Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees With Richard Noel - Episode 3

Hello everyone, we are here with Richard Noel. Uh, we'll wait, uh, for a few people to gather, um, but obviously people will be able to catch up a little bit in the live stream. I'll just talk for a little bit, Richard, because there's probably like an advert running on there for people to come in here at the moment.

So they're watching. Yeah, I imagine it probably is. Yeah, hi everybody. And nice to see you.

So yeah, Richard, 41 people straight away from the beginning, that's a very good start. If you want to, if you want to introduce yourself, but you know you need no introduction.

Oh, it's very kind of you, thanks. Well, yeah, so I'm a beekeeper in Brittany, British beekeeper over here. I moved to France 18 years ago, picked up beekeeping nearly— must be nearly 11 years ago this year. I kept bees like everybody else for a few years, then I got into queen rearing and I got into other things, then I became sort of more than an amateur and decided to go professional, but I was also still doing some other work. I was a landscape gardener, but I jacked that in last year, and my first full year— well, my third year as a professional, but my first full year earning my income from bees— was the worst year we've ever had in 32 years. So it's kind of trial by death, as they say, but no, I'm still here, all going well. I'm now looking to build at home. I'm building, we call it a miellerie in France, but it's basically a workshop for extraction. So that's all exciting, it's all expanding. The bees have seemed to be done quite well this winter so far, so things are looking positive. So yeah, we're always trying to reach out as beekeepers to kind of have new meetings and try different things. I haven't done any work with Laurence before. He asked me the other week if I'd be interested. I said, why not? You know, we're all kind of trying to hold that message about good honest beekeeping practices and trying to get the word out that beekeeping is a heck of a lot of fun, but it has to be fun, and that's why I always say, but it's all about sharing. We don't do any of this, you know, oh, I can raise queens, but why should I waste time telling you? Why not? It's good fun raising queens. We can all learn a lot from it, and the one thing to remember about queen rearing is there's no right answer. With all beekeeping issues, there's nothing that you do that is really the right answer. There's plenty of ways that aren't that good, and there's plenty of ways that are good, but you have to find something that works for you. So that's, that's kind of a bit of an intro, how I like to leave it open, because once people were— what we're probably going to do is we're going to do— I'm going to give a little presentation with Lawrence. He's going to take some notes and some questions, and then during that I'll give this presentation. It's some of the presentation I give when I'm doing queen rearing talk. And I hope it will prompt you guys out there to write a few notes down, and then we'll have a questions and answer session after. But if we have some narrative first and some nice pictures to wow at, which I like putting in, then we can all, uh, all work on that, and then everything should go swimmingly, I hope. But I'm using— I'm telling you, I'm using a new platform. I haven't used StreamYard before, and I don't use Google Chrome, so I'm just hoping everything works okay. So bear with us if we have a technical issue.

Oh well, I'm hoping the same after what happened to my stream last week. So I'm hoping everyone can hear me as well and I'm not cutting out. But first off, Richard, thanks for coming on. Like, uh, it was great that you said yes. And the background for me is that I followed all your videos in terms of my queen rearing method. So, uh, when I was learning, I watched your YouTube videos and I followed the exact same method, and that's the one that I kind of show on my channel as well. But I've always just been impressed at the quality of the queen rearing. So like Richard said, what we're gonna, what we're gonna do this evening is, as opposed to doing a bit of a scattergun, just random questions, Richard's kindly put together a slightly refined queen rearing presentation. So that will give you all of the detail about his process, and then we can have a scattergun Q&A at the end asking anything.

Yeah.

So first off, I will just hit onto the comments. If there's any questions coming in, I'll just kind of keep it going. I'm going to hand over to Richard, and he is going to give you a presentation on queen rearing. So I can't wait.

Okay, I'm gonna just try and share the screen, um, and hopefully you guys will— where are we now? Just to minimize this down. How are we doing, Laurence? Can you see that?

You can see that? Yep, far away.

Okay, right. So, um, I'm gonna— let's, let's start at the beginning, shall we? Um, that would be a big help. Okay, so all those of you who don't know where I am, this is where I am in Brittany. I'm right at, uh, right on the north coast, and we do get a lot of influence of our weather from the English Channel. You can see, like you do in, in the UK, we are very influenced by that over the winter, so we get a lot of mild damp weather here. But, um, I wanted just to show you that. We're going to rattle through what I do, where I do it, very, very briefly, but that's roughly where I have my apiaries. And I have about 3 kilometers between each apiary, so it just gives you some idea. We get really good pollens here, and there's something we're going to talk about when we get to that section of feeding larvae, is it's a really good thing if you, if you don't see this amount of pollen coming into your hives, or different diverse pollens, that you can give something else that has a broad section of amino acids. In other words, a good feed for your bees. I know some people last year, for instance, on the north, northeast side of, you know, the UK, were struggling because they had such a terrible year. They couldn't even raise queens because they had no natural pollen coming in. I spoke to several people who get that regularly in certain areas, and it's like a pollen dearth. We get it here sometimes, but most of the time we don't have a problem. We're okay. But it's just something to be aware of. You need a lot of good pollens and good food to raise queens. This is a quote from Mike Palmer: you can raise a few good queens from less than ideal stock under ideal conditions rather than trying to raise ideal selected stock under poor conditions. You know, less is more, okay? Just remember that. It's all about if you can't have the best genetics, it doesn't necessarily matter. It's how you raise those queens, but you can do it. There's just a few things you need to put into place. Why should we try and raise queens? Don't the bees do a good enough job? Okay, so I've got a few reasons why we should raise our own queens and why we should try. Why not? First of all, the obvious one: catching and waiting for swarms isn't reliable. The origin, age, and prolificness of the queen is unknown. You don't know what has come to that swarm trap. Okay, it's still a swarm and it's going to be booming because what do swarms do when they land in a box? They are monster comb builders. So you could say, well, it works for me. I agree, but But we're talking about a little bit further up the ladder now. We're talking about the next level of trying to be self-sufficient and raising our own queens that are better than we can trap. Importing bees from faraway places does not necessarily guarantee you good queens. The queens you can raise in your own area will be better suited to your area, a fraction of the cost. This is absolutely the number one reason why you should be raising your own queens. And there's a lot of debate in the UK now. I know because of Brexit and things like that, you can't bring queens in. And I'm not saying either way whether I think it's a good or bad thing. I love the ability to buy breeder queens in from a, like, the same climate zone as I have here, and I can then get really good genetics into my apiaries because I have a lot of rogue genetics around here. So that's my take on it, but it's a very big debate. We can talk about this after. You will get overall improvement to your stock. You will improve your pest and disease resistance by selecting breeder queens and grafting from the colonies that outperform the others. That's the number one cull and selection thing. You know, you don't keep bad queens that are aggressive and have chalkbrood, for example. It's just so obvious. You get better honey crops because you breed from bees that produce your honey. You have more prolific queens with stronger colonies, then you make more nucs because you can split them twice a year if you're lucky. Less swarming because your queens are replaced at programmed intervals. You speed up your production process because you're not waiting for the nucs to make their own queen cells. You can make the nucs, you can for instance wait 6 or 7 days, cut out the queen cells they make, then put a queen cell in, and that That queen is hatching out straight away, and you can win a week and a half— well, about 10 days on the production cycle. It's a real winner. And don't forget, that is such a bonus where we all are in northern climates because we haven't got a long season. Increased successful mating at planned times of the year. So you're almost putting those queens out there when you know there's more likely to be better drones. Okay, you're not doing it in the worst times of the year through no fault of your own. How can you raise some good queens? You need to have a realistic plan. You need to look at your requirements. What are you trying to achieve? Look at the resources you've got. Be realistic. Look at your seas and your nectar flows. Raise your queens only when the bees would be doing it. Work with your bees. Be realistic. Consider it doing with someone else, a couple of beekeepers or more, or a club. Pooling your resources. That's a good way. You might only want 4 or 5 queens because you're going to make a couple of nucs, a couple of cells in each one. See who's doing it, work with them. You all learn a lot by working together. So which queen method, queen rearing method is for you? There are many methods to raise queens, and I've got a couple of books here. You know, I've got Queen Rearing Simplified by Vince Cook. I love that book. I've got Snellgrove's book. It's like an epic volume, but you, you could read it all and you still don't know which one to do. How can you decide on which method? As I just said, do you have any previous combined experience? That's what it's all about. Have you tried something before? Did it work for you? I said about the books, you still don't know which one is the best one. More recently, most people are focusing on this method. If you find a method that gives you a swarm box starter and a queen right finisher, which is the method we use, but it's also really the cloakboard method as well, It's very, very similar. They're all around having a box that is desperate for a queen because you've taken the larvae away, and then you, once you've got those queens started, you can put them in a queen excluder environment, a queen excluded environment, sorry, and then let the bees finish off those cells. Get yourself a good mentor, okay? It saves you a lot of hassle and you won't be frustrated then and lost. Make sure it stays fun, as I said before. So when's the right time to make queen cells? Let the bees tell you. When the bees start swarming in your area. As you gain experience, as you, as you become, you know, a more experienced beekeeper, you'll know when that is, probably to the week, because that's what happens here. I'm sure it happens with Laurence. You get to know when you're going to be starting to raise queens. You know when those drones are going to be flying. Exactly what I've just said. Naturally, late spring and summer are the best times. High forage numbers bring in plenty of pollen and nectar for feeding those larvae, and good mature drones are able to fly well on warm summer afternoons. And I say this, and I will correct myself, I don't really mean warm summer afternoons, I mean whenever they can get out there and do the biz, because we're finding now that everything is a rush job. This kind of archetypal, or stereotypical is the word, stereotypical kind of, oh, queens go off in midsummer and they fly for about 2 or 3 hours and they go up to 5, 6 kilometers away, I think that's baloney myself. I think they're going to go out and get mated within 20 minutes and be back within going 1 to 2 kilometers of the area at the most. There's evidence to say a lot of queens are mated even closer than that. The presence of drone brood in colonies is a good indicator that you'll have drones to mate within a few weeks. When we make drones, we say when we put the frame in, it's approximately 40 days when those drones will be available to go out and mate with queens. So I've just put this statement in because it was— and I was going to explain the 3 different methods in detail, but there is 3 methods that the bees use to raise their queens. There's the supersedure method, there's the swarm method, and also there's the— what's the final method?

Emergency.

I can't remember, there's 3 methods, I've completely gone blank. But anyway, we use the swarming impulse and we use— that's right, the 3rd one is the emergency response, excuse me. But we use the swarming impulse and the emergency response, and we get a massive response, and we can get cells that are ready for us. The other 3 methods— the swarming, the emergency, and the supersedure— all produce queen cells, but they don't produce queen cells in quality— in quantity, sorry— in a way that we can use them, and obviously in quality as well. So if we use the swarming impulse and emergency response, we can actually raise our own queens and do a much better job. Not that it's any better than the bees, but we can set everything up for them so they have every chance to make the best cells. And remember, it's all in the jelly. It's all about providing maximum nutrition in the base of that cell cup so that even when the queen hatches out, she can still turn around and go back in, which we don't like to happen actually, but because we don't realize she's hatched often, but she does that and she can still feed if she's in the incubator or the bees, you know, or she's still waiting to come out. There's food in that cell. on the day she hatches, and that's what you want. So we— I use the cell builder here, other people use different methods, and there's so many methods as we say. It basically means that you can create and get an already strong colony, I give it brood, and it combines the swarming impulse with the emergency response, so you get a massive colony that is overwhelmingly full of well-fed nurse bees and all it wants to do is swarm. That's what they do, right? That's what— if you, if you give 10 frames of brood to a colony in, in spring, if it hasn't swarmed already, what's it going to do? It's going to want to swarm. You've made it too strong. That's exactly the response you want. You artificially swarm this and remove any chances of the bees making their new queen from the larvae they had that was there because you take them away. And this is called a hopelessly queenless colony. So I'll run through that again. It's a colony of bees that it's lost its queen, its eggs and larvae, and has nothing to make a new queen with. There's no eggs in that colony because the box you're using is taken away, and the box you had above those 10 frames you added, you've taken out any cells that were there. There's no larvae in it, and this is what we end up with. We do this on day— well, this is our grafting chart. Basically, we do that on day 1. On the same day we graft. You can see this is a standard queen rearing technique chart. At the very top you've got your breeder hive, you graft your larvae, you graft them into cell cups, they go into this queenless cell builder, and 10, 9, 10, 11 days after they come out. But it is 16 days between, for the natural period of a queen from egg to hatching out, for a queen, but we say 10 days because we graft on day 4. But we have to be very careful because often they can hatch out a little bit earlier, and if you're not aware of that, you can sometimes have a problem with that as well. But it's just to make you aware that it's not rocket science. You just keep it simple. You keep it a little chart going like that. You've seen these little discs you can get, you can work everything out and it'll give you the day you started and the day they'll be ready and the day you can put them— you can invert the builder and this kind of stuff. So pretty straightforward stuff. So this is my cell builder I use. I don't often have supers in it, but I do when I have a flow. So you start at the very bottom, we have these Dadant bases, which are fantastic because they've got a big front door and they're ventilated on the base completely. I'm not going to go into the debate on open mesh floor, but this is an open mesh floor and it's what we use here. Okay, but it's absolutely brilliant. They're plastic bases. Then you've got your standard brood box at the bottom, 10 frames Dadant. I'll show you a Dadant frame after, it's a very big frame. It's actually the Dadant frames. I've got it here, they are 41 centimeters by 26 centimeters. In inches, that's 16 by 10, the size of our frame, so they're big. So there's 10 of those in there, and we've added 10 frames above them on top. So that's a massive amount of bees gone into that colony that's already booming, and the super there just kind of mops up excess honey because you don't really want them to have no room during the period you're waiting for the brood to hatch out. But this is— this would be day 1, for example. So setting up the cell builder 10 days before we think we want to graft, we select an already strong colony and check it for queen cells, because you really should check it for queen cells, because if you don't and they swarm, you've just lost all the work you've put in. So above a queen excluder, we add 10 additional frames of brood that are harvested from our adjacent nucleus colonies, recording the date and time just so you know when you started, because you might go, oh, it's easy to remember because my aunt came came around for dinner that day, and you'll go 6 days later, you go, what day was that? You write it down. It's just logical, right? The bees below very quickly come up and they surround the brood, keeping it warm. It's like it's their own, and that's how— what you see. So you see here, you can see over here, look, these— if you look in the top left-hand corner, you can just see those 3 frames there. There's bees all over those already, and I've just added this frame in. There's the queen excluder. This is, this is the top box I'm adding brood to. Now you won't always find brood that is ready to hatch, so that's why we say 10 days before. But if you've got mostly hatching brood or emerging brood— so apparently I'm wrong to say hatching, if I say emerging brood that would be better— if you have mostly emerging brood, you could do the cell building 5 days later if you knew it was all hatched. It's just to make sure that all that energy and potential energy you're putting into that colony is most effective. That's all you need to remember. Here we go, 10 days later, all the broods hatch, so we prepare the cell builder. We call this day 1, and as I said before, it's the same day we graft on. So all I'm going to— I'm not going to go through the exact process here, but you can look, you can see the queen excluder there. I'm taking that top box off and I'm just putting it to one side because that's the box I'm going to use to raise my queens in after. So I've taken that box off, it's behind me, you can just see it above my left arm there. And on top of that box, after I've, um, after I've actually swapped these boxes around, this is what I've done. You see, so the queen is now behind that box, okay? And I put this new box here on, on a new base. So this was the box that was on top that I added the brood to, okay? So just keep it simple like that. But I've also put— I've gone through, take, check for queen cells, because you can't have a queen cell in a cell builder, otherwise you lose your cells. I'll say that again and again and again. But I've checked those underneath, and I've now— I'm now going to shake bees from the box behind that's got so many bees in as well. I'm going to shake them back into this box because there's no need to have that many in that box. They're doing nothing. There's loads of nurse bees there that hatched out into the, the 2 boxes. They've been going up and down between the excluder, but they've only been working with the queen. So she's in there, but she doesn't need all those bees now. So that's what I'm doing. I'm going to add bees to this. And there's me shaking the bees in. I leave about 3 or 4 frames of bees and brood in the other box. Sorry, bees. I don't move any brood across, obviously. But, and then I— this box is then overflowing. And there's the queen, or a queen. It doesn't mean you always find the queen. There's always sometimes more than one queen in a box, more times than you would realize. So you shake it through an excluder, and then you be sure that you don't lose any queens flying around and they don't destroy your cells. So that's what we end up with, a beautiful hopelessly queenless box that is ready, that is literally begging for a queen. In that box there is no larvae, there is no eggs, there is nothing for them to make a new queen. We have completely put the curtain down on their reproduction process and the bees are completely lost. They're circling around the apiary, they're not aggressive at all because they've got nothing to defend, it's like they're a swarm. And this is what we've created. We've created an artificial swarm, but we've also removed every possibility of them making a new queen. There you go. There's another cell builder I have. I've just taken this one to show you this video, a little clip. You should be able to see it pretty well. That's the volume of bees you want. This is real beekeeping. This is producing lots of cells, what I do at home, and I can get 4 or 5 rounds through that cell builder before it becomes Not as effective as it was when I first put grafts in. So I'll just run it again. That's what you want. You want you want so many bees in that that they that basically they can't all fit in the box, but that's fine. They'll just hang out the front. But it means you know that frame that the you're going to put in is going to be completely smothered in bees, and there's going to be no ifs and buts. So a pollen frame must be added now because you don't want to have to add it in later when you're trying to cram those larvae into that overflowing box.

