Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 46

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. There is no way it's only been 2 weeks since the last video because it feels like an absolute lifetime. How much stuff has happened in the last 2 weeks? We've got loads to talk about today. We're going to talk about Payne's closing down, we're going to talk about the last weeks of the year for Black Mountain Honey, we're going to talk about how we're switching things up going forward. Loads to talk about, so let me hand over to my very trusted whiteboard to give you the lowdown on what is going on. So final week for queens. This week we are sold out as of 2 minutes ago. We are sold out for this week. So Thursday the 29th of August and Friday the 30th of August, we are sold out. I am doing my very best to get one last batch of queens in, one last batch, one last week for the season, but I cannot promise that it is going to come in. So if you want those queens, order them as soon as available. And if they come in, you will be very, very happy with them. 60% of national nucs sold, and the Langstroth number is not far off, but we do loads more national nucs than we do Langstroth nucs. So there is a couple of hundred national nucs left, there is about 50 Langstroth nucs left for April 2024. Cannot believe how quickly these are selling. So if you are interested in overwintered F1 Buckfast nucs for next year, definitely get in there, get them as soon as possible. Check out this one here though. Channel member videos. There are currently 48 channel member videos that people who are not channel members will not have seen. There are tons on there that are advert-free early access. So these ones here went down to a guy called Adam who is a channel member and looked through his bees. They will all come out to the public, but every time you see here channel member exclusive— perfect honey extraction setup, simplifying honey extraction, protect your honey crop, varroa treatments I really don't like, etc., etc. They never actually get to the public. They are channel member exclusive only, and you can join that through the membership page. If you just go on to Black Mountain Honey, uh, the homepage for YouTube, there's a button on there that says join, and if you hit join, then you can join as a channel member. Let me jump back to this page here though. So this is the very last week of the 2024 season that I will be doing a stream 2 times a month, so once every fortnight. We are moving over now to once every month because the beekeeping season's basically over and there's not a huge amount for me to talk about. So I'm just gonna take a little bit of a break, take a back seat, and I'm gonna go back to doing one per month. As always, if you've got anything urgent, WhatsApp me, email me, call me, whatever. I'm happy to help where I can. Final one, if you have enjoyed Or found useful the live streams throughout the year, I'd be very, very appreciate. I would very, very appreciate if you could leave me a very nice Google review. That would be really fantastic. I put a lot of effort into these live streams. I do my very best to stay until the very end. I answer every single question and try and go into as much detail as I possibly can. If you like the streams and you want to give me something back, I really would appreciate a Google review. Black Mountain Honey. For Black Mountain Honey, to let me know how I'm getting on. If you've had queens, if you've had nucs, or if you've just watched the live streams and you found them useful. Right, enough of the public service announcements. You will notice a theme for today, and that theme is I'm gonna not be able to get my words out at all because I woke up this morning at about six o'clock, which I know for some people like Richard is is like having a lie in. But I woke up at six o'clock and I went and played eighteen holes of golf. Shocking. Had an absolutely shocking round of golf, but walked quite far. And then I've just been busy all day, and now it's half eight. So I've been up for fourteen hours, and we're probably going to do like a three-hour live stream now. So I'm struggling to get my words out a little bit, but I will do my very best to answer every single question that is in the chat. Let's jump straight into it then. So Scott, sorry Scout, Scout about. There you go. I got it wrong on the first one. Scout about says now Pain's closed. Unbelievable. Have you given any thought on what type of box you will be using for nuke deliveries if not the Pain? Pain's box. So yes, an incredibly large— I got— I literally can't talk. A huge amount of thought, I really have. This has been topic number one this week. I've spoken personally on the phone to Roger 2 or 3 times, Roger Payne, and, um, oh, I don't know what I'm gonna do. It's a very, very difficult situation, to be honest, because I love the Payne's nuke and it is by far and away the best nuke for sending nukes through the post. So for 2025 nucs, all of our bees are in the 2025 nucs now. So if you, if you're ordering overwintered nucs for delivery or collection in 2025, our bees are already in those nucs. We've got 700 or 800 of those. I've already ordered, I've placed an order, so luckily I got, I got a heads up to the sale by Roger, uh, and I reduced my order down a little bit from what it was originally going to be, but I've ordered another 1,000 nucs. So I've got another 1,000 split between National and Langstroth nucs, so just, just shy, I think about 900 and something. To ensure that we have enough nucs for the 2026 season. So for the next two years, we're good. I'm going to see what happens with the molds. So I'm going to see if somebody buys the Payne's molds and starts making the molds. So it starts making the nucs and pumping them out. Then I've not got an issue, and I can continue buying them. And I know there's been a huge amount of interest in those molds. I will declare my interest as well. I have been very interested in those molds. For one reason, really. There's there's only one reason so that I can send the nukes out in those molds because the molds are very very good. The nukes are very very good, and they are the best nuke for sending out in the post bar none because of the way that I can send people a feeder whilst sending a fully ventilated nucleus. If the molds do not get to the point where someone's making nukes out of them anymore. Then I'm going to have to do something a little bit different because there are no nucs on the market currently that I'd feel comfortable sending through the post. Not a single one. Certainly not one that would be cost-effective to do so. So we'll have to come up with another solution, and I will leave that up to you to decide what that could potentially be. But that has been a huge, yeah, huge issue for me over the last couple of weeks, and, and we've, we've dealt with it to continue to be able to send them out for the next couple of years, and then we'll see what happens after that. Uh, Paul, Denby Honey is in Cape Verde. Well gutted. Keeps on WhatsApping me pictures of bees and stuff on holiday, and I'm just here slogging away, Paul. So, you know, but at least you say some nice things. So we still have time to watch Black Mountain Honey live. A very honest guy. Google review later from Paul, I'm sure. Bob Bob says, hi, I've had some queens off you recently with the cages marked with a G. Any info on these, the line etc. So they will be a Continental Dark Star Buckfast. That's as much of information as I get, and that is as much information that Melita Bees will give you about the lines as well. They don't give you the certificates or anything like that of the, of the mothers or the fathers, but you wouldn't, you wouldn't get the fathers in that line as well because they are open mated. But yeah, Continental Dark Star from Melita Bees. Hi Lawrence. Hello Rufus, how you doing? Marcus Bug says, can I only extract 100% fully capped frames? I'm worried if it's not fully capped, the moisture content will be too high and spoil the rest of the batch. Thanks, buddy. Right, so I forgot to start rubbing stuff out, so I'm just going to rub stuff out while I talk to people so I can use my clean whiteboard. So no, you do not need— every single frame that you uncap does not need to be 100% capped over. What you need to ensure, and this is how you kind of like work back from it, what you need to ensure is that your mixed honey in the bucket, once you've mixed everything together and once it's gone into the settling tank, you need to ensure that that honey is of a suitable moisture content to ensure that it's not going to ferment. And once you kind of get that kind of end point in your mind, you can work backwards from it and say, well, if all of the honey in the capped-over frames is, say, like 15% moisture content, and then the honey in the completely uncapped frames is 20% moisture content, once you start mixing them together, you'll get somewhere in the middle. And there's no real formula that I can give you to make that work other than kind of drawing a little bit of a picture. So I won't choose a yellow pen because yellow pens are rubbish, but if you've got a frame like that— and everyone always laughs— and let's imagine that that's kind of 100% uncapped like that. Now if I've got a frame that is looking something like That. Yeah, so all of that in the middle is capped, and then the bits at the edge there, that's uncapped. I'm taking that frame. For me, that is 80% capped, and that is good enough to go in the mix. So anything from that at 80% to 100% like this— and sorry for anyone listening to this on a podcast, I'm just drawing pictures of frames— that's 100%. There. So anything in between there is going in the mix. And I find if you, if you take all of that honey there, so all of your 100% capped frames, all of your 80% capped frames, you're never going to be anywhere close to the 20% limit. You don't want your honey to be 20% moisture, you want it to be kind of like 16 to 18, something like that. But I find if I take a mixture of all of these frames here, I'm sitting at like 16, 17%. Now what you can do is you can definitely chuck in a few that are sitting kind of like that, you know, 40% frames. Shake the frames, make sure that all of the, the stuff that's here isn't, isn't nectar. Give it a shake. If it's coming out, don't put it anywhere near it because it will start to ferment. Even just like little bits on the top will ferment. But if that is like solid and not shaking out and you've got 40% capped, You can chuck that into the mix at a ratio of, I would say, I wouldn't go anything over 5%. I know I'm chucking in like lots of numbers, but if your whole batch is those frames that are 80% capped to 100% capped, you can allow for like 5% of the frames like that. You could even chuck in the occasional frame that's kind of like just 20% capped over like that. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be putting in more than 1% of those frames. And I'm, you know, I'm saying these numbers like they're a formula. It's not. It's just knowing roughly what you can get away with. Don't ever put any frames in there that are going to shake out nectar because that's definitely not going to work. Don't ever put loads and loads of like 50% frames that are not capped over in there. But as long as the vast majority of your frames are between 80 and 100% capped, you can get away with chucking in little frames like that and it does no damage whatsoever. Hopefully that helps. Aiden, Aiden, Aiden, definitely Aiden. How you doing? Good to see you. One of the questions, how can I reduce my hives from 2 brood boxes down to 1 going into winter? So we will draw you another picture. So what I would say is don't. So at the moment you have a configuration looking something like this. So you have a floor and then you have your 2 brood boxes and then you'll have your roof. And at the moment it's kind of looking like, well, all of that is full to the brim with bees. I'm just drawing it again, you've got bees all the way like that. What will happen is as the bees cluster up, they'll start to cluster up kind of like that, that would be the beginning of the year clustering up, and then come February, March, all that will happen is you'll just find that the bees just end up up there. So then in March you just take the bottom brood box away, And that is what I would do. There's no, there's no benefit to removing that box yet. When I say compress your colonies down for winter, I just mean compress them down to the brood space that they're currently in. And then if you want to go back, which I think a lot of people do, they like to start the year on a single brood box, which is a smart move, I think. Just work with the bees. They will cluster up. They'll all end up in that top box, and then you can just safely remove that bottom box. And it's the, the easiest and neatest way to do it, I would say. Aidan says, once you extract your super frames, I put the empty super frames back in, but some are like a jigsaw puzzle being really thick. Does it matter if the comb is touching the other combs? So I, I wouldn't— yeah, I think, I think it does matter, and I think you, you miss out on a really, uh, you're missing a trick basically not fixing this at this point in the year. So what I always do— I won't, I won't even, I won't even draw a picture. No, I will draw a picture. Let's draw a picture. We like pictures. So imagine this is like your cross-section of your frames like this. So you've got a few frames, all of the spaces at the top touching, and then you've got your frames hanging down like that. And what you're saying is like some of your comb is sticking like that and you've got it like touching each other. It's difficult for the bees to clear it up like that. But it's also not what you want in terms of recycling the frames for next year. So what I always ensure is if you're using self-spacing frames, which, which you should be, like DN4 or SN4 frames, regardless of whether you're using plastic spacers as well or castellations as well, makes it a lot neater. When I'm uncapping my frames, you just got to make sure that you uncap all the way back down to here. So don't leave kind of any of that wax sitting proud there. You want to uncap all the way back, and then you need to work out a way to recover the honey from the wax that's sitting there. So you might be thinking, I don't want to take it all off because it's got loads of honey in it. But if you've got, like, say, a capping screw press or another sort of press to get the honey out, that it becomes irrelevant. So it's just a good practice just to get into the habit of just cutting the frames right back Which means that when you— if you put them back on, I don't put them back on, but when you put them back on, you've still got that double bee space in the middle like that, so the bees can come up and kind of walk back to back and clean everything up. And it just means that when you come to re-put those— so tired— when you come to put those frames back into like the castellations, they're at the correct thickness for the bees to draw them out properly. So I would worry about it, and I get it fixed now when it's a really easy time to fix it, when there's no honey in there. and it's not messy, and just cut, cut them back, get them right back to the face again. How are we doing? He says, how long do you think a mated queen should be a proven layer before being sold? An American podcast I watched said 21, but ideally 28 days for best acceptance. So ideally, like, months— 8 months, 9 months. You'd go as long as you possibly can, but that's not, like, economically viable, I don't think, in the bigger operations. And with a limited UK season, it's definitely not viable as well. You know, like, you look at what the spring was like this year, and it pushed the beginning of queen rearing out to the right, made it— delayed it quite significantly. If you said, right, I'm gonna do 3 months, you wouldn't sell any queens until September. So you just, you need to make a judgment call, and you need to say, right, well, I know when it looks good, I know when it looks perfect, But all that means is that it's looking perfect now. 3 weeks down the line, the ones that look perfect might be duds. And even if you left it 3 months, all you can say is at that point, right, that looks perfect now, the brood pattern looks perfect, really, really happy with that. 2 weeks' time, she could be a drone layer. You never know how well mated they are, you, in terms of looking forward. So What we do with both the queens that we mate ourselves, or you know the UK mated queens and the imported queens, is we underwrite the quality. And I think that's what you need to do. And then it takes a little bit of the guesswork out of it, which is if a queen isn't well mated, we say, "Well, sorry, we'll fix it. Fix it straight away for you. Just send us a picture of the queen. Has to be the same queen on the frame of drone brood." No, and then kill it. Warning here: Don't don't take that as advice if we've got any customers on here. You need to email me first, and I need to go through the. Process with you because it might be a case that you, you don't qualify for that. So do, do come back and speak to me first before you do anything. But we do, we underwrite the quality of all of our queens, both our UK-mated ones and our imported ones. And I think the difference between 21 days and 28 days is kind of not a huge difference really. So I think for the breeder, I think the difference between 21 and 28 days isn't, isn't a big difference either. And I think most of them will go for— I think I'm pretty sure Melitta bees use 6 weeks actually, so it's like quite a lot longer than that. But I would say what's more important than that is the quality of the customer service and the underwriting. But what I would also add is you can tell when a queen is good at that point. You can say that queen is good, but you definitely start to get an eye to say, right, that queen's all right, and you'd never send one out that looks okay. Like that first round, you can tell you're like, yes, that is really, really good. You can just see the way that the eggs are laid, and you can see how tight they are, and you can see as it starts to emerge like into capped brood, like that, that is a good queen at the moment. The ones that are slightly off, you know they're not, you know they're not good because of the fact that they're just slightly off. And that doesn't mean that they'll never turn into a good queen, but it means that you can't take a punt on it. You can't say, right, that's good for— that's been good for 4 weeks, so I'm going to send that out to a customer. You get that feeling. And some of them turn out good, but a lot of them don't turn out good. So it's more, it's more the judgment call, I think, as opposed to looking at the days for the pattern and stuff like that. James says, hi Lawrence, your video on the wasp trap national solid floor, simple to make and