is what I would do. So Thomas Lindsay says, good evening, Laurence. Hello to you too, Thomas. What size mesh do you recommend to filter honey for sale? So I don't use any mesh apart from the one sieve that comes on my tank. A lot of people like 200 microns, and it's hard work getting honey to go through 200 microns. You'll end up with like show-grade honey. I just, I just, I don't want any of that stuff taken out of mine, so we have a 700 micron sieve on a conical bottom settling tank. And all we do— I'm going to get the drawing board out again, why not? We'll take the grid off. So my tank is like this, or like this. So I have a tank and then the bottom is conical, and then like that's where the tap is. So all I do is I just— sorry, I have a sieve on it as well. So the sieve, imagine that's a sieve there, and then the honey goes in, goes through the sieve. Take that measure off, 700 I can't even draw on that. 700 microns. This is like zoom or tomb. That is supposed to be 700 microns. And then I put all the honey in, and then what happens is you get this kind of like layer of like— not— it's not scum, it's just like air and bits and bee legs and wax. And just get everything sitting up there, leave it like once you've left it for 24 hours. And then I just kind of like connect that straight up to the bottling machine. and the honey comes out perfectly clear. And the only bit of honey that doesn't come out perfectly clear is once that scum has moved all the way down to the bottom. And then I just, as soon as I see the tiniest bit of scum coming through, I turn everything off and that's it. The jarring's done and any honey that's left in there just goes back into the bucket and then just goes back into the next mix and joins the next layer of scum. It's only like, it's tiny. It's not, it's not like this scum on the honey, it's just like a bit of air bit of froth, you wouldn't want it in the jars. But what the end result is, a perfectly clear jar of honey, like perfectly clear with a 700-micron filter, which is a very, very coarse filter. So I don't, I don't bother filtering because that's a really good system, and I would recommend that as well. The, the Lyson Premium Settling Tank has that conical bottom, and it makes up my favorite, favorite thing I think I've got in my honey extraction room. It is brilliant. Dominican Beekeeper says, is it true that Tropilaelaps was found in Europe? Um, I do believe it has been found in Ukraine. Uh, yeah, so there we go. Tropilaelaps, which is, is still quite far, is very far away from the UK, um, but not good that it is on the move. Uh, Daniel has joined as a channel member. Welcome, Daniel. Any questions, just give me a shout. James says, also wondering, should I get a new queen excluder as looks like some rust? I wouldn't worry about a bit of rust on a queen excluder. The bees will kind of COVID it in propolis and keep it as good as new. One of my strong hives has 3 frames of crystallized honey with 7-odd mega frames of brood. Will they be able to clear out the crystallized frames, or do I need to remove them and give empty frames? So clearing out crystallized frames of honey is so, so easy, and when you learn how to do it, brilliant. All you do is you take off all of the old drawings that are on the drawing app whilst you're still talking, and then you bring it back up. So there we go, that was just me keeping going. Right, let's get the snap back on and take the measure off. So say that is a beehive like that, and let's change the color. So let's call these— these are your crystallized honey frames. Uh, no, actually, let's do your black frames first. So these are your frames of brood. This, this is how I would set up the hive here. These are your frames of brood. You've got 3 crystallized frames, so I'd put like one there. I have to get like a swear jar for this. Basically what I'm going to say is the numbers are going to be wrong, but all I would do is I just get them in the middle somewhere like that, always a frame of brood either side. Oh, come on. So for each individual crystallized frame of honey, you've got like 2 frames of brood either side, and I've just realized that my beehive has like 20 frames here, so I do it like that. And then just assume all of the rest of them are black. Before you put them there, you need to bruise, bruise the cappings, properly bruise them, like smudge them. And is that enough? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, No, that's just ridiculous. You get the idea though, yeah. I'll have to do it to scale. I'll save some of these beehives so you can see it next time. But what we're saying is brood frame, brood frame, brood frame, and then in between the brood frames you're putting these kind of like mega crystallized frames of honey. Smudge them down, bruise all of the cappings, and then ensure that there is space above and the bees will clear it out. And they won't necessarily move it upwards, but just adding space above does help there. Bees hate you checkerboarding in between the brood with capped stores, so with uncapped stores, they won't do anything if you don't bruise it and uncap it, but do that and within a week it'll all be gone, like guaranteed. Good luck. Hi Lawrence, have you ever used brood frames as super frames and did you get much honey with them? Also, what's the best way to clean poly hives? Going to clean my equipment before the season starts. So yep, I use brood frames as honey frames loads of times, works very, very well. The downsides are— so do you know what, in terms of honey, there's not really any downsides. In terms of like physical lifting, it's quite— it's much heavier boxes, like a big heavy box is very, very heavy. I did it with 14 by 12s for one season as well, and it was— they were really, really heavy. Definitely don't do that. And then make sure that your extractor can take them out, all good. The only other slight downside that you'll get is that you'll get like some half-finished frames So if you're going to do it and you've just got like one national deep box per hive, then it's fine. But if you're doing it with like, say, 3 or 4 national deep boxes as supers, you'll find that you'll get like some unfinished frames in each one, whereas with the shallows, they seem to like work the shallow, finish it, and then go up to do the next one. So that's kind of roughly what I would do with that. And then for cleaning polyhives, we dip them, dip them for 24 hours in like a washing soda solution. So just like the cleaning soda that you'll get, we go really, really strong. You can't go too strong at that point, and you'll find after 24 hours, like, all that wax and propolis just becomes so easy, and you're just like scrubbing it off with a hive tool and like a little, like, a plastic kind of like scrubbing brush. You'll get them really nice and clean. Do that for all of your poly hives, and you can leave them outside or leave them— they're not sterile at that point, so leave them not outside at that point. And then you want to get a big tank, use the same tank for the washing, empty it all out, clean it, and then I use a 4 to 1 ratio of water to sodium hypochlorite. It is a lot stronger than the MBU recommend, but it gives you a great bleaching effect. Extreme caution, do not get it in your eyes, do not get it on your hands, do not get it anywhere. It will bleach anything and it will blind you. So like, take that with, uh, with great warning because it is not good stuff. But, um, 4 to 1 ratio, and then you dip it in for 20 minutes. And 20 minutes at that ratio is more than enough to kill anything, they'll be as good as new. Oh, there are lots of good— lots of questions, it's great. I love, I love that so many people come on to hear me waffle on about bees, I do, I do enjoy it. How far are we in? Right, we're 45 minutes in. I'm gonna have a sip of tea, I think. Who's next? Chunky, you are next. Have a sip of this. Chunky says, hi Laurence, thanks for another great stream. My pleasure. He says, how would you recommend doing a demerite on a double brood where both boxes are rammed with brood and stores? So I wouldn't demaray them. I think if you're— the demaray for me is like a single brood box system, and it complicates things if you add another double brood box in there, because then you're gonna need 3 brood boxes per hive. And you, regardless of what configuration that you have them in, you are going to end up losing a lot of honey to one of those brood boxes. And then you have the added complication of kind of like, are they Apivar tainted? Are they not Apivar tainted? I just think stick to a single brood box Demeray, like a standard Demeray, or go double brood and then don't have the 2. So if you're in a situation now where you've got a double brood where both boxes are rammed with brood and stores, I would just let them build up naturally on double brood and just super upwards and hope that the additional space in the double brood reduces the kind of impulse to swarm. Make sure they've got sufficient space and just see if you can get them all the way through the year, just kind of managing them normally, doing regular inspections, double brood. What a lot of people do, a lot of commercial bee farmers who run double brood, they don't inspect their bees, they just kind of like open up the 2 boxes and they just look underneath the bottom frames from the top box, and if they see swarm cells there, the bees are obviously trying to swarm, but if they don't see swarm cells there, they just say that's kind of likely where they're going to put the swarm cells, probably a 90% chance that's where they're going to put them. So that's just, that's their inspection, they just kind of like crack the boxes open, have a look, and if they don't see swarm cells, they crack, they go on with it, which is, is quite a nice system, an easy system to get around. Um, so yeah, that's what I would go with. I wouldn't complicate it, and I don't want to get my, my drawing pen out and try and kind of like come up with a system for double brood demerases. You could do it, but I just don't think the value would be there, and I personally wouldn't recommend it. Good evening, hope all is well. What is your recommended Queen rearing equipment? Oh, it's a difficult question, that one, because there's so many different ways of rearing queens and there's so many different, like, systems for doing it. So from the, the very, like, commercialized Apidea system, like little mini mating nucs— tons of different mini mating nucs, but Apideas are very, very good— and then you've got, like, the new Abello Mini National Plus. Really like that system where you've got the frames that kind of detach and then you can configure them in the mini mating setup. I like that system as well. And then you've got the, like, the— I call it the, um, the, the standard, the standard system where you're just going to use like 2 or 3 frame nucs and you just got like a standard national size, you're doing it with Langstroth. So like, what is my recommended queen rearing equipment? You kind of got to decide which one of those systems you're going to go with first. And then in terms of just like standard equipment, you know, you just need a, a normal queen rearing frame. You can get that from anywhere. In terms of cups, you are really— you've got 2 main choices. You've got Nikko Or JZBZ. I much prefer the JZBZ cups, like loads better. I think having spent time with Melita bees, they like they like the Nico cups, and everyone's got got their own choice and reasons why they like different things. Like for me, the reason I like JZBZ is that you've not got to glue anything onto the bars. You just it's just like push fit. I just like that is loads better than gluing stuff and then the glue failing. In terms of grafting tools again, like I like Chinese grafting tools. Melita bees, they use like the stainless steel, like the German grafting tool. So it's difficult, it's a difficult one to recommend. I can show you kind of like what I do and tell you what I use, but you might have like a slightly different system. So let me know your thoughts and we'll take it from there, I think, on that one. Thomas Lindsay says, starting my second season of beekeeping and ended up with one hive on brood and a half. How would you go about sorting this? Half is on the top, and the bees are mostly but not completely in that one. It's always the way, innit? Right, let's draw it. Brood and a half, right? So for anyone who doesn't know what brood and a half is, it is something that was invented by the devil himself. No, I'm only joking, right? Okay, sorry if anyone's taken offense to that one. Uh, right, get my PC hat back on, right? So that is a brood box, and that is a shallow. So a national deep and a national shallow. So that is what brood and a half looks like, and then you've got your queen excluder kind of running here. And so that's, that's the brood area, and it kind of always remains the brood area. So what Tom is saying there is his queen is up there, and this is where the majority of the brood is at. So really simple to get back to a standard, either a standard brood. So if you want to just remain on brood and a half, you do nothing, you just leave it like that. and add supers on top, wonky supers like that, and just keep on going. And you're just going to lose all of this area here is your brood area for the season. If you want to get back to a standard national brood, this is what you do. So your bees are up here at the moment, they're probably something like that, and then over time they're going to get bigger and bigger. People say bees don't expand downwards, they do, they expand wherever there's space, they'll go like that. So when they're kind of like filling that up, maybe 80% full, all you do, take your queen, find your queen, put her down there, remove that queen excluder, just place the queen excluder like that with the queen underneath, and then all of the brood up here will emerge and the bees will turn into a honey super again. And that's it, that's what I'd recommend, it's dead simple that. I don't like brood and a half, never been a fan, because it just gives you a lot of headaches, and you know, this super here, if you've treated that with Apivar, then you can't— that is never a honey super anymore because the wax is tainted, you can't extract out of it. So I like to keep everything separate, makes for a much neater apiary. There we go, I nearly terminated myself there. Right, Pink It's Honey, Steen, I'll never forget a name like that. Steen says, there was recently a reported incident of hive theft in Ireland, has this ever happened to you and what do you do to try and mitigate theft? Thanks, Steen. So no, but someone did text me today saying that there is quite a lot of theft going around at the moment, which is not good to hear, but it's the time of the year when colonies are going to get nicked because people can nick them and sell them pretty quick. We've got some cool things that we do with our nucs that are— some things that I just, I won't tell you because I don't want to give it away, but some of the other stuff is we mark stuff with kind