So um.

Pollen frames come from queenless colonies in your apiaries. It's a resource you harness when you find it. You might go, oh, how can I make a— how can I make a pollen frame? You can trap some pollen and rub it into a frame, it's the same thing, but it's best if you can find one that the bees have made, obviously. Strong working colonies, often in the spring you'll find even, you know, you just find that one or two colonies in the apiary that are just so prolific they've run out of space even in the beginning of spring, and you're frantically pulling out pulling out frames so you can get extra space in there, and often you'll find a pollen frame that's completely full and you'll go, oh, that's brilliant, I love that, that goes in the front of the truck. You make one, as I said, you can harvest some pollen and rub it in, but you can also make it of pollen sub powder. There's a nice frame from the summer, that's chestnut pollen. I'm just going to grab a quick drink, excuse me. That's what we find very often after our summer nectar flow. It's absolutely prolific with bees and pollen. There's even some drones up there, but this is the end of the cycle, and when this hatches out, the queen starts to slow down because we suddenly hit our dearth. But that's what we can have left, so you harness those frames and use them to make your last batches of queens. There's a frame, a nice clean frame rubbed in with UltraBreathe. It's okay, it works all right. You know, if you're stuck for pollen, sometimes you have to do that, but it's just to show you can do it. Breeder queens. Okay, what should we select for? Obviously docility. We don't want, as the expression Mike Palmer says, do you want your bees stapling your socks to your ankles? I don't want my bees stapling my socks to my ankles. I just won't have it. I'll give the queen the hive tool test. she starts doing that, you know, it's just not on. But, you know, you still get colonies that seem to revert to that when they requeen themselves. So disease resistance, chalkbrood, so easy to get rid of chalkbrood in your apiary. Just do not breed from a colony that has chalkbrood or from a similar genetic line that has that. You just get rid of it straight away. I never see chalkbrood in my apiaries now, ever. And I used to have it all the time when I caught local swarms around here, Apis mellifera imperator, and I was dogged with it the whole time. The minute I changed to a nice breeder queen that had been selected, disappeared. Stock mite counting through the previous year, you might start your own selection of mite-resistant stock. That's something to think about. Overwintering cluster size, do they go in the spring and I'm in this enormous cluster that is okay, you've got to feed it a bit and manage it, but You can make a split from that at the same time, you know, in the spring. Do you want that, or do they have to take ages to build up? That's something to, you know, you don't want to graft into a colony that was a tiny cluster in the spring. I don't think so. Spring buildup, how long do they take to get going? Did they give you any spring honey, or did they just give you some summer honey? That happens with some of the bees we have here. Honey crop versus post-harvest feeding, did you get 20 kilos of honey off of that colony, but you had to feed it 15 kilos of syrup, or did you take 15 kilos of honey off and there was still a whole box of honey in the bottom? Something to consider. It's all down to genetics and how they behave. Swarming— do you— we've had new thoughts on it here, but swarming is one of the things you consider you don't want to graft from swarmy stock. But the way it's going here is it seems that no matter what you've got and whatever your stock is, springs are getting earlier and earlier, and the brood nest gets clogged up because we don't have the right amount of bees to forage when the rapeseed starts. So it's all a bit odd at the moment, but that's just one of our thoughts. You know, you can do the hygienic test, you can do the brood pin assay, you can do liquid nitrogen tests and monitor how quickly your larvae that are dead are cleaned out of a certain area and compare that with different colonies. So I like to put this picture in because this is, uh, 2 Marken queens. It doesn't matter where they came from. The point of this picture is this breeder has done the work for me, okay? So, um, you don't have to do anything other than graft from her. She is already a selected queen. She's got all her genetics, okay? When you graft from her, you're only going to get 50% of those genetics in the daughters you produce if you open mate them. but it's still better than most scenarios, and you get mostly good F1 daughters, and they're the ones that really produce good honey. So we find these 2 are island mated, so we kind of refer to that as F0 because we know that the drones were controlled and we know obviously the queen was controlled, and it was completely— it was not like F1 where it's open mated. with everything they have in their apiary, so we know that line is fairly pure. So that's what you buy when you pay €160. This is me grafting on that day, day 10, 12 to 24-hour-old larvae. And I do this generally of an evening. I'll be out in the apiaries in the day, and I tend to do my grafting of an evening because often the weather is nice and calm and really warm at the end of the day. It's not ideal to graft early in the morning because it's still not that warm, and if I'm walking up and down with cell bars that are full of larvae, I like it to be a nice warm evening. Standard grafting— I use the Chinese grafting tool. I prefer it myself. It really works well for me. You're literally just lifting up those larvae on a puddle of raw jelly and just placing them back down in another cell, really. That's, that's as easy as that. There you go. There's that nice raw jelly around that larvae. That's what we want to see. And I will add this, at the moment a lot of people will debate about this, but I think that no matter how bad you are at grafting, I think the reason why people have poor results when they're— they say they're grafting is because it's not because their grafting's poor, it's because their cell builder wasn't set up correctly. And I put terrible grafts in in cold weather, but the bees have been so well primed and they've been so desperate to feed a larvae that the second you drop that frame in, they jump on everything and bring it all up, bring it all on. So that's just my take on it. There you go, they're ready for the cell builder. Now the configuration in the colony, I like to have 2 frames of pollen, one here and one the other side. You see, that's my, my, uh, grafting bar with 4 frames of 14 on, and sometimes I do a double graft. But it depends on many things and depends how many queens I need. But this will give me, um, 14 times 4 at most times. And even in a bad day, a bad grafting result, I'll probably get 3 of those bars returned to the— to a colony, to the finishers. I'll get, um, 3 bars of 14 back, so I'll only lose 14. It's not bad. It's a good way of getting a lot of cells through, and often I get much better than that. So on my box, you'll see I've got, uh, there's a very narrow gap here because I actually push these frames together so that the bees, that the nurse bees that are feeding the larvae, can really cluster around the cells as they feed them. And that's what I do. Actually, we have castellations in our boxes, you see, so I remove the castellations with an angle grinder and you can just slide those frames together. This is obviously the top of one of our Dadan hives, just gives us an example of how we help the bees. Feeding. You must feed your cell builder even if there's a flow running, unless it's an absolutely massive flow and the weather's perfect and you know the next 3 days are going to be good weather. You still need to put a feeder on, but I restrict the size of the feeder so that the bees can't take a lot out because they will continue to because they know they're hopelessly queenless and they seem to guzzle a lot. But you just want to give them the feeling there's that nourishment constantly coming in, so I actually tape off half the hole. And that's what you get. This is day 2, actually, not day 1, because the weather was tough the previous day. You can see the wax is a little bit more drawn out, but that's the kind of take we get sometimes. Every single cell is drawn out. There's only a couple of duds in there. I think there was 3 duds, a couple fell off. Um, yeah, so it's pretty good results, that. Pretty happy with that. And then what I do is I gap up my good accepted larvae and take out the ones that are non-accepted, so I have a complete bar. It's a very simple process, and that's why— that's how you end up with really good complete bars and looks really professional. But what people don't know is you've taken out the dud ones already. So you get— but you're not really cheating because all you're doing is you're just making your finishers very efficient because you're only giving them complete cells to finish. You're not sticking in half a frame and going, well, I'll put half a frame on that one, half a frame another. It's all about using your resources widely— wisely. I show this picture because I get all my sails ready to go into finishes, and what I do then is I put them back on top of the sail builder because it's really warm, that sail builder. Even on a cold day or a cold evening, if you put even like a loose piece of cloth over the top of that gently, you put the sails on their side, and the heat coming out of that keeps those sails warm while you're opening up your sail finishes and getting them ready. Because you don't want to have those sails out of the heat, you want to keep them warm until the last second, then you just pick them up, just to Tap the bees off gently, not too hard, and then you pop them in your finisher. Just a little tip I learned. So there's my finisher. I use a 5 over 5. You can see I've got the started cells on the left. You see these actually are a little bit smaller. Like I said, this is day 1, after 1 day, and their wax is drawn up. But there's a whole row of, whole bar of finished cells there, and I drop them in between the frames above an excluder. And that's my finishers. I have lots of finishers I make. The queen excluder sits between the 2 here, so the queen is in the bottom and the larvae sit in the top of the frame here, and they seem to build them out really well. This is what I found works well for me. So the benefits of using finishers— I get this question asked a lot, and I use finishers for the following reasons, okay? Because finishers finish the started cells. You put less cells per strong colony. Meaning each cell has the maximum attention by nurse bees in another colony that can give it maximum nutrition. If you do not remove the high number of started cells in a starter, the bees will naturally reduce their numbers to about 30 to 40. So if you left that box, that's fine, you don't have to use a finisher, but just remember you're not going to get— if you put in 80 cells, they might start 75 of them or 70, might only end up with 35 or 40 at the very end, and those 35 or 40 may not be that well fed, they may be smaller. So it gives you other options. So you also, you free up your starter so you can put another load of cells straight in. So this, the cycle continues for 4 or 5 days if you really want, if you need that many cells. And then you reduce the risk of a rogue virgin entering that hopelessly queenless setup because they are begging for a queen to come and help them out. They want someone to come and lay eggs, so they'll let anything in. And what will happen is she will munch all your cells. That's one of the downsides of using your original starter as a finisher, unless you have the queen cells above an excluder. If something gets in there, then you won't know about it till you've, um, to tell you, go back and say 10 days later harvest them, and they were all killed on day 1 or day 2. Because you had a queen in there, whereas if you move them to finishers, you're spreading your assets, you're using your resources widely, and you're protecting those cells because they're above an excluder. And your finishers can be your brood factories, which is so easy. Getting back to Mike Palmer's sustainable beekeeping, you know, we've seen a lot about that. It's fantastic. And you can just use this method above your 5 over 5, so they're in the top 5 frames. So obviously some finishers differ, some finish better than others. This is trial and error till you know which line of bees are finishing really well. Okay, so do I need to use a finisher? It entirely depends on your requirements. There's no reason to have finishers if you only want to produce 10 to 20 cells, but you really need to make sure that if you are going to just use that finisher, you put them in a protected section of the box for the— to be finished. When your cells are capped over on day 5, you simply reassemble the colony, putting the finished cells above an excluder or in an excluded part of the colony. As I just said, it's so important. I just think you're— you've done all this work to get everything perfect, you've actually made some wonderful cells and they look really cool, and you come back and they've all been torn down. It's nothing worse than losing that. So personally, I like to raise a lot of queens over a short period of time because I generally do too big amount of splits. After the spring flow and after the summer flow. And having a well set up starter means you can push at least 50 cells a day through there. So by the end of the end of four days, you've got 200 cells. I mean, that's just fantastic. You know, 200 free cells. Marvelous. So there go my cells, and there's some finished cells. They're not the most. They're not the longest cells, but if you look, they're all full of raw jelly. That's exactly what you want to see, and I'm happy when I see that. I know they're going to be good queens, no problem there at all. This is to show the difference in finishes. Now, the top frame wasn't a— this was one graft, but the top frame I did, I had a good graft, but obviously a couple didn't get accepted for some reason. But, and some colonies, this is smaller, these cells, but you've got to spread your bets, and obviously the first That row there, that finisher is exceptional. You know, you don't always get them finishing perfectly, but it just— I wanted to show you that you get different colored pollens making different colored wax. It's all interchangeable. They're not always perfect, but this is the reality of it. This is what you get sometimes. Okay, so it's just a nice selection of cells. So one of the most asked questions is, how do I make a few queen cells with limited resources? It's very simple. It's the same process. but in a smaller box. You've got a 10-frame hive, okay, you can do this very easily. There's a few other people that show videos on this. I make it into a finisher. It's the same as my 5-over-5s. You take a normal 10-frame strong colony that's very, very strong in the spring, okay, it's one of your best ones you've got. Say you've got 5 colonies, you pick your best colony, okay. The colony is converted to a 5-over-5. You arrange the brood vertically from the center out. Honey furthest out, as you always would have in the configuration when you make it a vertical colony. The queen is located in the top section above the excluder. She cannot leave the colony upon or swarm, and you leave at least 2 frames for her to lay in that top part. Okay, leave this for 5 days checking she's room to lay. This leaves the bottom larvae to become older so the bees can no longer make a cell from them, and on day 6 you use that bottom section. Okay. You take the top box off with the queen in and you remove that, rotate it 180 degrees. You can see it's been moved there, the entrance is now the other side, so all the flying bees, they only know this place where number 83 is, they only know that. So the flying bees will come out of there and go back into here, that's your foragers, they're maintained. The bottom box should be checked for queen cells because don't forget you isolated those previous larvae away from the queen, so some of the bees may well have made cells in that bottom section before you changed it around. Shake the bees off, and then you can shake more into that other box, like I said, because don't forget there'll be a lot of nurse bees that the queen in there won't need. So you're stocking that box absolutely full again, but on a smaller scale. So now you're ready to graft. You've got a hopelessly queenless colony because there's no larvae there in that box in number 83 that the bees can use to make a queen because it's all too old. So they're just waiting for you to give them a larvae. So you graft like we normally would. The flying bees, as I said, will return to the original hive position. You place your graft between the top middle bars, and, or if you wish, a whole grafting bar. But don't forget, you're only making a few cells, so one bar is usually enough in this. But you'll get a good acceptance if you put, say, 14 cells in. Use a pollen frame. You can juggle the frames around from the other colony, but just don't put any young larvae in. That's the anything. All right, and always put a feeder on and some pollen sub if you had it. I say this with all my cell building, it just gives that extra nutrition on hand if you need it. Check the cells are started after 24 hours, then you can— you have a couple of choices then to either reassemble the whole colony or you can leave them to be finished in there. And then you— and when you harvest the cells, you could leave one cell in that box or 2 cells Because your other queen is in the other box, she'll be laying away. She's depleted in numbers, but it means you've still got— you then create 2 colonies. It's just an option. So the bees will only use your graft because the other cells are too old. You see, exactly what I just said. So you can make a T-support. I've got one of these bars here to show you after. A friend of mine had the idea, and we use that to stop the frames falling down between the actual cells, between the The other frames, I should, I should say. Simple to do. That's what I do when I'm doing my finishing and when I'm making a small amount of cells. Very easy to do. So you can, as I said, you can reassemble a colony, but you must have a queen excluder in there, and then your cells go above, the queen is on the bottom. Providing the cells are started, you can reassemble the colony anytime between day 2 and day 5 until they're capped over. But don't touch the cells after day 5 when they're capped over because they are extremely delicate then and they're liable to get damaged. I used to whip them out on day 5, even from my main cell builder, take them up to the incubator, and I wonder why the hatching was so poor because I've got them knocked or they've got chilled. Just leave the bees do their job till day 8, day 9 at the earliest. As I said, this time the queen must not have access to the cells yet again, otherwise she will tear them down. Okay, at this stage I prefer the cells on the top and the queen underneath. The queen will rarely abscond or swarm at this stage because she's been away from the colony and she's been kind of checked. In other words, she's she's had a very limited number of bees for a short time, and that that removes a swarming impulse from her. She's she'll take her a while to get going again. So day nine, day ten, you with any luck can. Do this and you get nice cells ready to harvest. So there's the picture I have. That's what I like to see: pollen sub in the in the box. Don't forget you're feeding those nurse bees as well. You're feeding everything by giving it extra pollen sub. You're keeping that level of protein high in the colony because don't forget once you put a row of cells in to be finished, as soon as they're capped over, there's nothing wrong with you. just moving the bars up and putting another line in of cells to be finished. That's how finishers work. All you're doing is using the bees to finish another bar because there's no— they're not doing anything with the first bar. The first bar is now just maturing, just growing because it's been capped over. So you can use your boxes really to the full advantage, and you can put them into the incubator if you want, or you can put them into nucs. It really is up to you. Once you learn the system, you can really get a lot of cells through quickly, and you can really work it to your advantage so it works for you. Okay, you can use— I've listed a couple of things here. You can use them in splits prepared 5 days before. You can make up mating nucs. We use the Mini Plus system here, or you could use cells for Apidea. It really is up to you whatever you want to do. Or you can sell some queens or virgin queens. Personally, I don't like to sell any of my queens, but that's another question. This is my colleague Chris at the mating station. up at Ploëc with Mini Plus. So we were harvesting queens. We try and get about 4 series of queens through, but that's pushing it. You usually get 2 to 3, believe it or not, in the summer, because mating can be poor or it can be really good. It just depends. But we have bad weather like everybody. We struggle to get a lot of queens through, but we do what we can. So most of the queens we make, we actually use to make our own colonies with. And those are the Mini Plus frames. We build these up on top of a strong colony, and then we break them down and then make these. So we basically make small colonies like you would Apideas, and now they are stored for 24 hours in the cool, and then we put them out and give them a cell the next day so they get that check. But they're all full of nurse bees, they're all small colonies with— I think our configuration is a frame of Two, two to two frames of brood, a frame of pollen, and a frame and two frames of foundation in the in a mini plus itself, and that gives them room to build but also some stores. But we do feed all these colonies when we are having queens out to mate. That's what we like to see: lots of lovely eggs just laid, still vertical. When we see that, we're very happy. Nice larvae. I wish it was always like this. But it isn't always as nice as this, but when we see that, it's even better. That's the bonus you get. This is why queen rearing is such good fun. Frames like that, you know, beautiful to see. We— you have to harvest your queen sometime. We try and do it at least after 2 weeks. We give them 2 weeks delay so you can really assess them. Some people leave it longer, but as I said, the clock is ticking with queen rearing. You might get a really good batch through and then suddenly the next, the weather goes daft and you can't get some cells through or something. There's always something happens, so you just have to keep following that, that advantage and doing what you can. If you start early, you can usually get 3 or 4 through. It just depends what you want. Overwintered mating nucs for the following year. So these are queens I could harvest in early spring. You could, for instance, harvest the one in the middle and put this body on top of another one in the spring, and then that one there will then grow into these 2 again. So you've got what I'm saying is you've got queens available that you made in your apiary when you need them. This is when we make nucs late summer. I've got an old barn at the bottom of the garden I use to store my boxes in. I like this photo, it's kind of like a busy time when you're getting stuff ready. I foam off all the entrances, and these are 5-frame nucs I don't mind using in the summer. I find 5 frames really though too small to use in the spring because they grow too quickly, and you don't give yourself any favours because you're just you, as I said, the clock is ticking and they grow so quick, so you have to be careful. So I also make splits from clearer boards. You can see there's the clearer board, there's the lozenge. We just cleared the bees off. You come back the next day with your nuc ready, you take the top off and it's full of bees because the supers have just cleared down, and you knock that into a box, give it 3 frames of bees and brood, off you go. You know, you just have to make sure the queen isn't in there, but it's A pretty good way of making nucs pretty quick. There you go, knock it into a nuc and away you go. Give it a queen. Hopefully that's a colony next next spring. At the nuc, the mating station there, they're the nucs I've made that day. A lot of work though to get to get was it five thirty-five nucs there to get them all made in one day is hard going, but you can do it if you're organized. Feeding. As I said before, you must feed the cell builder regardless of the flow. We give a little bit of feed to just keep that colony thinking the nectar's coming in, and if it rains, you might think, oh, they've had loads of food, but it doesn't help. You have to keep feeding them. All nucs must be fed at least 1 litre of syrup when you're making up your nucs, and then it gives them that when that queen hatches the colony. It's another way of helping the bees accept the queen because the colony is Feels good. It's not stressed. It's another thing that minimizes stress in the colony, and that's what's important about queen acceptance. So we buy our syrup from Belgium like a lot of the beekeepers do. We go to another beekeeper who receives it all, and we just go and take our lot. We use the IBCs. To give you some idea of weight, that one, that's a 600-liter IBC, and that weighs 900 kilos. So it's really heavy stuff. So you have to be careful. When I feed, I— when I— this is on my finishers, I like to give them pollen sub as well as liquid feed. So liquid feed goes in the left, pollen sub goes on the right. Now these feeders we made at home, they work really well, but what we could have done was actually give them a bigger feeder because we find they empty this pretty quick. But I suppose it's all about finding a balance. So if you think they've taken that syrup down, you could always top it up. You know, it's, it's, it is what it is, you know, it works well. So how can you get your queens better mated? You, uh, we've talked about this, uh, in many books, but I personally like to add some drone comb, uh, to my colonies and let the bees augment what— because don't forget, we're always putting in, in worker comb, aren't we, into our colonies. So it's really good that we add some drone comb or maybe help the bees build drone comb. You can cut a frame in half And the bees will then build the bottom section if you put it in frame 2 or 3, and maybe 6 or 7, they'll build— sorry, 7 or 8, they'll build drone comb as opposed to worker comb. You could see on here they built some drone and some worker as well, so that's probably a young colony, and in young colonies they tend to build more worker comb than they do drone. But obviously, our drone foundation people will go, oh, you must use this for varroa. Treatment. I don't. I thoroughly disagree with that method. That's my own personal point of view. I think the drones are much better off having to deal with a little bit of varroa and being able to fly and mate well than— I believe you can control varroa with other methods. I think that by trashing a whole frame of drone brood is a massive resource loss, and you're losing drones that would be mating with your queens, and that's the problem we've got these days. There's a lot of research done that's saying maybe the fungicides and pesticides are affecting the sperm of the drones. So we need to give as many good drones out there as possible. That's what I'm saying. That's what we like to see. One or two of those in the spring and summer is a big help from our best selected colonies. We don't put in all the colonies, we just put it in our best colonies, and that's another way of natural selection. You're using your best genetics to give loads of drones out there, and it's because obviously the best queens are the most prolific, lay those up easily anyway. So It's no good putting it in a colony that might resist varroa if it doesn't do anything. That's one of the problems with VHS. Sometimes you get these queens that you buy from someone, they've got excellent VHS resistance, they're great against varroa, but they don't actually do anything, don't produce anything. That's very often the case where we're losing the traits that we select for on the process of breeding, and that's the skill to bring it back in. So I put my strongest, my best drone combs into the best colonies I've got and let the bees do their thing. So some ways to augment your drone population: you add drone comb, as we said before, to your selected stocks 40 days before you think you have virgins out on their mating flights. You move all your best stocks with the most desirable drones nearer to your mating station and move your worst ones away. Get rid of the rubbish, don't have them nearby, it makes a massive difference. Work with your nearest beekeeper friends, we said early on. Often to requeen some of— offer to requeen some of their worst stocks with your good queens. Normally they're more than happy, and it's actually— you are sacrificing a huge amount there, but it does help an awful lot. Feed your drone colonies, top them up with nurse bees if you need to, syrup and pollen. So drones need all the help you can give them. You want really good fat drones out there They're absolutely buzzing to go and do the business with those queens. It's a big part of queen rearing, is actually providing good drones as well, in my opinion, because don't forget, producing good queens is one thing, but getting them out to mate, but mate well with drones, is another. You have to bring that into the concept. So we introduce our queens under a pushing cage. I like to do that. It's really good because the nurse bees there know no other bee. They're born under the cage because you put the cage on emerging brood. They start to look after the queen, they love her, care for her, she comes in to lay, she's accepted under the cage, and then because there's brood there, it starts to— that brood pheromone spreads throughout the colony. Then after day 5, you can lift that cage off, And before you know it, you've got a nice selected queen. But you just have to be careful when you cage a queen if you do have larvae in that colony that are—it's the same same principle as when you're raising queens. If you remove the queen or you confine her, you're going to get cells built somewhere. And if you left this scenario, your nice breeder queen that is under this cage, when you release her, guess what's going to kill her? This rogue little scatty virgin will come out. hatch out, and the first thing she'll do is kill that beautiful slow-moving queen who's just popping off eggs nicely. She will be slaughtered, and you'll be left with some horrible little runt that will go off and mate and give you grief. That's the way beekeeping is. Releasing, pushing cage, I really do prefer this method because it's such a guaranteed safe method, you know, there's very little failure in it, and it does give you good results. Completely accepted. She's walking around, eggs in the cells there, no problem. Nucs at the end of the summer, overwintering. I used to work in different gardens, and I obviously used their gardens to put nucs. They had such big places in France, and they were quite happy for me to put bees there, so I was lucky. So what can go wrong with your cell builder? Just to finish off a few things, as I said before, mated or virgin queen gets into the hopelessly queenless setup. You lose your cells in 24 hours. This is why a finisher is safer. Okay, you missed the queen cell on the frame, and what happens? She hatches out, but she won't kill the first or second batch of cells. It'll be 3 or 4 batches in, and you'll suddenly find your numbers fall away. And what happens? There's a virgin running around creating merry hell. She flew. Sometimes they can. You didn't find her when you made up the cell builder. And if you don't find the queen, I'd advise you to shake the whole thing through a queen excluder before you actually start putting your grafts in, just in case. Because if you find her, then you'll go, oh, that was great, because I didn't— I— you feel like as though you've fixed the problem then, because you didn't find her, you didn't see that queen, and you want to know where she is. You want to know she's in the other box. And by doing that, you cover yourself. And this is what happens as well when, as I said, it's not on the first load of grafts, it's day 2 or day 3. This queen cell fell out the frame. It land. It got wedged between the frames and lid because I told you I pushed the frames together, and what happens? They built it out. Why did they build it out? Because it's a larvae in a hopelessly queenless colony. So the bees just think we need to raise this queen because it's the same as all the other cells you put in. So you've got to watch it. That's just an example of what can happen. Think on your feet. Don't wait for it to fail. Take some actions if. You do not find the queen when preparing the cell builder, like I just said. Find her, leave nothing to chance. If necessary, shake the whole colony back through the shaker box again. I've done this and it's really the best way to work. That's what you like to see at the end of it all, a beautifully provisioned frame. Honey at the top, honey, nectar in the cells here, and loads of pollen. And guess what's in the middle? Your queen has come back and she's laid, and they're the most beautiful glistening larvae. Success! That's what you want to see. There you go, a few little pointers there, and I hope that's given you some questions to ask.

