Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 58

Welcome everyone to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. So every other Saturday at 10:20 and then every other Friday at 7:30 in the evening, I have a morning one and we have an evening one. And I've realized that I have not answered a lot of the questions that are on the website where people are asking questions on there, so I'm going to fire through as many of those as I can at the beginning. Uh, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste them in here as comments And then hopefully that pastes it, and then hopefully I can show it there. So there we go. First question comes from somebody who I have not got the name of here. Brilliant start. Let's let's actually start again and go from the top. Sorry about that. Right, here we go. I'm at the top now. So this is the first question that's come in, and it's split over two. So he says, "Hi Lawrence." It's from John, by the way. He says, "Hi Lawrence. I was hoping to get your advice once again. I received the queen I ordered from you today, Friday, and she arrived safe and sound. Thank you. The issue is I introduced." into a 3-frame split, 2 brood frames and 1 food frame. However, after a second inspection of another hive, I still couldn't find a queen. I shook all of the bees into the brood box and went through each frame. There was no signs of any queen cells or any brood apart from a few drones, so I'm certainly fairly certain that this hive is hopelessly queenless. I'm now considering moving the Black Mountain Honey Queen into the 6-frame hopelessly queenless hive. Do you think if I placed a sheet of newspaper over the brood box of the queenless hive and put the split frames on top, this would work as a way to introduce them? Thank you for your help. So I always get a little bit concerned when I see messages like that because I get people who say the hive is hopelessly queenless. I've gone inside, there's no queen, there's no eggs, there's no brood, so they're hopelessly queenless. And I would say 99% of the time that's not the case. They probably have a queen, a failing queen in there, or a virgin, and she's not laying eggs. So whilst the hive doesn't have any brood, it doesn't mean that it's queenless. So any method that you use to try and kind of combine those 2 together If there is a queen in there, it will fail. I potentially would shake the bees through a box, uh, one of those queen excluder boxes, and identify if there was a queen in there, or add a frame of eggs in from another hive, and if they draw out emergency cells, then you can knock them back and you know that there is definitely not a queen in there. I would do one of those ways to determine if the queen is in there first before doing any sort of additional introduction. Uh, right, where's the next question on here? It's, uh, I always have this with something new. It's just going down miles. What's going on here? Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna pause the online ones. I'm gonna answer the ones in the chat because I've not worked out how to properly do that. So let's jump in. Michael Gill says, hi Lawrence, is there anything I can do to encourage them to use the super as they are storing all the honey in the brood box? So I've had this message probably 20 times already this week, and I completely understand it because I was the same. You get a nuc, you put a nuc, a kind of, or a colony of bees in a beehive, and then you think, oh, this is all good. And then nothing happens. And like one week later, nothing's happened. And 2 weeks later, they've maybe drawn out half a frame. You're thinking, what's going on here? They're just not doing anything. And then third week, you're thinking, they're kind of getting a little bit bigger. And then fourth week, bang, it's just all of that brood has emerged and the colony takes off. So it's like, it's like looking at the pot, the kettle that never boils. Never boils when you're looking at it, but it does take a little bit of time and you come back and it's boiled. And that is what will happen with your bees. You'll come back and you'll be like, wow, they have just drawn out a super in 2 or 3 days. So you just to be patient is, is my answer to that one. They will draw it out. There's nothing you can do to encourage them. So long as they've got sufficient stores coming in, they will eventually get around to drawing out that box. Sophie says, hello, if you demerit in May, how do you manage the colony through the June gap? Do you ever need to take the supers off and feed? So I only ever demerit really, really nice strong colonies, colonies that I think should be able to provide themselves with sufficient food to get through the June gap. So my prerequisite for a demerit is brood box full to the brim with brood Queen excluder, 2 supers full to the brim with bees. They have to be full of bees, but probably going to have like quite a decent amount of honey in there at that time. And then you do the demerare, and the idea is they continue building up the honey in the supers, but also they're going to build some honey upstairs as well. That should be more than enough to see you through the June gap, and I wouldn't do anything unless needed. No Life Beekeeper James Null says hello from Michigan, USA. Hello to you too. Robert Bones, channel member, says morning all. Thank you, Lawrence, for your good advice on the WhatsApp chat this morning. Really loving the chat and seeing everyone else's questions and answers. Great way to learn for us new beekeepers. Oh, well, thank you, Robert. That's very kind of you. Good system that you've got going on there. If anyone is interested in becoming a WhatsApp member or a premium member, they're the level above the exclusive VIP mentoring. So the VIP mentoring, we provide lots of different videos, exclusive videos for everyone to see who's signed up as channel members either on YouTube or Facebook. And we give you advice throughout the season. And then if you want to comment on any video, I'll get back to your comments. There's 2 