of like, it's like UV pen. So you can't see it, you can't see that stuff's marked. Our beehives are marked, our frames are marked, you'll never know where. But it means that generally what happens with hive theft is they'll nick a beehive, burn the beehive, and then just put the frames into like a nuc and then sell the nuc, just because it means that they can't be traced. So we thought, well, we'll mark the beehives just in case, secretly, UV marking, but then there's secret UV markings on the frames. really awkward places on the frame, so if it ever got to that point where we needed to prove that someone had nicked stuff, then we could do it. But then it's more for me like prevention. Prevention is the way forward, so we keep our apiaries well out of the way. Like, you'll see a video coming on probably tomorrow, I think I'll release it tomorrow, where I abandoned an apiary, abandoned an apiary and the hive because it was too close to a road. and there was too many people like snooping around and stuff. And I just thought, if I put 10— if I put 10 hives there, they wouldn't— they wouldn't last there. They'd either be kicked over or someone would nick them. And whose fault would it be? It'd be my fault because I put them in a stupid place. So I think getting those really, really good apiaries where you have almost like a bit of security in there— one of the other apiaries that I've got, there's 3 Rottweilers there, and it's like fully fenced off, and you have to go through 3 gates. And then once you get through the first gate, there are 3 Rottweilers Rottweilers, and they're friendly with me. They weren't always friendly with me, but they're kind of friendly with me, but they are properly scary, and I just think no one's nicking those hives unless they want to like get tackled by a massive Great Rottweiler. So you've got to kind of think outside the box in terms of that. I don't think like trail cams are really a massive deterrent because the resolution of them is so rubbish, and they'll just just change their reg and hide their reg and wear gloves and wear hats, and you, you won't be able to see who they are. So there's not a huge amount that you can do other than just hide them. You see other people talking about like booby-trapping hives and stuff, and it is a good idea. You see people saying like one of the hives will be— you get like a big, a big rock or a big like concrete slab with an anchor in it, and then the floor is attached to the anchor. So then when they try and ratchet, they try and lift up the hive— Let's draw Let's draw it. Why not? Right, so this is what some people say, and it is a good— it is a good idea. You need very, very angry bees for it. So you embed— let's put it on the— I like the snap because it makes it like really neat, right? So you have like a concrete anchor in the ground like that, concrete pad, and then like a loop coming up somehow, and then your floor kind of goes through it so it's connected, and then you have your brood box. I'm going to put a— I'll put a gap in there just to show what we're going to do next. And then you have your brood box there, put it there. So there's not really a gap there, but this is just to show the next bit. And then maybe like your roof or whatever. And then I'll take the snap away, and then you'll have like a ratchet strap kind of going through, but through here. So then an unsuspecting thief comes along, tries to lift up the hive, and basically just lifts the brood box off. And then if it's full of angry bees, they just get they get battered by them, which is, you know, it's nice in theory, isn't it? But realistically, they're probably going to come along and say, yeah, that one, don't take that one because it's, it's not connected properly. Like, they're not stupid. And then other people say just that's, that's the reason that I keep really horrible, aggressive, angry bees so they don't get nicked. And I just think, well, that's, that's not really a good— that's like saying, I'm never, I'm never gonna get robbed for money, I just don't have any money, just don't keep any, just be skint forever. But there we go. Hopefully that was helpful. Hopefully you don't have too many thefts near you. Frollys Bee says, "I've been feeding syrup for about two weeks now. Have put out double broods, looking at making roughly fourteen splits start of May." Oh, sorry. I thought I thought that was going to be a question there. Sorry. It's not a question. It sounds good. I think that would be good. Hopefully the double brooding is working. Roughly fourteen splits start of May. Nice. I like aggressive expansion. It's good. Margaret says, I found uncapped queen cells in a hive 2 weeks ago but couldn't find the queen. Was going to try again next day, but it's been 9 to 10 degrees Celsius, 50 kilometer winds, and rainy for 2 weeks. Will the bees destroy queen cells if they cannot swarm, or do I have original queen and a bunch of virgins all running around in there? So both of those could be a possibility. Bees definitely destroy queen cells if the weather's not right. I've seen them do it. I've seen them taking them down and completely abandoning them, and you see they kind of tend to go in like from the top Uh, so, so that will happen. Also, you could have the original queen in there that doesn't want to fly because it's too wet and too cold, too windy, and lots and lots of virgins running around. As the weeks go on, that's less and less likely. You'll find there'll be a battle royale and a virgin will win out of all the virgins and the mated queen. Um, but interested to know, interested to know how, how it ends. I know you're in northern Spain, so it's slightly different to UK weather and kind of timelines. Harry Reynolds says, first careful inspections today and everything is looking great. My Black Mountain honey buckfast are doing incredible with the weather in the southeast. Wow, that is what we want to hear, Harry. Good work. Frollies Bee says, Lawrence, have you done honey sections before? Pardon me. I've ordered 2 supers which I can make them in. Oh blimey. Um, yes, so I've done loads of different sections. I've done the English sections, I've done Ross Round sections. Uh, sections are very niche and very nice. I do like sections, and you'll find that if you, you kind of start selling them, people, you won't be able to produce enough. Keeping them in good condition is difficult. You really do need to freeze sections because otherwise they crystallize in the frames. But I do like them, and I think it's quite good fun doing sections and stuff. Good evening, Laurence. Prepping and looking forward to my nuc arriving on the first week of April. I thought I recognized the name. Thank you, Nigel. Any questions, just give me a shout, always happy to help. Hi, Laurence. Collected my bees from you on Monday. They are doing well and settled in nicely. Thank you. One question, how do you know if you have too many hives in one apiary? Not a problem for me yet, but just wondering. That was the next bit of it there. So Tony is right, Tony was the first person to come and collect 2 nucs from me on Monday, and he sent me some pictures and they're settling well. So the only way that you're going to know if you've got too many colonies in a single apiary is when you start getting like diminishing returns. So if you're getting an average of £50 per colony per season, and then it's gone down to 30 or 20 or 10 because you're increasing the number, then it's quite a simple formula. You've got too many colonies there. You can get 12 colonies pretty much anywhere, so I wouldn't worry about that too much until you start getting into like the 20 or 30 colonies in an apiary. Most places around here can kind of cope with it. Lots of laughing faces. The fleas bits cracked me up on I'll just let my dog die and get another one. Yeah, that is, that is kind of what I feel when I hear people say that they're just going to let their bees die because of the mites, because they don't want the bees. Very, very sad situation. The other thing, and I'll shout this out as well, and I, you know, people are going to complain, I do find it interesting that the people who don't treat for varroa, their bees never die of varroa, never. They die of moisture, or there was too much damp in the colony, or the queen failed, or they dwindled away to nothing. It's never the fact that the viral load on the colony is so high that not enough winter bees were produced, which meant that the queen couldn't survive because the winter bees died off before the next round of brood could emerge. Never that. It's always moisture. And I'm saying it tongue-in-cheek, like I don't want to cause a war with treatment-free beekeepers. I think everyone has a right to keep bees in the way that they want to keep bees. I personally don't like letting them die, and when I see— like, I saw one of these, this was on a Facebook page called Treatment-Free Beekeeping, and a lady went to great detail to explain what had happened, which was she bought 2— this is in America— she bought 2 nucs from a company that sells like VSH nucs, and they said, yeah, you don't need to treat, you don't need to treat those colonies, they're VSH, they don't need treating. So she bought them in, in kind of May. The colonies built up well, they've got some honey, and they went into winter. Both colonies died. Not deterred by this, the lady went back to the same supplier and said, oh, you know, bought a couple of nucs off you last year, they died, so can I get another 2? And the supplier said, yep, sure, there you go, there's another 2. And she said, they died, do you think I should be treating them? And the guy said, no, no, no, you don't need to treat them, they're treatment-free nucs. You can see where this is going. So she did it again, a bit of honey in the season, got them ready for winter, and then they died the following year. And this happened year 1, year 2, year 3, year 4, year 5. She went 5 years, and I think she lost 15 colonies. Every single colony died every year, and she wasn't treating. And she was on a group called Treatment-Free Beekeeping, and she was genuinely asking a question. She was asking this question, why do you think my bees keep on dying? Like, is it— am I doing something wrong? Like, that was the question that she was asking. I just thought, geez, but good for the— good for the nuc seller, isn't it? Now, I shouldn't— I shouldn't say that because it's not fair even then, but like, the nuc seller must just be sitting there just laughing, just thinking, it's brilliant, just steal some nucs and they die and they come back and just buy more nucs. But it's— it's so obvious, like, and I see it on Facebook a lot, like, oh, this colony's died, you know, the queen's failed, they dwindled down to nothing, recently died. What could it be? Or, I think it's because of this. And like 9 times out of 10, I look at it and just say, you've not treated for varroa. And then it turns out they've not treated for years and the colonies died. But I just, I would like it if occasionally they said, my colonies died because I didn't treat my bees, that's the reason. So sorry, Mark, I know you took offense to what I said last week. I'm probably making Making it even worse this week. But this is, this is how I feel about the subject, which I know isn't what you do now. You, you don't let your colonies die. You, you proactively try to, um, give them new genetics to stop them kind of succumbing to that viral load, which is a good thing. Uh, Frollies Bee says, is there anything you found helped with getting your YouTube Shorts viewings up? I can't seem to get much over 500. Um, I, I don't know. I think Shorts is, uh, like is a very contentious one. I think a lot of people don't like the Shorts that we do. Um, the Shorts by far outweigh any of the long-form videos and, and really do grow the channel. And the Short— the Shorts are definitely here to stay. Um, I have— I've got a new Shorts thing coming for people which, which hopefully you will like. It's good. Uh, but getting the Shorts viewings up, nice, it is difficult. YouTube's very, very fickle and strange, and I don't quite understand why YouTube views don't go as high as the other one. So for example, Facebook for us at the moment is growing at a crazy, crazy rate. So yes, yesterday, just yesterday on Facebook, it got 2 million views like a day. Bonkers. And had an extra— in a day had an extra 2,500 followers in one day. And then on YouTube, YouTube just kind of like plods along and it's the same videos but never get like loads of views on the short And I just, I think with bees, it's never gonna— they're never gonna go viral viral because it's such a niche. It's something that not everyone's really gonna want to watch. So I would just say, just kind of the ones that do, the ones that do well, try and make them a little bit better. Uh, the ones that have done well for me tell a little bit of a story. They have a beginning and an end, and they have a happy ending, and everyone loves a happy ending. especially if you're doing shorts. Good evening all. Good evening to you too. Smash the likes and subscribe for Lawrence. Thank you, John, appreciated. A while ago you did a video where you painted some hives with UV paint, and we're going to follow up a video to see if it made any difference. Not sure if it was to prevent drift. Was there an update? That is really interesting. I was up at that apiary today looking at the nucs with the UV paint on, so I'd like, I'd like to think that I could do like a study or some sort of, I don't know, follow it up in some way, but really, how am I going to know if it makes a difference? All I know is that bees can see certain colours. One of those things that they can see very, very well is UV, like their UV vision is exceptional, so my kind of thinking is, well, if it's exceptional, painting with UV paint can only help. And then doing it in the kind of like patterns that I did is very, very good. And then, you know, going out and speaking or seeing what Melitta Bees do, they do exactly the same with their mini mating nucs. Like everyone's painted with like a different grid and different colors and different shapes. They don't use UV paint, but I think that's pretty standard with queen rearing. Anything you can do to help differentiate the mini mating nuc or the hive that they're in compared to the one next door, it can only be a good thing. And the UV paint, when you're using it in such small quantities, not expensive anyway. So no, no formal follow-up, but I would say highly recommended. Good evening, hope you're well. Hi Lawrence, I'm a beekeeper in Southwest Devon with one WBC and want to expand this year. Is it worth taking multiple splits? So yeah, it definitely is, and I just think sit down and work out what you want to do. If you've got one colony, um, and you want to expand, work out how many you want to expand to and then try and come up with like a system I think the easiest way to expand from one colony into many colonies is like this. So you— oh, let's put the snap on. Snap makes it good. So if you've got one brood box like that, uh, my general