Richard, that was absolutely excellent. I was just sitting there just listening to all of that, just absorbing the information and picking up so much as you went through.

Whizzing through, I'm afraid, but we have to be kind of give us everyone time to ask some questions. So you know, I hope it just gives people a oh yeah, I wanted to ask about that. So hopefully you've got some to answer.

It was really good, and I think I think it fends off a lot of the questions because you could have asked a hundred questions about what you've put through there. So it gives it gives people the information that they can come back to, and I'm so glad that that's going to be sitting on my channel now so people can come back to that for reference because I think that. just a fantastic presentation. So there's been lots of questions that have come in. I'm going to ask some. I think a lot of them have been answered, which is good. I'll start with the ones that have come in first via email, and then I'll get to some of the ones in the chat.

So if you do have any questions for Richard— Well, I hope you're going to answer them as well, because I know combined we'll probably have an answer. There's probably no correct answer, but we'll just have to give the best we know. I mean, you know, fire away.

Yeah, okay, so the first question that came up has been answered, so we don't need to ask that one. The next one that came up was saying, old black combs can be used in honey supers, right? I believe Lawrence has said before that old combs are fine for supers. How old and black are we talking? 5 years? 10 years? I've seen Richard melt down anything slightly black. Why not use these in supers? So I guess the question is—

Okay, yeah, I completely agree. There's nothing wrong, um, with using dark combs. There is evidence to say— and I recently saw a, a talk given by Jamie Ellis that was interviewed with Bob Binney, and Jamie Ellis was in, uh, his new, um, uh, teaching facility in, in, um, in Florida, the new university teaching facility they got there. It's fantastic. And he said literally there's no evidence to say that using old combs has any detrimental effect, providing there's no brood diseases. But what he did say was it's probably good to rotate the combs between 5 and 8 years to move them through, because what also happens in your cells is they often actually wax up some of the cells, and you actually lose some of the kind of— what's the— you don't get the maximum potential from that frame because it's kind of a little bit bunged up, if you know what I mean. And there's the other thing that small cells help against varroa, but it's, it's kind of been disproved. But other people say that it still works for them, so that's fine. If it works for you, that's fine. So, you know, there's that evidence, you know, that kind of thing as well. But I say as long as they're clean, I, I do. Um, I was in a situation before where my, um, the person I worked with, he was like adamant that it was better to get to melt old frames down to rule out the possibility of any brood disease transmission, which is a good way to work. I mean, there's nothing wrong with doing it, but you're using a lot of kind of— it's a lot of work to maintain a colony with young frames in. Does that make sense? You have to rotate them more often, and if you're not making splits, you've got to physically work harder to maintain a younger amount of wax in there, you know, younger frames, if that makes sense.

It's really interesting. I think what— until you see it yourself, and I'm talking about people on the stream here, they underestimate the difference that drawn comb makes to the honey yields. Like, once you've got drawn comb on tap, the yield difference is remarkable.

Yeah.

And then you've got the other end of the spectrum where people, they shook swarm their bees every single year because they think that it's keeping the disease levels down. And I kind of look at that and just think they'd probably just get to the point where they're just about filling the brood box, and then it's back for winter again. But yeah, I don't melt down super frames ever, and then I recycle out the dark brood frames every 3 years.

Well, for our French frames, we use these plastic Nicoframes. You might have seen them. They're called batticadres, and they're supers that are built, and really you rarely melt those down. If you do, you scrape them out, you melt the wax down, and then you just pressure wash them, because they're partially built plastic cells. So we kind of do it, but in a different way. So we do regular, but we don't do it as often, and they don't seem to go as dark because when you think about it, they're not laying eggs into them, so they're not lining that cell with the lining that you would get in a brood nest. And also, they're only actually using it for a short period of time because the supers are only on for a short period of time. So your wax actually doesn't get that dirty very quickly unless you let your your bees run through into the brood nest, but some people do. Sorry, from the brood nest to the— some people, Mike Palmer in America never uses a queen excluder. He gives the queen unlimited access to the whole colony. He doesn't have a problem with it, but he doesn't really take spring honey. So it's different, it's just different ways of doing things that suit for you.

Good stuff. Right, next question is a good one. So compared to beekeeping in the UK, and apart from your battles with Asian Hornets, which are very interesting. What are the biggest challenges you face as a beekeeper?

Well, first of all, I'm an English guy in France and there's always the language barrier. I do my best. That is actually, believe it or not, quite a big issue because I'm a member of the French professional beekeepers group, so I have to work really hard at that, but it's one of the challenges. Bee-wise, I I find that I— what I like about France is that we have one frame. Most people use these. I've got a frame here. This is the Dadant frame. It's massive. Okay, that's on its side. So I had the, had the, um, the size before. It's 40, 41 centimeters by 26, which is approximately 16 inches by 10. So they're big frames. And, um, I actually quite— I got used to using single box production from those in France. And when you sell nucs No one even questions what frame it's on, whereas in the UK they go, oh, is it National? Is it Waray? Is it Langstroth? Is it? You know, I know that's not really an issue because you sell them as what they are, but to me it's the standardization makes everything easier because I know that everything is going to fit on those frames. That's what I like about it here. There's not much real difference really. I don't think we suffer different from the climate. I would prefer it if it was actually a little bit colder here. But I think everyone's saying that in the UK now. I mean, I would love my bees to be flying less over the winter, and so I would almost like to be further north, but then I see some people don't have good flows further north. You know, we have 2 really good flows here, and then on the flip coin, sometimes I wish I was in the Loire where we had acacia honey. We just don't have it. We don't have sunflowers here either. We have spring honey and summer honey, but we get lots of it when we do have it. So I think It's as broad as it is long. I think wherever you are, you've just got to capitalise on what you've got. And for instance, we don't have any flow between mid— our June gap is mid-May to mid-June. We're 2 weeks behind you basically in the UK. So we say, well, we have to make nucs instead, or we raise queens. You've got to look at beekeeping as whatever it is, you've got to do the best you can. You can't just say, oh well, I can't make honey here, so I'll just have to make do with that. You've got to diversify. You've got to put propolis traps on at the end of the season to get propolis to sell that instead, or you've got to look at ways of marketing that's different. You know, you've got to control these lovely things. I mean, like you, we will have this problem here, you know, with these mites, but you've got to just do things different ways, the best way you can. Nothing's fixed. So I don't think there's any major difference. It's just Mike Palmer uses the expression, you use what you have, and we have Dadant frames here. I think that's really good because it streamlines everything.