tiers above that though. If you want like a little bit more advice, there is a premium membership option, which means that you get access to the WhatsApp premium membership group. So all of the premium members are in there and I'm in there and you can ask me or ask other people questions and benefit from their answers. And if you want kind of like full-on one-to-one bespoke advice, we also have a WhatsApp membership. Got a few members on there as well now. And then we can just kind of chat one-to-one and I'll give you as much advice as you need. That— there is the link there for the VIP mentoring program. Right, let me jump down to some of the other questions that are coming through. I know I put a lot on there. Hi Lawrence, I've purchased one of your Buckfast queens. She is due this week. I'm going to requeen an AMM colony and have purchased the Abello frame cage. What type of frame do I use? Emerging brood? Uh, yeah, so you want as close to emerging as you can possibly get. So you kind of want to see the bees like coming out, and then what that means is that there'll be sufficient bees that can come out quite quickly in order to tend to the queen. What you can't do though, you can't just take a frame of empty emerging brood and try and put the queen on it, because what will happen is the queen will come out and she will really, really struggle to kind of get going. So what I like to do is I take a frame of bees out and I give them a little bit of a shake and all of the older bees come off. And if you do this on a frame of emerging brood, you'll see you shake the bees, loads of bees come off, and then all the ones that are left are the super, super young bees, bees that are only like 24 hours old. And then I would just put that into the cage, leave it 24 hours, and then introduce the queen. And what that means is you've got lots of young nurse bees that are available to tend to the queen whilst you're going through that introduction process. Uh, right, let's have a look again. I put loads and loads of comments in there, we won't do that again. Uh, Cosmic Beekeeping on Twitter says hi, Lawrence. Hello to you too. Denny Rays Bees says good morning, Lawrence, from Ohio, USA. Good morning to you too, Denny Rays Bees. Uh, Stealth channel member says morning, did inspection last week, one full super on each hive, 4 and full of bees, added second super, looking forward to today's inspection. Oh, it is the best spring ever, isn't it? I feel so spoiled that we've had this spring. And you know, people who are starting beekeeping for the first time this year, maybe you've got a nuc a couple of weeks ago and like you're seeing it grow and you're seeing all the honey coming in, it is not normally as good as this. Normally rains quite a lot more and things are a little bit slower. And I just kind of track back to this time last year when we were getting stuck in fields and telling people not to transfer nucs for 3 weeks and feeding them in the nucs. And it's mad how it's changed so much in a single year. Good evening, Lawrence. Must be very, very late there. Good evening to you too, slash good morning. Hey Lawrence, how do you deal with stored frames that have mold on them? Will the bees just clear them out, or should we not use them? So my, my rule that I use is I never reuse a frame if I don't know what's happened to that frame. So if a colony's died, if a colony's dwindled, if anything's happened and there's like leftover frames, I, I melt them down, reuse the frames, or I burn everything. The only time I would ever use a frame and transfer it over is I've got a healthy colony and I'm like sharing brood out or something like that. If I had a frame with mold on it, I would just be chucking it away and starting again. How would you merge a colony? So standard technique that I use is the newspaper technique. So all you do is you just kind of— let's do the drawing, get my drawing board out, uh, so it snaps. So If you've got a colony of bees there like that, and then you've got another colony of bees there like that— tried to do the boxes the same but failed. Let's turn that snap off. All you do is you just put a sheet of newspaper over the top there. I like to leave the queen on that one, take the queen away from that one. So that one's queen plus, that one's queen negative. You just take that, put it on top, and then on the newspaper you just put a couple of little slits just to get the bees going. And then what happens is the bees will eat their way through. And it should be slow enough, slow enough that you preserve the queen and no queens die. So a standard newspaper combined, that's called. Um, get rid of all of those images for next time. Uh, Stealth also says, have 3 queens being dispatched by you next Thursday? How does this work with postage on Good Friday? Very good question, that one. That Good Friday bank holiday has properly messed us up. So the, the plan for next week, if anyone's watching, is I'm hoping to receive the queens on the Wednesday. Wednesday the 16th of April, and I will send them on the same day. That is the plan, so they should arrive with everyone on Thursday the 17th, fingers crossed. Hi Lawrence, already sent you a few clips of my new colony on WhatsApp. I'll do a review proper over the weekend or Monday. Busy today and tomorrow with my other hat on— archery instruction. Oh, we'll have fun with your archery. Uh, anybody who wants to leave us a review, I've been sending out review requests. I would very much appreciate some reviews if you wouldn't mind. You don't even need to have had a nuc or a queen if you're getting good advice from kind of beekeeping channel or the live streams and you want to leave us a review, really would appreciate it. Google Review, best place to leave it. Second best place, but a really close second, and one where we never get any reviews, is Facebook. So on our Black Mountain Honey page on Facebook, you can leave any reviews you like on there. Much appreciated. Says hi, Lawrence. Hello to you too. Good morning, Lawrence. Looking forward to receiving our nuc in May and seeing