recommendation is like underbrood early on in the season or overbrood later on in the season. I think anytime from kind of middle of April onwards, you might as well stick it on top. And that snap is really annoying me. So if you're looking to turn one colony into 2, I'd always double brood. I'd try and get it to a point where you've got all of these frames here of brood. So in a national system, you're probably going to get— if you've got a 22-frame hive, and again, this is not going to be to scale, you just start drawing these hives to scale— you're probably going to have, like, in a good prolific Buckfast, maybe between 14 to 18 frames of brood, like, at the absolute peak. And then you can just take that and split. If you've got a 22-frame double brood configuration, you could split it out into 7 3-frame nucs, and you've got like one odd frame to chuck in somewhere else. But that's, that's always my system, is go double brood, build it up until it's very, very big and strong, and then aggressively split it. The other ways of doing it are you can double brood, build it up into a double brood like that— just going to leave it like that— and then just do a standard split. So you get That's one beehive, and then you split onto this side as well, so you've got 2 beehives. And then you could, you could continue and you could double brood again if you wanted, or if you're happy with 2, you can just do it like that. There's so many different ways of doing it. My recommendation though, like I said, if you're just doing— if you've got one colony and you want as many splits as possible, double brood it, let them fill it, don't let them swarm. Before they swarm, make the splits. At least one frame of brood, one frame of stores. Good shake of bees, and then whatever other frame is left, and take it to a new apiary. Really important when you're doing multiple splits, always take it to a new apiary over 3 miles away. Makes your life a hell of a lot easier, means you can feed straight away, which I recommend. So next day, go back, 1:1 feed, so 1:1 sugar syrup, and 8 days later, take down all the queen cells and add in a mated queen. And you might think, you sell mated queens, of course you're going to give that advice. if you want to do it with a walkaway split, feel free to do it with a walkaway split as well, but you'll make 7 splits and if you're lucky you'll get 3, maybe 4 mated. And then you kind of think, oh, it's annoying, I've got 3 wasted splits there that I can't find the virgin in now. So I just think if you're going to go for aggressive expansion, you might as well buy the mated queens and, uh, be done with it. Makes life a lot easier. Channel member, says, good evening, what would you say is the best way to make splits from one of got nucs plus mated queens. So if— let's see if we can draw this one. This is what I said on the channel member video today, so you can have a look at it later. So let's try and draw this one roughly to scale. So let's say that's your brood box there. That's— this is your 6-frame nuc that's going in. So frame 1, frame 2, frame 3, frame 4, frame 5, frame 6. It's not going to be a million miles away, this one. It's actually— it's a 12— it's the Abello 12 frame hive. Okay, so that's your 6-frame nuc there in a hive. So let's say, let's give another color here. So these are all going to be your frames of foundation, and then you're just going to let your colony build up naturally. So after a few weeks when you've been feeding them, that colony is going to expand. So you probably end up with something kind of that looks like this. So imagine all the black ones in the middle are brood. After six weeks, this is roughly what it will look like. So all the black ones there are brood, and the outside ones are honey. That's like kind of roughly what you're going to have. If you're looking at making a split, I would get your nuc box that we've sent you. Try and get it to six. I am going to get these as templates. Have I done the same thing? No, that's right. Okay. So in order to do what you said, best way to make splits from one of your nucs plus mated queens. This is what I would do. I would take from here. Let's get the snap over to here. I would get that and snap. So one honey frame, one brood frame, and then these are going to be frames of foundation, 4 frames of foundation like that. Then very important, take the snap off. Take that to a new site. Yeah. Once you're at the new site, you can put the feeder in, you wait 8 days, you knock down all the emergency queen cells, you add the queen in, you wait 24 hours, you pop the tab open, and you let the queen out. Leave it for a week after that, you don't need to go and check. Keep on feeding them 1:1 syrup until they've built up nice and strong there. This one over here, you need to do the same thing. Wait 8 days, knock down all the queen cells, adding a new mated queen there. Obviously you've got the original mated queen, so you need— the original mated queen can stay in either one of these, it doesn't matter which one. So when you're taking, let's say for example this one here, you've got the frame of stores, you've got your frame of brood, and let's say that you put the queen in there. So take that off to another site, and that one there just needs feeding. This one here is going to be the one that you need to knock down all the queen cells and to add that queen in. then wait 24 hours. That's the system that I would use, and I think every single person who is buying a nuc from us this year should do that, because you've got nothing to lose. Say this colony, say if you didn't do that, this colony here might produce, don't hold me to this, 100 pounds of honey, something like that. If you take that split out, so this split over here, take that out, you might get 90 pounds of honey. That's the kind of like impact that it's potentially going to have. It's negligible. You've taken out a frame of brood and a frame of honey. It's like not— it's not going to knock that colony back at all. What knocks it back is if you do it using the emergency impulse and you wait 4 weeks and you don't get mated, and that whole time you've not got the queen laying eggs and the colony just dwindles away, and then you've got to find the virgin. I do appreciate that people are looking at it, and I do get the comments, people saying, well, of course you're going to say that, you sell queens. And it's like, yeah, but we sell queens, but we also sell— we also give advice to people. And if I didn't sell queens, that's the same advice that I would give, is because it is the best system for you, it's the easiest thing, means you're not doing in your first year the most difficult thing in beekeeping, which is trying to save your beehive by going in and finding a virgin queen. And if you can't find her, your colony of bees dies. That's the scenario that a lot of first-year beekeepers find themselves in, and it's not a good— it's not a good place to be. And I think a lot of beekeepers become like disenfranchised with it after that, just like, it's too busy— too difficult, sorry, and I just can't be dealing with it. So that advice there is good advice because not only does it kind of stop that happening, it mitigates it to a certain extent, but it also turned your investment from one hive into 2 which gives you like a bit of a buffer for things to go wrong as well. YT Boobies— Bluebees, I've called you YT Booby there, I do apologize. YT Bluebee channel member says, I have acquired 2 more colonies over the winter. They are on 2021 frames and are very dark. Is there any way to replace the frames without losing the honey crop? So a number of ways of replacing frames. You can do it like this. I love this drawing app, it's so much easier doing it on here. So you can do what is called a Bailey comb exchange. I'm not going to draw the Bailey comb exchange because I— it's not that I wouldn't recommend it, this is easier though. Yeah, so say you've got all your black frames in here, this is where your black frames live, this is what your brood box is looking like, this is how I would fix it. I'm not going to bother drawing it the whole way across. Put a, um, sorry, I'm gonna do that yet. Get another brood box, put it on top, middle of April, May or something. Obviously it's supposed to be aligned, uh, new frames in there. Turn my snap off, let the colony kind of build up. So it's building up here and it's getting bigger, getting bigger until it's full like that. And just assume that's all full now, and then add a queen excluder in. this. Make sure the queen is upstairs. Place the queen upstairs. All of this brood down here, give it, give it a couple of weeks, all of that brood will emerge. Maybe, maybe 3 weeks just to be on the safe side, 4 if there's any drone brood in there. And all of that brood will emerge, leaving you with just an empty box. Just going to be empty old black comb. And then you just take it away, you remove it. Put the queen excluder up there, and then your supers just go on top. Will you lose, will you lose some honey doing that? Yep, you'll lose a bit of honey, but there's no real other way of doing it where you're not going to lose honey. The only other suggestion that you can do is let them build up, maybe middle of May, get brand new box, brand new hive, brand new frames, foundation, shake all of the bees in, leave them for a couple of days, and then feed. And that's a shook swarm, but that will knock them back just kind of like an equal amount, if not more. So I'd probably go with the first one. UK Honey Marketing Board says good evening. Good evening to you too. Russ Dorgan, hello. Hi Russ. Uh, Historic Honey and Bee Rescue says good evening, Lawrence, hope you're doing well. I'm very well, thank you. Hope you are too. Steve's Honey Bees, hello Steve. Uh, David loves the drawing app. I love the drawing app, it's good, isn't it? Uh, Zabit says, are you free to be in March water syrup? Um, so I'm get— I'm guessing, I'm guessing that is like, are you okay to feed like sugar syrup in March. So I would say little, little, and just do it when the bees are able to do it. So if the temperatures are okay, you can feed a little bit of sugar syrup in March. Probably go with 2 to 1 if you've just got like a real small opportunity to feed it, and don't feed them lots at all. Give them a chance to take it down. I think that was the question. Sorry if I've definitely got it wrong because I've said it twice, so Hopefully it was one of those. Apologies for mispronouncing it one of those ways. She says, is it possible to make a split twice in a year? I'm based in Kent and currently on double brood, and each of my hives has 10 full frames of brood. I wanted to do one in mid-March and one in the second end of May. Absolutely fine, really, really good, and makes your life so much easier. Splitting before they swarm, what more could you want? So that is what I would do, middle of April, if they're on double brood. 10 frames of brood, give them, give them 5 frames each, let them build up again, and then double brood and then split again if you want, end of May. I think that will work very well. Kerry says, hi Lawrence, I started my beekeeping journey last spring. My colony swarmed, requeened, threw everything at me. They have made it through the winter and I've just purchased my second hive. Just wanted to say thank you for the videos and live streams, straightforward, easy-to-understand advice that has been invaluable. Oh, thanks Kerry, that's very, very nice feedback. I appreciate it. I like, I love helping people with their bees, and I think like a lot of people watch or look at my channel and say, he just gives like such basic simple advice. It's, and that's not like, that's not in a complimentary way, they say like there's nothing new, there's nothing complicated, like why do people even watch him? And it's basic simple advice, but that's the advice that a lot of beekeepers need, and it's the advice that is not always forthcoming. And I do my best, I'm trying, I really want to Simplify beekeeping as best as I possibly can and help people where I can. So apologies if it occasionally becomes repetitive and I'm talking about the same thing again and again, but for new beekeepers, it's the simple questions that need answering. John is enjoying the Etch-a-Sketch. Very good. Graham says, great drawing app, helpful for those watching. Thank you. I'm glad people are liking the app. Louis, I think it's either Louis. I know someone with that exact spelling and his name is. Lewis. Well, maybe it's a Welsh thing. I think that's Louis, that name. So Louis Baldwin says, hi Lawrence, 90% of colonies are over 9 frames. When should I put on supers? For next 2 weeks it's average 11 degrees in day but 4 at night. So I would wait until the weather gets a little bit better for you there. If you're worried, I would undersuper with the queen excluder in place. Means that there you're not going to get any brood in your supers, and if the bees need that space, they've got a little bit more space. Over 9 frames is a nice big strong colony. Like, but for me up in North Wales, if I look in a national brood box and I see a box full of bees, like full, full, or even boiling over, I know I've got a few weeks before they're going to start swarm prep. So I wait until I put my supers on. Hi Lawrence, when would you recommend adding a top box? So adding a top box as in double brooding above, for me, no earlier than— sorry, no, no earlier, yeah, no earlier than kind of middle of April. Everything before that, I'd be adding it below and then switching it when, when the temperature allows. Uh, Paula is enjoying the, the drawing app as well, wicked. Hi Lawrence, what do you think will be the biggest threats, challenges, and opportunities for UK beekeepers in the next 3 to 5 years? So small hive beetle, Tropilaelaps, Asian hornet. Not to say that any of them, uh, kind of are going to make the UK their home, but they're the 3 biggest pest risks that we have here. The weather, the changing weather in the UK— like, people sold global warming as this fantasy that everything would get warmer. That was a joke, in case anyone wasn't— in case anyone was wondering. But people thought global warming meant that the UK would get warmer, but it's just become more extreme and wetter, which you would— which makes sense because the warm air can hold more moisture. And it's like I'm noticing the impact big time, especially on queen rearing. Like, that queen rearing window is very, very limited, and you almost just need to take a gamble and just say, right, we're going to try and raise 1,000 queens this week. Just go for it. And you might get none of them mated, or you might get all of them mated, but you've got to be in it to win it. And I think that's the way— that's the way it's going at the moment. And I think the people who gamble on that and it pays off with the weather, um, would do very, very well. I don't know, like, in terms of like imports and stuff, there's a lot of talk about imports at the moment. I can't see that being banned anytime soon. I just, I just can't see how the UK farming and beekeeping industry