very effective against wasps and mice. Thanks for the video. No problem. I, uh, I really like my underfloor entrances. I say they're mine, they're not mine, the ones that I make, but because they are very, very simple. I've made a couple more for Langstroth. I should do, I should do the Langstroth video for that as well. David, channel member, says, what do you do with supers that have a bit of uncapped honey in? How do I store them, or should I let the bees clean them up? So I think with uncapped honey in, I think you should let the bees clean them up, and it's pretty quick. You're not going to have a huge amount of frames like that or supers, and the bees will clean them up very, very quick at this time of year. And what someone mentioned to me the other day was saying, well, how do I let the bees clean up the supers if I put the Apivar in? Because you say, you know, take the honey off and put the Apivar in on the same day. And I said, well, That's just what I do. Like, you don't need to follow it so rigidly. If you want to let the bees clean up the supers, you just take the honey off, go and do your extraction, put the honey supers back on, let the bees clean them up, and then when you take the honey supers off, put the Apivar strips in then. It's only like a few days difference. It doesn't make a huge amount, or it doesn't have a massive impact on the bees waiting that little bit longer. And I would say the same with this. If you've got some supers that have got a little bit of uncapped honey in, Take all of the good frames off, all of the good supers off, go and extract it, take the ones that have got a bit of uncapped honey in and adhere them, so put them underneath the brood box. I would use a queen excluder, and so I will draw a very quick picture. So if you've got brood box like that with a super on top with all your honey in, just take that super, put it underneath, queen excluder there, and then that's your super underneath removed from the top. And then literally within like a few days, they'll take all of the honey from down there, especially if, if it's capped, then bruise it. But if it's capped, you're going to be extracting it anyway. So if it's open, which it will be, they'll just move it up and then just take the queen excluder and the super back away and you're good to go. So that is what I would be doing. And then after that, go in with your Apivar. I'm gonna have a sip of my tea whilst David gives you a heads up to smash the like button. Much appreciated. Oh, very nice tea. Okay, Tim Pearson says, good evening, Lawrence. Next year I am looking at doing some splits and purchasing some of your queens. I use Langstroth frames. What size and make of nuc box would you recommend? Oh, very relevant. So I, I would— the, the paint— the Payne's box is good. The Payne's box is very, very good, but you can't, can't buy them anymore because I bought them all and, uh, the sale went on and, um, Oh, who, who bought some stuff from the Payne sale? Even though I, even though I had a heads up that I knew it was going on and ordered loads of stuff before the sale went live— thank you very much, Roger, appreciate it— I still went on to the sale and bought loads of stuff because I just can't, um, resist it. And I did, I, I knew, I knew when the sale was going live, so, so I went straight on and I did buy all of the Wired National Brood Foundation So if anyone went on there thinking that they could get some wild National Brood Foundation, it went pretty quick. I did get 5,000 sheets of foundation, so yes, I love a good win like that. But even after I bought that— and here's a little tip if you're, if you're going on to sale sites like that— yeah, don't do what I've done before, and I'm sure lots of people do, which is, I love one of them. Oh, what else? Oh, I love one of them. Oh yeah, 6 of them, very nice. Oh, what else is there? Wow, this is, this is great, there's loads of things. And you just, you spend like half an hour putting all the stuff in your basket, and then you go check out and they say no, it's all gone. So you need to be, you need to be smart. You need to find out what's good, stick it all in your basket, like 5,000 sheets of foundation, right? That's it, bang, check out, thank you very much, right? What's next? And then Langstroth foundation, okay, we'll have a few hundred sheets of that as well. So I did that, I got, I got my foundation, which I was very happy about, and then I went back and I thought, you know what, I, I could do with some, some new polyhives. I fancy some new kind of polyhives. And I was looking at the, um, the, the Payne's polyhives, so the full hives and a couple of supers. I thought, that's nice, I'll go for the standard national. And it was working out like £105 with the discount, which I thought, that's, that is pretty good for like a floor, a brood box, a queen excluder, 2 supers, and a roof. And then I was thinking, I wonder if there's any way we can get this a little bit cheaper. So what I saw on there, there was 40 Grade B supers that were for £18 each, but then with the 50% off, it was taking it down to £9 each. So I added, I added all of those on, and then I thought, well, I've got 40 supers, I might as well— I like 4 supers per hive, so I'll add on, um, 10 hives. But then I thought, actually, instead of adding 10 hives with 2 supers on, I'll just add the standard brood box, which was working out at like, I think, £60, £63. So then you add the 63 quid to the 18 quid and it took us to 81. So I got like some seriously cheap Payne's polyhives, which I know, I know is annoying because everyone else probably got the same thing, but I was, I was quite happy, quite happy with that. But it's horrible. How horrible is the Payne's thing? It is, it is a very sad day indeed because they, they were one of the good guys. They really were. Like, I know I've known them for a few years and obviously do a lot of business with them, and I don't have a single bad word to say about them. They've always been very accommodating to my request, like very accommodating. I buy all of the nucs without the solid roofs, and they just, they switch them out. Must take them absolutely ages switching out my roofs, and everything comes when it's supposed to come, and it's always in like tip-top condition. And it's very awkward for them to get the delivery trucks in there, and they just, they dealt with everything really, really well. Every time I met them and spoke to them face to face, they were really nice, and It's just a bit sad, isn't it? Another supplier gone, but hopefully the, the nuc and the, the poly hive will live on. I'm sure it will. Um, but I completely digressed. Sorry, Tim, that's not answered your question at all. So, uh, what, uh, frame— sorry, I use Langstroth frames. What size and make of nuc box would you recommend? So I would have recommended the, the Paynes one. Because the Payne's 8-frame slash 6-frame nuc was, was very, very good. I do like it. I've not had a huge amount of experience with other Langstroth boxes, I'm afraid, because since I moved over to Langstroth for a lot of my stuff, that's all, that's all I've ever used, and they were really, really good. So keep your ear to the ground and see if they start like creating more With the molds that are there, I'm sure. I'm pretty sure someone or a group of people will buy them. But I'm just trying to think. I don't. I don't think there are many other specific Langstraten nukes on the market. There's a few. There's a few hires. Like there's the Anel. There's the Technaset. There's the Lysen. There's a lot of hires, but there's not many nukes, which which I've not really thought about this properly. I don't think I have an alternative at all. I will think about that. I would definitely think about that. Hey up, Laurence, good, looking forward to this even though my back's killing me lifting supers and the off-brood super, waiting for the ibuprofen and alcohol to kick in. So I got told a very important lesson by Murray McGregor, which is you can never ever moan about lifting a heavy box of honey. So there we go, serves you right. But you'd be, you'd be moaning more if you didn't have heavy boxes to lift. There we go. But I, I will give you some sympathy as well, so I hope the alcohol and the ibuprofen kicks in because I know what it's like to have a bad back. Steve's Honeybee says good evening all. Good evening to you, Steve. How do you manage mite treatment for a colony you're taking to the heather for August and September flow versus taking supers off and treating mid-August? So it's, it's a challenge, and you do have to run the risk a little bit. There's not really a huge amount of options available to you anymore. So in, in the best case scenario, what I would say if I was doing heather on any reasonable level, and I've not taken my bees to the heather again this year, and I'm kicking myself a bit because I think in some places, as long as the heather wasn't damaged by the cold, I think there'll be a decent yield on the heather this year. But let's say going forward for next year, what would I do? How would I manage it? I would cage my queen in— I'd work out the dates to make sure that my bees were healthy for the heather and to not impact the flow. So probably be caging the queens like early June, early July, I would say. Probably go for early July and take the spring slash early summer crop off last week of June, something like that. I might, might even just combine it with the June gap. I'd have to work out roughly when I would do it, but I'd cage the queen at some point, take the honey off, put some more supers on after I'd supplemented with apibioxal, one single blast. That's probably going to be the easiest way of doing it and trying to merge that spring-summer heather crop and have like a gap in the middle where you've not got any supers and maybe go double brood at the same time as caging the queen and blasting with oxalic acid. You've just got to try and balance the bees having enough space in the box and not having supers on while you do it. And then if you can, if you can combine those all up, and there's, there'll be a relatively easy system to do that for heather colonies That— but the only problem is, is I don't like double brood on the heather. Double brood in the heather is the biggest waste of money in the world. You just lose so much, so much honey to the brood because of that time of the year. It's really annoying that we can't use oxalic acid with supers on because it would just fix the problem. I just say just blast them 5 times with oxalic acid with the supers on and we're good to go, but you're not allowed to do that. I wonder if you're allowed to blast bees with oxalic acid or apibioxal with supers on, but only with frames, wooden frames and foundation in them. So you could cage— you could take your honey off, take your spring/summer honey off, 3 supers, whatever, put another 3 supers on with just frames, wood and wax or drawn comb, but nothing in it, no honey. And then blast the whole hive with oxalic acid. I don't think you can do that, but it might be worth asking the question to the VMD to see if that's acceptable, because it says no supers on. But what does— what defines a super? Surely it means no contact with the honey. That's, that's what they're getting at, isn't it? So if you could say to them, well, it's not good, it's not going to come into contact with the honey because there's no honey on, because I've literally just taken it all off and then put my supers on with just empty frames. is that acceptable? Because if that's acceptable, that's a really— that would be a very viable way of getting them treated. And then the other options are spin-offs on that, on different treatments, so using Max or Formic Pro or whatever it's called now, but all of those require you to not have the supers on. So is it the same situation? Can you have boxes above the queen excluder that have just got empty frames in, or is that not allowed? I'm not 100% sure. Or you, you do a check, you check for varroa using like an alcohol wash, probably the best way of doing it, most accurate way of doing it. And you say, well, any colonies that are looking good and don't need treatment, they can go to the header, and any that aren't looking good can go somewhere else and I'll treat them. That could be a useful way of doing it. But I do think you— the bees at the end of the header really struggle. But they really start looking bad, especially if you're, if you're taking it to kind of like mid to end of September and you've not done any treatments at all. It just— you see the deterioration over winter, and then the next year they look shocking. They look really, really bad. So it's a very good, very valid question, and one that I don't have a perfect answer for, but there's a few options for you though. What's the earliest time next season when you have mated queens in stock? So probably First week of April, pretty, pretty consistent first week of April for us. Good evening, Adam. Hope you're well. John Sylvester says, "Hey, good evening to you and your family. Thank for the strong view for Queen arrived well on Friday and introduced." Good stuff. Good to hear, John. Stealth says, "Hi Lawrence, can you recommend any custom label suppliers or a label printer for next year? Had a nightmare this year finding someone who isn't just selling generic printed labels." So so so we use company called Printed Easy. Who are very, very good, and when you start ordering bigger numbers, very competitive. Like you get, you can get. It's funny because I'm just redesigning our labels. Say I'm doing it. I mean, I'm in the process of getting someone who knows what they're doing to redesign our labels, and I'm trying to work out a design that's not going to cost that much because it racks up like labels. But when you order in big quantities, I want to be able to get the economies of scale. So looking at like 10,000 labels, and it's coming out at like about. I've got like gold raised gold foils and expensive stuff, but if you've not got that, you can get them for about 6p a label. And then with the gold foils, they're coming out like 11p per label or something like that. But you do, you'll need your own artwork, but it's not difficult to do artwork nowadays. I would just say some of the custom label suppliers are shocking, like really, really bad. But, and I think you could probably design something loads better on Canva yourself. And Canva's great. Canva will let you put like the bleed marks on there as well, which is what, what they— what these companies need. They need like the bleed marks and the cutting lines, and you can put those on, on Canva. And Canva's free. So I would— I'd have a look at Printed Easy, and I would have a look at Canva and see if you can design something yourself. They're really good. I can't recommend any of the kind of like semi-bespoke ones because I've not used them, unfortunately. says, keeping bees with a smile in Amherst, Ohio. Very nice to see you, Richard. says, not seen many wasps this year so far, then all of a sudden lost 2 hives in a couple of days to wasp attacks, so all shut down for winter, supers removed. Some have, uh, you— some have desupered and some not. It's weird, isn't it? I've seen a lot more wasps knocking around, but I think in general It's been the quietest year for wasps ever. Absolutely battered. I think they got battered early or late in the spring when it went— when it dipped back cold again. I think a lot of queens would have emerged and then gone— either gone back into hibernation or were killed. And they're just— they're kind of sitting ducks in that scenario because insects, when they get cold, they become like really slow. And if you've got like migratory birds, they're just going to take them all out. So yeah, it's been a really nice year to not have to worry about wasps. And what I would say to people, if this is your first year and you're thinking, what's everyone going— what's everyone talking about wasps for? Wasps, there's like— I'm not even seeing a single wasp. Don't become complacent because wasps really can blitz your colonies, especially at this time of the year. But it has been— it's been nice to not have to worry too much about wasps this year. Cajun Homestead says hello from Louisiana. Hello to you too. Tony and Liz say evening everybody. Andrew Rogers says, I have 2 full 6-frame nucs. Is it okay to hive them up at this time of year? So it's, it's like 50/50, I would say, at this time of year. If you can keep them in the 6-frame, keep them in the 6-frame. They'll be better off in there. If they're really struggling for space, then I would hive them up and maybe think about like an insulated dummy board. I saw Thorn selling those recently, but you can, you can make yourself a very, a very cheap imitation insulated dummy board, and then a full frame, a full-size hive would be just as good for them. Channel member says, good evening, Lawrence. Setting up hives for overwinter, mesh floor, brood boxes, Ashworth feeder, roof. Do you recommend queen excluder between the brood and the feeder, or no queen excluder? I'm not, I'm not one for queen excluder. The only, the only reason that I would ever leave the queen excluder on there, I've got 2 reasons. One is that if you're using like a a Suyensi polyasphalte feeder and it's not got the lip, then you need like a lipped queen excluder to give you the bee space to make it work. Or I definitely wouldn't keep a lipped queen excluder on with the Abello one because then you end up with double brood space and the bees will just go wild in there. If you've just got like a thin plastic one or a thin wire one, I don't think it makes a massive difference whether you take it off keep it on. If I was in that situation, I'd keep it on because then it just, it's just something, something you don't need to clean. And anything that you can leave on a hive and not take off, brilliant. So I don't take off my queen excluders, I don't take off my polyashworth feeders, I don't take off the roof, I don't take off the floors. Like, everything just stays on that hive and then it's never going back to another hive, so there's no risk that I can ever spread any disease with that. So as long as it's not got a rim or needs a rim, I would say it doesn't, it doesn't make a massive difference. And if you wanted me to choose one way or another, I would say leave it on, just gives you that added security. Says all entrance reduction done to as small as possible. I think that's wise if the, if the wasps are going for them. Loves the channel. Thank you very much, very kind of you. Says if I start feeding hard for winter, will the bees know to leave enough room for laying eggs or just keep filling frames until no space left? If you take one thing away, and this is everyone, if you take one thing away from today's live chat, is the bees do not know when to leave themselves enough space. If you feed them hard now, they will just fill every single cell and your colony would dwindle away to nothing. You need