you in June. Mark and Sharon. I'm very excited about both of those things too. David says, hey Lawrence, how do you deal with stored frames? We did that one. Um, and let's go again. Titan Games says, Cosmic from New Zealand, how would you merge a colony that is queenless with a weak queen right colony? So did that one. I would use the newspaper method. Uh, Denny Rays Bees says, been making and using plastic foundation in layens frames, what a game changer. I'm assuming that you're, that you're liking it. Um, I'm not, I'm not a fan of plastic foundation, although I've been using a little bit this week because I ran out of frames, but, uh, we will see how they get on. Adam Goodall says, good morning, hope all is well and bring on the season. Oh, we are well and truly in it now. Hey Adam. Anthony Scryce says, good morning, hope you're enjoying the weather. Just a question on the Suyenti polybrood box, do you use a dummy board as there is a large gap that is annoyingly too small for another frame? How annoying is the gap in the Suyenti? So yeah, you either need to use a dummy board or you need to just kind of cope with the gap. I found that if you use— I forget whether it's 10 or 11 frames that go in there, but the space— I'm pretty sure it's 10 DN4 frames go in there, and then you can put one DN1 frame. And if you just put a DN1 frame with a piece of Correx in as opposed to a piece of foundation, then they respect that space. Did that for years and it worked well. Hi Lawrence, hope you're well. What's the best way to remove attendance from your queen cage? I really struggle to see the queen in blue in my queen sleeve. So I'm going to make it dead easy for you. Definitely don't remove the attendance. I see that advice given a lot, which is, oh, you need to remove the attendance. You definitely do not. I introduce literally hundreds, if not thousands, of queens, and I never remove the attendants, and I always get 100% success every single time. So you don't need to remove them. Also says thanks for the queens received yesterday. No problem. Channel member says, good morning all. Have you ever had a spring that you kept on putting off prep equipment thinking that you've got time, and then bang, spring's here and good, but not enough boxes made up, and then blind panic? Welcome to the club. That is where that is exactly where I am at the moment. But you know, that's what nighttime is for—is for making up more frames. Titan Games says we had a great spring and summer in New Zealand. I had my first ever harvest of 100 kilograms in second month of spring. Was fantastic. Excellent. That sounds really, really good. He Bayern says hello, Lawrence. What do you prefer and why? Longer and smaller top bar lugs. Oh, for for handling, for ease of handling, I much prefer the national long lugs because they're so much easier to handle. For durability, I much prefer the short Langstroth lugs because they don't break anywhere near as much. Right, so I'm going to read out some questions from my thing now. I'm not going to try and paste them in because it's just not going to work. Let's answer the ones in here first. So Thomas says, hi Lawrence, one of my hives has a high varroa load and a few bees have deformed wing virus. I treated them last September with Apiguard, but it must not have worked. What's the best treatment to use now? Apiguard does not work. I know that's a really harsh thing to say. So many people Use Apiguard, and so many beekeeping associations say, "Yeah, that's it. That's all we use: Apiguard." It's a terrible, terrible treatment. Last time I said this, I think a few people got annoyed because they said, "Well, that's that's the treatment that I always use," and it's okay. It's the treatment that you always use, but it's the treatment that I have found and a lot of other people have found, unless used in the perfect conditions, is highly ineffective. So I wouldn't use Apiguard anymore or any thymol-based treatment for varroa. Apivar is at the— at this moment in time, by far and away the most effective for me. JK Photography says, how do you feel about the queen swap process? 2 laying queens swapped at the same time between 2 hives, is this possible? Or, um, it's possible if they're both laying and you swap them over, but I wouldn't— I wouldn't do it. Like, I don't quite see the benefit of that one. Uh, Ryan McGrath says, do you prefer plastic frames or wood frames in a super? The bees don't seem to fill the plastic frames out with honey as much as the wood. Also, do you prefer plastic all wood frames in the brood box. So I have tried every single frame going. Very, very fixed in my view. I prefer wooden frames with wax, good wax foundation, and there is no substitute. Uh, right, let's answer some of these questions in here. I'm not going to share the screen because it's not going to work. So, uh, I can do this a bit bigger actually now so I can see what's going on. Okay, the question is as follows. Let me put it over here so you can see me reading it. It says, Hi Lawrence, here in Argyll, 3 colonies overwintered in double national deep brood config. have been feeding fondant. First inspection today, Black Mountain Honey Queens all looking great. Rather than the brood nest all in top box and expanding down, there seem to be 4 or 5 frames of brood in all stages in both chambers. Normally I would run them on a single deep and do a preemptive demerare as per your video. What would you do now? Doing the demerare with 2 brood boxes would be more of a challenge for lifting. I thought maybe the queen in the top box with the queen excluder in between, allow the brood to hatch, then remove the bottom box. Thanks for all your good advice. So Lots of, lots of good options there. It is a question that I get a lot, which is, well, I've double brooded now, so how do I do the demaray? And I would say to anybody who's kind of thinking about this for next year, don't maybe confuse the two. So if you're gonna demaray your colonies, if I demaray my colonies, I don't double brood at any point throughout the year, and I try and get them