could cope without imports. Just don't think it could. I think it would collapse very quickly. But whenever, like, I know there'll be people seething listening to that maybe here, but if that does happen, it will collapse, but then it will be rebuilt back up again, and then there'll be great opportunity because people like us who import queens and sell queens won't have access to those queens to sell. So we'll have to diversify and have to like go fully, um, with, uh, kind of like UK-mated stock. And then, you know, the price of that will go up and you— everyone will have to kind of challenge themselves to make a living again Um, what I find, what I find interesting though with the whole kind of like banning imports and stuff, and like there's 2 points. One, the big point that they always make with banning imports is it reduces— so we want to stop imports because we don't want the risk of pests and diseases coming into the UK. And my argument is, well, so, so what do you think will happen once they ban imports? That just stops the risk of anything coming into the UK? Because I know what'll happen, they'll just come in illegally. And I, I don't know about you, but I'd much prefer for there to be like a fully vetted process on both sides, kind of like for the importer and the exporter to manage the risk using a system that has never let a single pest come through in over 30 years, versus just letting the black market deal with it and getting queens coming in from anywhere. Like, you can get from anywhere now, and it— because the black market, just do what you want. That is very much tongue-in-cheek, we follow all the rules. But so the risk doesn't go away by banning importation, if anything the risk of pests and diseases coming into the country increases by banning it. And then the other one is, well, it's the foreign genetics that are kind of like ruining our native local bees, so we want to ban those non-native genetics and then that should help improve local beekeeping. And I just think, well, Well, but the genetics were already here, aren't they? And people over here, loads of people over here do artificial insemination. So like, if it was me, if they ban imported queens, I'm not going to stop rearing Buckfast bees because I'll just use— I've got artificially inseminated Buckfast queens, and I've got people who can come and just continue that by coming and, you know, tapping the drones and inseminating my own queens. I can keep, I can keep that pure Buckfast line going indefinitely. And I will do, and I'll rear my queens from that. So it didn't really stop the spread of non-native genetics either. So I just, I don't think, I don't think it'll ever happen, and I don't think, um, it's gonna kind of fix any of the issues that they want fixing by banning it. I think it probably makes both of them worse. But whether that comes around, I don't know. It's, it's a difficult one for me. I, I'm the, I'm the biggest pessimist in the world. I really am. And I, I just think the beekeeping market is going to crash. I do. And I've been saying it for a few years now, and it's not crashed. It's got stronger and stronger and stronger. And every year it gets bigger, and every year, like, our sales go up. And every year I say, no, but next year it's going to properly, properly crash. And there's, you know, there's new, there's new people selling queens now. Um, I saw, I saw a new company that has been trading for a matter of weeks, um, who is the number one UK supplier of mated queens. That's what they've got on their website, the UK's number one mated— so the UK's number one supplier of mated queens, but they've just been in business for 2 weeks. Um, but there's a lot of that, there's a lot of different companies coming to the market selling more queens, imported queens, UK queens, nucs. It's a very, very, very saturated market, and you've got to do something different to try and stand out. And could collapse, could go pop overnight. Obviously don't want it to, But I do, like, we've been riding the wave of save the bees for years now, and, you know, a lot of people hate that term save the bees because the honeybees don't really, they don't really need saving. But what I think is driving a lot of the interest in beekeeping at the moment is strangely the fake honey movement, and it's impacting all of us, like beekeepers, because we can't sell our honey kind of for the price that we think we should be able to get for it. But a lot of people are just saying, well, I'm just going to bypass all of that and keep some bees and have my own honey. So I think that's driving it up at the moment. And then obviously, you know, you've got David Beckham and all these famous people, Jamie Oliver, people who are very mainstream who are keeping bees, and that doesn't— that's not slowing down at all, new people coming to the market. But I just— you could get this like perfect storm where all of that goes away. and the market could dramatically decrease overnight. Fingers crossed it doesn't happen, but there's lots, there's lots of challenges, and I do worry about all of them. I just gave one frame with brood and bees to a weak colony where the queen isn't laying. What do you think will happen? So the queen, if the queen is still there and she's just not laying, they might try and supersede her, so you might get a single Supersedure cells somewhere. That's likely, that will happen. If the queen isn't there, they'll take the young larva there and feed them, and you'll get lots of emergency cells, and then you'll get virgins coming out of those emergency cells. I think it's one of those two, one of those two things will happen. If the queen is there but she's perfectly fine, but she just isn't laying because she's having a brood break, then they just won't do anything. They'll just take that frame and let— tend to all the brood in there. all that brood will merge, and you won't get a supersedure cell, and you won't get any emergency cells either. So I think that's what will happen. Looking forward to receiving your nucs in a couple of weeks. How many splits would you take from one nuc? So I spoke earlier about like what I would recommend like everybody taking from their nuc regardless of if they want to make any splits. Like, I'm sending you the nuc box, you kind of got a spare nuc box, you might as well make one split from it. Um, I am going to do this video again. I don't know if I'm going to do it this year because I'm trying to do, I'm trying to do the beekeeping course this year. But I do want to do though, like, how many splits can you get from one colony each year? And I really do think 80 splits from one colony is feasible, but like with unlimited mated queens on supply, unlimited drawn comb, very nice cozy poly hives, and then just feed, feed, feed, like feed the whole way through the year. I think you could get from one colony, but you'd have to be a big colony to start off. I think from a nuc you'd be hard pushed to get 20 out of it in a single season. And people are probably looking at that thinking, what? That is insane, like how many nucs you can get. And I think, well, you know, just— you only got to buy one, it's £350, you can split it and get 20 yourself, and then there's £7,000. Um, but it's, it's not as easy as that. It's not as easy as that. You've got a factory in the queens that you're buying in there as well, and you've got a factory enter in the feed, and, um, you gotta know what you're doing. But it is, it is feasible to make a lot of splits out of a single colony. So I give you a lot of answers there. Uh, a user says, no invites because you sell Buckfast. Um, I'm not, I'm not sure what that means. We do sell Buckfast though. Gary Wheeler says, hi Lawrence, great hat hides the mullet. Um, how is your branding iron doing? Let's have a look. It's getting— it's like, it's almost a bit like— oh, what am I doing with my hair? I was gonna say it's a bit like Take That, like '90s. Not that I take that, but you know what I mean, curtains. Um, yeah, branding iron's doing well. I've not branded up that much stuff with it really, it's just kind of sitting at the bottom of the box. I do like my branding iron though, I'll have to dig it out. Uh, Lee says, I didn't see Richard's question, you said it can't have both. Sorry, I did, I did exactly the same, didn't I? Uh, channel member says, hi Lawrence, Black Mountain Honey 2024 nucs, went to take away last season, bottom brood on 4 hives, double brood, and all of them bubbling over. Guess I'm rethinking this year's plans already. Great problem to have, thank you. Oh, that is a brilliant problem. I do, I do like it when a plan goes well like that. says, what do you do with your wax, Lawrence? So all of our wax goes into making foundation for making the nucs. Um, we get through a lot of wax, nowhere near enough that we can supply just to our own, but it does help offset it. Uh, Roscoe says, would you try AMM queens again? Yeah, I try anything again. I'd love to, I'd love to do that. Like, I'm— we run a business and I like to kind of do new things for the business to add value to people. And one of the biggest things that people say is Can I buy AMM queens from you? I'd love to buy AMM queens, local native black AMM queens. Can I buy them? And I always say no because whenever I need to like underwrite the quality of things. So if someone buys an NF1 Buckfast queen and they say, are those bees calm? I say, yeah, really calm, really nice bees, very productive, lots of honey, reduced swarming. Like we use Buckfast in all our production qualities, very good, you'll be happy with them. I couldn't sell someone my AMM queens with any of those kind of taglines on them because the, the AMM queens that I had previously weren't like that. They were aggressive, they stung me a lot, they swarmed a lot. I really didn't get on with them. Lots of brood disorders, chalk brood. But that's not to say that that's what AMM is like for other people. Like, I know some bee farmers and I see some people on like BeeForce forums and Facebook and stuff who use exclusively like native or local feral stock or close to AMM, and they seem to do well, and the bees look nice and calm. They've got nice brood pattern, minimal brood disorders, minimal swarming, quite frugal. So, you know, like, you could, um, I'm assuming you can kind of get the very best out of AMM. It's not something that I've ever been interested in because I tried to do it for about 3 or 4 years and just got stung a lot and didn't get any honey. So it made me quite frustrated with the effort that I was putting in. But what I don't understand is why is someone not selling AMM queens on like a decent scale? Because the market's there. So there you go, Artem, if you want your opportunity, sell AMM queens, like just local feral AMM, and get them from a good breeder, get them all mated in the UK at the right time, and take over the market for that. And I'm obviously not just giving away all that information there. I don't think it's possible to do it on scale, and it's definitely not possible to kind of underwrite the, the quality of that at the moment. Not to say that you, you couldn't get that quality, but I just think like AMM's here and Buckfast is here, and I know people will be really, really annoyed with me saying that, but that is the truth. It is a highly bred and selected bee that has this huge breeding network where people are swapping lines and swapping virgins and cells and drone semen, and kind of you're just getting this incremental increase of good breeding characteristics. They're, they're like, uh, it's like Crufts. They're the most like high pedigree that you're gonna possibly get versus like the survival nature of AMM feral stock. They're very, very good at surviving. That's kind of what they're breeding themselves for. But someone, someone needs to do that with AMM. Someone needs to do with AMM what's been done with Buckfast for the last kind of like 30 or 40 years and just build this wide network. And it'll have to be kind of UK and Ireland based. Um, but this, this is the thing that I really get confused about, and I do not understand why. I've, I've had a number of conversations with people about this topic here. And I've said, well, so, okay, so if you, if you've got, um, if you've got like a really good artificially inseminated AMM breeder queen, and they say no, and you say, do you know anyone, do you know anyone that's got that? Because if you've got that, like, I would consider like grafting from, you know, get the very best one that you can get and then consider grafting from it, and then like test the daughters and see, see how they do. Like, I'm open to it, let's try it. I think it'd be good for the channel, I'd be interested in doing it. Um, but I want to start with, you know, I want to start with something really, really good. And every single person that I've spoken to who's kind of like into AMM is very, very much anti-artificial insemination. I don't really understand why. If anyone, if anyone knows why they're against it, I don't, I don't quite get it. But to me, that's what it needs. It needs like a few people who are into AMM and into artificial insemination to kind of like go out and find the best, the best of the best, and then start selecting and start breeding and start bringing stuff together and boosting, kind of like if you're going for high AMM percentage, or if you're going for like calmness or honey production or whatever, to try and build like some characteristics in. But I don't think you can do that in the UK without the use of artificial insemination, for the reasons that people who have AMM, um, and are trying to kind of like have like isolated areas for mating complain about a lot, which is other genetics like Buckfast or Ligustica or whatever. They say, um, we're struggling here because we're trying to keep it pure, pure as it can be, um, and we're getting crossmatings with Buckfast. But then they don't want to do the artificial insemination. I'm like, well, that, that mitigates your issue a bit, you know. You, you can, you can just select the colonies and the queens and the drones and bring it together and kind of like boost the purity. Um, so I don't really understand. that, um, I— all I can talk about is the experience that I've had with them, which, which wasn't a positive experience. And I, I've had experience with AMM and I've had experience with Buckfast. A lot of people that just keep AMM have not had experience with Buckfast. They just see them as the devil and they don't like it. Sorry. Does anyone— there we go— does anyone else feel bad not mentioning where the yellow blobs come from on their car's windows washing with the neighbors. Yeah, it is bad, isn't it? Good— there's a proper well-kept secret, that one. Says, gonna try a small bit of queen rearing as I only have one Abello mating hive and a few BS Honeybee nucs for getting virgins mated. Was thinking of trying the Miller method to get a few cells. Thoughts? So there is— oh, there's so many different methods of queen rearing. So I've, I've got 2 or 3— no, 4 videos coming out this year on different queen rearing