to be really careful at this time of year. And I did, I did a channel member video talking specifically about this the other day, saying it what I've said previously might have been slightly misconstrued. So what I say is, middle of August, take all my honey off. Same day I put the queen— I put my Apivar strips in. Same day I put my polyashworth feeders on and I get ready to feed. And if they need a feed, I give them a feed at that point, but I definitely don't like all the way up to the rim. I'll give them like a litre if they need it. And then all I'm doing between middle of August and middle of October is waiting for the Apivar strips to work But every week I'll go and I'll just heft the hive, and if the hive doesn't feel like dangerously light, I just leave them to it. I leave— I kind of want a light hive at this time of year. I don't want a nice big heavy hive because a big heavy hive indicates that they've not got enough space to lay. So I just leave them to it constantly, constantly leaving them to it. And then come mid to back end of September, I'll start to give them like a little bit more feed, but I'll only feed them if they need it. And then from back end of September through to early October, depending on where you are in the country, maybe I'll start that like 15th to 20th of September, I start to feed more, move over to 2:1 feed, and then I'll give them like one big heavy feed and just let them go. And then they always take it down at that point as well with the polyashworth feeders. I take the metal dividers out, I take the plastic inserts out, I chuck loads of hay in, or straw, I always forget which one, the one that's not the grassy one, the drier one, you know, like the proper— I think it's straw. Chuck loads of that in and then just let the bees clamber all over that and they clear every last little bit of it out. and then the bees are ready for winter. So hopefully that's cleared that up. I don't religiously feed at this time of the year. I don't feed if they don't need feeding at this time of the year. I just leave them to it. If you feed them hard now, they will not have enough space to lay and you will have bee issues. Oh, we've done that one, done that one, John. People with their 2 comments, thanks, John. Right, Ben Davis says, hi Lawrence, hope you're well. To stop them bearding, would you recommend putting an empty super on and just keep on taking the wild comb off every time you inspect? So yeah, I think, I think I mentioned that on, uh, on an email to or WhatsApp, didn't I? So when I compress my bees down, you'll get lots of bearding outside the front, and I do it to try and coincide with good weather. Now generally, in the underfloor entrances, they've got like a little bit— you've got like a little bit of a buffer down there, so you'll see bearding in the entrance there. As long as they're out of the rain, I've not got an issue. But if you have a colony like bearding out onto the grass, there isn't— there's just not enough space on there. So you've got a couple of options. One is double brood. I just stick another brood box on. If they're really struggling that much for space, just stick another brood box on and let them have double brood for as long as you want over winter and then take it off in the spring. Or what you can do is put a queen excluder on and just put an empty super in there, and sometimes they'll just cluster up in it and they won't draw any wild comb at all. If they start drawing loads of wild comb in there, I would say there's just too many bees for a single brood box, and I'd reconsider. Just remove the wild comb and just Go back to double brood if they're really insistent on doing it. The other thing you can do is just put the queen excluder on and just take off the wild comb, but it's a bit messy, it's a bit risky, and I would say if you've got all of the bees there that want to draw comb and you're not feeding them, then they're almost generating a surplus, and you might as well take advantage of that by getting them to store it in a brood box or getting them to draw out some frames or getting them to do something with it. So let the bees tell you if they're they've got something to do, just get them on there. John says, mash up the likes and subscribe, it's free, people. Very good, thanks, John. Hello to Shannon. Hello to Ian. Good evening. No problem, I love doing the live streams. John did a Google review. If anyone's coming in late and you would like to give me a Google review, hopefully a positive one, it would be very much appreciated. Hi, Lawrence, how have you been getting on with the Paradise Honey Bee Box Smart System? Would you recommend buying one? So it's been good. I didn't get any honey from it. So I made— and it was my own fault— I made a split early on in the year, and then they— I got them back up to speed, and then they swarmed. And I had 2 Paradise Smart beehives. I had one that swarmed on me, which is always the risk on those kind of systems, is that they just go up and they just say, no, you're not going up there. So one of them decided to not go up there, and then one of them, the queen turned drone laying, so I had to replace the queen, and it really knocked the colony quite far back. So I had these 2 different scenarios that both ended up with no honey, and I always do this with my colonies when they're looking like that. I say, right, the focus here is on the colony. So I wanted to test those hives, I wanted to get some honey in there, I wanted to extract it, but the main thing is the health of that colony. So the colony that swarmed, they obviously got knocked right back. I left them single queen cell because it was an artificially inseminated queen in one of them, which was annoying, but it meant the queen cell would have been an F1. So they requeened naturally, which was good, and then the drone-laying queen I killed and replaced with an F1 Buckfast. So I've got 2 nice queens in there now, so next year will be the year to do that. But in terms of their management, they were fine. I had no issues with them at all. The boxes are nice. I can certainly recommend them in terms of nice boxes, but I've not had a chance to extract any honey out of them yet, but I am sure that they will work just as well as the Flow Hives. Peter says, hi Lawrence, shame about Payne's Hassocks, used to enjoy going there, but glad Roger is carrying on with the bees. He certainly is. So Roger, Roger will be carrying on doing what he does best. Glyn says, Lawrence, thank you for giving out the honey for sale slate signs, I got a few sales. Good, got a shout out as well. If anyone wants a honey for sale slate sign, give Glyn a shout. John Hayes says, hi Lawrence, so can I store my filtered honey in plastic tubs or is it better in stainless settling tanks? I'm keeping my apiary honey separate. Plastic tubs is fine. Good quality food-grade plastic in the correct temperature is fine, no problem. Hi Lawrence, got some supers that have not got too much honey. I'm planning on putting them under the brood with the queen excluder on top of the super so the bees can take the honey up. Is this a good idea? I'm guessing you say, yep, perfect. That's what I was going to say. Mem is also very happy about splodge. Loved it. When I was doing that video, I was thinking, Mem is gonna love this video. He is going to really be very, very happy about that. But it's, it's a nice story, isn't it, that one, that she continues to turn that colony around? That was a really shocking colony, that one, in terms of the, the drone brood that was in there. And not only has she turned it around, she continues to survive and thrive, which I'm very happy about. Hi Lawrence, what would you do with the queen that stopped laying? No eggs, larvae, brood, nothing. Gave a frame of eggs and fed, but no queen cells made, and queen just walking about in hive. So I'd have to look at the whole colony as a whole for that one. If you've got a colony that's not gone anywhere all year and is, is starting to dwindle, I'd be immediately killing the queen, putting a new queen in. If you've got a colony that had 4 supers of honey and is full to the brim with bees and the queen's just not laying for a few weeks, I would say that's perfectly normal at this time of year for the queen to, to have a little bit of a break, but it's not nice. You know, you want to see eggs, don't you? You want to see her kind of laying again. I would potentially get the feeder on and give them a light feed, see if that makes any difference. And then if she doesn't lay within a week or so, I would, I would think about getting a queen. But it's— this isn't a plug to sell queens. It's going to be difficult to get late season queens. Everyone is finishing early this year. Uh, we certainly are. Channel member said, had to euthanize a colony due to CBPV but caught a swarm from that hive. Is this hive swarmed also doomed? Not Not necessarily, but I would be keeping it, keeping a very close eye on it and keeping it well away from all of my other colonies. It's, uh, it's very infectious, CBPV. Hi Lawrence and fellow beekeepers. Hello to you too, David. Hi Lawrence, I've been in one of my nucs today and there was no sign of a queen. They are currently being treated with Apiguard. Can I requeen whilst treating them? So this is one of the reasons that I'm really not a fan of Apiguard. I'm genuinely surprised that it is like sold so excessively, and one of the reasons is it can kill queens. It's nowhere near as bad as Formic Pro, so formic acid, but I do find that Apiguard— queens go missing on Apiguard like occasionally, they do. It's pungent and you occasionally get cannibalized brood as well, and bees not knowing what's going on, especially if you get the temperature wrong with it. Can you requeen whilst treating them? So no, I wouldn't recommend requeening whilst treating with Apiguard for that exact reason as well, because pheromones are so important when it comes to requeening and the distribution of kind of the removal of the old pheromone and the distribution of the new pheromone. When you've got something as pungent as thymol in there, it just massively impacts that, and they can't— you can't spread that pheromone of the new queen around properly. So I would wait until you finish Um, it's not— I'm really not a fan, fan of Apiguard. Oh, I do know, I do appreciate it when people say to have a sip of tea. Thanks, thanks very much, Duncan. Oh, I do like a good herbal tea. Ben Davis says, have you thought about the Abello nuc, as that's what was used when I bought a nuc from Abello? So I love the Abello nuc. The Abello nuc is by far and away the best nuc on the market in terms of like how solid it is. It looks the best. It's got a really rock-solid plastic molded floor. I love the fact that it's modular. I love the fact that you've got brood boxes for it and supers. I like the fact that they've now got a good feeder for it as well, good polyashworth feeder that goes on it. But the problem that I have with the Abello is that there's no screen. So when you buy a nuc from Abello, you go and collect it. They don't send them through the post, and our business is based upon you know, getting the bees here and sending them through the post to customers. So I need something that's going to have that mesh screen on, but also not only just have the mesh screen on, but be able to send a feeder to the customers whilst having a mesh screen on. And to have those 2 things, there's only one nuc that satisfies both of those, and it is the Paynes nuc, because they have a frame feeder as opposed to a top feeder, and then they have a good ventilated travel screen. So it is a shame, but I'm sure, I'm sure there will be progress on that next year. Should I be okay making a split and immediately putting a caged queen in? Is the rest of the process same, e.g., 24 hours and pop tab, then wait 7 days? So I've done videos showing both of those processes. One where you, you make a split, wait 8 days, take down all the queen cells, and then put the queen in. Wait 24 hours, pop the tabs, leave it for 7 days. That's my preferred one. In an emergency situation, you can make a split, immediately put the queen in, wait 8 days, take down all of the cells, and then pop the tabs. That's, that's why you don't need to wait the extra 24 hours in that situation. As soon as you've taken down the emergency cells, you can pop the tabs. But that's not my preferred method. I think the other method is, is far superior. So unless you've got like a queen coming that you weren't aware of, like we allow people to order queens for a very specific date, and I would say order the queen to align with that process of making the split and then waiting 8 days, taking down the cells, and then have the queen arrive on the day that you take down the cells, or any like a few days after that. As long as it's after the 8th day, it's fine. Tony and Liz says, what do you do with any fermented honey? So we just chuck it out. Um, we're not wearing any use for it. You can make mead, make mead with it, be nice, but we don't, we don't do anything with it. Jack loves the whiteboard. I love the whiteboard. Brilliant. Hi Lawrence, I finally caught a live after missing the last 2 with day changes and no warnings. Sorry, I've been quite bad at giving people warnings and I'm just not able— pardon me— to fix a, fix a date. I can't say it's going to be Friday or Saturday or Sunday every single week because My life doesn't work like that, so we have to we have to change it up. I was saying to my I said to Helen, my wife, on the we were having dinner today that that Sunday's the worst day to do a live stream because I just you get the whole weekend and you get you get tired. Sunday's like the chill day, isn't it? It should be it should be the chill day after you've done all your work on the Sunday, but like Sunday evening should be a little bit more laid back and a little bit more relaxed. And I guess for I guess for everyone else it is, but it's just me. I've got to do the live streams. But it is, it's fine. I like doing the live streams. It is quite relaxing talking, talking about bees, what I like best. JSCFB says, why are some hives within same apiaries producing drastically different amounts of stored honey, more so than I've seen before, from some doing really well and some without any? Is it purely genetics? So I'd say yes, 2 things. I'd say one, like, genetics is huge. Genetics is the biggest one, and genetics kind of impacts the second thing that I would say, which is how has that colony fared throughout the year? So if you've— the thing that I learned very early on in beekeeping is in order to— this can sound so patronizing— in order to get lots of honey, you need lots of bees. And that's not lots of colonies in the apiary, I'm talking about a single colony here. In order to get lots of honey, you need lots of bees in that box, in that one hive. And if you can master that, you'll get lots of honey. so long as the genetics are right. And it, you know, the more bees that are in the box, the more honey you're able to get. Doesn't mean that you are going to get, but it means that if the flow conditions are correct, the more bees can take advantage of that. So the genetics plays a huge part in that in terms of, you know, like Buckfast or Italian bees are gonna, are gonna create loads more brood and have like peak numbers and rapid growth and build up in order to take advantage of those flows. But then the fact that they don't swarm anywhere near as much as, as like a local mongrel bee, and that's like, that's like a proven fact. Local mongrels are self-selecting themselves to be able to swarm because that's what, that's what bees do, that's how bees survive. Whereas like I said, Buckfast are being bred specifically to try and reduce the amount of swarming. It's not saying that they're not going to swarm, and any good colony will eventually swarm, but it takes a lot longer. I find with the Buckfast ones to swarm. So in a single apiary, the skill is trying to get all of those bees to the same point, same genetics, and ensuring that they're not swarming. And I've just found that the Demaray is the elixir, it's the silver bullet that really does work. It's not perfect, but it does give you a much higher chance of getting the majority of your colonies through to the point where you're going to have maximum amount of bees when you need it. And if you'd have done— if you'd have, in those cold snaps early on this year, if you'd have just fed and kind of like kept your bees alive and kept them going, and then when it started to warm up and the bees start to build up and you've got a brood box and like a couple of supers full of bees, even if there's no honey, if you did a couple of demarais there and got through that swarm period— and the swarm period did get pushed out to the right, it was delayed a little bit— but if you got through that and then just let your bees just crack on with it and kept on adding supers Some people this year would have had the best summer crop in like living memory, I think, would have been like— and we've had really good, really good summer crop. It's been excellent. Spring crop was— we didn't get a spring crop, it was zero. But after that, it's been, it's been very, very good. So it is, yeah, that's why you're seeing the differences. You might have had a colony that swarmed, and then if a colony swarms, it's going to get far less than the colony next door that's the same genetics that does swarm. And then if you've got some kind of local mongrels there, then they might not get as much honey as, say, an F1 Buckfast. And then if you've got like an F2 Buckfast there, it might be different again, and you might get more honey than the F1s. You just don't know kind of what they're being crossed with, but genetics will play a huge part in the, the amount of honey that your bees are storing away. Hopefully you've got a decent amount of honey though. How's it going? I'm not even going to try and pronounce it. I get it, I get it wrong every time. Graham Thomas says, hey Lawrence, hope the family is well. Looking forward to some warm sunny weather in the northwest this coming week to help boost colony stores. Be nice, just keep some ticking on. We like, we like good weather at this time of year. Uh, Michael Gill is out in Turkey watching. Hello in Turkey! I wish I was. I love Turkey, one of my favorite places, um, especially this time of year when all the fruit and like the, the figs and Oh yeah, everything's ripe and nice. Wow, I'm well jealous. Hello from Colorado. Hello. I have 2 nucs side by side on about 4 or 5 frames. One nuc is robbing the other even though both have been fed syrup. Best way to prevent this other than moving one of the nucs? So moving one of the nucs is definitely the best way to do it. Uh, second one, if you, if you recycle a bit, is, is probably feeding syrup that's, that's triggered it. So I would like— ask yourself, did you need to feed the syrup? Because feeding at this time of the year does trigger robbing. It is