back to kind of like a, um, a single brood management system by the time the spring comes back around again. But if you've already double brooded, I would almost can the demerare and split them into 2, and then you can still demerare. Or can the demerare and just leave them on double brood, manage the colony as a double brood throughout the season. That should help with swarming as well. It will reduce the honey crop down a little bit. Or you could do what you said, which is take the queen, put her in the top box, queen excluder in between, let the brood in the bottom box emerge, and then take that box away. And at the same time, give them additional space in the supers. Few different options for you there. I'd probably choose the last one if I was you. Uh, next question from John Wick says, I found 3 queen cells but they only had a freshly laid egg, must be less than 2 days old. Could I get away with a Demerara as my queen cells were not matured? I know I should split, but honey greed got the better of me. So for me, any sort of egg charge, royal jelly, or anything in a queen cell means that it's too late to do a Demerara split and they will still swarm. So I would be doing a split on that basis. I have to say, I wouldn't necessarily split just on an egg in a queen cell, but as soon as it's charged, I would definitely do a split. But an egg in a queen cell is a sure sign that they're going to go within kind of like a couple of weeks, so keep an eye on them. I am new to beekeeping and I've just received my first nuc of bees. My question is, I have a Langstroth hive, but I purchased a national nuc by mistake. I have added a piece of wood either side, either end of the hive, so the national frames will sit nicely. How and when will I be able to remove the national frame and replace with Langstroth Thanks for your time, Gary. Right, so we will draw this one. I've got someone you need to get on. You need to get onto the the WhatsApp group because this was the advice that I gave to Rob on the WhatsApp group this morning. Well, I say it was the advice. It was. I just agreed with what Rob said because he had it absolutely spot on. So what I would suggest is doing what Rob's done, which is a conversion box. So this is a let's go to there. That's a national box like that there. And then what you want is a conversion board, which is just like a piece of wood, standard piece of ply with a hole cut in it. I'll show you a bird's-eye view of that in a second. And then you take your Langstroth box and you sit your Langstroth box on top like that and let the bees— let me take the snap off. So your bees are here at the moment and they're going to kind of like grow up here, get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then when they get to that point, you're going to take a queen excluder And you're going to put a queen excluder all the way across there and put your queen up at the top. All of the brood down here will emerge, and then you can just remove that box completely, and then the transfer is complete. Let me just quickly show you the cross-section of that board there. So that board there is going to be— snap on— going to be something like this, and then you just stick a hole kind of in the middle like that so the bees can go through it. Any size hole is fine to cut out with the jigsaw, cut out with the saw, anyway will work. Hopefully that gets you back on track. Right, next question. I need to work out a better way of doing these, I think. Let's try that, that's a little bit better. Right, next question is from Darren. He says, I'm a subscriber but still get adverts on the live stream. Is this normal or should I be advert-free? I'm watching the live stream now, 4th of April, 8 minutes in and already An advert, so apologies. There are adverts on the live stream. I tried doing them with no adverts, and YouTube did not like it at all. So the channel memberships mean you get free access or advert-free access to all of the videos, all of the exclusive VIP videos. But then I do the live streams for everyone, so channel members and channel subscribers, but everybody gets access to the live stream. So I have to put the adverts on; otherwise, YouTube seems to penalize it massively. Next question is from Damir. He says, "Hi Lawrence, on the 18th of March, I done my first inspection and accidentally killed one of your queens." Day 8, I shook all the frames and cleared of all cells. Yesterday, day 16, I went through the frames again and there were 4 new queen cells, one of them with the open top. Is it possible that a new virgin is hatched, and is it safe to introduce your queen that arrived today? Oh dear, that's not good. It sounds like you missed one of the queens, one of the queen cells, and then the queen has emerged. So no, it's not safe to introduce the queen. You need to go in, find that virgin, kill that virgin, and then you can go straight in, put the new queen in, wait 24 hours, pop the tab, and Let them eat through the fondant. Definitely going to do another public service announcement here. If you buy queens, do not open the cages. Never. You never, ever, ever open the cages. Not once. There is no circumstance when you open the cage. None. The amount of people that have bought queens and then rung up and said, "Well, I opened the cage and she flew off," and I said, "Well, that's definitely not what the instructions said to do." Do not ever open the queen cages. The queens will fly off. Right, next question from Andy Field. He says, one WBC hive in our garden, South Scotland, and had them since June last year. Super proud of my wife Sophie who has got them through winter and they seem super busy now with the warm weather. First inspection this weekend. Do you have any advice about getting through any potential issues as they transition as the winter bees decline? Are there any things to look out for? So the only thing, the bit of advice that I would give you, 2 bits of advice, kind of coming out of winter and into spring, they are at high risk of starvation. ensure that you do not let your bees starve. Make sure