techniques. I'm just going to do as many as I possibly can, but I've already filmed, I've already filmed 3 of them. I've got another one that I'm going to do. I would just say if you just want to get a few queen cells doing like a combined starter finisher method, I'm not familiar with the Miller method. I might be familiar with it but not called the Miller method. I always get like bogged down with names of stuff, but a starter finisher, just kind of like all in a single hive, do something to move the queen away to reduce the the flow of the pheromone, boost all the young bees in the other area, and you'll get some really nice queen cells. So if that's what the Miller Method is like, I would definitely give it a go, and I would recommend everybody— you know, let's do it the other way around. I sell queen bees, I shouldn't be saying this. I recommend everybody to have a go at queen rearing. Rear some of your own queens, it's brilliant fun, really, really good fun. Give it a go. Hi Lawrence, question, have you ever used pseudo Queens or QMP? I have not, but I'm guessing it is some sort of pheromone. Is it a pseudo queen, as in like pseudo with a P? Oh, I'm writing at the same time now. That is not what I searched for. Um, no, I've not used them. I'm gonna have a look and have a look at both, see what they are. Uh, Mem says, I've done the undersuper today. Great idea. Thank you, Mem. Glad it's going well. I recently read a document from the NBU saying that all imported queens have to be moved to a new cage with the older tenants removed and sent for testing. Have you had an— have you ever had an issue after testing? So the NBU has never received a single issue in 30 years they've been importing queens, not one. And the funny thing about it is, and I've mentioned this to the NBU a number of times, I've said Right, so let's go, let's go through a scenario here. 500 queens come in, we change all the cages, we send them, send them out to our customers, we send you the cages back. 3 or 4 days later, you find something. Let's say you find something that you shouldn't find. What do you do next? And they say, will you give us the name and address of all of your customers that you sent that batch of queens out to, and we'll take it from there? And I say, well, Come on, what you what you going to do? So I give you 500 people's addresses. What's the plan? What's the plan of attack there? Surely you're not going to send bee inspectors to 500 people's addresses. And and their answer was yeah, that's what we'll do. And I say that would take months. And they say it probably would take months. And it's like well, like that's that's madness. That's not that's not a deterrent. That's not like what's the point in doing it? Because by the time you get round to that. that one person that had that one queen that had an issue, but you don't know, you don't know which queen it is. Um, it's probably going to be spread, but in 30 years of importing queens, there's never been a single pest or disease transmitted through, through the cages like that. Nothing's ever been identified, either through kind of like visual inspection of the cages or like a more thorough inspection of the cages. So like, the risk is tiny. but then the kind of mitigation that's in place far outweighs the risk and doesn't even mitigate the risk. It doesn't mitigate it at all because by the time they get around to go into these people's houses and go through all the colonies, it's spread. Come on, it's spread. Just imagine if like Tropilaelaps came in through one of them and that scenario was there, and then 3 months later they found the hive with Tropilaelaps. You know it's going to be in all the colonies, in all, in all the apiaries that are around there. Definitely isn't it. So I'm not, I'm not a fan of the case changes. Absolute ball ache. Sure, bees in trees will start drawing comb at the top and work down as they expand. They just, they go kind of wherever. It's a good point. They probably do do that in trees, don't they? Maybe they start at the bottom, but they've got to connect the wax somewhere, haven't they? What about any drones if you underbrood So when you— when I underbrood, there's no queen excluder in there, so if they want to, if they want to create drones, the drones can freely move around. But at that time of the year, they're not gonna, they're not gonna have loads of drones anyway. Good evening, Laurence, hope you're well. When you started beekeeping, at what point did you give up work and go at it full-time? I love that, that's, that is the question of the night. So 13 years after starting beekeeping, I've still not gone I've still not gone full-time, so I have a full-time job. I'm a project manager. Nuclear decommissioning is my main job, and my beekeeping is a hobby, believe it or not. Channel member, says, one of my single brood hives, queen excluded with a little fondant left underneath, upturned Polly Ashworth feeder. Bees have filled space with wild comb. Wasn't going to remove it yet, but when, how do I tackle this? So if it— so let's draw it. Let's draw it. I didn't mean to do that. Right, so you've got beehive like that, queen excluded there, going across, upturned Polly Ashworth feeder, and then you've got kind of like— let's take the snap off— you've got like wild comb coming down like this, maybe a bit of fondant here. How would I tackle that? It's a really— let me just double-check— one of my single brood hives, queen excluded, a little fondant left underneath, upturned polyasteroid feeder. Yeah, so if you've got it, if you've got it set up like that, if I've interpreted that right, it is really, really easy. You basically take the polyasteroid feeder off, give it a big thump on the queen excluder, shake all the bees out, take out all the wild comb, and then just put your super on top. The big risk is queen, where's the queen? But if you've got the queen excluder in place, you know she's below the queen excluder, so you You can just take that off. If you didn't have a queen excluder here, you just want to go through here first, just checking to see if you can find the queen. But I still think like the best way of getting a queen out is lifting up a box and just giving it a big thump where all of the bees fall back in. That's like the safest way to get all of the bees in. And then if you're looking at the box and you know the queen's not in the box, you just have to safely assume that she is in the hive. That is what I would do. Well, let's take all that back. I do like this app, it just makes it so much easier with the snap function because it, it, it, um, means I don't have to draw like 3-year-old. Oh, Andy the Bee Man, channel member! He's become a YouTube channel member. Welcome, Andy, um, thank you for joining. Let's have some tea. Um, Ed Walton says, if you were to transfer bees from a 14 by 12 to Langstroth, would you place the Langstroth box above or below? Right, so let's do another drawing. So this is another version of a transfer like that. So 14 by 12 box is here with some frames in, not going to go all the way across. So you can use what is called a conversion board. So a conversion board is just a straightforward board that goes all the way across like that. It is only really like across there. Ridiculous. I'm gonna have like a swear jar. Every time I get that wrong, I'm gonna do a pound. Right, so this board here will look— I'm gonna give you like a bird's-eye view of it now over here. So it's just a straightforward board, and then in the middle you just have like a hole like that. It doesn't matter what size, like big hole. Um, but the idea is that the dimensions here are big enough to cover both The 14 by 12 and the Langstroth. So it might, it might be that it's coming out to like here, and then you've got the Langstroth to go on top here. So snap it again. Oh, it's nowhere near as good, is it? Ah, love it, love it, love it, love it. Good work, John. Good work, John. John's just WhatsApp me saying can't see the drawing. He's good, John, and he is good. Right, so let me start again. So this, this is, this is the box. That's your 14 by 12 box there, and then I was saying you're going to put a conversion board in here, and then the bird's-eye view of that conversion board looks like this. It's a straightforward board with a hole in the middle there. That shouldn't look like that, it doesn't snap off. Hole in the middle like that. And it needs to fit— it needs to be able to cover both a 14 by 12 box and a Langstroth box. It might extend out like that. And then your Langstroth box will sit on top. And I'd always do the conversion going up, just wait until it's warm enough to do it, makes it a lot easier. Um, so, so that's what I would do. No queen excluder or anything. The bees will build up, they'll be in here, you turn the snap off, be up here like that, and then they'll start to kind of come up there a little bit, and then they'll get bigger, and then by the time they're kind of like filling all of this area here All you do is put a queen excluder in, and then make sure the queen is upstairs. My drawing has got very bad there. Make sure the queen's up there, and then once all of this brood down here has emerged, you can just remove your box and the conversion is complete. All right, let's recycle all of that. Thank you, John, for letting me know. That was the first major blunder. Aiden says, I'll be making frames for cut comb today. Could you give your techniques on how to get perfect cut comb. Thank you. So I can't, I'm afraid. I'm not one for cut comb, and it's not something that I've ever done, so I'm not going to pretend that I am the expert on that one. Sorry. And that's as far as I'm going to go. That's the biggest cop-out answer, but I honestly don't know. I don't do it that much, um, and I just— it's the tips that I know. The tips that I would give you are really good sharp knife, like the best sharp knife that you've possibly got, and then some way of keeping that sharp knife clean. So you need some water there, um, and you want to like, after every cut, you want to clean the knife, and then it gives you a nice clean cut like that. Nice clean wooden board, um, and that's probably the easiest way of doing it. I wouldn't do like, you know, the ones where they stamp it like that. I just don't think you get a good cut out of them. Very difficult to get them clean in between. A nice clean super sharp knife that you clean after every time, and you should get clean cuts. Julian says, evening, Laurence, what a tan! It's not that bad, I've got beekeeper's tan though. Look at that, can you see it on my hands? Like, maybe more on that one. I came back with a proper beekeeper's tan, my hands were really brown and everything else was just pale. One of my hives is on brood and a half, but most of them are— I think we've done that one. Uh, yeah, done that one there. Right, Scout About says, if you want to build a nuc we have overwintered to a double brood nuc, when would you add a brood box above them rather than below? So no earlier than the middle of April, I would say. It's all about the temperature. As soon as you're getting kind of like 9 or 10 degrees overnight temperature, you can do anything like that. It's that nighttime temperature where you don't want to give them the space up above. So I'd say middle of April, safe bet. I'm in southeast of England, we have a cold spell coming, so I'll put the supers on afterwards in the beginning of April. I think that's a sensible move. Hi Lawrence, what are your thoughts on disinfecting your frames with bleach instead of soda crystals? Thanks, Ed. So soda crystals don't disinfect. So soda crystals are there just for cleaning, to getting the gunk out, getting the wax out, getting the propolis out. The only way to really kind of like sterilize frames is to bring them up and properly boil them, and that will— that brings them up above the temperature needed to kind of kill EFB. But so disinfecting them with bleach, you could, but I would just say I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to put like my wooden frames into bleach and then have them soak it up and then have that in the hive, so I would just boil them. I think it's a much better way of doing it. Hi, I want to ask how to make the bees go up in the honey box where we take honey for the season from them. I don't know what is the right term and when should I place them? So for us in the UK, I would say safe bet middle of April, and then to get them to go up, this is a question that I get a lot, The bees will go up when they're ready to go up, as long as your queen excluder is not defective. You do get defective queen excluders with the sizing that's slightly wrong, but as long as that's not defective, the bees will go up when they need to go up. There's nothing you can do to get them to go up any quicker. The queen excluder is not stopping them go up unless it is defective. You get people saying don't use queen excluders, they're called honey excluders, and it's not true. We'll, uh, we'll do a video on that one this year to prove that that is a massive, massive myth. John Sylvester says, thanks so much, Lawrence. I should have mentioned single queen discounts as I may buy 3 from you, as I've seen the 5 queen discounts. Um, we'll do some single queen discounts as well, but they, they won't be before the 24th, so they'll be after that one. Uh, John Begree, ah, legend. He says, post added on No Nonsense Beekeeping Facebook group for poly cleaning and playlist for my first nucleus. Great work, John. Collector Rick's Honeybee says, stack silver, gold, and honey better than fiat money. Nice, that's a little riddle. Uh, Morley Honey says hello all. JL Hayes has given a $5 Super Sticker, thank you so much, it's very kind. Got any questions, stick them in there, I'll be happy to answer. Um, he says Morley. Uh, Carol McCaskill says evening, I checked my hive yesterday, had 6 frames of brood and 2 frames of brood-nal stages. I ended up deciding going to double brood already as this Buckfast is a prolific layer. Was it too early? So I think if you've underbrooded, so if you put your new brood box underneath, you're all good to go. If you put it above, maybe gone a little bit too early. I would be tempted, if the temperature's coming back down, I'd be tempted just to lift it up, just put it underneath, and I think your bees will be much happier that way. Thanks, nice easy. Yeah, tainted super, but oh well, maybe turn the wax into Yeah, that'd be a good idea. With beekeeping, you know, it's all about just finding like what works for you. Brood and a Half, I know a lot of people that love Brood and a Half, really do like it, they'd never change from anything else, and you know, it's just kind of like a slightly bigger brood box, but double the amount of frames to inspect. But then, like I said before, you could just lift up the top of that Brood and a Half, see if you've got swarm cells underneath, and if you don't, you say, right, they're not going to swarm, and then it becomes becomes a very, very easy inspection, better than a single brood box. If changing from brood and a half to single brood, can you clean