I wish we had that in the UK. I'll tell you what, Richard, you've got some really interesting things around your desk. I got tea bag.

That's all right. Well, I've got this as well. This is what we use sometimes. These, I don't know if you've seen these, these are actually made by JZ Bees here. Not a lot of people know about these. They're quite a handy little tool to have. They're queen cell protectors. So if you're ever introducing a queen cell and you're unsure if the colony is going to be kind to that queen or to the cell, you can always put one of these around so she can only hatch from the middle bit, from the end there.

Nice.

They are a good piece of kit, just— and that's one of the things I've got kicking around on my table, you know. So a little, little thing, little, little tip-tops people like to use, but I find they're quite handy.

If anybody wants to guess what Richard's going to bring up as a prop next from his table, stick it in the comments, and if anyone gets it right, I'll give you a jar of honey as a prize. How about that? Right, next question is—

Things on the table, there's the clue.

Next question, and I suppose this is very relevant to what's going on with you at the moment: who is your favorite honey extraction machinery manufacturer?

Okay, there's a lot on the market, and at current I'm looking at everything very closely because I'm going to be buying a whole extraction line. It's a really interesting question because I'm still not convinced what is the best thing, because I don't think anything is perfect, and everything you buy in beekeeping is a trade-off. Because when you start to analyze honey lines, you, you go on— I mean, I get— I'm lucky I'm in a really unique position where I kind of— I'm not saying I know a lot of beekeepers, but I know a lot of beekeepers, and they've all got different setups. And you speak to them all, and they're like, Oh, I love it, but— and then they ream off this problem they had. And then you speak to someone else and you go, oh yeah, I love it, but— so it's really difficult. But what's— what I would say is, um, the French stuff is good, but it's extremely expensive. The Italian stuff, Lega, is absolutely excellent, top quality, if you can afford it. Um, I'm looking at, uh, Königin, which is actually made in— which is Polish. They're slightly higher level than Lyson. Lyson is really good. Carl Fritz is like— the great thing about Carl Fritz is like the Rolls-Royce of beekeeping equipment, to be honest. But if you buy a 32-frame extractor that's fully automatic, you're looking at 6 grand per extractor. I mean, no one system— well, I'll put it like this. The thing for me is I'm in a unique position now where I'm not just buying, do I need an extra extractor? Or do I get a heated sump? Or I'm buying the whole line together, so I'm not having to go, well, will that fit with something else? I'm buying something that will fit together. And also, if I was— if I already had owned the equipment and was thinking, I don't really want to buy that because the other one I've got's okay, can I really justify it? When you're buying— when you're buying a whole load of equipment from scratch, when you put individual items together and you buy— but you buy a whole line, it works out actually better value. I think, but it's it's still difficult to know what the best thing to get is. I'm I'm to be honest, I am I'm still not convinced either way. All I want is something. The problem is I I've been looking at Paradise Honey Lines in Finland. They're fantastic, and they're like right up there in quality, and everyone says how good they are. But then you speak to someone else and said, "Oh, I had a problem with this," and they and the after-sales service was tough because they're in Finland. They're not interested. But I don't know, maybe that was just them. You can't really say. I think you've just got to go with what the populace use, and if you think it's going to work for you, go for it. It's so difficult to know. But I mean, if I had the choice, I would probably go for Carl Fritz on everything. But they don't make a whole extraction line. That's the problem. I just like the idea of not having to of being able to put my frames on the machine at the start and take them off. After they've been extracted at the end. But you can do it on a small scale. You don't have to buy an enormous machine that you're spending a lot of money on, because don't forget, you're only extracting for 4 weeks of the year in most cases. For us here, we're having only 2 nectar flows. It's a massive amount of money to invest in a machine that for 10 months of the year is doing nothing. But if it's efficient and works really well, the machine will last for years, and you've got more time because it works quickly and you've done that job quickly. So there's kind of trade-offs on everything, you know, there's just no right answer. You've got to just say, well, I want to do it because I like the machine, and yeah, that's all you can say, you know.

You've definitely not made your mind up, but I'm very much looking forward to watching on your videos and seeing which one you've gone for.

I've got some preferences already, but I'm just waiting for prices to come back. It's difficult to organize everything because there's so much To make sure you get it right. That's why you're hesitant, you know, because it's a one-off job. You can't buy it, oh well, I'll change, I'll try something else. You're spending £15,000-£20,000 on an extraction line. You can't afford to, you know, to get something that you're not going to have any after-sales service with if there's an issue. You know, you've got to be sure.

Yeah, definitely. Cool. Right, next question, and this is one that I've answered a few times. It's a good question. So if you could start again with all the knowledge that you had, you've not got any equipment, you've got nothing, you're starting as a day one beekeeper, Nothing.

I think you've got to go through the trials of beekeeping to become who you are, and you've got to be yourself to do it, because only you— I, I couldn't say this, obviously there's incidences I've done things stupidly, but I think the best thing about beekeepers is we're learning from our mistakes the whole time. And I'm sure you're exactly the same. There's sure— I'm sure there's things you look at your videos now and you'll go, My God, that's the number one schoolboy error, do you know what I mean? You know, I'm like, how did I do that? But at the same time, I've looked at videos when I first had nucs and hives and gone, well, I didn't really worry about varroa then, and what was the problem? I seem to have really good bees then. Now everything's a nightmare and I'm working my hardest. I don't know, I wouldn't do anything different.

It goes back to what you said, and it's so good, and you see a lot of other countries are good at this, is that everything's standardized so you don't get caught up in the trap of buying some fad equipment or a frame size that doesn't work.

That is definitely something I didn't fall into the trap of because my colleague at the time said to me, no matter what you do, keep it standard because 10 years down the line everything will still work on the first frame you bought, on the newest box you've got, it still fits. You know, I've seen so many people making nucs up and they're going to be professionals, they're making their own nucs and they're going, oh well, I'm actually, I'm going to stop doing that. And I thought, Well, you've now stopped and you've wasted all that time making those, but no, those frames don't fit anywhere else. You see what I mean? You're absolutely right, it's standardisation is key. Absolutely.

Cool, right, so that is all of the questions that I've had come through, barring— I did get one from Keith actually, which was saying, he was saying that the bigger the cell, the better they are fed in terms of quantity and jelly, but I think you covered that in terms of Feeding, didn't you?

Well, it's interesting, there is one other point that sometimes due to genetics you can get— some bees tend to raise bigger cells and some bees tend to raise slightly smaller cells, but it's only when you go into a little bit into the insemination side, you start weighing queens, and then you realize that certain lines produce heavier queens, but it's only a very small thing. And then a queen that's well fed, even— I've had, I'm sure you've had it as well, even tiny queens that you can't find, like, where is this queen? You find her, she's the most ridiculously small queen, like, how could she produce all those bees? But still a good queen. It doesn't really— there's no correlation in it really. But I'll speak— well, in terms of that, but generally speaking, yeah, um, the best queens raise the best colonies. You know, the nice big juicy queen, you know, that's got a huge abdomen on the frame, is going to produce much more queens than some runny, skitty, um, thing that's running around stupidly. But cool.

Well, there's a question here that they've asked it for me, but you, you can answer it as well, but it is a little bit Loaded. So it's saying, as we know, it's illegal to sublimate pure oxalic acid in the UK, so everyone uses apibioxal. So why does Thorne sell pure oxalic acid? Are you— am I being naive, or does everyone just illegally use pure oxalic? I will answer, and I'll give you the firm answer here. I think, I think it was, uh, Jim, this one. Um, it's for cleaning the inside of wooden hives is the reason that they sell it.

Absolutely. It's a hive cleaner. It's a hive cleaner. There's no more we can say about it. We put oxalic acid in our hives to clean, to clean the hives. Helps keep the walls clean, preserve the wood. If I was treating with oxalic acid, I would always use ApiBioxal every time because that's the law. Can't be wrong on that.

Cool. Well, I've jumped all the way back up to the top of the chat and I'm working my way down in order of questions, so hopefully we'll get through.

Okay, cool.

Right, so Richard, so this is from Peter saying, hi Richard, thanks for joining us. In general terms, how do you keep your brood over winter? Single box, double brood box, excluder on/off, supers? Thank you.

Okay, I use a single box and often I go down to 7 frames because we can, if we use 7 frames, what I'll try and explain the configuration, we'll make a split in the autumn as we Well, late summer as we harvest that brood, or if we're caging the queen, which is what I do now. Shall I show you that prop? Yeah, there it is.

Oh, nobody got that one, did they?

There it is. If you didn't see, if you got that right, you won a pot of honey. When we're caging our queens, we do that. But so we want to go into the winter, and if we do get through most of our colonies and make as many nucs as we can, we'll put a partition in number 1. A frame in number 1 to number 8. In other words, normal frames are number 1— sorry, number 2 to number 8. Okay, so you've already— and then number 9 is another partition and 10 is a frame of foundation. The reason being that if the following spring they build so much they've got room to go around the— it's when we say a partition is not a complete partition, it's a frame partition. In other words, it doesn't completely block the bottom so the bees can go around it sort of to the foundation if they wanted somewhere to build, and it actually helps us in the spring because we don't often know when to take those partitions out to give them extra space, so when we're in the spring we take them all out, and often they've started to go around the polystyrene partition and building in number 1, but it kind of reduces them down. So, and also in the autumn, you can, in the late summer, you can actually make a nuc But because you're replacing those frames with partitions, in other words, the same space, you're not really having a massive dent on the colony density, if that makes sense. You're kind of reducing the amount of bees, but at the same time you're also reducing the amount of space that's in their colony, so they seem to overwinter absolutely fine. And because they're such big frames, we're always still taking honey out. I mean, that's going to happen in 2 weeks. I'm going to go out there, I've got loads of frames here, and I'll be going through through probably 500 or 600 frames just taking out frames of honey because we'll have to give them space because if we don't, they'll swarm, you know, it all, that whole cycle starts again. We're basically moving frame movers up. Ian Stepples says box movers, I say frame movers because all we do is move frames out, move them back in, take them back out again, move them back in again, you know, and take them back out at the end of the year. It's just the business.

It's an interesting technique that I know a bee farmer that does exactly the same and he'll go in kind of end of the year and he goes down an 11-frame in a national and takes it down to an 8-frame and takes out the 3 frames, and he'll take the honey from them, use the honey, melt down the frames, and that's how he recycles his third of his frames every 3 years and then overwinter on an 8-frame configuration. And that's on a single national deep as well, so nowhere near the size of your frames.

Yeah, because the actual— I think the nationals are actually 2 and a tiny bit more more, or that you basically need more than a double British National to even come anywhere near to a Dadant. It's just monstrous.

Yeah.

But the weird thing is, it's like every spring, if we didn't take out the frames and the bees have been in there all winter and everything's fine, that often there's 2 frames either side of the nest that's just— there's nothing on it, it's just combs. So you can actually take— if when I used to do swarm trapping, you see, That was a way of getting combs to put in your swarm trap, so it used to work really well. But I just believe it. But also, we do reduce the combs by making splits. So you take out 2 or 3 frames twice a year, that already rotates your colonies, you see, already rotates your frames in the colony. So by naturally making nucs, it's a way of rotating the combs. We don't have to do it.

You don't have to, just, you know, Yeah, it's a good way of doing it. Next question up then is, is that— so the answer is, is there any danger if you clip the queen's wings? And I guess the answer would— the question would also be, do you clip your queen's wings once mated?

Okay, personally I don't. I don't see anything majorly wrong with it. It does help against swarming because the bees— the queen obviously can't go off, and she might fly out by about A couple of meters out the front and then kind of come back, but it can get messy. And there is another theory that wings— bees that have clipped wings are more likely to supersede because the bees might think there's something just not quite right about her. I don't know, I don't do it. I prefer my swarms to be— if I get swarms from a colony, which we all do, I prefer them to be clean in the apiary. And if you're going around the apiaries, fair enough, you do get most of them, you know. You do lose a few, but I've had a couple that go underneath the, you know, the pallet, and it's a real mess. And I know you get more of that if the queen was clipped. Personally, that's my preference on it, but I don't like doing it. I just— there's something about it. I do it if I'm doing some insemination because it's the standard procedure when you inseminate queen and you've done the procedure, you clip the wing and then you mark her with the, you know, with the disc mark it, and then you put her back and she revives. And it's a good, it's a good time to do it because you can really hold her still. Perhaps I'm just a bit afraid of making a mess of it on site out in the apiary. It's one thing marking queens out in the apiary, let alone clip, clip on a wing. But other people seem to do it and they say it's a really good method. It's just not my preferred method.

It is interesting how different, because I used— so for about 6 years I never clipped wings because A, I didn't really see the need, and B, I probably wasn't confident to be clipping, to be holding the queens to clip them. And then one year I lost, I must have lost 20 swarms, and it just really annoyed me because every time that I was building up these big strong colonies and I was getting to a point where I was thinking, right, they're going to get the flow land now, the colony's perfect strength, I'll go back in the middle of a flow and they were gone. And you've got like 20% of the bees left, and it just annoyed me so much.

Yeah.

And because I work full-time anyway, I've not got every single day on the bees, So there's kind of, I have to work on like a different schedule, so I moved over to clipping them all, and I'll tell you what, it's reduced the number of swarms down by such a huge amount.

I mean, I think it's something that perhaps I should think of. I agree, because one of the problems we do face is swarming in the spring. There's that period of really 3 to 4 weeks that even if you're on top of your bees, sometimes no matter what you do, they all kind of seem to want to go. And every apiary you go to, you're like, because you think it's going to be a quick trip to an apiary, and you get there and it's like 6 cells deep on every colony. You're like, you've got to go for every single box and shake them all off. And you do think maybe if I clipped her, it might be worth it. But as I said, when I'm using my— if I'm using these cages and I do find a queen cell, often I'll just pop the queen in that now, make a note on the box on the top, and then I know that she's confined. And it doesn't seem to affect the colony too much apart from obviously reducing the brood a bit.

Yeah.

But it stops the queen going. There's— there is ways of doing it, but it— as I said, there's so many ways in beekeeping of doing it. I'm not sure any, any way is the right way or necessarily the wrong way. It depends what works for you. I think if you're running 2 jobs, it is really tricky, and I think you're probably wise to do it because I can be around all my apiaries every 6 to 7 days for those peak 3 or 4 weeks because I do really put the resources into getting Regular checks in that critical spring month. The minute that our nectar flow stops, like as soon as the rapeseed oil finishes in mid-April, bang, there's almost like a— almost— there's still a couple that go, but there's hardly any swarming that happens. And you're like, oh, I've made it. If you've got bees in boxes, then you're halfway there for the year. You've done all right, do you know what I mean? It's like, okay, let's go, you know what I mean? Right, let's go for them all again and then see what we got. But usually you're okay. But I think maybe I'll clip an apiary and see what happens and just try that.

Yeah, you just got to try new things, haven't you? And for me, I was so reluctant to do it, and what I found is that it works for me. So that's what you need to do, and it work out what works for you. Uh, next question is, have you ever heard of Hexacell comb?

I presume it's a company that's making maybe plastic comb, is it?

Or So I'm I'm pretty sure that I've seen this, and it's it's fake wax drawn foundation, like like actual wax combs fully drawn, but artificial. Okay.

I haven't seen anything of it though. Yeah, it's someone asked me that. Sorry, someone asked me the other day, do I do I use plastic foundation in my brood nest? And I'm like, well, no, we don't. And I thought about it a lot, and I thought, well. I could give it a go. And I thought, well, no, because part of our beekeeping mantra, or we'll say our opera— the way we operate is we change our frames. And I think if you've got black combs, so if you've got like, um, sheets of plastic foundation in the brood nest, um, okay, they're going to draw it up probably quicker, but— and there's a little bit less resources in drawing it up, there's that argument— but long term, you're less likely to melt it down. You're less likely to return it back and get something on that. Because I like the fact that when you melt down frames, you start afresh. You clean the frame. It's that it's that nice cleaning method. You get nice new wax in and you rejuvenate. If you're using, I I well other people out there would probably go no it's absolutely fine. And what we said before about dark homes is probably makes no difference at all. But how do you melt it down after? And I don't like the idea of they say oh I just toss it in the bin. I don't like like the idea of tossing. Plastic combs in the bin. It's a waste of resources, you know. I— and you can't melt those because I've tried it. The ones I, um, well, when I was out in Hawaii, I used a lot of American frames and some of them were the black plastic, and we tried to melt them down and they just twist and buckle. And you basically, you've got to scrape them off first and then either pressure wash them— that works okay, but it's really messy and you need a good pressure washer. But most people say, oh, I just toss it in the trash, you know. I'm like, Well, it doesn't really tick my box for that because it's, it's not resourceful. It's a good resource, it's a good way of doing it, and you don't need to use plastic. But saying that, I know I argue that the bases are good we use, but they don't rot and we use them for years and years and years. But you can't do that with— to me, you can't do that plastic foundation.