really bad, especially if you spill any of it. I've seen this happen before. I'm not sure that I would recommend it, but if you've got 2 that are robbing each other, what I've heard some people say is you just take the roof off both of them. Just take the roof off, and they just— they soon realize that they can't go out and rob because they have to defend. So then they all just kind of like retreat back to their own hives. It kind of resets it a little bit. It can also cause a massive robbing frenzy, so I'm not recommending that, but I'm saying that is— the textbook does say that you can do that, take the roof off both, and then they stop robbing. The other one is All you can really do is just close the entrances down to single bee space and just hope that it stops. You can potentially, if the weather's not too hot, close them in, so just close them in for 24 hours. But what will happen there is it'll just, it'll appear that it's stopping, and then all the bees that are in the wrong hive, when they go back out, they go back to the correct hive and then tell all their mates, yeah, it was great in there, and then the robbing starts back up again. So like you say, The best way to prevent it is just to move one of them, take it out the apiary, put it somewhere else, and then it will stop immediately. But give, give one of those a go. Says, hi all, tough year, hope everyone got some honey. I hope you did too. Says, looking forward to getting my nuc in 2025. Cheers, Lawrence. We're looking forward to sending it, Lee. If you've got any questions, give me a shout. Says, so what would you do with super frames that don't have enough to extract? Should I freeze them until next spring. So no, I, I don't— I'm not a fan of that. If they're not, if they're not good enough to extract, I would just nadir them, stick them under the brood box, get them cleaned out, and just get them all stored with no honey in them. Takes up valuable freezer space. Thomas Lindsay says, evening Lawrence, it's cell time at the end of my first season. What kit should I be looking out for for my second season? Assume bare minimum equipment so far, borrowed extraction stuff too. Oh, I like I like a question like this. So definitely stock up on frames— DN4s, SM4s. Get them in the sales, packs of 50, aiming like £30-ish for DN4s and then like a little bit less for SM4s. Get your foundation— um, so wait, wait to get your foundation because the foundation is never in the sales. So don't, don't kind of get that at a specific time. It's one of those things that when it gets cold, it breaks. So just wait until April for the foundation and put it in at the last minute. In terms of boxes, if you're going to go poly boxes, get them as soon as possible before the, the new year price increases come in, because the, the sales will start coming through now. You'll start to see good poly sales coming through, so I'd get them earlier. If you're going wood, go cedar seconds. Don't go pine. Don't go cedar seconds with pine locking bars. Just might as well just chuck the money on the fire to stay warm. Um, and then honey extractors— always oversize your honey extractor. So if you're looking, if you're looking to get one, just get the biggest one that you can get in the room or that you can afford. Try and get an electric one. The reason I say get the biggest one is obviously like you've got the future-proofing in there as well, but it just stops it wobbling around. The taller, narrower ones do, do shake quite a bit more. Whereas the wider ones got a little bit more ballast to them, they don't shake around as much. What else you looking for? Don't, yeah, don't go wild with honey extraction equipment, don't think that you need all the kind of fancy gizmos yet, no, there's plenty of time for that, but just keep it simple. Simple uncapping tray, good sharp knife, don't buy knives from beekeeping stores, just buy a nice sharp knife from Where's a good place to get knives from? And I like a really, like, really sharp bread knife. If you're just going to buy a knife, sharp bread knife, good uncapping tray, simple settling tank. I like a settling tank, and again, oversized settling tank. I like 200-liter is my, is my one with a sieve, premium one from Abello. And then a good extractor. And that's like, that's a really good— that is Richard's honey extraction setup. Okay, he's got, he's got like an ApiMelter in there as well, but you don't, you don't need a big heater if you're just doing it on a small scale. So put, put the money where the, the investment needs to be, as opposed to like spreading it further over bits that you don't necessarily need. So hopefully, there we go, hopefully that gives you a bit of a flavor of what's good. No problem. Says, planning to buy a few Abelo 12-frame hives, how would you run them Brood box plus traditional shallow supers or deep DM4 boxes to act as supers. So I've gone, I've gone full 180 on this. I always say, I always want to say a full 360, but then that just leads me in the same direction. I've done a full 180. I have— no, wait, I have done a full 360. Let me get it right. So, so I started off brood box with supers on. That's what I thought was best. And then I did a 180. And I said, right, I'm gonna save money here because the cost of buying deep brood boxes or brood boxes versus supers or shallows was negligible. The difference in frames was negligible. The foundation was probably like relative, but I just thought, well, I can lift the box, it's fine. So I did. I moved over to a lot and I bought loads of brood boxes and I run them for quite a few seasons, and then The issues that I had were it is heavier moving them around, but I was okay with that. I never moaned about a heavy box, but it was the blowing out the boxes that I found it was a bit more difficult, quite a lot more difficult than blowing out the supers, like the shallow boxes I should say, which for most people is not going to be an issue. But then the big one, I found I just don't find that the deep boxes extract quite as well. As the shallow ones. And I, I guess it's to do with their, like, position in the brood box. Like, the further away from the center they're getting, like, greater— is it centripetal or centrifugal? I always forget which one it is. Yeah, I know it's both. They cancel each other out, I think. But the force seems to be better. They seem to extract a lot better. You seem to— they come out way drier, I find, than the national deep ones were coming out. And then the final one was When you mix and match brood boxes, so when you, when you, when you run it like that, as long as you don't keep the boxes separate, you end up getting brood in your supers. So not like whilst you're running them as supers, but you'll end up using frames that have been used previously for brood as supers, which gives you a massive wax moth problem unless it's— unless you deal with it and you, and you know what you're doing. You'll just come back and all your frames a blitz by wax moth. And then I find once you've got brood in them, you can extract out of it, it's fine, there's no— it doesn't taint the honey, but it makes uncapping a lot more difficult and it makes extracting a lot more difficult, and it leaves behind more honey because it kind of like soaks into the cocoons. So I didn't foresee any of those issues when I was doing that 180, and now I'm— I complete the— I have completed the full 360, and I've gone back to running just national deep with shallow supers. So that would be my recommendation. Stick with the shallow supers for, for all of those reasons. Keep them separate, never have brood in them, extract out a lot better, blow out a lot better. I think that's a much more sensible solution. Uh, Justin Hill says, so love watching the videos, so want to start my own beehives. You should definitely do it, Justin. Good fun. It's interesting Justin's watching on Facebook because I've, I've been putting a lot more effort into Facebook, and people may have noticed at the moment. I've actually started— for channel members on YouTube, you can now be like a channel member on Facebook as well. So do the same over there. So I've uploaded all of my channel member exclusive videos over to Facebook as well. So it is, it's the same, basically like the VIP exclusive content level, which will become— once you get past this season, that, that's the place to be. You want to be on the VIP exclusive level so you get exclusive videos. At the moment, the early access level has been getting those videos, but that at the end of the season will finish. But that's what I was going to say. Yeah, so I've been putting a lot of effort into Facebook, and I put, I put a video on Facebook, uh, like 48 hours ago, and it got 1.6 million views in a day. I was just like, yes, I love it! I love it when a video goes like that. And then I thought, this is going to get— this is going to blow up, this is going to be huge. And then it just died, and it's died at 1.6 million again. I thought it was going to be the big one, but it was, uh, what, what I've worked, what I've worked out with Facebook, it's gonna sound really, really bad, and I'm a bit gutted that I didn't work this out before. And a good tip for anyone there is all of the algorithms work really, really differently. It's so strange, the different algorithms for, for like Facebook and Twitter and, or X, and Instagram and YouTube. And I've not worked any You know, I've not worked any of them out, but you just, you get to notice these different things. But what I've noticed on Facebook is everyone has an opinion on Facebook. Everyone has an opinion and everyone wants to say what their opinion is, which is fine. It's great and everyone loves an opinion. But the Facebook algorithm really rewards, um, that discussion. It loves the discussion. So if you— so the video that I posted was me Um, just, just basically just messing around with a heat gun on a frame of honey that I was gonna eat because it just came out of a nuc. So I was, I'm gonna eat this, but I'll play around with a heat gun and just, and just show people what you can do with uncapping a honey frame with a heat gun. Playing around with that, I thought this would be a cool video, but it's one of those videos which is you kind of sit on the fence a little bit. I don't say anything on it. I didn't say like, oh, this is a brilliant technique, you should use this technique. Or this is a rubbish technique. I have subsequently put something like that on the title because I wanted to make it clear that I'm not— I don't, I don't think it's a very good technique. But I posted that on Facebook just because I thought this is a cool video, and you get a lot of people who are like, that's a really good technique, I love using that technique, works great for dry cappings, not so good for wet cappings, but it saves so much time, means I don't have to process the wax that comes off, it's a much cleaner method, it doesn't impact the honey because it's only Melting the wax on top or heating up the gap underneath the the dry wax cappings that are there. So you've got all of these like really positive comments, and then you've got loads of people saying, "What are you doing?" Thumbs down. You're heating up the honey. You're losing all of the bacterial microbe benefit that's in the honey. This guy doesn't know what he's doing. But then when someone posts something positive, the negative guy jumps on them and says, "Oh, you're wrong. You're wrong." And then the positive guy says, "Well, I'm not wrong because that's that's what I've done." And then people just argue. Over this, this little kind of like perfectly innocent video just showing a process, and then Facebook algorithms are sitting there in the background just saying, "Yep, that's it. We'll just show that to loads of people because everyone's kicking off and having massive arguments about it." And I don't, I don't get back to the comments because I'm like, I'm, I've not got time to sit there and have arguments on Facebook. I've got, I've got plenty of other arguments to have, but I just, I find it not amusing. I just find it really interesting. How the dynamic of the different platforms works. Because we, we got quite a few followers on Twitter like early on, so we got up to like 5 or 6,000 followers within like, I don't know, within like a year. And that was about 3 years ago. And then since then we've gone backwards and we just can't get any more followers no matter what we do on Twitter. Nothing happens. Like we just, we just dwindle and we go away to nothing. And I've come to the conclusion is because I don't pay Twitter. So you have to pay them like £200 a year to have like your little tick and stuff. And then you look at any channel that's got the little tick and they're just like chipping away, still going up. And I'm thinking, paying you for social media, that's ridiculous. I'll just, I'll just dwindle. It's fine. Hence why we're not live on Twitter today, because I have to pay. I have to pay to be live on Twitter, and not many people watch it on Twitter. So I'll stop, I'll stop baffling, babbling on. About social media, but it was just interesting because I saw your Facebook badge there, Justine. I want to say BBs, BBs, we'll call you. Hi Lawrence, can queens successfully mate in September or is there a poor chance? So definitely the success rate of mating in September drops significantly, really does. Not to say that you can't get queens mated in September, but I wouldn't sell any queens that I had mated in September, because I think the percentage rate of the ones that are going to be good come spring is way, way lower than I could kind of honestly sell to anyone. So an individual queen maybe, but keep an eye on her. And Devon Honey and Candles says, so much can still go wrong with the well-mated queen. Very true. So did the rubbish early season weather have an impact on your honey harvest? Mine was rubbish, but when the weather picked up, the bees went mad as slightly made up for it. So yeah, exactly that, we've got zero honey. But what I said, and I said this to a lot of the channel members as well, is just keep yourself in the game. Don't let your bees die. Don't worry about contaminating your supers. Like, dead bees collect no honey. I know that sounds like really tacky, but it's true. Dead bees collect no honey. So contamination of supers is not an issue. If your bees are dead, and you can deal with contamination of supers like quite easily. So I think that what I suggested to a lot of people to do is just double brood. Like, if you have an early season cold snap like that, just— I'll get the whiteboard out— the easiest manipulation in the world. If you've got bees like this, and this is what a lot of people had, yeah, so you had your brood box like that with the roof on, and it was freezing, and it was cold, and it was miserable. But you had bees like bursting out of this box like that. And people were saying, I'm not even inspecting yet because it's just too cold, but the bees are responding to the length of the day. So what people did, what a lot of people did, is the first time they took that roof off, they just had a box full of dead bees because they hadn't gone in and checked and they hadn't fed them. And the bees, you know, the bees respond to the, the weather, but they respond to the daylight as well, the lengthening days. And they're just building up and building up and building up. And they just burnt through their stores. A lot of people lost bees early in the year from not, um, not feeding their bees. So if that happens again, keep on taking the lid off, seeing what the bees are like, hefting them. But the easiest thing to do is just brood box underneath, polyashworth feeder on top, and feed them syrup. And like, it was in a polyashworth feeder, they'll take syrup down when it's like 10 degrees, 11 degrees, so it's fine. Even if it's that they're not going to come out and fly, they'll take syrup down. And all they'll do is they'll just start building up here and they'll just come down, they'll just keep them going down. And like, you're mitigating that swarm impact because they're just building up. And then once you get to the point that you're happy, like if you don't want double brood, just split them. Just take that box, take it down there, and then just super often you've got, you've got 2 colonies and you've used that really poor weather period just turn your one colony into 2. Add a mated queen in at that point. Really, really easy way to do it. And that's, that's what I kind of recommended for a lot of people to do, is just keep yourself in the game, keep on going, keep on feeding, and the good times will come. And the good times, the good times did come because they always, they always generally do. You like, you don't get a year— very, very rare to get a year where you don't get any honey throughout the whole of the year. You've got the the early spring, you've got the kind of normal spring, you've got the summer, the late summer, you've got the heather. There's always a chance to get some, but you need some bees to be able to do it. I'm gonna have a sip of tea while I read this one. I like this question. So Ken Byon says, "Hi Lawrence, I want to become a beekeeper, but don't know whether I have enough time to be one. How long does it take to manage no more than six hives per week?" So. When I do my inspections, it takes me about 5 minutes per hive at the best. Like, that's the best it's ever going to be, and that's assuming that I don't find anything. That's assuming that there's no queen cells, there's nothing like that. If I've got all the equipment there and I come across like a swarm or like a colony that's swarming, it's probably going to take me another 5 minutes, so maybe 10 minutes. So looking at— so for argument's sake, let's call it 10 minutes. Per hive per week, so it's an hour. So for 6 hives, it's an hour per week. But I've like kind of got that pretty much nailed down. I would say for someone who's doing it in their first year, you're probably looking at like 20 minutes per hive, something like that, as like a realistic— you'll do some inspections in 5 minutes, you do some inspections in 10 minutes, but if you put aside 20 minutes per hive per week That's going to be— you'll be absolutely fine. And that's only from like April through to August. After that, it becomes like loads easier. Um, but, but that's— it's never going to be like that. Everyone knows beekeeping, it, it grows arms and legs and gets a bit out of control. But it depends how kind of strong, or how strong your character is, and, and how much you let it get the better of you. Because a lot of beekeepers, that's all they ever think about, that's all they ever talk about. and it just becomes quite an interesting hobby, a time-consuming hobby it does, but it's fun and we like it, we love it. So no more than 2 hours per week and you'll get it down to about an hour per week, I would say, for 6 hives. Hi Lawrence, new beekeeper here. Sorry if I pronounce your name wrong. How much do you recommend