the shallow and use new frames to make it a super again? So yeah, definitely. If you use new frames in it, you wouldn't even need to clean the super, I don't think. Like, Amitraz is wax soluble, so it's not like wood soluble, so it's not gonna be like sitting on the wood, it's just gonna be like absorbed into the wax. Um, so yeah, you can give that— you can give the box a scrape and a scorch if you want, um, but there's, there's no, there's no need to do it. But new friends should be good. Simon in Devon says, how do I become a channel member? So if you go on to the YouTube homepage where it says subscribe, there's a little button next to it that says join, and then you click there and you select which channel membership option you would like. I recommend the exclusive VIP mentoring one, which is very, very good value, uh, £8.99. You get access to all the exclusive videos, and then you can ask any questions and I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can. I'm pretty good at getting back. Says, I installed eye bolts in my lay-on hives so I can lock them down in my town. Very good, hope that's working for you. Says, in the new Abelo mating hive, why have they made it so you end up with 1.5 frames each side when 2 full frames is obviously needed? Seems a strange idea on a great system. Um, dude, so like 1.5 frames as in like 3 half frames? Yeah. That's what it is, isn't it? You've got 3, so it's like 1.5 frames each side when 2 full frames is obviously needed. Why, why, why 2 full— why is 2 full frames obviously needed? I'm well confused here because it's, you know, like each mini mating nuc is 3 frames, like 3 full frames, and then you, you put them in half and you get 1.5 on one side and 1.5 on the other side. Um, they're quite, they're quite big frames. They're much, much bigger than like standard mini mating hive frames. So in terms of like number of cells, way more cells in 1.5 frames that size than there are in 3 or 4 frames of a smaller size. I think I've confused that. I don't think I've understood it well, but I don't, I don't see, I don't see an issue with it. Um, is it you're saying that you might end up with like half a frame that you don't need, but then it's— you've got the 2 sides to balance it out, so should always work out, I think. Um, Andrew Cook says, hi, big shout out for James for beekeeping for Hope Charity. Such a good guy, he's been taken for a ride and abused his good nature. I think you know when— what went on. Loving the live chat. Um, really, really sad what's happened to, to James. Like, he, he runs his beekeeping as a charity. It's like an enterprise where he takes donations to help keep his bees. So he does it for, I don't know, oxalic acid sublimation and beehives and stuff. But then every single jar of honey he sells, he gives away to charity, and he, he's been kind of like suckered in by some scams in Uganda. And it turns out that the things, that the orphanage and the animal shelters that he thought that he was helping don't actually exist, and he's just been giving away money to scammers who have been parading it on TikTok. Um, when I, when I saw that video, I just thought, oh man, I'm so like, I'm so sad for him. Because he started that up, like, he just wants to help people. He's a really, really nice guy and he just wants to help people and he's trying to do something different and he puts a huge amount of effort into it and, and like, it's got it, got it to a brilliant place where it, where it is. And, you know, like, constantly fundraising, constantly getting people to support stuff and do GoFundMes, and, and then to have something like that happen, like, it'd make you feel sick. Would make you feel properly sick because I think he feels like that money could have gone to someone, like help someone out, but also that he might have, you know, people who have donated might feel like a bit cheated and stuff. But then for him to come out and do that video and like to hold his hands up and be so honest and stuff, I've got huge respect for him. That is not a difficult thing. Sorry, that is a very, very difficult thing to do, to kind of have the courage to come out and say like, this has happened and I'm, I'm embarrassed about it. And you can see the emotion in the videos. It was really, really sad. So huge respect for him for doing that. And I just, I hope that it doesn't kind of permanently put him off doing what he's doing. I don't think it will because he's quite determined and he's built something that's, that's good and unique. Oh, but yeah, it wasn't nice to see. My Bibiwear suit turned up yesterday. I hope it's as good as you say in the summer. Last year I was laughing at people spending that much on a suit. They are not cheap suits, are they? But I'm sure you will love it when that temperature starts going up. Uh, channel member, says, as adding chili to honey is classed as adulterated, what extra requirements do you need to undertake to sell hot honey compliantly? Insurance, labels, health and safety. Um, I'd love to be able to answer that one. We outsource it and we get someone else to do all the work for us and all of the compliance. Because when I started looking at it, it was a huge undertaking and there's no way that we could have done it here. So we outsource it all, excuse the pun. And I don't know, because when I started looking at it, it was just all of these different legislation and regulations applied. And I just thought, well, we've just got one outlier product. If I have to do all of that, I just won't sell it. And that's what I think a lot of people do. So we get someone else to do it for us. Much easier. Is there any reason why I can't find queens in the hive after the winter season? So maybe they were marked before and they've like rubbed the markings off, or maybe they superseded later on in the year. So you had a marked queen, you no longer got a marked queen. Also, if, if you don't mark your queens and you just can't find her, you lose your eye for it. I always find the beginning of the year terrible at queens, and then you get, you get much, much better at it. I'd say it's probably one of those, one of those reasons. Apologies for joining late, but I bought 7— I'm assuming that's Black Mancin honey queens— late last year. They're bubbling over. Not the first time you've heard that today. Very good. When do I double brood under? So if you're going underneath, you can do it anytime after that middle of Feb. Want to do it now? Do it now, it's fine. If you want to go over, I'd go from middle of April Onwards. Frollies B says, I only have one site at the moment and you can't see it from any roads. I find that works well. Yeah, definitely does work well. Far away from anyone as possible. Uh, Elsa Dex says, what's the difference between F0 Buckfast queens from Italy and Germany and Denmark, and which is better for the English weather? So all of those countries produce Buckfast queens that are suitable for the English weather. I know some people tell you that that's not true, but It is true. Germany and Denmark for Buckfast genetics. Italy is where a lot of the matings take place because the weather further south can get— it's much, much nicer, starting the season earlier. But I personally, all of our genetics come from Germany, but you do get a lot of good Danish Buckfast genetics as well. Also says, how many times should I treat my bees since Feb to April? So my varroa treatment, I said the system that I use is I take all my honey off middle of August, Apivar strips go in, 8 weeks, feed the bees up for winter. I do one blast of apibioxal around back end of November, something like that, and that's my system. If you need to treat in the spring as well, you can treat with Apivar kind of like 1st of Feb, take it out 1st of April, or you could do multiple vapes or drizzles for oxalic acid them anytime now at 5-day intervals. That should see your bees being very healthy coming into the season. Hi, are rats a problem around beehives? We get them underneath our hive and they eat parts of the dead bees which go through the mesh. Are there health risk damage? Sub to The Beekeeper, love your videos. So as long as they're not entering the beehive, no issues whatsoever. If they start going in and chewing, then you do have an issue. I would say the bigger issue is kind of like in storage, you know, if you've got all your supers or your brood boxes stacked up and then a rat gets in and starts going through and defecating everywhere, then you've got a serious issue and you need to probably burn it all before you go again. A local vineyard owner has asked if I consider putting hives on his land, but they use fungicides. Is this a bad idea? So fungicides aren't gonna— you know, I don't know the ins and outs of the fungicides that you're going to use, but it's going to be highly unlikely the bees are going to come into contact with those fungicides, and the fungicides shouldn't really have any impact on the bees. Obviously you don't want it if you've got any insecticides there. Channel member says, hit the like button and subscribe. Laurence is the only YouTuber that answers every question without Super Chats. Thank you, Laurence, it's my pleasure. I've got a very sore throat, you can see I'm going, going a bit quicker today. Julian Lawley says, saying hi to Ben the Beekeeper from fellow Southwest Devon beekeeper. virtual high five there. Uh, Flower Street Farm Bees, Jen and Brian says hello from Colorado. Hello to you too. Uh, Robin Todd says Mantap pack, definitely in joke there. Says yesterday was really warm and was exciting to see the bees bringing pollen back. I cannot wait for the new season. I'm like that, it's like, come on, let's get going. Um, we're there though, you know, the first batch of nucs goes out next week, this Wednesday. Can't believe it came around so quick. I'm getting my first bees next month. Very exciting, there's nothing like the first bees you get, it's brilliant, isn't it? I think says, do we need to remove a med— a medium super used for winter stock as it went through Apivar treatment? When the super's gone, the bees could move the tainted honey around. So it, it's weird, like I have loads of discussions about this with people. It's not the, it's not the honey that's tainted with Apivar, it's the wax that's tainted with apivar. And what they say is that you can't extract out of the wax that's tainted with apivar, but you can move that honey around. And if the honey from the apivar-tainted frames is moved out of those frames and into clean frames, then it is no longer tainted with apivar and you can safely extract it. It's— see, I know it's like a really like weird thing to think about, but, um, the, the amitraz can only be dissolved, it's only soluble in wax. It's not soluble in wood. It's not soluble, um, in, in honey, which is like water-based. It's just soluble in wax. So it's only going to kind of like get in the wax, and then when the honey's out of the wax, it's just— it's still there just in the wax, and it's not transferred through to the water-based honey. So you can see how that honey can be moved around without it being tainted, because it's only the wax that can be tainted. So I think, I think that, I think that works. Um, so says, how are people getting away with selling honey as raw on TikTok Shop? Drives me crazy. Doesn't drive me crazy. I think raw is a perfectly acceptable term for honey, and it's one that we should use more. And the latest landslide case, when a council that won't be named took a company to court for selling raw honey, when they said, we're not changing it, take us to court. So they took them to court, and then the judge massively sided with the company and saying, by calling the honey raw, and kind of like paraphrasing a bit, but by calling the honey raw, he did not think that they were misinforming the consumer. And that's always been my point of view, which is not misinforming anyone. They want raw honey and they know what it means. So a customer comes up and says, can I, can I buy some raw honey? And you say, can't really call it raw. And they say, why is that? It's like raw honey, isn't it? Honey that's not been adulterated or like coarsely, like finely filtered or heated above a certain level. Raw honey. They know exactly what it is, and they give you the characteristics of it as well. But you can't, you can't call it that. But since that, since that case, everyone calls their honey raw honey now, and I, I like the term. Raw honey is a good term. Cub Rider does not like the term raw honey. I'm tempted to start up a TikTok shop. Get me on the live saying, oh, talking about raw honey. But I've not got time for that. Peter says they also come in on ships. The ports are hotspots. I think we're talking. Talking about, so yeah, Asian hornets there. But but similar to to anything really, you know, could be like tropalaylax, could be varroa. Varroa came over here on fruit is what they think. But who knows? But they do. They have on on the ports. They have sentinel sites, don't they? So you have a port, and then you have like surrounding the port, you have like sentinel apiaries that the the bee inspectors go and do like regular regular checks on for for pests coming. Coming in like that. Uh, John says the how many splits in one season has been posted on No Nonsense Beekeeping. We got, we got up to, I think, did we get up to 20 nucs on that from April to June? So we only needed to do like 2 more splits. So from 20 to 40 and then from 40 to 80, easy do that in a year. Uh, Guy Walker says GoPro Hero 13 with optional macro lens, good, bad, better option for recording hives during manipulations for a complete videographer amateur? It's no better than your phone. I would say the phone's better, and also when you're wearing, like when I wear anything like a GoPro like that, the bees attack it a lot, where what I would do is just get a good camera and then get it on a tripod and then just film from your camera, and it will be kind of equal, if not better, than the GoPro, assuming you've got a good camera, a good phone, sorry. Hi Laurence, did a quick inspection earlier this month when it was fairly warm, all colonies were active, and calm. That's what we want to hear. Uh, Beagries Bees John says, Lawrence, if you want to try AMM again, I'm sure I can get a good friend to send you one of his, and he goes for good traits. Scale-wise, unsure, as whether in Aberdeen a shorter season. I am 100% up for that, John. Feel free to connect us and I will pay for a queen. Scout About says, we want to build up a stock of drawn brood combs and are happy to use one hive as its sole purpose for doing this over the year. How would you suggest the best way to do this. I see a number of people do this, and it goes from, you know, people say, oh, like, protect your drawn comb and it's worth its weight in gold. It is very true, beekeeping is a lot easier with drawn comb. It's not a lot easier with drawn comb, it's a lot more productive with drawn comb. It's actually a little bit more difficult with drawn comb, especially if, like, for beginners, because adding on foundation just gives the bees something to