It's, it's with plastic foundation, I think if you came up with some sort of plastic frame/foundation, and I'm going to be trying one this year, that could be like, can be melted down, it can be pressure washed, it can be cleaned, and it can be recycled, then you're kind of saying, okay, maybe that has got a bit of an argument for it. But if you can't do any of that, then you're going to chuck it out. My counter-argument would be, well, why is it any better than wax? Surely it's, it's probably not. Just go with wax.

Well, yeah, that, that, that is my argument as well. I, I just think that to, to get that Frame clean is more work than it is to do it the other method. You know what I mean? Because if you if you go for plastic, fine. And we use plastic in our supers, as I said, and they part it's part build. But then you can pressure wash it, and you definitely can renew that frame. But with the frames that you stick into the plastic sheets, you stick into the comb, into the frame, you don't seem to be able to to be able to handle those well easily to renew them, to get them to rebuild on them. them, you just have to throw them away. You can scrape the wax off, yeah, but it just seems to me to be a little bit wasteful to, to go down that road in, in the times we're living in now. We don't really want to be chucking plastic away. We want to be seen to doing kind of making a better job of it, if that's the right word, I would say. Um, you know, yeah, I'd agree. It's difficult to really know, you know. It's so difficult to know.

Next question is saying, what are your thoughts on drone congregation areas?

Okay, um, I have very, um, I've thought about this an awful lot, DCAs, and I've never ever found one. Um, as I said before when I was talking about queens going out to mate, I do question the— I know they proved it, I know there is these areas that drones congregate, but I'm— but it doesn't mean that drones don't congregate in smaller amounts In a general area, okay? But I know there's land masses and maybe grey lines and magnetic lines. No one seems to really know why they. No one's ever worked out, as far as I know, why they have do congregate in these areas. But they do exist. I'd love to know if I had one nearby because I'd move all my mating colonies near there. Obviously we would. But it where we are, I don't know. But they can use that queen pheromone to to mimic one, and you get a lot of drones conglomeration. So to me, that proves. That wherever you have drones, they are they are basically grouping to where there is queens out mating. So that's the way I think about it. What else can you say? I mean, unless you know there's people that live apparently near known ones, and they say that that's where their bees go off. I don't know. I honestly think with the way things are going at the moment, the queens are struggling to mate well. And whether it's climate change, whether it's all the issues we're having with sperm content of the drones, with other issues like that, with varroa giving viruses to our bees, that could be part of it. I just think that there's something that isn't right, and I believe that queens aren't getting well mated, or they're not perhaps going as far to mate, or you know what I mean? It just doesn't seem to— I remember we used to, when I raised queens 10 years ago when I first started, maybe it's just me thinking this way, but I just seem to have not as good of queens as I had 10 years ago. I don't know why, um, I just feel that way. Maybe we've just had a couple of bad years. I mean, last year was atrocious for mating. I think I raised 200 queens in the spring and I probably got 25 mated in boxes at the end of the year of that group, you know, peanuts. So it's really hard sometimes, you know, to know why, and there's so many factors that could be an issue with You know, there's fungicides now, there's obviously insecticides, and they're saying sometimes that it's herbicides that have an effect because we get so many cereals around here and they're all sprayed with selective herbicide. Is that having an impact? No one really seems to know. It's just food for thought. I just think queens are mating when they get the chance. I don't think there's any of this, you know, this stereotypical beautiful summer days, they're going off and out the colony, but it just doesn't happen. We're trying to get queens mated in April and May when we first start raising, then we'll try and do it in June and July before the drones finish. You know, it's lovely to write about it and romanticize about it, but I just don't think it happens like that.

Yeah, cool. Our next question is from Todd saying, in the States, breeder queens are only produced by a few artificial insemination breeders. He's a little concerned that the genetics are being reduced due to the the few number of breeders. Is this a concern for you, and is it a problem in the EU?

I think not because there's a very good amount of breeders that share genetics. I learned quite a bit about it from Peter Little where before he sadly passed away last year that they were all part of a breeding program and they would share genetics. There's like there's a pedigree register. And you can log on and see it. It's all throughout Europe, for example, so they were all able to ask for genetics if they were of the same, you know, okay, obviously there's a lot of beekeepers that don't share their stuff with other people, but generally, no, there's a good swapping of genetic stuff like that, so I don't think that was ever an issue. You might have it in the States, I couldn't comment about that, but when you think about bees genetics-wise, Even if someone is, um, inseminating queens, we talk about inbreeding, but I think you'd have to do something pretty drastic for a long time to close that, that source off of other genes coming in so much for so long to see any real signs of inbreeding, you know. Um, I, I— they talk about it a lot, but I've never seen any. not that I know any evidence of it. I mean, we're just— I'm just a beekeeper here doing what I can, but I buy genetics in. I buy genetics in from 3 or 4 different places, and the problem we have here is so many other beekeepers here that have all got their own ideas of what the best thing to have is. There's no way we're going to have a problem with diversity, that's for sure. We've got every character of bee here in the world, you know.

Yeah, it was interesting on one of Murray McGregor's recent talks he was saying that their philosophy is just to bring in as many different types of breeding queen as possible, loads of different genetics, and really get that genetic diversity into the yard. So you're not kind of like selecting downwards for your breeding, but you're bringing in these other breeds to give you that hybrid vigor. And that's like a real kind of like benchmark for what he's trying to do. And I've seen from the results of his queens, they're very good in what your Lance is doing. But people do it differently, don't they?

Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt that when you get an F1 or an F0, well, an F0 queen that's inseminated, she might herself just be an average queen, but as soon as you cross it, that's when they get fire in their bellies. That's when you can get really good— I mean, everyone wants F1s in their colonies, first cross. It's the same when you're raising plants, F1 cross, you get brilliant broccoli or tomatoes, or, you know, that first cross is that strongest thing. And And that's what you see. You raise a load of good queens, and for a couple of years you have amazing queens in your colonies. They just bring in loads. They can be a little bit temperamental, but they're strong. They've got that vigor, you know. But you can buy, as I said, you can buy a really good inseminated queen. She might actually not physically look that great, you know. It might just be a good colony. But usually, obviously, with beekeeping, it's the same with most things. If it is good and it's a breeder queen, breed from it, don't you? I mean, and they'll show most of their traits. But what I'm trying to say is you don't always see those great traits until you take F1s from them. Then you go, wow, what a fast hen! And you do— you run back to her and go, is she all right? Check there's no cells, you know. Like every spring you're like, is this still alive? You know, it's, uh— Because you— I've, I've, I've got one from Mark, and it's actually the one on the left-hand side in that picture. One of the— one on the, on the right— on the left-hand side, sorry, didn't do well. The one on the right did brilliantly, and she's still in the in, in the garden now. I bred loads of daughters from her for 2 years, and that's the only queen that has been prolific throughout the year. Actually gave me some honey in the apiary at home because it doesn't produce that well here anyway, but it gave me 2 supers of honey when everything else was giving me half a super. And when I did a mite wash at the end of the year, there was one mite, one mite in a 300 bee wash from the whole of this season, and it's surrounded other colonies full of mites. So I consider that a damn good breeder queen. The chances are that she'll pop it this season, so I'm gonna— my first load of queens is going to be from her. So that's the one you want to breed from, you know. But it's difficult to really know, you know.

At least the drone lines will continue with all of the F1s that you got from her.

Well, I hope so, you know, I hope so. But the problem is, after that F1, that all changes again, you know. You're going to get some of the genetics kept in, but It, it, I mean, the variables on the F2s are enormous, you know. Once you get rid of that first 50%, don't forget you're getting 50% of the 50% after, and, and it, it becomes very complicated to explain. I don't really know much about BGS because all I know is that on F2s and F3s, and we joke over here, they're so bad they're F26s, we call them. I mean, they become so atrocious, they must be in high number Fs rather than 1s and 2s. They're They just, you know, we call hive tool test material. You just put them under the hive tool and you push, and guess what? It fails every time. Do you know what I mean? So we have to do that, you know, we have to be— so you have to cull rubbish if you want to raise your own good queens.

Definitely right. Next question, how often do you change your queens, I guess, for production colonies, and at what time of year do you do it?

Okay, if I do have enough queens to change queens, It's rare because most of them go into nucs, to be honest. What I tend to do is they become queenless because they swarm, and then I generally give them a new queen that I either got here or I buy in. I raise queens, but I also buy some in. I don't deny that. I can buy in some really nice genetics, you know, not expensive, and I treat myself. I might buy 20 or 30 queens a year, and I spread those out, and I'll put drone comb in, and then I'll get some extra different, like you said about Murray, that's what I try and do as well. It's all about breeding from what you've got and maybe buying a breeder queen or 2, but then also buying a few in. But changing queens, ideally we'd love to do it every second season, and it would always be at the end of the season. Like, so say I was gonna change the queen, I'd do it in July for that reason. Then you've got enough time for that queen to become accepted, to start laying. And then to build up for the winter. That's the ideal time, but it's not always that easy.

It's a really good tip, that, for people, and it's exactly what we do, is kind of end of the season, because we find end-of-season queens are generally better mated. Yeah, the colonies are much more likely to accept them because at that time of the year, give them anything, they'll accept it. They're just desperate, really.

Yeah, they're like, this is, this is game over, isn't it?

They're like, we've got one chance here, and usually And also, if you get the young queen at the end of the year, she's strong going through the winter, so you get better overwintering performance. And then the following year, they're just perfectly set to boom and get a massive spring crop if you can get it. So I hope—

That is the theory behind it all, isn't it? It's just changing at the right time so you really get that explosion the following spring. We like to say if you have a really good queen, she should give you a small nuc in the spring, a bigger one in the autumn, so that you'd make a split from her twice. and 2 honey crops. If you can do that, that's the kind of queens we want here. But we can't always do it because some swarm and the weather and blah blah blah. But that's— we always do splits twice a year, but we can't guarantee we use all the bees. That's kind of how we play it. So yeah, it's a nice ideology to say we'll all have enough queens to change all our colonies, and then by the following year they'll all be producing amazing drones. But in reality, it doesn't quite work like that. But I think you have to work to a plan in beekeeping, and one of the plans is to change your queens regularly, and that does help reduce swarming, but it's not the answer. As we said, it's one of the ways to help against it.

This is a really good question, I think, from Julian, because this is so counterintuitive what you're about to say now. So he's saying, is there a queen in your cell finisher, and if so, why will nurse bees continue to draw out the queen cells if there is a queen in there, which there is.

Okay, well, what you, what you're referring to is what I would call a queen-right finisher. Okay, so the queen is underneath the excluder. It's the queen that tears down those cells, and above the excluder you've got— I always say that you should bring up some open brood, in other words, some larvae that are waiting to be finished and to be fed by bees as normal in a colony. So you bring that brood up So it's above the excluder, but your cells are up there next to it, so it draws those nurse bees up to do their job. And because they just find these cells, they just feed them as normal cells. The queen can't get to them and tear them down. It's a bit like, how could you say, super— either super— some are supersedure cells in the supers. If you don't have a queen excluder, that's where bees naturally make supersedure cells. They'll do it in the top of the colony, in the honey frames. If you've ever done that and you've had— you'll see one, you'll see sometimes they'll draw the cups up at the bottom of a super frame. That's what they do in nature. And then it's a continuous thing where, okay, they might make a cell and then that cell will go off and it'll mate and come back, and they might swarm with just that new queen, or the existing queen might go. That's what bee colonies do most of the time. We think that the the new queen comes back, starts laying, and then they kill the old queen. But that's the theory behind it, though, is that you put that— I'm digressing a bit— but you put that, you have that queen excluder to stop that happening. But all the bees see it as, they clearly see it as cells that just need feeding. They just want to feed. I've kind of pondered over this very question many times. And the only thing I can think of is it's just they treat it as another cell because it's already started. Don't forget, but you've had to put that cell into a starter to initiate that queen, to change the caste procedure, to change that momentum of it being made into a worker, to go, right, we've fed it slightly differently now and it's the queen. But when you put it back in a colony that's strong with lots of nurse bees— but my other argument for having finishers is you're not putting a lot of cells into a colony to be finished. You're only putting a selected few, so you're— they're going to be finished well because there's plenty of nurse bees in that working colony that has a queen laying underneath, and there's plenty of larvae they need to feed, and they're working bringing food in. We put feeder on, we give them Pollen Sub, but there's no reason why they won't carry on feeding those cells as if they were normal cells, and that's what they do. But it's a really interesting question because I still really Can't sometimes understand why they do it, but that's what they seem to do. They finish the cell in a finisher.

It's a very helpful clarification because I think anybody watching the videos look at that and, and you have to double watch it and say, well, but you've just made it hopelessly queenless. You've taken away all the eggs, all the larvae, all the queens, made it hopelessly queenless, and then on day 6 you're going and putting it back with the queen. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense, does it? That is the method and that's what works.

Well, it— yeah, I agree, but you are in the same respect— think about what happens if you, um, if you take a frame of brood from a colony and stick it in another colony that's lost its queen. They will make a cell from that. It's, it's the same thing, um, because they're just missing— they're just missing those— that, that ability to— people don't realize that hopelessly queenless actually happens often in the colony. doesn't just mean you're creating this artificial environment that the bees never have. They're never hopelessly queenless. What happens when they swarm and the queen doesn't mate and doesn't come back? You get drones, you get laying workers, and that's exactly the same thing, but laying workers is the next step. For a while, they're hopelessly queenless, and then those ovaries develop in the workers, then you get some nasty bees laying, and it all becomes pear-shaped, and it's finished the colony in most cases. But that's another thing. You know, there's so many things that you have to kind of be aware of with beekeeping that the only way you can do it, as I said before, if I would change anything, it would be nothing. I think you've got to go through that, and I'm going through it all the time. You know, it's just experiences.

Yeah, we all are. You learn every single day, don't you? I've learned tons already today, Richard. This is great. Right, next question. If the queens emerge in the incubator, can the virgin queen be directly introduced to queenless colony as the virgin has no pheromones. So they're guessing, how would you introduce a virgin queen that's emerged?

Okay, well, there's various ways. Sometimes you can— I run them, if I have colonies that are small colonies with lots of nurse bees and you've harvested a queen from them and there's loads of brood hatching out because they've just laid their first load of eggs, you can introduce them directly onto the frame. But you need to have what we call running virgins. Excuse me. So they've been like in the incubator for a little while, so they're more than like 2 or 3 hours old. What I'm saying is you don't want to introduce one that's just been born. If so, you need to put her in a cage first, or in one of these cages. If they're really docile and slow, use a Nikko cage like that with a candy plug. Your candy goes in there, and then you can— the bees can get a little bit used to her first. and they won't kill her because they can't kill her until they've eaten out the plug and she can be released. But that's what I generally do. Funny enough, incubation and putting bees in an incubator, queens in an incubator, is another science altogether because what you want to do is you want to bring them out, you want them to hatch, because I think that it's a way of checking each queen is strong and viable. But at the same time, you desperately don't want to keep them in there too long because the longer you keep them in there, where they need to be is with the bees. So you've got to learn when the best time is to introduce them. You've got to have your nucs ready, and if the nucs aren't ready, yeah, put them in a cage like this, and then most of the time they are accepted. You've got 24 hours, or you can put some— see at the end of that, you've got a plug in the end there. You can, if you've used it before, the cage, you can just tape it up, put some new candy in it, and then put that in the colony, leave it for a couple of days, then release the tape, and then the queen will be introduced. It's a lot of work. but it works. You know, at the end of the day, if you knew— if I knew that every single colony I'd made, I had a queen and a colony at the end of the year, I'd be delighted. But it doesn't work like that. It's just there's always some mistakes. There's always a certain percentage that do something to the queen, or she doesn't do that well, or she's got a leg missing or something stupid like that. They try and kill her. But that's how I— most of the time, for me, I introduce queens. There's another method as well. You can run the queen onto the frame You have a little bottle like this of syrup, and you turn the frame on its side. You let the bees settle. You run the queen out. She'll run around a bit, but immediately you just sprinkle some syrup over the frame. You cover. Don't drown them in it, but literally like as though you're drizzling olive oil. You know all about that with your mate who drizzles olive oil over everything. It's the same thing with syrup. Do a bit like that, you know, and then you just put it. you cover the queen in it, you cover the worker bees in it, and then you literally put her back in the frame, put the frame back in the colony, and the bees will just start licking everything up. And by the time they've licked everything up, they'll forget who the heck she is because she's been licked all over. And that's one way of getting her accepted. It's a really good little method, but it just takes— because you gotta— you go through quite a bit of syrup when you've got 20 queens to put in. And, you know, it's— you just have to have everything ready.