trickle feeding a single brood colony after taking the supers off? In Scotland, the weather is still shocking, so they're not getting much forage-wise. So I would just— I'd give them a liter, 1:1 at this time of year. You can give them 2:1, but don't— I just want 1:1 is fine. And just give them a liter and see what they do with it, see if they take it down. At first you might give them a liter, they might not do anything with it. And then I'd go back again a few days later, see what they've done, and then maybe give them another liter. And then the whole time I'd be hefting, I'd just be like tilting the hive forward and seeing like, is it, is it putting on weight? And you could, you could get like a hive strap if you can lift it up and see if they are actually putting on weight. And the, the art in late season feeding and trickle feeding is, is just giving them just the absolute minimum, the bare minimum to keep them alive, and then heavy feeding, moving over to 2:1 towards the kind of, I'd say, mid to end of September. But for you, probably any time from early, early, maybe like the first or second week of September. If it's— if the weather up there is not that good, you might want to get them ready a little bit earlier than that. But as long as they're taking down syrup, it's going well. But just don't overdo it, and don't be afraid to have a quick kind of like look inside the colony. Be really careful, and don't— I don't like people taking out frames at this time of the year, but sometimes you need to have a look and you need to see, have you got 10 frames of brood, or have you got 10 frames of stores? And if you've got Either you probably need to be fixing it and taking a look inside. So don't be, don't be too scared. I also love that you're, you're on Twitch as well because nobody watches on Twitch. This is like your own personal live stream on Twitch. Brilliant. Marcus says, what's the point of a settling tank and does a hobby beekeeper need one? If the answer is yes, how would I get around it by not paying loads of money for one? So you probably can't get around it by not paying loads of money for one because, uh, sometimes you just got— sometimes you just gotta pay the money. But settling tank is like— you hear a lot of people talking about like different sieves and different micron filters and cloths and straining cloths and all that, and I just think, why are you messing around with all that? Just get one big tank, settling tank, one big sieve, really like big micron. I think the one that I've got is like 700 or 800 microns, so like that is big micron just to get the, the big solid bits of wax and the legs and anything, any bits of bees and stuff. You put all the honey in and you just leave it 48 hours, and basically all of the sediment, all of the tiny little flakes of wax, all of the froth, all of the stuff that you don't want in your jar just rises up to the top. And then you just get a big bit of cling film, put that on, lift the cling film off, all of the scum comes off, and you're just left with perfectly clear Clarified honey, and then you can just jar directly out of your settling tank. So it's just a really, really easy way of settling, of storing your honey, jarring your honey, and not having to mess around with all of these filter cloths. Because it's just— I've just got no time for filtering honey like that to try and get through different micron ratings and stuff, where a settling tank just does it all with no fuss. Just takes a little bit of time to leave it in there to settle. I love my settling tanks. Brilliant. John Hayes says, "Do you know if how I can fit castellated runners onto a Suenti?" So it's it's quite an easy fit on the Suenti actually because the the Suenti I'll draw it for you, John. Here we go. So how does it work? So the Suenti has got that weird little nub like that. So that's like the outer wall, and then you have the runners. that kind of like push in like that. That's it. And then you've got the frame that sits there. Um, so, so all you do if you want to put castellations in there— and I've run castellations in Suyensi— is you just slot them in there, just put it in, just like rest it in, and it just sits in. It's fine. It's like the, the best polyhive for putting castellations is, is the Suyensi because it works really, really well. I know some other people as well that have turned it from a bottom B space to a top B space. And what they do with that L-shaped runner is they take the L-shaped runner out and then they cut notches out of it like that. So you can't do it whilst keeping it bottom B space. I've done the wrong bit out there, but you, you get the, you get the idea. You kind of like turn the actual integrated runner that pops out into a spacer, but into a castellated spacer. But it only works if you convert it to a top B space. But the other way of doing it is, because, because this, this thing here is effectively just a little L piece of plastic, is you go to a, um, I don't know, like a hardware store or something, you just get some L-shaped plastic that's like a little bit higher like that, and then you could, you could just cut your own castellations in there. But it's a bit tedious. I would just slot them in, loads easier. But some people like to, to play around with it a little bit. But it is, it is a good one. I, I'd like to see the Abello hive have that somehow because the way theirs are molded, there's no, there's no way that you can slot them in. But if you just put a groove in there so you could slot castellations in, I think that would be a very neat upgrade. Looking forward to receiving my Black Mountain Honey Queen at the end of the week and nuc in 2025. Again, John, we're looking forward to sending them. Any questions, give me a shout. Scout About says, if we had a drone-laying queen in the summer, should we replace the frames now we have larger amounts of drone brood, or the bees sort it out? So I used to say take them out, and then I do think the bees sort them out now. I'm, I'm convinced that given time, the bees will sort them out. What I would say though is, if a colony's gone too far drone-laying, sometimes it's easier to just start again. And I think that's maybe where I confused it a little bit in the past. If you've got a big strong colony, loads of bees, loads of like young, reasonable, reasonably young bees, but a queen that's drone laying, just kill the queen, replace her, and just let them get on with it. If you've got a colony that's too far gone, that channel members will know very well about, the one that I put on there the other day, then just either close them in, which I did, or shake them out and then just Recycle the wax, melt it all down, and start again. Let's say that's the way to do it. Uh, Cup Rider says, shouldn't wish your life away, but I was feeling down today knowing the nights are drawing in and it's ages till March. What will we all do? Grim, innit? But I've begun to love— I, I really don't like the short days. I, I struggle. No, not like struggle, but I love the long days. I just love being able to like get outside and get stuff done. But since, since, since the business has taken off the way it has, I do, I do quite enjoy winter a lot more than I did. To have a bit of time off and chill out a little bit and go away, because I can't, I can't go away in the summer. I've got, like, like Paul, where, you know, Cape Verde, Morocco last week, you're just jet-setting, and I'm here just selling queens. But I can't go away because the queens come in every single week. There's no— I don't have any weeks off, and there's need to be there to like tend to the queens and take the deliveries and send stuff out, talk to customers. But come, come the end of the year, I can go away. So I, I quite look forward to it now. It's given me a whole new lease of life, and I do, I do enjoy it. Hello, well done on all the lives you have done this season. Really value these. If you were to store full supers over the winter, how best to store them? Heated room, dehumidifier? Many, many thanks. Oh, I think I'd probably try and convince you any way to not store a full super. I'd say, why would you ever want to do that? I'm just— if there's decent honey in there and it's all capped out, it's all capped, I would say that the value of that is getting that honey out of the supers into the buckets. So I would recommend doing that. If I just, I can't, I wouldn't store them. I don't think there's any reason to store them, and if you're thinking I'm going to store them to then feed them back to the bees, again I'd say just don't, just get the honey in the buckets and sell the honey and feed the bees sugar. I think that was, I think the bees would do better on that and it would save you all that issue. You're going to degrade the honey very, very quickly, like you're saying there, heated room, dehumidifier, So what will happen to the honey is it will start to granulate in the frames and then you can't get it out. So you're kind of preempting that by saying the heated room. Keeping the honey heated at that level to keep it liquid is going to raise the HMF through the roof, which is essentially going to turn your honey toxic and you won't be able to sell it because there are like legal limits on HMF as well. The dehumidifier, I wouldn't worry about. I don't— I think the moisture content of the honey, if it's capped over, will be at the correct level. So as long as your room isn't gathering moisture from somewhere else, it should be fine. Honey is hygroscopic though, so it will, it will attract moisture in. So you're right to think dehumidifier, because even just the natural humidity in the room will be drawn to the honey, and then it will start settling on it and it will start going a little bit. I'm really interested to know why you want to keep them. Maybe, maybe put it on there. And I can reevaluate my answer if I know why you want to keep full supers, but I would recommend to not, not keep full supers. Hi Lawrence, as I already told you, the queens arrived fine, but today I think those nucs are being raided. Found grubs outside. What can I do please? Queens arrived on Friday. Um, I would cage up the queens, get the queens in there, cage the queens, get them back in the cages, close the cages up, put everything back together again in the other colonies. Give them a day or so, leave the queens— you can leave the queens in like the supers if you've got supers still on, or you could probably just leave the queens in with another queen, or cage the other queen in the donor colony and then make fresh splits and take them to a new site. I always say to be new sites, moving splits to a new apiary site just fixes all of these problems. doing it in the same apiary is— it can be challenging. So if they're doing that and they're cannibalizing it and chucking stuff out and there's not enough bees and they're being raided, hopefully it's recoverable. Hopefully the queens are still there. But you can definitely do it if there's that amount of bees, as you said, big strong colonies. But you just— I wouldn't do it in the same apiary if you're having issues like that. Hi Lawrence, how do you use the InstaVap with the underfloor entrance? Do you drill a hole in the brood box. So you can drill a hole in the brood box, that's a good way of doing it. Or if you've got the Abello box, you can take the plug out. Or what I, what I do with mine is I just have like an eke, and then I just, I take the roof off, put the eke on, and then just go in from the top. I find blasting with oxalic acid or apiaproxyl works a lot better from the top because at the bottom you'll get stuff going out. So unless you put a board in to trap it, you'll lose a, you'll lose a lot through leaking through the the mesh floor. But if you're going from the top, you've not got to block the mesh floor because it kind of just goes and penetrates through all the bees before it goes out. So that's the way, that's the way that I like to do it. Lindsay was annoyed that he couldn't get any wide brood foundation. I am, I am sorry. I'm sure you would have done the same if there was 5,000 sheets of brood foundation there at 60p a sheet. Sorry, Tom. Got 20 nucs in the sale. Very good. Says, so that's why I couldn't buy any Payne's nucs. Thanks, Lauren. So, so I did, so I did have every single nuc, oh, not, not in my basket, but that, that was what I said it was. It was going to cost me 68 grand and it was going to be 56 pallets worth of nucs. And I think it was about, I think it was like 2,200 nucs. Um, but, but then I realized that the mold was going to live on through it one way or another. So I thought, well, I don't really need all of these nukes. Like, I'm buying them just to secure, obviously, a good deal. You get trade price on nukes as well, so it wasn't like, you know, 50% off wasn't like 50% off what you normally pay, but it was a fair bit cheaper. But then once I knew that, I thought, I'm not buying all of that. I'm not I've not got anywhere for 56 pallets. So, uh, so we, we reduced, we reduced the order, cut it in half. Um, Steve's Honeybee says, are you going to the beekeeping show next Feb in Telford? Not sure, not sure yet. I'm not 100% what I'm going to be doing for that. Uh, Chrissy says, hey, hey, I'm at work but I have an earbud in having a cheeky listen. Hi, Chrissy. Chester says, hi Lawrence, I bought a queen a couple of weeks back from you. Today I noticed the bees are trying to supersede her for the second inspection running even though she is laying. Should I leave them be? So no. So whenever you get, when they try and supersede kind of early on into an introduction like that, it's just, it's the genetics of the bees that you've got versus the genetics of the bees that are, the queen that's being introduced, and they're just like, no, we don't like that queen. It's not, there's nothing wrong with the queen, like you said, she's laying right, so I always take them down. Always take superseder cells down when they're during the introduction until you get to the point where the queen, um, the introduced queen is laying some of her own brood, and then they stop doing it. So yeah, take it down. Howdy, howdy everyone, good to see you doing this, Lawrence. Hi Bruce, hope you're well. Good to see you, good to hear from you. Hope all is good over on the other side of the pond. I did not know about pains, that sucks. It certainly sucks. Uh, Cub Rider says, shame about Pains, but we still got Temu. Yeah, I know. Has anyone got anything good from any— anywhere like that, like Wish or Temu? I don't. I never trust it. I always think it's like, oh well, you can buy this for a pound, and then it gets here and it's like 50 quid, and you just think, oh man, suck it in again. David, thank you very much. Says, do you know why Pains went out of business. Yep, I do know why Pains went out of business. I can't— I'm not gonna say though. It's not— yeah, sorry about that. Uh, Devon Honey and Candle says Mazemore might do a Langs. Oh, that's, that's true, they might do. Probably about £100 though. I can't believe how expensive Mazemore poly kit is. I had loads of Mazemore poly kit when it was like £20 a nuke, and, um, it's, it's like £100 a nuke now for national stuff. It's, it's bonkers. I don't know how they sell any of it. John Jackson says, it's like a plug, how do I, how do I become a channel member? If I get my words out. So if you go on to the Black Mountain Honey homepage on YouTube, next to the subscribe button there is a button that says join, and if you click there you can become a channel member. Uh, Julian says, sorry, lava, not grubs, laugh out loud. So gutted, was looking forward to these nucs working. Queens are still caged. Okay, if the queens are still caged, like I said, put it all back together again and beg someone to let you have an Out aprary, you should be good. Oh wow! The the chat comments are way behind where I am. Chrissy saying OA plus supers—that would be great. That was that was a long time ago, but it would be great. Damir says, "Hi Lawrence, it was great to meet you at the Abello. Pizza was great. I just wanted to say thank you as I learned so much from you this year as a newbie beekeeper. Sixty-five kilograms of honey later, I'm looking forward for next year. Good God bless. Thank you very much. I'm glad you I'm glad you enjoyed the pizza." Sponsored by Abello, I might add. Abello did pay for all of the pizzas. It wasn't me paying for the pizzas. So if you had a nice pizza, tag Abello in a post and say thank you because it was Damien and all of the team at Abello that paid for your pizzas. BB says, now that Pains have stopped selling their nukes, what nuke will you use going forward? So we've for all of 2025, it will still be Pains nukes. For all of 2026, it will all be Pains nukes. So I've got like. 2 years in the bank, and then we will have an— we'll have an option for 2027. So if someone's still using the Payne's mold, we'll just— we'll just buy from whoever's using that Payne's mold. And if they're not, then we'll have to work out something else because there's not currently anything else on the market that is going to suit our requirements. So we will have to explore that avenue. John Hayes says— John, he didn't say that. John H is national to Langstroth. Yeah, John, sorry, John Hayes, national to Langstroth 3D printed converter. Anyone know if he's selling them or how to get hold of him? Sent a message via Messenger but haven't had a reply. So other than he, he posted a link on there and he's probably sold out, but he does do, he does do different 3D things. They're pretty cool. Good evening, thanks for the quick replies today, Lawrence. I wasn't expecting to get a reply until Tuesday at the earliest. That's no problem, Lynette. Sorry I couldn't have been more help, but like I say, if that happens again, give me a shout straight away, we'll sort things out. Lawrence, I love the videos with your daughter. The way you listen and talk to her and allow her to be so hands-on is just brilliant. Thank you. All I can hear in the background— oh, um, the wasps. Uh, the, the— if the wasps come in, the bees will try and come and kill the wasps. And it's like, good, good fact, good fact there, Ivy. I love it. She, she's learned a very important part of sales early on, that the truth does not matter, it is the way you say it. And she just babbles on in her own very cute little Ivy way. But yeah, I, I love doing the videos with her. She is very funny and she really, really enjoys them. She really does. And she's constantly saying, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad. Can we, can we go and do this? Maybe we go and do this. You just think, yeah, let's do it, whatever you want, my dear. Your channel is the best on YouTube. There are very few, if any at all, across all subjects who answer every question. Much appreciated by, by all who comment on here. Thank you for the live streams. It's my pleasure, David, it really is. I, I know this is the last one, uh, before I move over to doing them kind of once a month, but