do, keeps them busy. They've got to draw out all that foundation, it's energy intensive, they've all got like a job, and I find when they've got foundation to draw out, they're much less likely to swarm. If you put on a box of drawn comb, they just go bang, fill it, and then they go and swarm. So it's more productive, but it is more difficult. But I wouldn't worry about building up a stock of drawn brood from— sorry, drawn brood combs, for one reason, they're really difficult to store because the wax moth will get in and just ruin them. So like, that is what the wax moth will go for. But also, like, what's the reason for having lots of drawn brood combs? The only reason that I can think of is that you want to make like lots of splits. But I just think in, in a single season, you can turn one colony into as many colonies as you want just by feeding them. And like, foundation, okay, slows that down a little bit, but you'd only be wanting to build up a stock so that you could do like some rapid expansion. at some point. So I wouldn't, I just wouldn't recommend it. I can understand getting super frames drawn out, but again, I would just, I would just like naturally and organically allow that to build up. I certainly wouldn't kind of like dedicate one colony just to building stuff out because it's difficult. You're not going to get to a point where you put on a box of foundation, you feed them, and then you come back and you've just got 10 frames of perfectly drawn out comb with nothing in them. You're going to have syrup, you're going to have pollen, maybe you're going to have stores, natural stores, nectar coming in, and then you're going to take that away from that hive. I, I just— yeah, I'm not a fan of building up colonies just to get drawn comb, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't recommend it. I've had 3 AMM queens and they did not survive London winters. The Italian Buckfast queens I've had have always survived winter with the bigger colonies. Buckfast is best in my opinion. Buckfast is best in my opinion as well. I'm not sure it would have been the AMM queens not surviving the London winters though. I think like they're survivors. AMM are survivors. They're good at surviving. And, you know, I say like a Buckfast colony will do well anywhere in the UK, same as an AMM colony. An AMM colony should do well anywhere in the UK. Shouldn't be a case that it's kind of like too hot or too cold anywhere for them. Um, but interesting, interesting observation. Um, but I, I like the Italian Buckfast queens because they're just nicer, aren't they? Sorry. Inspected my colonies earlier this month when it was warm. Oh, we did that one, cool. So there was another one. Inspected today, 18°C, and they were pretty angry. Any obvious reasons why? Protective of existing stores maybe. So I think when it's cool, the bees are still just a bit like, they're not, they're quite lethargic, they don't want to fly up. So you open them up and think, oh, they're nice chilled out bees, and then when they get bigger and there's more bees there and they've kind of got like a surplus of bees, that don't need to be tending to brood, then they're slightly older and they ping you a little bit. But also there's no flow on at the moment, so the colonies are building up but there's just not much happening, so they are— they get a bit frustrated. The Miller method is cutting the brood comb in several VVVs to get the bees to draw queen cells up. Okay, yeah, I have seen that method there. Not my favourite method, that one, but it's good because you haven't got to graft that one. You can see you can, um, you can do it. What's the other way of doing that? I think of it in a sec. But yeah, no, that, that would work. It's a simple way of doing it without grafting. Julian Lawley says, I'm going to try queen rearing this year. Hold on to your hat, Lawrence, hotline time. Always, always welcome the calls. Uh, Jizz Wizard, love it, says, my bees are confused. My bees are flying today and there is still 6 inches of snow on the ground. Um, they're probably desperate to get out and, uh, have a toilet break. That's John saying we can't see it, so I'm about 45 minutes behind on the comments. Philip says, do you send queens to different countries like Poland? I'm afraid it's UK only for the queens and the nucs. Under the Bee Man channel member says, well, I'm in North Wales with Buckfast bees on Langstroth frames waiting for the horns to grow. I love it. Whereabouts in North Wales? Tony Morris says, I'm in just one of my new nucs, the bees have started to draw wild comb in the feeder section. I'm feeding a litre of 1 to 1 syrup every 2 to 3 days, but they're building in the free space. Should I worry? So I'd slow the feeding right down. If they're building comb in the feeder, that means they probably want a bit more space, but I've seen your nucs and there is space on those frames, so I would just reduce the feeding down. I'd maybe go to like 1 litre of syrup every week and just let the bees just naturally build out. They won't have filled those frames out in since Monday. You've got, you've got a good 2 weeks, maybe 3 weeks in that, in that nuc. Hi Lawrence, from Tasmania. The bottom mesh entrances you make, does that stop the bees robbing? Also, my hive lids have vent holes with mesh, should I seal them? So for me, I do not like any ventilation at the top, do not like it. Ventilate at the bottom, insulate at the top. That's not the standard way of doing things, but that is— I think, I think a lot of people do that now. No holes at the top, no ventilation, lots of insulation, but mesh at the bottom. And then the bottom mesh of the underfloor entrances that I make— let's quickly draw the cross-section of the underfloor entrance because that's quite fun. Right, so this is what the underfloor entrance— what is that? Right, black and snap. Right, so this is what the underfloor entrances look like. Kind of like a cross-section. I've already drawn it wrong. So you have kind of like 2— are you joking? All right, so that's what they look like. So the idea is the bees fly in here and they have to go up like that to get into the hive, which is kind of like up there like that. So does it stop robbing? No. Does it help the bees defend the hive against robbing and wasps? Definitely. So that gap there, this little gap, if I measured it, is 26, 28.7 points, it's 8 mil, so it's a single bee space, so only one bee can get in at a time, and then what happens is all the bees line up here, and if anything comes in, they just go Bash, smash it. But you can also reduce it down from the front, so you can reduce the entrance down from the front as well. But it is a very, very good system. The reason my favorite thing about the underfloor entrance is the way that you close it up. So all you do is you just get some like foam and you just like jam the foam in there like that, and then that's it, it's sealed. So you just like stick a bit of foam in. Really, really easy to seal it. And even better if you get, get the foam right in like there, like that. Just like standard foam, get it for— you'll see it in skips when people chuck away sofas and stuff. Just chop it into strips like that, stuff them in, and then you can transport the bees. And the best thing, even better than that yet, is that on hot days you take the foam, dunk it in water first, and then stick it in, and then the bees drink it and it like, um, they use it for cooling Cooling it down during transport. It's a really, really nice system. How many more questions we got? Bob Bob says, I've nucs going out of Correx boxes in the week. Any advice on when to put them in the Correx? Early better, later better? A frame of foundation for space, all drawn, comb, and food. I do not like Correx boxes for sending. We've had— I say we've had so many die. We've had a lot die in Correx boxes. Very, very few die in poly boxes. I've had a couple die in poly boxes, um, but we've had— I've had it where I've sent out like 12 nucs to someone in Correx and they've all died. Uh, expensive. Uh, and the reason is, is there's no, there's no spacing between it. So, so no matter what the way that you give them to the courier, they're just going to do what they want with them and they stack them up. So in— you can imagine, let's do some drawing, um, with poly boxes you have kind of like— imagine that's the nuke there, and then you'll have like these feet that sit like that, and then they stack on the next polybox like that, you know what I mean? And then you've got the feet, and then the next polybox, etc., etc., etc. Like, that just makes no sense, that last bit. Um, but with Corex, they stack like this, and I'm doing it a bit smaller, like top to bottom. There's no gap, so you get like this real big buildup of heat, and that's what kills the bees. So I really, really don't like, um, Correx boxes. So excuse me there. So you said, I've got nucs going out, any advice on when to put them in? So put them in absolute last minute, spray them. We spray ours with like cool water. Make sure that you're using ones with the biggest possible mesh that you can possibly get. Definitely don't use the one with holes in. That is just the best way to blow Baker Nuc. Can't believe people still sell those, and I'm really sorry if they're the ones that you've got because they're not good and I wouldn't be sending bees out in them. Frame a foundation for space, yep, so understock them, more brood, less bees, definitely, and put them in at the absolute last minute and get a very, very late collection and get a quick courier, someone that's going to send them next time. At Telford I heard a couple of well-known beekeepers say if you inspect before April, they can bore the queen. Have you heard this before? Ah, that is— who said that? That's bollocks. That is just rubbish. Basically something that you say to someone to stop them inspecting before April. Not true. Have you used a solar wax melter before, and what's the best one? I'm looking to speed up the wax melting process. So I have. I've got the Abello one, and it's, it's good, but like, it only works on the very warmest of days. but then once you get it up to temperature and it's warm, it's very, very quick to get through quite a lot of wax. So you can make them as well. This isn't a shameless plug for Abello, but the Abello one is well made. I think the big thing is the insulation and the quality of the glass that you've got. You want glass that's going to let as much heat through, and then you want a body that's going to keep as much of that heat in. The Abello one is good, but I've seen a few other ones as well that are similar. So I think they're all much of a muchness. The thing that I do like about the Abella one is they have this stand. It's quite expensive, but it's like a rotating stand, which you kind of think at the beginning, oh, that is well frivolous. Who needs a rotating stand? And then by the time you've moved the solar wax extractor around like that to follow the sun, you think, I wish I had a rotating stand for this. And it works really, really nice. And I'd love to see someone who's good at automating stuff kind of put it on a timer so you can like get it to turn itself to face the sun. The whole, the whole way through the day. That would be cool. Love that. Uh, Marcus says, @EdButler, in Estonia we disinfect with a max 5% nitrous— what's— what? I don't even know that. Sodium, sodium hydroxide solution, is that right? Um, what do we— we don't use— we don't use that over here, do we? Use bleach. Um, yeah, I've, I've got really tired all of a sudden. 2 hours and 30 minutes in. I know. I'm an inch into my cold tea. Carol says thank you so much for the advice. No problem at all, Carol. The Whirlabies has joined as well. We've got loads of people joining today. I think that's 4 members joined today. Thank you. If you ever need anything, give me a shout. Uh, Cub Rider saying, I'm saying you need 8 halves, not 6, to make the 2x2 frame hive starter. I don't think you do, do you? Because it's It's 6 frames. No, it's 6 frames that go into it, so it's half. So you see, you need 8 halves, not 6, to make 2x2 frame hive starters. I, I'm not understanding it. I don't understand why, why I'm not. My, my view of that system is you've got 3 national frames that split into 2, so you just take those 3 national frames and you're just going to put them in your colonies. The bees build them out, draw them out, got brood in them, and then you take those 3 frames, split them into half, so you've got 6 mini frames, and each side of the nuc takes 3, so 3 plus 3, so 6. I'm not sure what— I'm not sure why— where the 8 comes in. I'm probably being really, really stupid, but I don't see— I don't see the issue with it. Sorry. QMP, referring to queen mandibular pheromone, is a synthetic substance used in beekeeping to stimulate the presence of a queen, potentially maintaining a queenless colony as queen right for up to 3 weeks. Interesting. No, I've never, I've never kind of really, I've never heard of that and I've never really found a reason to need that, but I'll have a look. There probably is a good reason for using it, so I will have a look. I've inspected, had bees on all frames and a hive getting heavier for a month, New comb being built in the feeder space, ended up suping above with above the queen excluder on crown board. Have I made a mistake and should should I put under the brood? So don't don't worry about the stuff like that. I know, like I'm saying to people, you should you should underbrood early on in the year, but normally the advice is is to overbrood, and then it's just a case of timing to get it right. So I think if the temperature's right and you put the super above, it's fine. It's no problem. It just depends where you are in the UK, and if it's dropping down really, really cold, you might have done it too early, or you might be better off putting it underneath. The risk is that you do nothing and the bees swarm, so you don't want that to happen, so it's probably best to do something. But yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about it depending on the temperature, and hopefully you've seen it. So if it's like 14, 15 degrees in the days there and kind of like 8 or 9 degrees at night, you can super up above. If it's 10 degrees in the days there and 2 or 3 degrees at night, I would take the super back off and either leave it for the time being or put it on, put it underneath if the bees do need some additional space. Harry says hi, I hope you're well. Hope you're well too, Harry. Says looking forward to my Black Mountain Honey Queens, can't wait. Excited to send them out to you, Stephen. Says if the chemical is only contained in the wax, why bother with being concerned if a honey super is on while treating unless that wax is condemned forever? Very good point. A lot of the way that these treatments are licensed, they're licensed like in a very specific way, and though it would be easier for them to get the license through if they just say, oh yeah, just take the supers off, because they'll ask those— if the supers are on, they'll ask those questions. So if you just