That's a really good method. And it's difficult getting virgins introduced into a colony. The way that I've done it previously is you dip them, you kind of get some honey from that hive, mix up a little bit of water, dunk the virgin in it, like you are, you do pretty much drown her, and then just chuck her straight in. And all the bees, what they do is they just clean her down, and by the time they've cleaned her down, they're kind of just like, yeah, whatever, we'll accept her. But you need to get them hopelessly queenless. That's the key, isn't it, with all of it?

Yeah, I know. I mean, I know some people that have got bees that they can seem to Harvest the queen, an hour later they introduce the cell, or the day later introduce the cell. They never check for queen cups, they never have to do that, and the cell is born without any cell protectors, without any of those, and the queen is born and off she goes and mates, and before you know it, within 10 days there's another mated queen in that colony, you know. But I don't seem to have that luck. I don't know why, it's just, it is what it is. We have to do different things in different areas, you know. It would be lovely if it was that easy. One of the biggest problems I have, I think, is introduction. But of mated queens, not really a problem. We do have the problem sometimes when you use one of these, even with, even with, well, using one of these, sometimes you release the queen, she's laid up the underneath, there's no problem, the bees accept her, she's walking through the colony, you put the frame back in, you feed her, you come back later, they've killed the queen, and guess what? They're making a cell from the larvae that was under the pushing cage that she laid. It's like, you know, it's bitter when they do that. I mean, it really hurts, you know, but that is beekeeping. That's exactly what they do occasionally, but not very often, luckily. You know, you can do 20 pushing cages and I think you'll probably get 19 out of 20 most times.

Cool. Well, I'm going to combine the next 2 questions, so you've got to listen to the first and the second one. First one says, "Do do honey farmers feed bees sugar? I noticed some honeys get crystallized while ones that come from Asia don't." So just a bit about that. And then the other one is, "Have you had any time to learn French yet?" So maybe you can answer the first question in French.

No, I do too. The reason why people are getting confused—I'm I'm not going to support importing honey. I believe we should be selling our own honey, and when that runs out, we shouldn't really be importing it. But what I will say is the reason why people are getting confused that say honey is crystallizing because I think it's got sugar in it is because it's not been pasteurized. Honey brought in from other places in pots that's mixed generally has been heat treated so it doesn't crystallize, and that's why you can go to your Morrisons or your, your wherever you've got any supermarket you can name, they've got non-crystallized honey in pots and it looks fantastic. You go, oh, that's great, £2 a pot, brilliant. I'm going to buy this. And what you don't realize is that it's lost most of its goodness because the enzymes and the proteins, even though they're small, and most of the minerals and the vitamins have been heat treated, so they've lost— the honey is not as nutritious as it was, but it doesn't crystallize. Okay, crystallizing is a completely natural process, and you can't really As much as we don't want to, you can't criticize people bringing in honey from other places because it's just business. We have to stop it in a way that is the correct way. We just want to be able to produce our own honey and sell it for a fair price. I think that's a much better way. It's just business. For instance, over here there's a big honey place up the road that brings honey in from all over Europe. I wonder if they really know what's in the honey and where that honey has come from. At the start. Do they know, has it come from two— I mean, they tracked some in America that had come once they'd found it was an illegal source and it was rice water, you know, watered down. They actually found that it, rather than coming from the original place, it had gone for two other ports on the way to be brought in to America a different way. That's just one example, and I, and I can't quote exactly what it was, but I saw a documentary on it, and people will do anything they can to try and bring in a product. It doesn't matter if it's wine Doesn't matter if it's forageable, they'll try it. It's just business.

But it's true. And what I would just add to that is that what's so frustrating is that they're comparing potentially fake pasteurized honey and saying that's the real stuff versus your honey that's crystallized, which is clearly the real stuff because it's crystallized. But then the other thing to say is that just all honeys are different. Like, it completely depends on what the bees are foraging on, that glucose-fructose mix. Some honey can take years to crystallize. Some honeys take a week to crystallize.

I mean, look at borage. Borage and acacia, it might stay liquid and clear for months, months before it even turns slightly. Where, as we know, spring honey, mostly because it's a lot of rapeseed oil, you're lucky if you get it out the barrel into the pot before it crystallizes, you know. That's what we're up against. That's why it's such great honey, you know. It's really As I said, obviously I don't support importing honey, but you can't blame— you can't blame importers for importing honey because it's there and it needs government assistance to help them change to just local honey and other ways of doing it. That's how I see it. It's not really their fault, it is just a product of people wanting to buy cheap honey and someone supplies it, you know. You have to take away that that first call. So you have to educate people about, come on, you're buying a pot of honey that's €2, what honestly do you think has happened to that honey to be able to sell them for €2 or 2 quid, you know, for that pot? Do you really think that buying honey that cheap is going to be good for you? People don't understand that, and I have no problem with that. They just don't know it, they just don't understand. We have to educate them and do what we can.

It's a perfect time to plug the BBKA's new petition. So they've just raised it within the last week or so, doing a big kind of UK-wide petition to put in place stronger legislation over honey adulteration and what's going into honey. So I would urge everyone, take a look, Google BBKA honey petition, and it should come up. Sign it if you can. Right, next question.

I'll just add to that, in Brittany We've just launched our own, it's our own mark, it's called Le Miel de Bretagne, and it means that we can sell our honey because, or we can sell it as a, with a sticker on the pot that means that we have to conform to all the criteria. So we have to give it complete traceability, when it was harvested, where it was harvested, what feed the bees had before it was harvested, or obviously prior to the nectar float Everything you can think of, we have to be accountable, and it builds a really good case for us having a really good quality product that we can now market, not for necessarily any more money, but it brings up our level of accountability, of traceability, so anyone who wants to say, where's this honey from, here it is, here's the answer, this is what we do on our apiaries, everything is noted, and it's a lot of work, but it means we— it's like a standard, it's a really good thing, and that's what a lot of beekeepers should do. maybe the Welsh government, maybe the English government should start to think of something like that because it will protect the beekeepers and give them value of their product. Because the moment they're competing with someone else who's bringing in honey that is potentially the same product, but it's nowhere near the same product, that's what this is all about, you know.

Yeah, I think those schemes are very, very worthwhile.

But they have to be well thought out. There's other people in France that have done it. They've done it in the Alps for the Alpine honey. It just gives you power to be able to prove, hey, this is what we got, and yes, it is real honey. There's lots of people who sell honey on market stalls. There's just a label on the pot that says honey, miel, from whatever, and you think, what guarantee have you got that that is actually— but people buy it. This is the problem. We have to keep that education thing going, you know, it's really difficult.

Definitely. Next question, do you use polyhives?

Myself, yes, I do. I use Dadant 6-frame polyhives because they're brilliant for us because they are light, they are adaptable, they're a little bit difficult to clean, but they're really easy to move around when we're rushing around making nucs in the summer and in the spring. So I made a lot. You might have seen some of my pictures of my old nucs. They're all five frame nucs, and those are the ones I used to use to put swarm traps in. I used to make swarm traps from those with some old comb and whatever, and we put them out, and they're fine. But when you put a nuc in that in the spring, you are you are buying into a what we say a cauchemar, a nightmare, because you've only because one minute they are fine, and next minute they're they're falling out of the box. They just don't— when those nucs explode in the spring, which they do, you need 6 frames, and 6-frame nucs are brilliant. So I've got poly nucs for that, and I bought a load of those, and they work really well. So far so good. I've got nothing really negative about them. They're a bit prone to woodpecking— well, they're prone not to woodpecker, those ones, they're more prone to badger damage because they push them on their side and chew the sides. But that is one of the issues. But you lose a few, but they're fairly cheap. Out of preference, I prefer 6-frame wooden nucs, but when I make the next load, maybe I'll make wooden ones. But when you can go and pick them up at the shop and they're ready to go, that's the difference, you know, and they're light.

You know what, you're, you're so lucky in the EU now. Somebody sent me some, some of the French Iko ones, and the difference in price— like, take a look at some of the UK poly prices at the moment. So for like a 6-frame, a 6-frame poly nuc from BS Honeybees is now about £60, so like €68, €69. Yeah. And in France, what's that, like €25 still?

Um, they've gone up a little bit because everything's going up, and obviously the price of oil has gone up, so the raw material has gone up. But there's— I think you can get them about €29, €28 each. Um, but you have to buy them in bulk for that. I mean, like, if you buy them by the hundreds, you can get like 10 to 15% off. So it's still what they just treat it as, a commodity. They're beekeepers that have grown, they now run a big one I go to. I'm actually going to it next Tuesday, and you can buy stuff by hundreds, and it's actually incredibly much cheaper when you buy in bulk, you know. But not everyone can do that, I'm afraid.

Less than half the price than what you can get them for in the UK at the moment. Real issue.

I know, I know.

Next question, you might not know the answer, but what extraction unit does Michael Palmer use? I, I just imagine him with like a little 12-frame hand crank extractor. Well, I think you imagined wrong.

He has—I think he's got Maxton extractors. I know he bought a new one beginning of last year—an additional one. I think he had like a 120 frame extractor, Maxton one. But he is a beekeeper that has grown, and he's added to his his equipment. When I was there, I didn't write all the names down. But and then and they finished—we hadn't actually—they hadn't actually started extracting the optimised there in mid-July when. We're changing queens, because he changes his the same time as we do, uh, as we do here now. But, um, yeah, difficult to know. But he uses this, you know what, like everybody else, he's cobbled together a system that works for him. I know he has a, a flatbed decapper, so it's like a rotary, um, a rotary chain and like a chainmail base, and you basically put your frame on and it's, it's, there's like a scratcher like I used to use and in the workshop. It just scratches the frames both sides and it works. You just put the frames through and they just, they just clean. So, you know, he, he just does it in a way that works for him. He has machines that are, are like reliable. That's what he goes for. He doesn't go for quickness. He's gone for reliability of equipment and he's used it year on year.

Cool. Uh, Desert Fox asked that question, and all I would say is that you, you may be able to ask him for yourself in a couple of weeks because he has agreed to come and do a live stream. I'm just agreeing with him at times. So Richard, if you could put in a good word for us, that'd be much appreciated.

Yeah, cool. Thank you.

Joe said, is beekeeping more popular in France or the UK?

It's a very good question. I think everywhere globally beekeeping has become very popular. A lot of people who've had nothing— I'm not saying nothing to do It doesn't really sound very nice to say that, but a lot of people have become interested in beekeeping because they've had a lot of time on their hands during COVID and the number of new beekeepers has grown enormously. I would be wrong to say it's for the wrong reasons, but I can't help but think there is a bit of that because people don't understand how difficult it is to keep bees. And I know very many people who bought one or two hives and gave up afterwards. Because they didn't perhaps think it out right at first. They wanted to put 2 or 3 hives in their garden, it wasn't the right garden, it wasn't the right place, they knew nothing about bees, they didn't want to join a club, they didn't do all that, and that is the reality of it. But in France there's a lot more space, we have about, well, population-wise it's the same but there's 3 times as much space, so we do have a lot of single, as Mike would say, one onesies and twosies, people with 1 and 2 hives that have these hives and they don't want to manage them because they're saving the planet. And I'm probably going to be scorned on for saving that, but just for saying that, but you're not saving the planet by having 1 or 2 hives. You're giving everyone a headache because you're not looking after your bees properly, you know.

Yeah.

You have to be a responsible beekeeper and you have to take it seriously. And I believe that by having 1 or 2 hives, you're not going break the varroa problem. You're not going to be the next breeder who's gonna— even though everyone seems to think they are, that's the impression I get. Sorry, but it's a big headache, and I support everyone having the right to do that if they just follow the right guidelines and learn what they're doing properly. You have to go to a beekeeping class, you need to be trained in how to manage bees properly.

I would agree.

And I'm a beekeeper, we shouldn't be afraid to say that. We've all become very Worried about saying the wrong thing, but we must say that. We must say that if you're going to keep bees, you've got to be responsible, and you've got to know how to keep bees. You can't just wing it with bees because they will die anyway, you know.

I think I'd 100% support it, and the clue's in the name, isn't it? You're a beekeeper. You've got to keep the bees. Don't let them go into your neighbour's chimney because then you've lost that battle. You've not kept Bees, you've just sent them into someone's chimney and caused a real problem. So exactly.

I mean, I mean, it still does happen with us, but we, you know, but but we just say I was a swarm from nature. You know, of course it wasn't my bees. No, it does happen, and it does create a problem. And yeah, even when people are responsible. But my my my main point was, as long as someone's made the effort and is is conscious to join a club and to register. their hive. We have a lot of people over here that, oh, I've only got a couple of hives, they're not doing any harm. Well, I've got a mating station half a mile away, and you probably are doing harm, do you know what I mean? And I've got colonies that might be getting foulbrood because you might have not seen or know what foulbrood is. I just want people to be aware it's a responsibility.

Yeah, I think that's a fair shout. I'm sorry to everyone if I'm, if I'm missing your questions. Like, we've been on for nearly 2 hours now.

Still more questions coming in.

There is still more questions, so I'm just trying to filter through. So anytime, Richard, once you're finished, like, that's it, we can call it a day. You've been very—

No, we'll carry on for half an hour if you want, it's fine. If you've got time, you know, carry on going.

Got a good few questions. There's just one here that I really want to pick up because I think this is a very important one. So on grafting cells, are they all the same size, or is there a best size of larva to go for?

Okay, Mike Palmer says And I'm quoting him a lot tonight, but he's like a really good person to quote. He says, if you can see them, they're too big. So if you can just see them, they're about right. I've grafted larvae that are much too old and they seem to do okay, but the best larvae are the ones that are just— don't forget, the eggs that aren't hatched aren't fed. So when you look on a frame and you're trying to find out which one to graft, if you see a massive puddle of raw jelly you know that that larvae is actually, even though you can see the size, you know that that larvae is probably too old anyway. What you want is you want the ones where you just see, you'll find the eggs and you'll work out where the queen laid and then, oh look, there's one hatched there, and you'll just, you'll kind of see a swathe where the right larvae are. And when you see that, you'll learn to interpret what is about the right age. That's how to learn. And obviously if you learn then how to Put frames of comb into your colony so that the queen can lay up at the right time. You'll work that out as well, but you have to really see it on a frame first to work it out what's the best time. If you can't get the larvae up because it's too dry, that's for 2 reasons. One, the egg has only just hatched, or 2, the bees aren't being fed that well. And there's sometimes you do have problems grafting because there's not much raw jelly, and sometimes it is a struggle because you might— One thing we're actually very easy to do is neglect your breeder colonies. Something that you take your frame from. As much as you've got to build a cell builder, you've also got to feed and nourish and, and well, and keep your breeder queen well, because you want good eggs that are laid. You don't just want like mediocre eggs, you want them full of royal jelly so it's easier for you to grow. So it's one of the points that we often overlook. So as I said, you won't— my biggest thing was it's not the size of larvae really that is the problem, it's the cell you put them in, that has to be right. I've seen loads of people, loads. I get asked probably 10, 15 times a year, you know, um, what is, you know, what, what's the problem? My cells are failing. Well, I said, well, show me a picture of the cell builder, and they'll lift the frame up and there's like 20 bees on it. I said, well, there's your answer. You might spend hours, and that's probably the time as well you need to just get your grafts in quickly, not hang around, get them done quickly. Don't spend hours doing it. If you can't literally see, don't do it. Do something else. Use a cup lock method or something. Try that. But if you can see it, get your grafts done and get them in a strong builder, and they'll always be accepted. Every time. Every time.

It's interesting about the size of it as well, because when I do it, what people say is they're too small and I can't see them. And I say to them, well, when you actually get used to grafting Like, I don't look. I'll look at the cells and I'll look at the frame and I'll say, right, this is the cell that I'm aiming for. And then I don't even look. Like, you just, you develop a technique, I think, with the Chinese grafting tool.

Yeah, I agree.