you give them enough food. Also make sure you don't give them too much food because you will honey bound them, and then you need to ensure that there's enough space in there. It is a balancing act. Give them enough food to survive, don't give them too much food that they're going to be restricted and then they're going to swarm. If you kind of fix both of those 2 things, you should get your bees out of winter and into spring very nicely. I'm sure you get asked this loads, but when to do demerets? I'm in northern England. So for us, normally middle of May is about when I start doing it. This year, definitely going to be early May, I would suspect. Hi Lawrence, my bees swarmed yesterday and totally caught me off guard. How can I get them back to the original hive eventually so not to lose out on a fantastic strong colony and a delay in honey crop? Didn't expect this to happen so early and see no drones anyway. So when the bees swarm like that, you effectively get a split, whether it's a forced split by the bees swarming or an artificial swarm that you do yourself. There's no real way to put those back together again anytime soon. without risking further swarming. And you know, you caught that swarm, so you've got the resources there. You've got the swarm and you've got the split. If you put them back together again now, you just dump them all back in together, you probably— they'll probably swarm again with less notice this time, and then you might lose the bees. So I would just— I'd stick with the 2, and then later on in the year you can decide which one you like best. And if you want to merge them back together again, you can just kill the worst queen, merge them back using the newspaper method. I inspected my bees and found 2 charged swarm cells. It's my largest colony already with 2 supers and a clipped queen. Should I do a demeray split, or should I risk making a split, letting the bees make another queen? So the rule is, if you find queen cells, you cannot do a demeray split. Cannot do it. The bees will swarm 100%. The only thing that you can do if you find charged swarm cells like that is to make a split. Doesn't matter if your queen is clipped. If your queen is clipped and you let those cells emerge, what will happen is the bees will swarm with the first virgin that emerges, which is kind of equally frustrating as the clipped queen going. So what I would do at that point is I would make a split. And you can either make a split and let the single queen cell that you're going to leave try and mate naturally, or you can take them all down and add a mated queen. The choice is up to you. I had some comments on Facebook this week saying, oh, he's always trying to sell something, and it's like, well, not always trying to sell something. In fact, I'm probably one of the better ones in terms of not selling stuff and just giving out free advice to everyone. And a lot of the time my advice is like, you get people messaging me saying, oh, what do you think of this brood frame here? I'm thinking like drone laying queen, or I'm thinking the queen's running out of kind of sperm or whatever, or eggs I should say. And I look at it and say, no, no, looks all right, looks fine. And they say, you sure? And I say, yeah, yeah, you don't need a queen. So maybe people don't see that side of it as well, but there is no need for me to do the hard sell on stuff. Things generally do sell pretty quickly. I want to give people the best advice possible so they can get the best out of their bees. The comment was on the chalkbrood video. Someone's saying, oh, we're always trying to sell the queens. And it's like, well, no, that is genuinely what you do with chalkbrood. If you have a really bad case of chalkbrood, it is proven that it is the queen's offspring that have a genetic disposition to that fungal disease. And by changing those genetics means that you generally get rid of the chalkbrood like that. That is, that is what you do with chalkbrood. But apparently that was, um, too, too blatant sales for our queens, which are, which are sold out for the next few weeks. It is worth saying on the queen front as well, we, we are sold out until the 1st of May at the moment on queens. The demand is crazy and it's not, it's not slowing down. So that 1st of May date is now like 80% full, so that one will be gone within probably the next week. And, and I think May is going to be the same. So if you need kind of, no matter whether it's 1, 2, or 100 queens, I'd get the orders in as quick as you possibly can. Uh, next question was from Joshua. He says, do you ship to the USA? I'm afraid we can only ship within the UK. Next question says, hey Lawrence, I was wondering if you do a Demerara split but you have treated your hive, how can you do anything with that brood box and its honey that is going in the top box. Can you even do this with a treated brood box? Many thanks. Also, don't know if you are answering in stream, so please take a sip of your tea. Excellent, I will take a sip. So I'll draw that one again because it's always good to have a bit of a recap on the Demerose split. Uh, right, let's put the snap on. So Demerose split is kind of like this. You have a brood box there, you have a couple of supers, and then you're gonna— let me take the snap off. are going to add another brood box up there, you're going to put the queen on a single frame of brood there, and then all of that's going to be brood up there. So that's the standard setup. All of that brood emerges and kind of just turns into bees, and then the bees will backfill that with honey. Now, if you're quick and you get in there quickly, they don't put a huge amount of honey in there, so you can kind of get away with it without doing that, but this is the setup to get that honey there. Into the supers. So set yourself back up again. You've got your queen downstairs in that box there. You've got your— sorry, yeah, that's not right. So what you want to do is take this box, once it's all emerged and it's honey, and you put it downstairs like that. You lift this box here up one. So that's the