I, I feel it is the least I can do I've had such amazing support from everybody, you know, everybody who watches my videos and everybody who buys the queens and buys the honey and buys the nucs and, and just comes on here and listens to me talking away. Like, I, I appreciate the support so much that it is the very least that I can do coming in and answering people's questions as best as I possibly can. I will caveat it with saying I'm, I'm probably not the most experienced or the most qualified to answer a lot of the questions, but I will, I will do the very best that I can. David also says, my partner and I love your videos with Ivy. When is the next plan? So it is planned for this week. So we've got the last batch of queens coming in on Thursday, and the next video is her choosing the queen for her nuc. Um, but I was going to say something there, but I think, I think she's in the room next door. But she's going to choose her own queen for the nuc, and then we'll introduce the queen into her nuc and then get it ready for winter, and she is well excited. So it was you that stripped my Payne's basket of wide brood foundation. I'm sending your Xmas present card to Griff now. Sorry, sorry, Mick. Yeah, I think, I think unless you— yeah, unless it was like 7 o'clock on Friday night, I did get in there pretty quick. But you, you were probably there doing the thing that I said you definitely can't do, which is— I love that, I love that, I love that— you just need to go bang, the one you want, and clear the checkout. I'm sitting here smug. I have had the order confirmed by Payne's but they're probably not going to send it all, are they? I, I dread to think how overwhelmed they are with putting, putting a sale like that on, because there was, there were some big numbers of things on there. There's like hundreds of, of nucs, thousands of nucs, and thousands of polyhives. They're going to have a very, very busy couple of weeks, I think. Good evening, Lawrence. We have 2 Payne's nucs which originally housed Black Mountain honey colonies. Do you know if any company do supers which we can use with the Pains nucs. Just bought 2 X as we can add feeders. So I, I do, I do know a company, they've gone out of business, um, last week, which, uh, means that you're not gonna be able to get any supers for them anymore. What I would say though is I just keep them for nucs. Like, they're really handy as, as nucs. Just keep them as nucs, and, and when you need to make a split, make a split into there, keep it as a nuc, and then upgrade them as necessary. and then keep the supers for the hives. It's probably the best way forward. Uh, sorry, Julia, sorry, but it's recoverable if the queens are still alive in the cages. It is recoverable. Definitely loads of wasps appeared this week. I saw one sitting on a table near my hive, looked like it was eating a bee. I didn't realize they ate bees. I thought they just robbed the hives. They eat anything, wasps. They really do. They kind of have like different feeding periods. So early on in the year, they're going for protein to kind of build the nest. So you'll see them, they'll go for flies, they'll go for bees, they'll eat basically anything that's got protein in it they can get. They like raw chicken and stuff like that. So they do a lot of— wasps are really important, like they play a massive, massive role in our ecosystem. Without wasps, we'd be in big, big trouble. But they do a lot of cleanup. So like rotting bodies and carcasses and stuff, they'll I'd say bodies, you know, not human bodies, like animal bodies. They'll eat the protein, and then it switches over when the nest dies down and they start sending the queens out. They switch over to sweet feeding. So then they'll go in and just— they're basically just, um, looking to survive. Then it's every wasp for himself or herself. So they're just looking for sweet stuff to keep them going because it's loaded full of carbs, which we, which we all like to do. Paula says, hi Lawrence, now that the honey season is coming to an end, over the winter I want to make candles with the beeswax. Any tips please? It's my first time. So this will be one that I definitely cannot answer with any conviction at all because I've really never made any candles. Go— this I will, I will defer to Griff's channel here, and you need to speak to Angrad. Say that the best Welsh accent that I can, butchering it, but she's really good at making candles. I will. That's that's something that that me and Ivy can get into. We can have a go at making some candles. She she would she would like that. So maybe I'll get some candle molds. I can recommend some molds. I know I know the Abello molds very very good. And speak to speak to Carrie there. She knows Carrie at Abello everything there is to know about all the candle molds there. So they're very very good. But I can't I can't give you any tips. I'm afraid I would watch I would watch Griff's videos on it though because he does a lot of candles makes huge amount of candles. So there we go. That's I hate I hate a cop out answer like that, but I won't. I'm not gonna kind of completely bullshit. Sorry, I shouldn't swear. David says we have a fake wasp's nest hanging near our hives. Wasps are very territorial and will not set up home near to where a wasp's nest already exists. They're very cheap and seem to work. Cool. I've seen I've seen people do that. It'd be if this year is the first year you've put them up. Then let's, let's see how they work next year. I, I, I think you are right though. I do see a lot of people putting them up, and I think it would put off a wasp's nest from setting up if they, if they saw it there. I think the logic holds true. Can you explain how you feed fondant to the Abelo 6-frame nucs or the 11-frame hives with the standard crown boards? Does the fondant go above the crown boards? So depends which iteration of the crown boards you have. They used to have like 5 feeding holes, but now they just have the one feeding hole. So if it's the one with just the one feeding hole, it's just— it is as simple as that. Just, you need to have some space above the crown board, so you can have like an empty super or something on there. Or if you've got the roof that's got the space in it, you can do that as well. And then just put the fondant directly over the hole. You can, you can decant it if you want into like plastic takeaway tubs and then put that over the hole. That's quite a neat way of doing it, seeing people doing that. Or if you're buying pre-packaged fondant, just cut a square out, just place it directly over the hole. That's kind of the easiest way of doing it. Uh, Thomas Lindsay says, wondering, do you recommend painting the inside of the polyashtral feeder? So yep, 100%. If you don't paint it, the syrup leaches in, and then once it leaches in, it just goes moldy and you can never get the mold out. So you need to paint it with either exterior-grade masonry paint or exterior-grade, like, gloss Make sure they're both exterior grade though, because otherwise it will all start coming off when you put your syrup in there. And if you want me to pick which one, I'd go with exterior grade masonry paint is the best for that one. Simon Collins— Simon Collins, sorry— says, hi Lawrence, is it a good idea to combine a drone laying worker hive with a queen right hive? So I know I hate, I hate drone layers, absolutely hate drone layers, or laying workers, whatever ones you want to call it. So no, I wouldn't combine it. And a lot of the time when you've got a laying worker hive, you need to stand back and say, what is the value in that hive? What is it? What is the value in the hive? Because there's no brood in there, so you've already lost a lot of the value. There's no queen in there, so there's no— can't take the queen out. The bees that are in there, because they've turned laying worker, very old bees, like they're 6 to 8 weeks old probably. You might have a few that are 4 weeks old, but the majority of them are very, very old bees. So what you've got in that box there is just a box full of old bees that are probably going to be dead in 3 weeks. So is it worth risking combining that with a perfectly queen-right good colony for the sake of what? Like, what benefit do you get? You don't get all the brood that emerges. All that you get is risk, and I don't like taking risk at this point in the year. So all I would do is I just shake them out. And I know I've had issues shaking them out, so if you don't want to shake them out, I would close them in and you'll honestly end up with a better— that sounds horrible, I know, just closing them in and they're all going to die, but they're all going to be dead in 3 weeks anyway because they're very, very old bees. So you're not— all you're doing is just losing 3 weeks and you're not getting any benefit from it. So if that was in my apiary, that's what I would be doing. I'd be closing them in. Uh, Landon Epting says, hi Lawrence, is it okay to overwinter bees in a Pro Nuc plastic nuc? So in the UK, we don't, we don't really have those in the UK, so, but I've seen them. They're kind of shaped a bit like that, aren't they? Uh, and, and they're made of plastic, and I'm not sure if they've got any insulation in them in between the plastic like, like we have over here. We have like the plastic coating with a polyurethane insulation in the middle. I would say if there's insulation in the middle, like a polyurethane or other insulation in the middle, then it should be fine. Depending on where you are. If not, I would get them into something that's a little bit more insulated. But the benefit of nucs, poly nucs, sorry, for us is they just, they do so much better over winter. Like a poly nuc versus a wooden nuc, you pretty much double the success rate of getting the bees through the winter just because they can maintain their temperature so much better. They can keep the brood going for much longer, which means they come through a lot stronger. So I'm not sure with that one. I've not had any experience with it, with the Pro Nuc or the plastic nuc, as to how well insulated they are. So I would— that's, that's what I would be checking and challenging to see if they are actually insulated or not. Let's grab some water. Here we go. How are we doing? Would you use wasp traps, i.e., jam water in a jam jar? My thoughts are if you put them close to hives, you're only Encouraging wasps with the area of the hives. What's your thoughts? So my mantra when it comes to wasps are wasps are good. Wasps are good. I don't want to kill wasps. I don't, I don't like the idea of killing wasps. I think wasps are the good guys. If you manage your bees correctly and you have big strong colonies of bees and you are sensible with feeding. And you are sensible with your entrances and you reduce your entrances down at the right time of the year, wasps aren't a problem to bees. I think they're not a problem. Keep your colony strong, keep the entrances the right size, and don't spill any syrup, and you won't lose any colonies to wasps. And then you've not got to— you've not got to put the traps up. But I agree, putting them up does attract wasps to the apiary as well. But I'm not a fan. I will caveat that though by saying if I've got a colony that's getting absolutely blitzed by wasps, I will remove the hive from the location and put a really effective wasp trap in place and kill all the wasps. Do you know, like, it's a— I wouldn't preemptively kill wasps, I wouldn't plan to kill wasps as like a management strategy, but I would reactively kill the wasps if they were killing my bees or they were attacking my bees. So I'd prepare for the worst, but I wouldn't kind of— I wouldn't be the one to fire first. There we go. Glenn says hello from Melbourne, Australia. Bruce's Bees, very kind, £9.99 or $9.99. Very kind of you, Bruce. Thank you. For anyone who's wondering who Bruce is, Bruce's Bees, brilliant YouTube channel, great YouTuber, and puts an incredible amount of time into Creating and editing brilliant videos. So if you've not, if you've not subscribed already, go have a look at Bruce's videos. Very good. And I had a great chat with him at the North American Honeybee Expo about his favorite team, which I've forgotten, but I remember it's a red hat with an A on. And oh yeah, no, it's a, it's a, I can't remember who it is. College football though, isn't it? So it's not, it's not like, not Premier League. I'm sorry, butchering all of the American sports. organizations out there. It's not the NFL, but it's like college football in it. 120,000 people at the stadium. I want to say like the Atomites. It's not the Atomites, that's probably from Springfield, from South— ah right, I'm getting— I mean The Simpsons. It's from The Simpsons, right? Sorry Bruce, I'll stop offending all Americans. Is invert much more benefit than normal 2:1? Can we get away with 2:1 with hive alive for our last winter feeds? So simple answer, definitely 2 to 1 with Hive Alive. Brilliant last winter feed. Ed Butler, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, what item of equipment would you use to melt down used frames for a semi-commercial sized operation? Was thinking Melleflow or steamer. Want to use the wax afterwards for candles. So yeah, I'd go with— I'd go with the Melleflow. If you're going to go with the Melleflow from Lyson, get the— get the best one. get like— they do like a stainless premium plus version, and I'm well jealous because I properly want it. It's loads better than my one. It's just, it's just, it's a nicer material, it's thicker and stuff, but it's got like gas-powered struts on the, the lid, and it's just, oh, it's so much better than my one. But also what I would say, if you want to, if you want to use the wax for candles afterwards, you'll probably need like a clarifier as well. So what comes out of the Happy Melter is, it's fine, like, but it needs further processing. you can't use it directly for candles, so get like a clarifier, which is just like a big heating bucket that taps out the wax kind of halfway up and it comes out like super clean. My honey has started to go very thick in the jars. I think it's because of the cold. What would you recommend I do, or is it not a problem? So I don't think it's a problem. Thick in the jar is nice. Good. Went from 7 colonies to 15 this season, lost 2 in the last couple of weeks. Plan for next year is 20 to 25 colonies. Love it, love a good plan. Be 40, I reckon, by the time you get to this time next year, Steve. Oh, we did that one there. Uh, David says, one of my colonies has become very aggressive. I took 4 stings. As I won't be doing weekly checks, I've decided that I will requeen next year. Would that be okay, or would you recommend doing it now? Now that is a brilliant question, and you can, you can take this as honest advice here because I was sold out of queens for of the year. Do it now. Definitely do it now. We might have queens, we might have one more week of queens, but the reason I say to do it now is that if you know the colony is aggressive and you want to requeen it next year, if you go in now, you get a couple of stings, you kill the queen, you replace her, and then you just be like, right, leave that colony alone. When you come back into April next year and you want to start managing that colony again, colony again, every single bee in that colony will be a daughter of the new queen. Whereas if you do nothing now, every single bee in that colony will be a daughter of the aggressive queen, and then it takes months for you to be able to kind of like see that benefit next year. So say you did it middle of April, like end of June you're still going to have remnants of the, the original bees in that colony, maybe like the very last dregs, but it just, it wipes out the spring. So I would do it, always do it now. David Pescott says, what do you think of apistan for treatment? So apistan worked for ages, but it's— they have shown signs— mites have shown signs of resistance to it. So it will work, and if you've not used it before, I would say use it for a season, that's fine. But definitely don't use it repeatedly because it is proven that mites will become resistant to it. Vera Giles, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, have you ever made mead? And if so, is it much a faff. More importantly, is it drinkable? So I have made mead. It was not a faff at all. Like, it's just you get like a demijohn that you— demijohns are the kind of thing, if you go on like Facebook Marketplace, you can pick them up dead cheap or for free. And then you get like a little airlock thing, like a rubber bung. And all you do is you just, you get honey, you get water, and you mix it up to a certain like specific gravity, which just works out the amount of sugar that's in it. Sounds more complicated than it is, really not. and then you just put some yeast in, or you can naturally let it ferment, but it's best to put like a specific type of yeast in. And then you just let that yeast work through. It converts all of the sugar into alcohol. And then once you get to a point where it stops like glugging, you know you've reached like the correct alcohol content, or the maximum alcohol content's killed all the yeast that's in there. And then you let it settle for however many years you want to let it settle for, and then you taste it and it's rubbish. I'm joking. Then you taste it and then you realize that it's— yeah, you're not, you're not a massive fan. But some, some people do like mead. Um, Hive Mind, Hive Mind do a lot of mead and they're making mead a lot more popular. I'm— I don't drink. I'm, I'm like teetotal. I, uh, I've not, I've not drunk for like about 12 years, and then about a year ago It was my mum's 70th and everyone was drinking. I was just like, oh, let's have a few beers. So I had a few beers and then, oh, really, like, I feel sick in the back of my throat now thinking about it. And that was a year ago. I probably had like 6, maybe a bit more, 7 or 8 pints, but like over the whole day. I was really ill for like 3 days afterwards. And that was, that was February last year, so that was 18 months ago. I've not had a single drink since then. But that was the, that was the first day in like 10 years that I'd had a drink. And I used to drink a bit, but I don't like alcohol anymore. I'm past that stage of my life. So I wouldn't make mead, but it's not much of a faff, no, and it's quite fun. And it's one of those things that is a good— is, you know, if you're doing any sort of honey extraction and stuff like that, it's quite a usable byproduct. Uh, David says, I find it hard to spot my queen as she is unmarked. What is the best solution to find her? As in my other post, I said I want to requeen because colony has become aggressive. So that, that's the, the negative. I'll flip it around. You'll be able to find your queen a lot easier in the spring than you will now because you're kind of like probably at max, well, maybe just a little bit, a few weeks past max capacity or max number of bees. So it will be a