You slide it down the bottom, go around the back, you bring it out, you put it into the cell, into your cup, and then—

And sometimes you don't even literally, you don't even see the larvae. You might have seen videos, there's people just on YouTube doing this when they're grafting, and that's like amazing. One of the other methods we can— I can tell you that you can use to help is you can cut the cell open and fold the wax back, so you don't— it doesn't matter, the bees will rebuild it. You can actually, you can ruin some cells to bring a whole line of cells out so they're easier for you to get at with the grafting tool. You don't have to go in to every cell at the right angle, you can just open the cell up before you take the larvae out, it doesn't matter, you know. Some people use a little brush to do that and they open the cell first. There's loads of ways, but you just got to try. The problem is if people don't explain regularly that you've got other options that, you know, like the cup lock method or the Jenter method, all these other different things. I personally don't like those 2. I think they're a waste of time, but some people get on really well with them, you know.

Yeah, I know some big breeders who use that exclusively, kind of like Nikko cages, and they'll put— for me, I just don't like putting a really expensive breeding queen in a cage like that. I'm just always a bit scared of something going wrong or her just I don't know, saying no, not having any of that.

A number of times I've heard people using those systems, the queen lays them up and they'll take the queen out and they'll put the, the plaque back in to be like, for the eggs to hatch, and they come back and the bees have cleaned all the eggs out because the bees don't like the eggs in those cells. The queen was happy to lay away, but bees do strange things, you know, they're reliably unreliable in many cases, you know.

Our next question was, do you have any tips for when you pull a newly mated queen from a mating box and you're introducing a new cell? Saying sometimes they won't accept the new cell. So kind of what's your process about taking out the mated queens and then what do you do next?

Well, the kind of thought of way is that you remove your queen one day and then you introduce a cell the following day. Whether you use a cell protector or not, that's up to you. I personally end up usually screwing up my rotation and end up having to go and cut out queen cells, but then if you do that 6 or 7 days or 5 days later, you guarantee that— virtually guarantee the new cell will be accepted. There's just so many methods, but you've got to try what works with your bees. But the ideal thing would be 24 hours after you put a cell in, a ripe cell that's about to hatch. And then she'll be accepted, no problem.

It's interesting, this, because it completely depends on your system. If you're the kind of person that needs to just be doing queen after queen after queen, then you need to take that queen out on the one day and put the cell in either on that day or the day after because of your time scale. For me, boxes get so congested, so I would just take the queen out, do whatever you need to, let them build the cells, knock back all of the cells, and then you're setting that colony back a little bit. so they're not going to get too big, so you're reducing the chance of absconding, and then you're increasing the chance of when you put that cell in, they're more likely to accept it because they're back to being hopelessly queenless again.

I agree, you're back to that hopelessly queenless, you know, thing. They're begging for a queen and they'll take anything after a few days. It's not the best thing in terms of production cycle, it does— you do lose a few days, but if you haven't got many queens but you want to be sure that the ones you've got are going to are going to work, make it hopelessly queenless. I've heard stories of— I know Peter Little told me once that he would have a pushing cage and they had some really nasty bees and he'd put the queen under there and he'd take it off and if they didn't like her he'd find another frame of brood and put her underneath for another week and if he took it off again— and he's done that 3 or 4 times where he's had a colony that was going to kill a load of bees and he used a pushing cage 3 or 4 times, you know, it's all about experience. It's always about, well, I know I'm putting the colony back because 4 weeks without any brood is a nightmare, but if you've got a big colony that you're just making a nuc with to go over winter and she's got plenty of time to build it, it doesn't matter as long as she's accepted. You've got to look at each need. Why are you putting that queen in there? For what reason are you putting a queen in there in the spring? Because you wanted to get a honey crop. Okay, you want it to grow, you want it to lay. You've got to be a little bit different with your approach. But if you're going into the winter and you have got plenty of time because it's still midsummer, but, you know, things are finishing off, if you need to cage her for 2 or 3 times, you can do that. You know, you just don't want to see her get killed, you know, because it's an— because what do you do at the end of the summer when you've made all your nucs and that colony rejects that queen? You've got to basically give those bees to another colony, haven't you? That's all you can do because you've got no more queens. It's one of those, uh, it's experience that tells you how to deal with that. But it's funny, as you go into the autumn, your options get less and less and less. You end up then, yeah, then by the time you get to like November, it's like, oh, just hedge, you know what I mean? Well, we don't do that, but you, you kind of say that, you know, you, your professionality becomes a little bit in tatters because you have less options, you know, as the as the season progresses. Um, and then you just— there's this cutoff point where you go, there's nothing I can do now. It's, you know, you have to be brutal. There's people I know that try anything to get a queen accepted, and if they've got time, fair enough. But when you're professional and you're trying to get 100 nucs with queens in, you're gonna have losses. It's just percentages, it's just numbers, you know.

It's— it is a good point, that, as well. But— and I've mentioned this on a recent video about chasing losses, in that People will kind of— they'll see this one queen, this virgin, they'll want to get it mated, and they'll put everything in and they'll try and get it mated numerous times. But what they don't take into account is that if you, if you lose that virgin and she doesn't get mated, and then you've got a colony that you know has got a non-mated queen running around and you can't find her, then you end up spending like 40 minutes trying to find her because you can't do anything with that colony with the queen in it. You're much better off after 4 weeks if she's not mated and you see her, she gets Like your method, like you say, she gets the hive tool test and you just start again because you know where you stand then. Yeah, it's a lot more effective and efficient in the long run, isn't it?

It is, it is. You can waste so much time. It's a bit like catching swarms in your apiary, and I know people, other people disagree mostly. I'm not being defamatory, but if you're an amateur and you've got time to waste 2 hours climbing up a ladder, shaking a swarm in a box, and it's only a small swarm, probably with a virgin in that's not mated or probably 2 or 3 virgins, good luck to you. But when I'm in my apiary and I see a small swarm that's way up in the trees, I don't even give it a second look. I just go, great, you know, and then you move on because, you know, if you're in the spring, you've got to check all the colonies anyway. It's quite likely you'll find a queen cell that's about to hatch out, so you have options. Okay.

Sorry, sorry, just on that, I speak regularly to a bee farmer in Herefordshire, and he says that of go— if you go through the orchards in Herefordshire in, in March— sorry, in May, um, he says like probably half of his colonies have swarmed and they're all just hanging in the trees and he just does nothing with them. He's just like, yeah, they'll just— some of them will go back to the hive, some of them will kind of just go and find a tree to live in. He said, I've, I've got my honey already and I got paid for the pollination, so they've just gone out. And whether that's, whether that's the right thing to do or not, but yeah, the attitude to swarms does—

Yeah. I think, I mean, that there is one train of thought that if you never collected a swarm, you would get rid of all your non-swarmy genetics— sorry, of all your swarmy genetics. But the problem is, it's not your genetics that are in the trees from your boxes, it's all the other stuff that is flying around that have caused those genetics to be like that. So, you know, you can look at it both ways. What I do is I have a nuc or 2 in my box, in my in my truck permanently from about mid-March— sorry, the end of March. Last year it was, I think, the first week of April I had a swarm, which was great. But I keep a nuc box in the truck then, and if it's gettable and I can do it quickly, first thing I do is grab the box because I'm going to be in the apiary for 20 minutes, half an hour at least, shake it in and see what happens. And often I'll just literally move it as I'm about to the lead and take potluck. That's the kind of thing. It's like, it's another way of building comb. It's another way of giving a, you know, a queen— they might abscond, they might not. You just can't afford to waste too much time.

Right.

Because if you actually worked it out, if you wasted 2 hours, that's probably another apiary you didn't get to that day because 2 hours wasn't enough to quite do it. But you would have got there and done some of it. Or, oh, I've got to pick up the kids at 4 o'clock and now it's past 2, up past 12, and now, oh, where's the time gone? And before you know it, you haven't got to that next drapery, and that next drapery swarmed the next day because you didn't get to it in time. That's how it is in beekeeping. You have to be brutal in the spring. There's no ifs and buts.

So the next question feeds on very nicely from that, which is, what is your favourite method in the spring to mitigate and reduce swarming?

Well, we've already talked about queen replacement as often as possible. My main method is just regular checks. If I find a queen that has made cells that are still open, I will try and knock them down. If the cells are capped and she hasn't gone, she goes in a nuc, and I— or I move the colony away and artificially swarm it. There's nothing else you can do, because if she's making cells and they're more— and they're basically capped over, she's gonna go. I'm convinced now, through all the averages I've worked out and looking at numbers, that if you don't do anything with a queen that is still in the colony, she is going to go anyway. She'll just wait a few days and she'll be gone. She'll just go, you know, and sometimes she'll go with hardly any bees, but she'll go. You know, when you get to that point, the colony is ramped up for swarming. It's got— it's full, there's no space, so you're better off just cutting your losses at least you can— even if you kill the queen, at least you keep your bees, and your bees are what you need to bring in the honey.

Um, right, a couple of questions. I'll clump these 2 together as well. So Ben has asked, um, what kind of bees do you use, Buckfast, etc.? And then Azadullah has asked, how many types of queens have you tried, for example Carniolans, Italians, Russians, etc.? Which is— which do you find is the best?

Well, I stick to mainly Buckfast because I find they work really well. I'd like to try some Ligustica. I've heard from other people they're really good in our area. I've had some Carniolans, but they didn't do very well, perhaps because I don't know how to manage them properly. They're very, very good early builders. The problem we're having here is our springs seem to get earlier and earlier, and I was talking about swarming before and things going no matter what you do. We're just finding that that brood nest gets clogged up before. Well, I think it's because like the rapeseed oil never used to flower years ago until like the end of April, May. This now, it starts towards the end of March, and, and it's always a battle to know whether you've got the right kind of bees to forage, whether you've got a good amount of bees to move that— receiver bees to move that honey out the brood nest. We think that's probably why we're getting a lot of swarmings, because there's Too much nectar suddenly comes online from nothing. Terrible weather, it goes really good really quick, and suddenly the nectar pours in, and we're wondering. So maybe it's a question of trying different races of bees to find something that's maybe more adaptable. But I like the Buckfast because it's a well, well-bred and well kind of known bee in this area. But obviously the hybrids aren't that good. I I work with black bees from the local black. Local Apis mellifera mellifera, and I had lots of colonies with that, but I ended up getting stung a lot, and they were the most miserable, runny bees to work with. And no matter what I did, I couldn't get nice bees using those. You'd find one or two colonies that were well behaved. I'm not saying you don't get that, but when you use Buckfast after using black bees for years, it's like a revelation. It's like the sun comes up, the sun comes out, the rain, all the clouds go away, the birds start to sing, and you can enjoy your beekeeping. And to me, that is worth its weight in gold because I still wear a suit, I'm not stupid, I still get the odd sting, but nothing like I used to. I've gone into apiaries before, I told you the story the other night, Laurence, where I was in my— I had to literally leave the apiary once. I had bees that got in my suit, they were so defensive. And I'm not saying aggressive, they were just really defensive because I've been fair to the bees. It was probably something I did, it was probably windy, the weather. But I had one went down my ear hole, I couldn't get it out. I had to— I, I was— it literally, it got me into a panic that I've never experienced before. And from that day on, I just said, I either give up beekeeping or I'll find different bees because I, I, I don't want to work like that. It's, it's not— beekeeping should be fun. You know, there comes that cutoff point, you know, and also as soon as I start changing my bees, I got a lot more honey, you know. There's— you have to work harder, you have to manage Buckfast really well because they really explode, they fill colonies really well, it's a lot of work to manage them, and there may be others I should be trying that might perform better under our conditions. So yes, that's definitely a good idea. Something like— it's like we talked about before about trying different methods that, you know, like clipping wings, that may help me as well. They're all things we've got to try, but you, you're afraid to try new things sometimes because you know what the average is and you know what you're good at. So it's very difficult when you're under pressure in the spring. And don't forget, you've only got 5 months of the year that's going to bring all your honey in, so you're very reluctant to make anything drastic changes. Maybe just try an apiary do with it. Maybe buy 20 queens of, uh, lagustica or something else for next autumn, for next year, you know. It's a good question, and I think I should try it, but I don't know.

Do you know what? I feel very lucky in this regard because beekeeping is not my job, like, it's not my main income, so I can just, like, try different things and take a gamble and use different bits of equipment like this. Like this checkerboarding that I'm doing. Like, come on, is it going to work doing checkerboarding? The guy says you do this manipulation, it's done, took me 10 minutes, and he says you don't need to inspect that colony now for the rest of the year and they won't swarm. What are the chances of it working? I don't know, but we'll have a little bit of fun with it. But if that was my livelihood, there's no way I'd be doing that.

That's, that's what you have to weigh up. Exactly, it's exactly what you've got to weigh up. Um, when you've got a proven method and that is kind of not perfect, but it works. You have to be very careful. It's like me caging queens last summer. I knew it was a risk, but I, I knew that at that time there's probably not much major damage I could do because I'd seen other people do similar and thought, well, I'll do that but a different way because I think this way. And it seems to have paid off at the moment, but I can't say for sure, you know. It's, um, It's it's really difficult to know, and you and you have to be very careful because, like you say, okay, it's you've got another income. For me, I haven't now. I've got to be really careful with my income. I mean, like really careful. You know, you've got a budget. You've got a I've got kids to feed. I've got you know bills are endless. We don't need to go into that, but it's a risk. I do like Buckfast. There's no question in my mind. they are an ideal bee for here if you can keep them in the boxes. But it's that issue as well, you know, they can swarm. The weather is very variable here. In a good year, they can produce really well. You need prolific queens if you want to have honey crops. It's as simple as that, you know. And when you know a prolific queen, if you really— you've got to do something really— if you do something crazy, you might just not get that honey crop in, you know.

Yeah. Next question, and you've touched on it a little bit already, but How do you see climate change, or have seen climate change, impacting your beekeeping operations?

Okay, well, for me, the biggest thing here is I talked before about it, about the springs being a bit what seemed to be— everything flowers a little bit earlier, but more intense earlier. What I think used to happen before was we'd have some flowers that come out, so the bees would have some food, but it wasn't like a massive amount. What we're getting now is we're going from virtually zero to everything in flower within like a week, or we'll have terrible weather during the period where there would have been a slight slow, you know, nice slow build-up so the bees get used to it and more brood hatches out, then you're going to peak a few weeks later and usually get enough bees at the right time to bring in a spring honey crop. But what's happening now is that the spring is coming earlier and earlier, yet the bees aren't out the winter enough, they're not developed enough. If you've got monster colonies, great, and yes, we always go on about nice overwinter colonies that are nice and big and they can cope with that, but then you've got a load of work to do because you've got to manage that colony so that it's ready to stick that honey above, you know, you've got to give it space in the brood nest and because there's so much coming in and you've also got to put on supers, you know. I know beekeepers in some parts of France in the spring, it's so intense now, they're making a split before the main Flow starts, or they're taking out 3 or 4 frames of honey and putting 2 supers on just to give them that chance to have room. Um, that's what I think is happening. What the other thing I will say is our winters definitely seem to be milder and less sunny, so we're getting wetter and more humid, continuous humid weather. Where when I first started landscape gardening, I know I was out there every Bloody winter. Excuse my French, but and I was in the last three or four years when I was finishing doing it, I absolutely detested it more so because it rained the whole time. Probably a bit like living in Wales, Lawrence. You know what I mean?

Every day. It's funny. I asked this question the other day, and it's in the summer. Like I'm sitting there in the office, bloody looking out thinking, "I wish I was out there beekeeping now." And I sit there in January when it's Pouring down outside, so smart. Little laptop with a cup of tea thinking, yeah, I quite like my job in the winter.

I know, I know, I have to agree with you. And that— but that's the time we should be doing that. But the problem is, what, what, what I'm getting at in, in my kind of story is the fact that it seems to be less clear weather, more overcast, more drizzly, more damp, because we're— we seem to get more— I mean, you've seen it, we seem to have continuous southwesterlies, one storm after the other, after the other. When I was a kid, we always had like a week of it. Then we'd have like a whole blast of cold from Russia. We had like we'd have periods of dry, crisp weather. So even though the bees are clustered, they're they're like in a cold cluster. They're well hunkered down, and the air around them is dry. What I'm trying to say is they they don't seem to be to be hibernating like they or winterizing sorry clustering in a way that they used to because they're always working. They're never really. They're like, shall we fly? Shalln't we? Will the fly a bit and come back in and bring in like you know three grains of pollen, and it'll give something someone on YouTube a bit of a thrill. Do you know what I mean? Because everyone likes to post. I've got pollen coming on Boxing Day. You know, keeps me happy. Keeps you happy. But it's not good. Our bees should be. What I like about watching in Stepler is the bees are shut down. They don't do anything. You know, people in Canada, people in cold climates as well. They have a winter. Mike Palmer again. He has a winter where it's cold and dry, and his bees seem to do really well. Ours just absolutely hate this damp, drizzly weather. And if someone would ask me if it's climate change, I don't know, but we just seem to be having a lot milder winters with more rain and more humidity, and I don't think the bees like it.