box with your queen in. And then you want to put additional space above. So instead of there being 2 supers there, now maybe you're going to put 3 or 4 supers. You get the idea. And then the idea is the bees— this is brood, this is honey— and the bees don't like the honey being below it, so they move it upstairs and put it up there. And then if you do that, it is safe to eat and the honey will not be tainted. So doing a video on that this year, show you all the steps of the process. Obviously can't do it until we get to that point in the season. Let's take that off. I think that is all of the questions on here, and I've got one more. So one more says, hi Lawrence, I haven't heard anyone speak about doing splits and add a mated queen of another strain of honeybee. I'd quite like to add a Buckfast bee. I have dark bees, although I got them knowing without knowing their genetics. Any problems I should know about before doing it? So introducing a Buckfast queen to an AMM colony can be a little bit tricky, and what you generally find is that acceptor let her lay a little bit of eggs, and then they bump the queen off, and then they try and supersede off those eggs. So as we said before, you can introduce in a queen introduction cage, which means that the bees can't get in and kill that queen. Or once she's introduced and outlaying, you need to go in every 2 or 3 days, and if you see any emergency cells, or any supersedure cells I should say, being created, you just got to take them down really, really quickly. Just keep on taking them down. As soon as the queen has laid some brood and that brood has emerged, they do stop trying to supersede, but you just got to be on top of it. Right, that is all of the questions on the spreadsheet there, so I'm going to go back through and I'm going to answer every single comment in the chat, and when I get to the bottom, that is the end of the stream because that is how it works. It's your job to keep me here until quarter past 10. I've got half an hour left. Right, here we go. Next question is from Titan Game. He says, 2 questions. 1, do bees like long hives, 22 frames total? 2, Could you do a nuc raising in a long hive with 4 disc entrances? So I've got and have had a few long hives and I'm not a fan of long hives, not a fan, not at all. The only exception to that is if they're used as queen rearing or for making up little mini, making up little nucs, then I do like it. So I would say number 2, could you do a nuc raising in a long hive? Yes, works very, very well. Do bees like long hives? I don't think they like it. I think they like to put the honey above the brood as opposed to putting it next Gina Ramsey Martin says, "Good morning from Tennessee. I've started torching my boxes. I use cypress, and I'm guessing that's pine. Oh, sorry, and mine turned out great. There we go. My friend used pine, and her boxes are off when setting them on non-torch boxes. Do the type of wood do differently? They shouldn't. It sounds like it's a moisture issue, that one, and the scorching has kind of like twisted them a little bit or bowed them. So, hmm, I've not. I've never experienced that. The bees should fix it if it's kind of minor discrepancies, though." Titan Game also says, another question: your wooden bases you make, do they prevent wasps? As it's been very bad this autumn. So they don't prevent wasps, but they give the bees the necessary tools in order to help them defend wasps. The prerequisite to not having issues with wasps is having a big, strong, healthy colony of bees. If you have that, they can deal with most entrances. Matt Page, channel member, says, hello, hello, I'm at work but listening to as well. Thank you, Lawrence. Thanks, Matt, for being a channel member. Frollies Bee says, I stupidly forgot to take out one Apivar strip out of my hive and put a super on. Is there any way to save that super, or am I best using it as half brood box now? I would say it depends on how long you've had it on there. If it's been on there like a day or so, I wouldn't think it's a major issue. If it's been on there any longer than that, yeah, maybe take it out and do something with it. Hi Lawrence, when using the frame cage, how would you recommend getting the queen from the yellow cage into the frame cage? So this is, this is what I was saying in terms of, um, making sure that there's some young nurse bees in there. So I would never open the cage, just not a good idea to open the cage. But if you take the cage, open the tab, and inside the frame cage there is young nurse bees, then the young nurse bees should eat their way in. The only other way of doing it is taking the cage— it's horrible doing this, never nice— dunking it in a cup of water until the queen is completely submerged, opening it up, and then you can just take the queen out because she can't really move because she's wet, and the bees will clean her off and dry her off very, very quickly. And that is the only safe way that I would ever open in a cage. Why do some queens produce more drones than others? One of my queens barely lays drone eggs. Is this normal? Um, so yeah, it is normally just varying kind of amounts of drones that are produced, but also different times of the year. So they might just be like a little bit behind and they'll kind of produce it later on in the season. How long can a queen stay alive in a queen cage usually? How to give water, etc.? So my recommendation to everyone is to never, ever, ever keep the queens longer than you need to. As soon as they come, take them, put them in the beehive instantly. That is going to be the best for the bees. If you do need to keep them, keep them in the packet that they're in, spray them with water every maybe like 4 to 6 hours, just a couple of drops on the cage, you don't need much at all, and then keep it in a warm, dark environment. Should last a couple of days, but we take no liability on that. We say put them into the hives as soon as you get them. Morning, Laurence, I've just taken over some hives and on inspection yesterday one of them is very aggressive. Want to requeen