challenge, especially if you've taken your supers off and condensed them all down into the brood box. I wouldn't, I wouldn't start doing any like silly manipulations to try and find her now. I'd just have a look and see if you can find her, and if you can, maybe, maybe take action. But if not, leave it to the spring. It's not, it's not the end of the world leaving it to the spring. It just means that you have to wait for them to calm down a little bit. Says, pop the tabs on our Black Mountain Honey UK mated queen on the 7th of August. Now there is so much brood, worry we may have to double brood the nucs. Thank you, that's a good problem to have. I'm, uh, double brooding, double brooding nucs is not— is like, it's a really nice format if you've got extension boxes. So, um, they, they would like it, but I would— you, you'll find at this time of the year, saying that the weather, the weather does look nice for the next few days, like next 10 days, so you could double brood now. But a lot of the time what happens is you get these big colonies like bursting out over the top, you think, well, or double brood. You put the double brood on and they're just like, yeah, we're not touching that. And then you have to take it off again. But they kind of like maybe appreciate the space, they don't want to do anything from it. Hi Lawrence, I recently bought a Yolanta queen from you. Are these Buckfast or Carnica? Thanks. So, so when I spoke to Murray about this, because, because the Yolanta— Yolanta is just her, isn't it? That's just the breeder. She does— they used to say it was 65% Carnica, Carniolan, 30% Buckfast, 5% AMM. And some people took that as like, oh, it's like this super bee that's been merged together. And it's like, no, it's, it's 65% of the queens that she sells are Carniolans, 30% is Buckfast, and 5% is AMM. They, they quickly chopped out the AMM because I think they were just trying to cater for a very specific crowd and realized that they didn't want that in their operation. So they, they took the AMM out So now it's 65% Carniolan, 35% Buckfast. So I said to them, well, do you want to— do you want to tell me which one's which and I'll just sell them? And they said, well, it doesn't work like that because they have to balance their numbers. So they just want to sell the Yolanta Queen, and the Yolanta Queen covers that kind of breadth of genetics from Carniolan through to Buckfast. And they have like other bits and stuff mixed in there as well. So I don't know is the answer. I don't know which one I sent you. And you can kind of see, you can see the difference. I, I can pick out the Carniolans when they get sent, and you can see the Buckfast when they get sent. But I don't know how many I'm getting sent of each. So it's a bit of a— it is a little bit of a lottery. And I did— I have, I have suggested to Marian and Jolanta, should we change that? Should we make it a bit clearer? And maybe, maybe they'll do that next year, I don't know. But at the moment, then they don't want to do that. They just want to— Jolanta line. And I appreciate and respect why they want to do that. So I'm not sure which one you've got. It is quite easy to tell, I have to say. They look distinctly different. If you've got a dark queen, very likely to be Carniolan. And if you've got a kind of— the Carniolans look very, very dark, and you're like, oh wow, that's a really dark, long, slender queen. And then the Buckfast just look like Buckfast, which is they look like a kind of like a tiger pattern. They're not like particularly orange, but you can see the real banding on them. So you, you should be able to tell by looking at it. Thin cover laying worker, got drone brood above and below the queen excluder, no sign of worker brood or a queen. Would you just shake them all out? Hive must have killed the new queen introduced late July. So almost certainly got laying workers, and yeah, I would just shake them out and start again afresh in the spring with a split. I make blackberry mead that averages 16 to 25%. No more stalk borer poison for me, thanks. Oh, that sounds headbanging, 25%. Wow. Oh, hi Robert. He says, hi, I hope you and your family are well. How are you getting on at the heather? A couple of full boxes per hive in here in Derbyshire, with— and fingers crossed with the weather coming. Yeah, it is, it's good weather for finishing heather I'll give you that. I didn't go, I didn't go in the end. Life got in the way and a few other issues got in the way of the heather apiary, so we didn't go. A bit gutted. But I did have a couple of bumper heather crops though over the past few years, not last year but the years before that, so I still have heather honey. It didn't sell that quickly, the heather honey. We don't sell it kind of on the same level, like wholesale, as the spring honey and the wildflower honey, so it seems to It seems to last for ages. Love your queens, even though I can never find them, but great brood patterns. Excellent. You know, you know it's a Black Mountain honey queen when you've got a brood pattern. Does the price of pure honey vary around the UK? I'm looking at £6 for an 8-ounce jar. Um, so I think, I think that's reasonable. It's very, uh, like localized honey prices. And you can't, you can't say, oh well, if you're, if you're south of the country, you should be able to get this, or if you're north. You can just find, like, in one village you can get loads of— you get, you get £10 for an 8-ounce jar all day long, and in the village next door, you, you struggle to sell a pound for a fiver because there's X amount of bee farmers. It's very, very localized like that. So it is difficult to say. I think £6 retail for an 8-ounce jar is, is very fair. It's, it's, it's a difficult market, the honey market, though, because you've got, you've got like, you can buy a pound of sugar syrup in Aldi for 69p or 79p or whatever, and people think it's honey. And then they say, well, I'm paying £6 for half the size. I can buy, I can buy a jar double the size of that in Aldi for 79p. And you just say, well, Can't really, can't really argue with that, can we? But you could argue with it, but I don't think you'd win the argument with them. But I think £6 for an 8-ounce jar is very reasonable. When will you pick the best uncapping video? Um, I did— it was Christmas I said I'd do the best uncapping video, but I do think you are way in the lead, like next level in the lead. I have been posting them on all the different platforms, but I think, I think your one got 100 and I think your one's got 170,000 views so far. So again, I'm going to be awarding a hat to the person who doesn't wear hats. I'm sure sell it to someone and get 30 quid. But it was going to be Christmas. That was going to be, that was going to be the day that I did the uncapping video. But you are well and truly in the lead. William says, hey, what do you think about the Abello 3-in-1 extractor? Thinking of getting one next year, or should I get something else? So I really like the 3-in-1 extractor. I've not, I've not used it personally, but I've seen it being used and I've seen it in person. And it's— if you're thinking of kind of like buying an uncapping table or some sort of uncapping device and an extractor, it is a really neat solution keeping it all together. And it, it works out like loads cheaper. You get like a 20-frame extractor With the uncapping tank, and then something to like jar from at the same time in in one neat package. What I love about it—the best thing I love about it—is just the small footprint that it takes up. So if you've just got like a tiny place to extract honey, just got this little three-in-one bellow extractor. I think it's really good. I think it's well worth getting, especially especially if you're limited on space. Oh, I can drink a bit of tea. Marcus Bug says. I wonder why they say to spin out within 2 or 3 days of taking them off the hive if it's capped and kept indoors. Um, because it— when it's on the hive, it's like 36, 37 degrees. They keep it at the right temperature so it's liquid, and as soon as you take it off, it gets cold. And then it doesn't— it doesn't granulate straight away, but it gets cold and it's very slow. Oh, it— you only make that mistake once. So what we do is we take the honey off in the morning from an apiary, take it back, have everything ready, and just go bang, extract it straight away. And it's the easiest thing in the world. Like, knife slides straight through it, get it into the— goes through the uncapping machine, through the capping screw press, flies out into the extractor. All of the honey comes out straight away. You don't get any remnants. You haven't got to spin the extractor at crazy speeds to try and get it out. You don't get any blowouts because the honey just comes out really quick so it like balances itself. Get it off quick. Um, Any update on the, uh, any update on the new Paradise Smart Box frames? I missed the start, so you may have covered it. So I did. We didn't get any honey in them because one, one swarm, one turned drone laying. So my poor bee management on those two, but we'll do it next year. Uh, Hey Lawrence. Hey, hey to you too. Man United says, where do you get your jars from? So we get— when in COVID, the price of jars— before COVID the price of jars was like so cheap, and then as COVID started picking up, the price was like literally doubling. So when we were in the Bee Farmers Association, they— I still am in the Bee Farmers, but they used to lock people in. They used to agree a price of a jar with their manufacturers, and then they'd get like 12 months lock-in on them. And then all this was happening as the prices were going up. So what they said was, you're locked in for like this mega cheap price, and if you go anywhere else now, it's like double or treble the price. But you like— we've got this agreement with them. And they must have been kicking themselves because they were losing loads of money, but they said you can order as many as you want. So I ordered 40,000 jars, and that was in 2020, I guess, like right, right in the middle of, right early, early COVID. So yeah, 2020. And I've got, I've not got many left, but I've still got them. So I've still got them at the cheap price. I dread, I'm really not looking forward to buying jars again because I've never had to deal with the, they're so much more expensive now. So I get, I get them from the Bee Farmers Association, which is no, potentially no use to you. I, I would just go with wherever is cheapest. Freeman and Harding, I think, is where a lot of people get their jars from, and, and they're good. And I think, I think that's where The Bee Farmer had, um, I don't think that's where my batch came from, but I think at one point they were with them. I've got 2 nucs of dark bees, did 2 queen introductions the 8 days, and the queen in tape bloody killed them both. FML. That's annoying. Yeah, dark bees sometimes don't like Queen's being introduced. Stephen Phillips said, had problems with heather honey last season, extracted it using a potato ricer. Issue I've had is it seems to have been so gelatinous that it imparted what seems to have been air bubbles. Is there more to this? Sorry, I thought there'd be more. Yeah, so it is, it's used as a USP, so you will get bubbles in heather honey, and the purer the heather honey, the more bubbles you'll get in in it. So it is a— use it as a selling point, you know. It's thixotropic honey, and pressed, it means you get these beautiful air bubbles into it as well. So, um, like, it's not a negative, it's a good thing. Shows that you've got good, good heather honey. Is it an old wives' tale to tap a frame with a hive tool to force the wax moth larva to the surface? Have you heard of it before? It might work. I guess I've not— a big strong colony will keep on top of wax moth. You won't get many knocking around on big strong colonies. It's only when you get areas of the frame that are not covered in bees that they start to take hold, and they always take hold. But no, I've not heard of that before. But it's— I guess if there are wax moth larvae knocking around, a tap will get them up. Good day from Perth, Western Australia. Hello. Hi Lawrence, 5 of my 8 green 2024 Black Mountain Honey Queen colonies have superseded this summer. All are fine, but wondering if you've had this happen to you this year rather than splodge. Mia, 13 now. Um, no, I've not had that, and that's interesting. That's interesting to hear. What were they— what colonies were they with? Were they kind of like Buckfast colonies that you requeened, or were like local mongrel colonies, because they will, they will continue to supersede, like, for potentially weeks if not months after you introduce it. So I just, I'll constantly take down supersedure cells. But supersedure isn't, isn't the end of the world. I quite like a good supersedure of a queen. I know, I know if you've like bought a queen and you, they're superseding her, but supersedure is, is a very safe mechanism because they just, they keep the existing queen in place until the new queen is successfully laying, and then they'll pick the best one. So you're kind of— you, you're essentially getting like a free upgrade. And I find like an F2, the bees are absolutely fine. Like F2, you get— you essentially get more hybrid vigor in it anyway. So some of the F2s are better performing than the F1s if you've got nice drones in the area. And then obviously if the, the superseder queen doesn't mate, then you've not, you've not lost anything because they'll keep the existing queen. But I would say it's more, it's more likely to do with the, the bees that you're introducing it to and them just wanting to somehow preserve some of their own genetics. It's, um, yeah, interesting. Well, I've not seen, I've not seen it happen kind of like on that scale there. When you, when you get queens that kind of failed like that, you, you normally get them, they'll lay some worker brood and then they'll just switch and they'll just switch extra drone brood. But to get some that— like, supersedure is like quite— supersedure is like a very like minor defect thing. It's just that they're sensing something's not quite right. So it could, could be paint, could be like a damaged foot or something, or it could be, could be that they're, they're going to run out of fertile eggs at some point. But to have like 5 like that, it seems, it seems a bit strange. So I think it's more likely to be kind of like some external factors or the bees that are in the hives. David says, you know what they say about opinions, it's the same with bum holes, everyone has one but no one wants to hear about it. But David has just told you about it, so there we go, thanks David. Mating late in the season results in darker bees. I wonder why that is. I've never heard that before. Is that true? I'm confused. You need to, you need to tell me why, but I take it with a pinch of salt. Do you ever feel like giving up beekeeping? I know I did but came back to it late this year. I definitely did feel like giving up beekeeping before I worked out how to keep calm bees that produced honey. It, it was, yeah, it was tiresome and hard work. And I think everyone likes to put— everyone, everyone likes to put like hard work into something, and you can put a lot of hard work into something with the hope that you're going to get something back. You can kind of like plug away at it and just keep on, keep on working hard, but if you don't start getting stuff back, it becomes— it's not a hobby, it just becomes like really tedious and tiresome. So when you're going out beekeeping and you're not getting any honey and you can't make splits because your bees are just swarming, and even your best-looking colonies are kind of like brood disorders, you know, like chalk brood and stuff, and you're getting stung and getting blitzed by the bees, and you just think, what am I doing? What am I doing this for? Then I can see why people would give up beekeeping. But then Fast forward and you've got like lots of bees and they're doing well and there's lots of honey and you can sit in your apiary without a bee suit on and just watch the bees and like sit, you know, like you see me sit in front of the entrances of the hives and just watch them. It's probably the best thing in the world. I really do like it. And just to like be at one with the bees and be at one with nature and, and watch what they do just in awe. and not get stung, and for them to be healthy, and to think like you're doing something right. It's really good. So you've got, got the 2 extremes there, but I don't— I think I'm, I'm too far into it now to ever give it up. Hi Lawrence, your requeening video where you cage the original queen and then put the new caged queen for a few days before removing the old queen works a treat. Why haven't you adopted this method? So the reason that I've not fully adopted this method is I don't find that it's foolproof, and I don't find that it 100% works 100% of the time. I don't find that it works 100% of the time. So it, in, in theory, it should work, and they should— they shouldn't create any emergency sales. But I've had it where they've created emergency sales, and it only takes one experience for me to say, well, They've done it once, so they could do it again. And it depends on the colony and the strength of the colony and the strength of the queen's pheromones and stuff. But I, I want to give people like a 100% foolproof version that's going to work every single time. I don't want to say, well, cage that queen, leave it however many days and come back, and then just take her out and put the new queen in and don't look for queen cells because there might be queen cells there. So if you're gonna have to go in and look for queen cells anyway, I just say, well, just, just kill the queen or take the queen out and just go back and look for queen cells. But it does work, and I think if you've got like a particularly aggressive colony, I think it's a good, a good technique to have up your sleeve to reduce the amount of kind of like destruction and interaction you have to have with that colony during the cell taking down phase. But that's the reason that I've not adopted it fully. But it's a good, really, really good method, and it's a very smart method as well. Also says, also honey has gone mad. 4 of my Langstroth hives have done 3 brood boxes full of honey plus a super. I ran out of super frames, so we use Langstroth brood. Best honey crop I've ever had. So that's, that's very good to hear. So they can't, they can't have been too bad, the queens, if, if they superseded, but they're producing that much honey. So I think it is likely what I said. They're just fickle. They're just the darker bees that were trying the last gasp attempt at keeping the DNA in there. Hey Alex 2 says, found your channel as I searched for beekeeper for beginners. Top stuff. How did you get into it? So we had just swarmland, or I had swarmland in my garden, and then a beekeeper came around to get it, and then the next week the same swarm, the