take the supers off and do the treatment, we've not got to do all these questions in the licensing. And I think a lot of it is done like that. They probably could license it for use with the supers on, but they'd have to jump through a lot more hoops. Cup Rider says, I love the term raw honey but didn't know those facts. Thanks for the info. Raw it is then, definitely. Like the, like the word raw honey. Where we going? Right, sorry, that one there. Atlas says, I don't use any chemicals but I find the rationalizations around using curious. It is very, very curious indeed. El Sadek says, I saw a couple websites selling manuka trees here in the UK. Why not plant Manuka trees and extract honey from them. And there's actually an estate in the UK that has gone all in on manuka. Couldn't have timed it any worse, but they've got thousands of manuka trees, and I think they're at the point where they produce their own manuka honey now. In the UK, the regulations say for a honey to be classed as like single floral source, it needs to have over 75% of that nectar in it. So you couldn't just do a couple of trees, you'd need a huge, huge estate to make it. actually Manuka honey. GoPro 13 with macro lens is really good, very sharp images, but I would say similar to like an iPhone 16 or Samsung Ultra 25, equally very good images. I want to go from 24 to 60 hives this year, any tips? That's pretty easy, that one. I would just go straight forward, bang, split down the middle, go 24 to 60. Just do it in one hit. Split them all in half and some of them split into 3. You should be good to go. Would you say it's too early to checkerboard drawn frames? Um, I wouldn't be checkerboarding anything yet at the moment. There's just too much risk for stuff going wrong, and I don't think the benefit's there, and it's still cold. I would give it a couple of weeks. Make pushing cages or learn how to graft or buy an incubator with queen cages? Is that, is that a question? I think that's in response to someone else, isn't it? I think learn how to graft. William Sharples says, how do you store drawn supers over winter? So I like to store them wet, so I harvest them, take the honey out, blow all the bees out, and take the honey out, and then I stack them up on a pallet, crown board underneath, or an upturned roof, stack all the supers up 4 high-ish with a roof on top, ratchet them down, build up a whole super, So they're like properly secure, and then wrap in plastic wrap. That is my system. That is the system that I use. Ben the Beekeeper says, "Sorry, my keyboard was weird. I meant sub to Ben the Beekeeper. Love your videos." Everyone out there needs to sub to Ben the Beekeeper. There we go. Larrymore Farmer says, "Hello everyone. Hello to you too." Stephen Sly says, "My Carniolan was the only colony that I lost this winter. All other Buckfast survived. Gonna stick with Buckfast." fast. Some people not keen on carnivore. Anglesey nuc coming from you in late April. Oh, very nice, I do like Anglesey. I noticed some bees in a hive are a bit darker on their abdomen and a bit shiny compared to their sisters in the same hive. Are these just old bees? So likely that it's just old bees. Google CBPV as well though, so chronic bee paralysis virus, when you get like really old, super shiny, slick bees like that. they're a bit like not moving very well, or shaking, or trembling, that is Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus, and that is not good. But check it, see what it is. Have you ever tried Correx boxes for swarm traps? So no, but I don't see any reason why they wouldn't work. They're probably a bit small. So this, I think someone did, who is it who did the test, was it Sealey who did it, I can't remember, 40 litres he said is optimum size, so quite a bit bigger. You're probably talking like 14 by 12, a bit bigger than a 14 by 12 brood box for the optimum size. True, raw is best. We always see so-called pure honey used. This is the one that I never understood with that yet. When I was saying 3 years ago, having my big rant about raw honey, and they said, no, you can't use raw, raw is not the correct term, just use the term pure instead, and I say, well, Hang on, that's that's not in the honey regs. And they say, yeah, no, but that's fine. You can use pure. And I even checked that with trading standards when they made us take down every single reference to the word raw off everything. They said, just use pure instead. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa! I'm not letting that. I'm not letting that down. So why can't I use the word raw? And they say, you cannot use the word raw because it is not a defined term in the honey regulations for a descriptive term to describe your honey. And I say, okay, fair cop. Is pure in that regulations? And they say no. And I said, I can use that? And they say yeah. You're just like, you're just making it, you're making it up as you go along. You're literally making it up. And apparently pure was okay. You are frustrating. Scout About says, can underfloor entrances be used for nucs that are used for queen rearing? I'm just going to go back to this one here. I do, I do kind of wish at that point when, when the Trading Standards came to me and made me take down Raw off every page of the website, of all the Amazon listings, of all the eBay listings, of all my labels, I do wish that I'd had the, the courage, which I was very close to doing, which was saying no, not doing it because I don't think I'm breaking the law. And then seeing what they did and then letting them take me to court and then going through with it. And there's no way I would have done this. I'm so I'm so just like, yep, you know, I'll do what you told me to do. We don't want, we don't want any trouble here. Um, I wish I had the courage to do that back then because it looks like the, the legal precedent was set, which was, yeah, he's not misleading anyone. He's using it, he's using a descriptive term to provide additional information on the kind of composition and processing of his product. Would have been good, but I didn't. I was too scared. Scout About says, can underfloor entrances be used for nukes that are used for for queen rearing? Um, yep, don't see any reason why not. The queen will find her way in and out of there, no problem. Another great live, keep up the good work. Thank you, sir. Hi Lawrence, greetings from Limerick. Do you reduce the entrance in underfloor floors in winter? So I don't unless I see any signs of robbing or wasp attacks, and then I'll give it a go. I reckon we'd be up to a 10 in the swear jar already with that stupid app. It was good, I like the app. We'll get better at it. I ideally want to get my pen because I, I sat here for half an hour with my, with my tablet trying to work out— because I did it with the tablet before and it worked quite nicely on the tablet using this same app, um, but it's definitely better on— it's neater on the PC. But I would like to be able to like draw with the pen and not with my mouse. Alan Malone says, ended up with 4 hives dying early winter. I have 1 nuc and one hive left. When should I start splitting and when can I get queens? So we're taking orders for queens now. First batch goes out first week of April, basically sold out. So the, the second batch is— we have a weekly batch then, so every single week send them out on a Thursday. I would focus on getting the colonies nice and healthy, getting them double brooded, probably going to take you through to like middle of May, and then you've got lots of frames to work with them, and then there should be a good supply of queens then as well. My son bought me a Flow Hive a couple of Christmases ago. Late last year I put a colony in but left the super off for obvious reasons. How do I store the super this coming winter period? So it's quite simple to store the super really for the Flow Super. You just extract it, take all the honey out, and then leave the taps open and leave them kind of like facing downwards just to get like all of the remnants out, as much as you can get out. once you've already harvested it, and then just put the super back together again and just kind of put the roof on, put it on. You can keep— you can leave the super on the hive if you want to keep the super on the hive, as long as it's sealed and the bees can't access it. That's probably where I would keep it. That's where I keep mine, easiest place to keep it, and then the bees just clean it up all the way on in the spring. Bob Bob says the Correx nucs are for pickup by the buyer. Okay, I'm I'm happy for you now, don't want you sending out Coryx nucs. Where are we going? Good evening from the Isle of Man. I've just started my local beekeeping course and I'm looking forward to starting beekeeping this season. I've been reading and watching lots of YouTube videos from yourself, Griff, Stu at Simply Beautiful, and just Alex's beekeeping journey, so thank you all for the info, advice, and enjoyable content you have created. Oh, thanks Paul, you've got some very, very good people on there, Griff, Stu at Simply Beautiful, and Alex. All very, very good beekeepers and YouTubers. Mr. Meow says, thanks, Lawrence, have learned a lot from your videos. I'm glad I can be of service. Cub Rider says, once the 3 halves in each side have a mated queen success, then you can't put 3 halves together to make 2 full frames for a new hive. Sorry if I'm not explaining it very well. That's not what— that's not what the system's designed for. It's like a one-way system. So the idea is that you, you put, you put all of the full frames into hives, get them drawn out, get the brood. You put the— put them into your queen mating nuc, you add a queen cell, virgin comes out, she goes and gets mated. And then at that point, you just take the queen out, harvest the queen, do whatever you want with the queen, just put another queen cell in. You just keep on doing that. Harvest the queen, put another queen cell in. Harvest the queen, put another queen cell in. End of the year, you just take all of the frames from all of your hives, click them back together, and put them in your hives. That's the system. It's not— it's not a case of once the queen's mated, you take out the 1.5 frames and try and do something with it. Um, that's where the confusion is. I'm glad we got to the bottom of that one. I don't think there's an issue, so as long as you use that system, we should be good. David says, been loving your slow-mo vids. The head-on collision one made me smile thinking to myself, out of my way, fool! Get out of my way, fool! Um, I know it's good, isn't it? I, I spent way too long sitting there videoing stuff because I was out with them learning the whole day. So they were going out collecting bees, making up mini mating nucs, queen rearing, doing a lot, but there were, there were kind of gaps, so they'd be going out for 4 hours in the morning. They said, right, 8 till midday we're going out collecting bees. So all we're doing is just going through every colony, finding the queen. I've got loads of queen hunting videos, they're really good. But finding the queen, putting her off to one side, shaking off 6 frames of bees, and that's why you're seeing— if people are thinking, why is he posting all these videos of like opening up a colony and it's like rammed full of wild comb and all this stuff and feed and stuff in there. That's what they want. They just want big, massive, strong colonies. They feed them protein candy every week, so there's lots of young nurse bees, young bees that they can harvest to go and put in the mini mating nucs. So that's what they were doing. But in between, so I'm there for like 4 hours, and there were loads of cool videos, like things happened, and I was like, oh, I'll do a video on that, do a video on that. But there was a lot of time where I was just not standing around, but like we're an hour away from base and there's only one van, so I'm like, right, that's it, let's do some slow motion videos. So I made, I made the very most of it. Ryan McGrath says, is it an option to dip frames in bee-safe miticides or spray them on the brood frames? All open cells would be treated and you could treat a couple of times over the month to treat all cells. Um, I don't think there's any approved product that allows you to do that. Like, it sounds like a nice idea, but it also sounds a bit, oh, maybe a bit like OTT, because the, the miticides like Amitraz that spread through the bees walking over it is very, very effective. So you could just spray Amitraz all over everything, but I don't, yeah, I'm not sure it'd be the best idea. No, I'm not, I'm not going to go with that one. It's a nice idea though, I do, I do like different ideas, but I don't think it's something that would work very well. Do you ship to Belgium? Are there taxes added? I'm afraid we do not ship, it's UK only. Sorry about that. Cub Rider could buy some extra half of the frames and have them drawn out and ready to use, especially if they have pollen stores in them. Could do that. Evening, Laurence, I'm buzzing for next Thursday. I am buzzing for it as well, it is very, very exciting. Thank you for the live. Thank you, Harry. Cup Rider says, ah, makes sense, thank you. I'm glad we got to the bottom of that one. Evening, Laurence, you may have covered it already as I'm late arriving, but when will you start full weekly inspections of your hives? So for me, first or second week of April is when I start going into weekly inspections. I might have a sneak peek before then, but that will be it. We have reached the end of the stream, 2 hours 29 minutes, 144 people are still here, 15 likes. I can't be good enough. 15 likes. So on the way out, I would very much appreciate it if you hit the like button. Thank you very much. If you want to buy a Langstroth nuc, there is 5 left and that is it. And that is not a forced marketing technique, that's genuine. If you want a Langstroth nuc from us this year, there are 5 left and then we are sold out for the season. So we're done. That's the live stream done. I've got Nigel as the last one. He says, I'm with Paul M. Learn lots from yourself, Alex and Stu. He's sometimes Sometimes though, watching Griff on subtitles is possibly one of my favourite things in the world to do. Google has no idea what he is saying. It's really, really good fun. Watch a Griff video, put it on subtitles, and see what they say. But we're done. So every Friday, half past 7, Let's Talk Bees. I'll be here. Come loaded with your questions. As David said, I always get to the bottom. I don't leave any question unanswered, and you have not got to pay me for the privilege of me asking your— answering your questions. I will answer them for free. I just appreciate your support, brilliant support from everyone. I love it. And if there's anything I can do to make your beekeeping easier, just let me know. David has found 102 likes. I think I was looking at the Facebook likes. 102 likes, I'll take that. Thank you for first giving it the thumbs up as well. Thanks, Laurence. Thanks for a great stream. Thank you. Thank you. Sting you later. We are done. I'll see you next week. Have a good one.