it Is it too early to kill the queen, add a queen from a friendly hive, and let the friendly hive requeen itself? So it's not too— it's borderline too early to do that, but like within a couple of weeks you'll be able to do that. But I find if you've got a really, really angry hive, you know, I'm here to sell queens, aren't I? Of course. But this is genuine advice here. Buy your queens from whoever you want. If you want to fix an angry hive, the last thing you want is to requeen with all of those angry drones in the air. You're much better off killing the queen, taking out any frames of drone brood that are there as well, killing the drone brood, adding in a new queen, and that will requeen it and get it to a friendly state much, much quicker. Just had 3 queens and a half through split. Leave for 5 days, then take down the queen cells, then add a queen and pop the tab. It's the second person that said that. I don't know if I've put something wrong in a video, so no, this is the, this is the, the process. Um, find the original queen or make a split, Kill the queen. You need to wait eight days. It's not five days; it's eight days. After eight days, take the frames, every single frame, shake off every single bee, take down all the emergency cells, then put the queen in. Twenty-four hours later, pop the tab, leave it for a week, and then job is a good'un. John says, "Thank you, Lawrence." Thank you to you, John. Rachel says, "Thank you for the explanation on honey and the demeray." My pleasure. Lynette says, "How do you know which queen cell to keep?" Sorry, I did see your email come through, Lynette. I've not got around to finishing on that. If anyone's got any questions, put it on the link. So there's a link on the website that says ask a question, and then you will show up on my little list there. How do you know which cell is best to keep? So most cells are going to look very good. You want one that isn't overly extended because that shows it's going to be a dropped larva. You want one that looks lots of royal jelly inside. You want an open one that you can get the visual ID to show the larva sitting in the pool of royal jelly. You want one with nice even dimpling. You want one that's kind of as far away from the sides of the frame as possible, which means you're not going squish it. So if you've got one kind of like nice on the inside of the frame, use that. You're kind of thinking most of the, most of the cells are going to be good, but if you've got an open one that you can look at, that's going to be the one that I'll always choose because you get that ID on the larva. And then for me, it's more about choosing one that you're not going to damage in the hive, and then you should be good. Um, Nick Collard says, just got a nuc from yourself. I've put them in the National Hive with 11 frames. Queen is laying in 7 of the frames already. Thinking of adding a super in the next few days. What do you you think. I would 100% agree. With the weather as it is at the moment and the honey that's coming, the nectar that's come in, then you've got a little bit of a buffer there and you shouldn't have any issues with temperature. I know it's getting a bit colder over the next few days, but you can still kind of ride on the back of the good weather and get that super on. The bees are going to swarm early this year, so do not get caught out by not giving them enough space. I'm playing with the idea of good for going forward with Dadant hives. The bees do really well in them. The only thing is someone's at the door. That's good. Uh, we'll just have to leave that. I didn't think about that. Um, just seeing if B continues, right? There isn't much call for Dayden nucs. Boxes are a lot easier and quicker to make than national. You've got to choose kind of what's right for you. I think in the UK going with Dayden would be probably the wrong, wrong idea. Everything would be more expensive and you wouldn't have the market for the nucs as well. Roger Taylor says, wow, actually managed to, uh, to hear you in the live. Hello Roger, how's it going? Uh, Nathan Williams says thank you. Matt Page, channel member, says saw today there are 2 levels of membership, this already or coming up. Also, if true, how do I know and upgrade, as I would want to do all— uh, oh sorry, all that you do for new beekeepers, both new and old, you deserve something. So I'll give you, I'll give you the memberships again. So there's channel supporter, which gives you just a badge and you say thank you for kind of what we do on the channel. There's early access videos, which means that you get early access to all videos that are not exclusive videos. So for example, there's a video coming out tonight about how to mark a queen bee. If you, if you're an early access subscriber, you would have seen that a couple of weeks ago. Um, the next one is the exclusive VIP mentoring, which means you get access to all of the exclusive VIP videos that I produce, and there is a lot of them. I think we're currently up to about 80 videos. So if you sign up today, you get access to 80 of the videos. You get access to all of the old ones as well, tons of videos from last season in there to give you an idea of what's kind of going on throughout the season. And then what you also get in that plan there is that if you leave a comment on any video at all, I filter it every day and I'll get back to you. So if you've got a specific question that can't wait for a live stream, that is the membership one for you. Premium membership is all of that, plus you get access to the WhatsApp group. And then if you want to go for the one-to-one WhatsApp mentoring, that is the top tier, and there's a few people on that one now. And that means you can send me pictures, you can send me videos, we can chat, we can talk all about your bees, and it is very good fun. Good morning, looking forward to your nuc arriving in May. We are getting the bee area set up in our big garden. The beehive will face southeast. How many hours of sunlight should the hive have? So it's great that you're thinking like that, you want to