No, and what I would say is that I seem to remember someone saying this to me ages ago, you think climate change and like global warming me, you think, well, okay, everything's getting warmer, so it's going to be sunnier. And then someone said, no, it doesn't work like that, because the warmer that it is, the more moisture the air can hold, and then that moisture has to come down. So basically it just rains loads more. And then you think, yeah, that's what's happening, isn't it? It's just, it's just a lot more rainy, which is rubbish.

They say it's kind of more intense, where it'll be hotter for a shorter period but more intense, and then wetter for perhaps a longer period But not quite as cold, and then maybe maybe colder. We might get cold soon, but it'll be colder than usual. I don't know. It apparently is changing the weather patterns. So I think I'm not saying the jury's out because there's there's really good evidence that things are happening. But on terms of my bees, it's that's what it seems to be doing here.

Have any impacts on?

I wish I was wrong, but do you have any issues with flooding?

Because obviously had bad bad floods in France. Last year, didn't you? Is anything close to you?

Yeah, we're lucky here because where I am, we're fairly shallow soil, and even though places the apiaries get saturated, there's probably most of the apiaries I can't get in in the winter anyway, but that's normal because I'm quite happy about that for security as well. I don't have a Unimog, I don't have a tractor, I don't— I just have my truck that's got twin wheels at the back, and if I go in and I get stuck, it's my own fault. I know when I can get in, when I can't. And if I have to walk 50 meters to the apiary, it's not really a problem because by May, you know, you can get in. Um, but we're lucky here, we're fairly, we're fairly hilly. In other words, we've not got a lot of terrain high, but it drains well, you know. So most places, that's why you choose your apiaries really carefully. You, when you choose an apiary now, you've got to consider everything, and you consider winter access. Okay, between November In March, not really a problem if it gets sodden because that protects your bees as well. You don't have to be in there, and you know no one else can be in there, um, unless they want to walk them out. But if they want to lift my heavy hives, well, good for you because they're heavy. I don't even like lifting them. But no, it's not a really good attitude to have. But what I'm saying is it's pretty difficult to get them out there in the winter, so you're kind of okay. But as long as you can get in there in the summer— as I said before, we have this thing over here where, as much as it's like the flowers it goes from absolutely sodden to bone dry very quickly. So one minute you can't get any, the next minute you can do figure of eights and, you know, wherever you want, and you'll never get stuck, you know. But it's just knowing when.

It's strange in Wales. So like in 2018, we had a massive drought in the UK, and you see it across the world, there's drought and it doesn't rain, and everyone's like, well, all of the plants have stopped yielding and the bees don't get anything. You don't get that in Wales. When it doesn't rain in Wales, it doesn't matter. And in 2018, I think it rained twice and people had 8 or 9 stacks of supers on. Really? Just big trees. The water level's so high anyway.

Yeah, the water table deep down. Yeah, well, we, we've had similar, but I mean, last year we just seemed to have— I'm not going into the dissection, but we just had that continuous grey. And then when it cleared is when you had your flow for 2 weeks. So for you guys, I know, I know Griff, I'm not going to try and pronounce his surname because I keep getting it wrong, you know, Griff, for his honey production, he had the same, he had a really good flow like you did. I think you had a good one as well. So yeah, other people further north didn't have it so well, you know, it's very variable last year. In France, it was the worst beekeeping year in 32 years, they say.

But I spoke to a lot of beekeepers around here, a lot of who go to the heather as well, and it was the best heather year that I've ever had. And they said that people who've kept for 30 years, they said it was the best heather year they've had in the last 30 years. They said it was absolutely perfect. And you've got the pouring down rain when you had all of the small shoots, which meant it grew and you got this rapid growth, and then it dried off, and then you've got this dry, really hot spell for like 2 weeks. And we, we averaged like £60 just on the heather on the colonies.

Really?

Yeah. And I know, I know had a good year as well, but it was, it was a very, very good heather year. Spring was a right off, um, but yeah, right, next question.

Spring was kind of okay for us, you know, we didn't— it wasn't brilliant, it wasn't bad. We had spring honey, I've still got some in stock now, you know, so it's, it's so variable, you know.

Yeah, uh, next question, and you can come at this, you can answer the question and then come up with an alternative solution, I think. But, um, he's saying, can you grow Graft two cells and just use a mini mating nuc with a cup of bees.

It's an interesting scenario. What I've done before is if I've had a small colony that hasn't accepted the queen and I've been grafting, I've actually put a started cell into that colony and they've drawn it out and just used it. And before you know it, you get a lovely mated queen, but with the genetics you. One. But as beekeeping goes, standard practice doesn't allow that because there's too many variables. And I think you will— if you— the problem is what a lot of guys don't know is, and girls don't know, is if you've got one strong colony in the apiary that's got a really strong pheromone of a queen, you put another box next to it with a failing colony, most of the bees come out that box and go in the other one. You end up with different colonies with different amount of bees because they're not going to stay in just for one larva. If there was no other bees around and it's the only option they had and they were kind of, and there was some brood. Okay, if you have some brood in that colony but closed brood, they might stay. But if you just put a cup in my experience, if you just put a cup of bees in without an actual queen or a queen cell, if you just put a larvae, I think it's something that doesn't work. But saying that, there's people that there's people that do. Introduce 3-day-old cells into nucs, but they're nucs that have already had the queen taken out of, so they have nurse bees in that are hatching and they've got brood, like I just said. So to try it with a cup of bees, I think it's a non-starter, but you could try, it might work.

It's opening a can of worms because I would say you've got to— where are you going to get your cup of bees? Is it from the same apiary? And then if you're putting the 2 grafts in, the next thing you need to do is feed. So then you've got this little Tiny mini nuc with no bees, cup of bees from in the apiary and sugar syrup. I just reckon it's going to get robbed out within a matter of hours.

Well, probably you'd have to you'd have to do it at a time when there was no robbing going on and feed it well and feed everything else in the apiary so it wasn't in need for food. I think it's too much of a risky option to even waste your time doing it. I know there's people that think up these ideas because they think, well, how can I make bees from bees? What's the quickest way? And there is proven methods. of doing it, but you have to be absolutely clinical in the way you do it. You've got to stop your robbing. You're right, absolutely right about the robbing, Lawrence. I didn't even think of that. But in that respect, I mentioned about the strong pheromone. I took nucs once, right? I took 15 nucs, I think it was, I made one day to an apiary, and I got them there and it was really hot, and I thought, oh, I really need to open these boxes now. And it was like the sun was still out and it wasn't It wasn't that, um, it wasn't that cool, so I couldn't risk leaving those boxes closed, you know. I kind of got it wrong a bit, but so I opened the boxes and all the bees poured out the front of the nucs like they were swarming. And I came back, I thought, well, there's nothing I can— I came back the next day and the one hive that was there was like a cell builder. All the bees had gone to that hive because, um, I should have just taken it and closed it and opened them at night, or left them in a cool spot and then opened it in the night, and then they probably would have stayed. What I did then, I was— I then shook frames of bees from that colony into each nuc, and they kind of made it okay. They did all right. But as I say, there's methods of doing things, and that's not— I've never seen that actual method. I've seen 3-day-old cells taken from this in the same apiary straight into a nuc that's ready to receive that cell, because there's even more chance they'll accept it because they've got brood and it's a colony already, and the bees know where that box is. If you take a cup of bees from, like you say, from another colony, a lot of them are going to fly unless you shake out nurse bees and just use just nurse bees. A lot of those bees are going to fly back to where they came from. It's tricky, you know, you've got to think of everything like that.

This next question kind of follows on a bit from that, so saying, how do you stop your bees absconding from newly made up mating boxes, either Mini Plus or Apidea or any other ones?

Well, the easiest way is to never open them until late evening, so they'll be there overnight. And the other way is just to not— is to have a lot of nurse bees and not many foragers, because you're giving— nurse bees are capable of getting feed from a feeder. They won't need to go and forage because there's plenty of food in the frames and there's pollen in the frames. So if you use a lot higher percentages of nurse bees, you won't lose so many foragers. But the easiest way is just to move them more than, say, 2 kilometers away, then they won't abscond.

Do you ever move— you ever use pheromone strips at the beginning of the year, or not for you?

To attract swarms?

No, just— I've seen some people with the mini mating hives and they make them up first time of the year, they'll cut a little bit of a pheromone strip, pin it on the frame And then until the first queen has gone out and got mated, and then they'll take it off just to stop them absconding.

No, I've never seen a need to do that myself because I, I kind of make sure that I always create a nuc with some brood in it, and I leave them closed for usually 12 to 24 hours in a cool place, and that's usually enough. It does the job because you come back to it and you just see frames. The minute you lift that plastic and you see a nice load of bees, you're like, yeah, that's great. great. And, and there's very rarely one, um, that they abscond in. I, I just think you have to watch the weather. If it's really hot, that's, that's, that's your, your downfall. That's your— the Sword of Damocles. If the weather goes stinking hot and you've just made those nucs up, oh my God, it's a nightmare. So, you know, then you like— queens go and they get— oh, they're just not happy bees. You just want to obviously manage the stress levels of the bees, you know.

I think the key point you said there is that you put capped brood in there as well. So capped brood is a perfect attractant.

There is a brood pheromone, everyone knows it. Once you've got brood pheromone in the colony, it does a lot to stabilize the colony because without brood pheromone, they think they're queenless and then they'll try and make a cell and blah blah blah, you know, they'll do anything they can to make sure that colony survives. So, you know, then, or they'll start laying workers, you know. Which is another can of worms.

Oh yeah, next question is from Matthew, and Matthew, you did send this in. I don't know why I've not got this on my list, so apologies for that. Uh, he's saying, where do you buy your breeder queens, and why is it better to do this than using the best queens from your own stock? Why does it matter if she's an F0 or an F10?

It's a very good question, and it's quite long-winded, the explanation. But if you imagine you have a breeder that breeds his queens in one area and he controls the mating. Okay, that breeder knows what— well, not exactly, but he knows virtually what drones are mated with his queen. So he knows the result he's going to get, and she might be different to what you think she's going to be like, but generally that queen, the daughter that he raised, has got really good genetics in it. If I select my colonies in my apiary, I'm going to get 50% of the genetics from that mother queen I bred from. But because I— she's already got 50% of other genes in from what's flying around, and then I cross her again, technically everything I make is an F2, F3, F4. Technically, you have no control of what is— what genetics come out of that second cross. So if you start off with an F1 or an F0, sorry, all the daughters you make the first time around are all going to be F1s. So you, you're already guaranteeing 50% of her traits are going to be transferred to that new daughter. Don't forget, it's not one queen that's— sorry, not one drone that's mating with your F1. It's 15, 20, maybe, maybe 13, maybe 12. We don't know exactly everything's different, but it's a multitude of genetics that she is getting. It's like we say, head in a salmon tin job, you know, you just don't know what's gone on when she's up there. I don't think she knows either, you know, and then that's the problem you have with bees. If you actually read genetic books and you can kind of fathom it out and follow it through a bit, it's massively complicated. I'm not joking, spend some time looking and you will then understand how from one F1 it becomes so mixed, the genetics, which is why we're talking about before, I don't think that inbreeding is really ever a problem where we are because there's so much variable genetics. But try— but the whole point is you are buying a breeder queen from a breeder who spent his whole lifetime controlling those genetics, so that F1 you're buying is really, really good. And you're, you are basically like around the back door. You don't have to spend time killing queens and crushing and trying to make— you're just getting something in your apiary that's, that's as good as you could ever make in all your lifetime. So it's, it's a no-brainer to buy, uh, to buy one or two breeder queens because you're starting, you're getting that head start, and you're going to have good results.

Yeah, I would just add to that in terms of like the difference. If you've got a really good queen in colony, then yeah, you can breed from her and you'll probably get good results. But that may be the best 1 out of 10, where—

Absolutely.

I have 4,000 colonies and they've got the best 1 out of 4,000, and then they've crossed that back to the, say, second best drone line. So you're getting this, this multiplication effect of like the 2 best, as opposed to 1 out of 10 with some random drone that you don't know about.

Yeah, the other thing is— sorry to interrupt— When you're selecting from your best one in your apiary, that already is a mix of drones that just by happens that some of the traits have come out. You don't think for one second that you are going to get a repeat of that daughter. You might get better, there's no doubt you might, but it's pretty unlikely.

Right.

What I'm trying to explain is, like you say, the multiplications are gigantic when you consider What is out there and what different drones are out there flying around?

And then the follow-up to that is, so where do you buy your breeder queens? Don't you don't feel?

Well, I mean, I don't. I I buy some from Dr. Peter Stoffen in Germany. I buy them from Marken from Buckfast, Holland. Where else have I bought them from? I generally stick to those two because they produce really good breeder queens. But I also get some from Tenuta in Italy. They produce really good queens. They also do breeder queens as well. I think you just have to try it, but I always buy bees from the same geographical line so that they are of the same— what's the climate zone? That's the word I'm looking for. Because if you're buying in— my opinion is if you're buying in bees that are used to operating in a hotter or a colder climate and you try and work them in this climate, You're going to have problems because they're not used to that environment. You want your bees to be as much adapted to that environment you bring them into as you can. That's one of the ways to help you. Remember, you're working with the bees the whole time. You've got to remember that. You've got to work with the bees.

Yeah, so I've just had a lot of comments about my Ravenna bottle, so it's not completely neat, but it is quite strong.

It was red wine in there and you were just trying to be— look as though you're not drinking.

Teetotal. Um, I think, Richard, I think we're gonna, we're gonna draw it to a close because I've—

Yeah, yeah, I think it's a good time because we're what, 2 hours 30 now?

So, um, but I just wanted to say, like, it's been so good having you on here. I really appreciate you coming on and kind of giving us your, your wealth of experience. You've answered so many questions and I, I know everyone's really enjoyed it. So thanks for, thanks for stopping by, and you're always welcome back. Obviously, everyone go over to Richard's channel and subscribe because I'm sure you're all subscribed already.

Um, well, thanks very much. It's a pleasure. I mean, I'm— I'll just reiterate, I don't know all the answers. I just try and share what I, I've learned, and I change my modus operandi often. I do different things, but I, I like, for instance, queen introduction. I still haven't found one thing that's the best thing. I wish I had because it would save me a lot of work, but it works okay. And some years we do good, some years we don't do so good like last year. But you just have to be— remember to be open-minded with beekeeping. And there's so many people doing different things. You might look at someone and say, what a clown, what is he doing? And I think that regularly, but I never say it. I just go, if you want to try that, try it, you know, let me know what happens. I'll be interested to know, you know, because I've done a lot of stupid things myself. I've done loads of stupid things, and I've had some stupid results, um, but I think it's, it's the learning curve, you know. It's all, it's all you can do is just keep pushing, keep trying, keep planning, keep your planning going. Be realistic in your approach. Don't say, I'm definitely gonna— I've got 40 colonies, I'm gonna definitely end up with 150 at the end of the year, because that just doesn't work. If you want to have no honey for a year and you can split all your nucs 3 times that's possible, but you need to buy in queens and you have a year out where you just make colonies. That's possible, but you have to invest resources. Be realistic.

Definitely right. We'll call it a day there. That was— I enjoyed that very much, Richard.

Thank you very much, everybody. And, you know, it's good to reach out to everybody. We're all kind of in the same boat. We're all doing it. It's just to say that, you know, no matter who you are, where you are, what you're doing, beekeeping is the buzz. We all know, we all have got our ideas about the best way. It's all just important we share that energy and keep that, you know, that thing going, you know, um, and just try and raise some good queens.

It's possible. My final thing to say is, uh, you're— you need to get some t-shirts made for your channel. And you know what it needs to say on them? It's all in the jelly.

I know, I think you're right. That's one of the motives we had, you know.

It's all in the jelly, definitely.

Well, if you end up with good jelly in the cells, you're halfway to making good queens, you know. So it's a good thing to start, maybe. Yeah. Okay, thanks, Lawrence. It's been a pleasure. And thanks everyone who's tuned in. It's great to meet all you people out there. I hope we've answered some of your questions, and maybe we'll see you next time.

Good stuff. All right, cheers, Richard, and thanks everyone for dialing in. See you next time. See ya.

Okay, bye-bye for now. Good, good luck everybody for this year. Have a good season. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.