give the very, very best for your bees, but in garden situations I always say make it work for you. So whether it's 6 hours or 8 hours or 4 hours of sunlight a day, it doesn't make a huge amount of difference. You're kind of talking about marginal gains. What's more important I find in a garden is making sure that it's secure, making sure that children can't go near it, making sure that the flight path's not going to be on your hallway or going on your washing, or like my washing, or anyone's washing. Um, make it work for you. And as long as they get like a decent amount of sunlight in the day, and if they're facing southeast, they're going to get a lot, then it should work very, very well. Uh, Dale Hancock says, thank you. If I order some queens from you next Friday, what's the dates likely to receive them sooner rather than later, just so I can plan for getting rid of the old queens and making queenless? So if you order and select Thursday the 1st of May, we will send on Thursday the 1st of May for delivery on Friday the 2nd of May. Might sound like that's a long way away, but it's really not. Like, it's the 12th today, and you need to wait at least 8 days after you've taken the queen down or killed the queen for those cells to be there. So you're only leaving them queenless for like about 8, 10 days, which is good. It improves the acceptance as well. So that was the one we did before. There we go. And Lynette says thank you. Thank you to Lynette. Also, I usually use some of the Beekeeper for my stuff but can't seem to buy brood boxes or supers at the mo. So where else is good to use, please? So you know I do some of the social media for Abello. You'll notice that somebody else is doing some Abello social media at the moment. You have to try and guess whose is whose. But Abello very good. Thorns very good as well. Gwynny Griff give him a shout out as well because he's got very good customer service. Mihei says greetings. Sorry if I've said your name wrong. Greetings from Romania. Like your information. I will have my bees. I'll have my bees nuke at the finish of May. I'm thinking that I can have enough time to make them strong. Oh, definitely. A May nuc can still produce a really, really good bumper crop of honey in the season. Nick Collard says thank you. Thank you to you too, Nick. Titan Games says thank you, Lawrence. Also, your pup also video bombed you. Yeah, he's gone right behind me there, Jasper, isn't he? Um, Matt Page says thank you, but how do I upgrade, uh, to the top level of membership? So if you go on to the home page where that subscribe button is, there's a button next to it that says join. And if you go on to it there and hit join, it should give you those options again. What I will also do for you as well is I'll just quickly go onto my channel membership page here because there is a direct link that you can click on. So I'll click that on there. So you'll see on there now I've just put that— I think that's gone to all of them. Yeah, it's gone to all of them. So there we go, to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch. If anyone wants to join up as a channel member, there are the links. Um, I don't think it worked on the Facebook one, so let's go for the next questions. Amazing, thank you. Looking forward to getting some of your Calm Queens again. All from last year are doing really, really well. We'll be making splits soon, so we'll be ordering more again. Excellent, thanks for that, Dale. Hey bud, double brooded with nuc box underneath a month ago. Supers on, bees filling top brood box with honey, not putting in super, and only drawing out second box. That sounds kind of like normal for early April. If you want, and they're only just drawing out that second box, like the second box for me is your buffer, stops the bees swarming before you go and put any supers on. If you get to the point where you're putting the super on now and you've got space above and the bees are maybe going up and working that super and starting to work the brood box, I'd probably take the brood box away, the second brood box, if they've done like 10% drawn it out. Depends what your management system is. If you're going to leave them on double brood, you want to leave them like that. If you want to get it back to single brood, now might be the main, the good time to do that. David also adds reverted Box main box to bottom with second brood box above now. Was this the right thing to do? Will they draw up to the super now? So as I said before, they won't do anything unless they've got the bees to do it. I would make that decision. I think that's a good decision, switching them round, get them to work up. But also, if you want to stay on single brood, I would say now is the time just to take that single, that second empty brood box away if you need to, and let them, and then they'll definitely end up in the super a lot quicker. Marcus says, it's weird that you say you don't like horizontal hives. This is the most common way in Estonia, and the hive is called the lamav. Or laying hive. So probably similar to a layon's hive as well. I know a lot of people do like them. I've given them a go and I just can't get the management system the same. I find it so much easier to manage colonies for pretty much everything, kind of like for queen's nucs, but specifically for honey in a vertical beehive. That is it, we have reached the bottom. I love it if we get to the bottom and kind of before time, so I can stay here until quarter past, but I won't because I've got loads to do. That is another successful Let's Talk Bees stream. I will be back this Friday. You've not got long to wait. This Friday at 7:30 PM. If you've got any more questions, stick them in the ask button on the website. Go to blackmountainhoney.co.uk and under learning it says question and you can ask a question and I will answer them at the beginning of my stream. I hope you all have enjoyed this incredible spring. Ends today unfortunately, does for us in North Wales anyway. And I wish you all a very, very good weekend. I'll see you next week. Take care.