same colony I suspect, threw another swarm into the garden and we thought, oh, we're gonna keep, we're gonna keep this one. And little did I know that my life would change so much. Hi Lawrence, what's the latest on the spread of Asian hornet this year? Not heard a great deal about it, maybe I'm living under a rock. No, it's gone dead quiet, hasn't it? It's great. I think they, the queens obviously suffered the same way that the wasp queens suffered, so I think it is just a slowdown in the expansion, which is really, really good. But I think next year they'll be back with a bang. But also, like, it's time of year now, so keep monitoring, keep looking out for them, because if you are going to see them this year, like, now's the time that they're going to become like a real nuisance. Steve's Honeybee says, use suitcase scales and hive strap to weigh hives, then you can record weight rather than guessing weight my hefting. So you can do that. A lot of people can't lift up a hive like that, but it, but it is a good job getting them ready for winter. You can do that, get it really, really accurate. Andrew Leach says, hi Lawrence, can you suggest a good repair for chewed polyhive parts? Uh, so best repair that I found is like a Gorilla Glue. Gorilla Glue is the best. That's the one that I use. And you can mix a Gorilla Glue— there's like other things you can mix it with, like, um, You could do it like a wood chip. It's like foaming Gorilla Glue, so it expands. It is polyurethane glue, but it will expand. But if you want a smoother finish, you can polyurethane down just below the surface and then use like an exterior-grade wood filler. But you see some people, there's, there's like different mixes that you can mix polyurethane glue with. Don't get it on your fingers, it's horrible stuff. But you can get kind of like different formulas for for it. But that's what I've done in the past. Polyurethane, so Gorilla Glue, but keep it below the surface, and then a good slab of like exterior-grade wood filler, and it gives a really nice repair. Stuart Leslie Gould says, how many supers of honey should I expect from a double-brewed Langstroth hive? I only seem to get at the end of the summer. So Double brood is much easier to manage, but you will lose a lot of the honey into the brood. So on a single brood Langstroth hive, I'd say average 3 to 4 supers. On a double brood, I think you struggle with more than 2 to 3, something like that. So just be aware, on a double brood you will get slightly less, but it gives you easier management and it means that the bees don't require as much feed going into winter. Paula says, love seeing the videos of you and your daughter together. I have 3 grandchildren aged 3, 7, and 10, planning on getting the bee suits for next year. Absolutely brilliant, they would love it. How many hives have you got? So I keep between kind of like 100, 120 production hives, but focus mainly on the nucs now. And between me and Richard, who do the nucs together, we've got up to about 1,000-ish, something that. Uh, 990 wants a shout out, so there we go, there's your shout out. Says 139 watching, only 60 likes. Come on, ladies and gents, hit that like button. It costs nothing and helps Lawrence give us content like this. Remember, he has probably answered your question. Thank you, David. I like, I like you giving it the, uh, giving people the shout out to give the like button a hit. I'm knackered, I really am. I'm struggling, I'm flagging. And I like your next comment as well, which is Have a sip of tea. So there we go, have a sip of tea. I needed that. I'm nearly at the bottom though. Here we go. Chester says, thanks Lawrence, I'll take them down. She looks great, and aside from that, all looks okay. All the best. Thanks, Chester. Om says, do you leave any supers on your hive over winter, or do you harvest it all? I took 3 supers off and condensed into 1 brood. Lots of bees bawling outside at night now. Also treating with Apicard now. So I always take all my supers off. Extract it all, and then feed the bees. Give them enough space. Just just makes makes my life so much easier, and I think it's the best for the bees as well. Pains pains have gone out of business or will shortly be going out of business. Yeah. David McDowell says, "Hey bud, late to the show tonight. How do you clean your extractor out?" Good question, that one. So I get a hose on my one. It depends if you've got like a top. Or a bottom extractor one, but I just I get hose in there. I just fill it up with water. Not not not full. Don't don't fully fill it up. You fill it up about that much with water, but like an inch or so over, like so the the cage sits in like that, and when I turn it on at high speed, it chucks the water up the side. You do you do need to watch underneath some models that will let the water go through, and if you've got the motor underneath, it will. flood your motor. So don't do it on all extractors. You need to make sure it works on your extractor. Um, but it does, it doesn't mind, and it's, it's fine to do it on mine. So that is how I clean mine out. When you're buying it, buy one that will work like that. It is a lot better. You will occasionally need to take the spindle out and re-grease it if you do it like that because it can wash the grease out, but the grease is kind of like underneath, so you'll never contaminate anything. Uh, Pliny the Dumber says hi everyone. Hello to you too. Callum McKinley says, I've had an absolutely terrible year this year. 15 hives, only 5 have moved up into the supers. Just wondering what's happening or where I have gone wrong. Hmm, it sounds like a case of local mongrels to me, that one. Where have you got your bees from? Is it like swarms and stuff that you've caught? Just local swarms? Because that's that's kind of what was happening to me for years, which was you do everything, you do everything you think you can, and they just don't get bigger, and then they swarm before they've reached the— or filled out the brood box. I'm going to call you Peter D. Is it too late to add another deep brood box to my 10-frame hive? I'm at a similar latitude here in the Northwest as you are in the UK. So I would say, yep, definitely too late. There's no need to add any additional space now. All you're going to do is give the bees a harder job to keep that space warm over winter, so just keep an eye on them. But you can be quite brutal with bees, in a nice way, at this time of year in terms of not giving them enough space. Also, we have 20 hives. What is the best way to make up feed on scale, i.e., heating water on a larger scale and manually stirring? Need a more optimal, time-efficient way. So I learned this out from Richard, yeah, I learned this from Richard. So what Richard does is he has— I drew the picture of this before. It was cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go down and we'll film with Richard. He's got like an IBC kind of thing like that. Imagine that's an IBC sitting on a pallet, or a tote if you're in the USA. And he's got like this mixer. This is how he described it to me. It goes in like that and then it just spins around like mechanized. And he— cold water system. Yeah, he makes 2:1. Using a system like that. And he said it takes about 24 hours to get it to, um, dissolve all of the sugar, but he uses cold water and makes 2:1 sugar syrup. So if you're making 1:1 sugar syrup, you can do it really, really easily. I've done it, I've done it before just with a, um, get a, get a steel drum, like a food-grade steel drum, and like a plasterer's drill with a paddle on it And you can just, you can make up, you can make up 1 to 1 using that. That's really, really easy. I've found that you can't, I can't quite get 2 to 1 with cold water doing that because I just can't be bothered to hold it in there that long. But if I left it all day, you probably could just about get it. But what you'll find is that the sugar sinks down to the bottom and causes a sediment, and you can't get that sediment back up. So you need to keep constantly moving. That's why, like Richard's one here, Because it— because he's got it like stirring right the way down to the bottom. It's constantly stirring all of that sugar around, and it will, it will eventually go. Um, the other, the other way that— oh, I just hid your comment there. There we go, we're back up again. Wonder what I was doing. The other way of doing it, and this is the way that I do it now, I get a, like, um, a water pump. So like a groundwater pump that, that with like a big kind of like a 2-inch hose on it. And then I put that in the bottom of a 200-liter drum. Like a, I just got like a food-grade drum. I then get a hose out of my kitchen and I just heat, just from the hot tap. So I just, I empty my, my water heater, wherever it is, and I basically fill it up to a certain amount. I'm not going to give you the measurements because I've just got it marked on the outside of the drum, but I think it goes up about like 45% of the way, something like that. 40% of the way. I forget, I forget what it is for 2:1. It's all marked on there. So you need to work out your measurement. Basically fill it up with hot water, put the pump in the bottom, and then I put the end of the hose back into the pump. So it's effectively just recirculating all within the tank. And you could do that in any— you could do that in a WBC, uh, WBC, do it in an IBC, you could do it in a tote, do it in any container that you want. So you've just got really hot water, but not boiling. but just straight out of the tap, hot water, and then recirculation. And then all you do is you just chuck your sugar in and you just do it really gradually. So don't chuck 200 kilograms of sugar in straight away, but if you're just doing it like 1 kilogram at a time, just chucking it in, and you can do it like maybe take like half an hour to put all the sugar in. And every time you put it in, it's just that pump is just circulating it round and round and round and round. And because it's on the floor, any sugar that's on the bottom, like these pumps, they're built They'll chuck like little stones and stuff through, like big pebbles. There you go, big pebbles like that. So they'll just like chomp up through the sugar and it works a treat, works a treat. And then because you've got your, um, you've got your pump in there, when you're finished you just reach in, get the, get the hose out, and then just turn the pump on. I've got like a, um, a little kind of like valve that I put on it and I just put the— connect the valve on Get a bit sticky and stuff. Connect the valve on like that and turn it off. Put the pump on and get my canisters ready, and then you just pump it into the canisters. Then hose it all down at the end because everything's a bit sticky, but it works really well. And all like this, there's no heating, there's no cooking, there's no boiling. It's just hot water from the tap and a like a recirculating sewage pump. It's not a sewage pump; it's called like a groundwater pump. You know the one I mean. If you, if you don't, drop me an email. I'll send you a, I'll send you a link to the one I've got. Steve's Honeybee says your channel is the best, as previously commented, and thank you for all your advice. No problem, Steve. Thanks for being a channel member. Good evening, Neil. Hope you're well. Richard O'Brien says, do you remember which company sells the medicinal honey you showed at NABI? I think can't find the right video. I'm not sure. David said wasps get bad press. As a gardener, I see them eating the young queen flying ants. Yeah, they do lots of, of kind of, um, control in the garden. I forgot what the right word is. Shannon says, I'm going into my 3rd year of beekeeping. I work with a very patient mentor who stands back and lets me do the inspections. Do you think you ever stop learning to beekeep? Absolutely not. And if you do, you've, you've completely missed the point. I learned something literally every single day in beekeeping. You really do. And what, what's— what I love so much about beekeeping is that you, you've— you work stuff out for yourself and you can kind of see what's going on, but then you change your mind the whole time. You're kind of like, well, no, this, this way works best. And then you, you go down, you think, oh, you know what, maybe, maybe the other way that I was doing it is best. And you go back to that. You do your flip and flop all over the place. And, and I think so in, in one year one thing will work, and then another year another thing will work. And what I love is, is the ability to change and the ability to learn more and the ability to watch other people doing things differently and take that on board and adapt it and change it. I think it's brilliant. And I think anyone who, who says that they, they've learned it all, they're just, um, a bit stubborn maybe with with their beliefs. Uh, David says, also bought 10 English feeders from Thorns, seemed good, plastic, a little flimsy. Another 10 ordered from Castle Hives to see the difference in thickness. Castle Hives ones £5 cheaper. Any advice? So I've got a few English feeders, I just— they're nothing on a, on a polyasphalt feeder because, because with, with an English feeder, you know, you, you need, you need a crown board You need an eke or you need a super to get them in, to put them in, and then they're going to break because they're just plastic. They're not going to last anywhere near as long, and then you don't get the insulation. So by the time you've added like an empty super, a crown board, the English feeder that's not going to last that long, and no insulation, I think you're better off just biting the bullet and getting the polyashworth feeders. They're loads better. Paul Lewis, channel member. Hello. David says, also ordered some Hive Alive supplement to add to feed. The magic seaweed ingredient, do you use it? Any advantage you've noticed? So it's interesting that, because, because for me Hive Alive is all about the thymol. It really is. I know, I know people say it where their marketing is the magic seaweed, but I, I like it because of the thymol, and I like the fact that it doesn't, uh, allow the syrup to go moldy, but I do find that the bees do very, very well on it. Is it the thymol? Is it the magic seaweed? I don't know, but I, I do like it and I do use it religiously at this time for every feed for this time of the year. Uh, Paula says, thank you for your honesty regarding candle making. Would be nice to see you and Ivy learning candle making together on a stream. I should check out Griff's site. Good stuff. We'll definitely do some candles. Uh, David said, use the blower to clear the supers this year. Good job for an out April This year was on an on-site apiary, bees everywhere. Question is, can I use a rhombus clearer on my crown board or need a circular hole as in actual rhombus clearer board? Uh, can I use a rhombus clearer on my crown board? Yeah, see, you can use a rhombus clearer on the crown board, that's fine. Some people put the rhombus clearer just directly on like the circular, the main hole, that will work. Or what some people do is cut it in half And then have it at two sides, and they say that's quicker. But what you will find is you'll use the rhombus clearer board, and then you'll still need a method to get the rest of the bees off. So you'll end up going there one night, putting the rhombus clearers on, going there the next day, taking the honey off, and then blowing it all out at the same day anyway. That's what I do anyway. That's what I found. Patrick says, "Good evening. I got my first bee colony yesterday. I fed seven liters yesterday. Today it was all gone. Is that normal? Many greetings from Joe." My screen changed there. Yeah, I would say I would say this time of the year that is that is normal given that they've got sufficient space. Very late in the year to get your first bees, so get them fed but get your mite treatments on as well. I would say is good is good advice. It's getting perfect time of the year to get some apivar in and your your bees would do very well. Jensen's Bee says hi. How did you get on with the Abello wax melter? Been waiting to see the video. Thanks for the pizzas. Oh, it's a good getting on me because I've not done the videos. Good shout. I've got about seven videos from that day that I need to. I need to finish it. It was really good. We actually got through, got to a second batch. So I got like a big, a big, quite a lot of wax out of the Abello solar wax melter. It was very good. Scout about says, "Do you add extra insulation to the Payne's nuke?" So the original Payne's nukes with the thin roofs, I did. Because there was an issue; they were too thin. Now they've got a much thicker roof. I don't add the insulation. I did before. Oh, Paula says, "Are you still checking WhatsApp for pictures?" So I, I'm not. I can do, but I completely forgot about that. Let's have a look. Oh, there are there are some ones on there. Object. Just look at looking at people's pictures now. Um, well, I'll have to go— I have to go back through. So I like— I'm classic man, I can't do 2 things at once. That was just me reading stuff on there, so I need to go back in there. Bruce's Bees, it's University of Alabama. There we go. No, no, it's my pleasure, Bruce. Thanks for staying on, you've been on for ages. Good man. University of Alabama, 130,000 people watching college football, and if you want like a good seat, it's like a few thousand pounds for a good seat. It blew my mind, that did. I love wasps, but people need to have traps set up for Asian hornets. You may get the odd wasp, but the danger of the Asian hornet in every beaker— it should be vigilant. Very good point. Had to pop 2 queens in a nuc on day 6, still tabs still on, and knocked all the cells down. Joe went back today to break the tabs but forgot to recheck for cells. Could we go back in tomorrow? Um, yeah, I'd go back in tomorrow. She's probably not got out the cage yet, and take down any cells that are still there. Hive Alive, don't go over the recommended dose and only 1 gallon per hive per year. Yeah, so for us, we just use— it's basically the last feed of the year, we'll get Hive Alive, maybe like the last 2 or 3, but we don't go crazy with it. Just usually once we've popped the tabs, we don't go in for 7 days. Okay, so as a follow-on to that other one there, Neil's been a member for for thirteen months. Best channel around. Thanks, Neil. David says, "Is it better to leave my honey in the settling tank and jar as needed, or straight into the jar? Surely cooler in tank to stall crystallization." Oh, I wouldn't. I wouldn't. Yeah, I wouldn't leave it in the tank and jar as needed. Leave it in the tank. Leave it to settle. 48 hours, get the scum off, and then jar— get it all into jars. Definitely, that's what I do. Neil very kindly gifted one Black Mountain Honey membership as well. I wonder who got that one this time. Very kind of you, Neil. Jay says, hi Lawrence, heeded your advice regarding the honey pull and adding Apivar mid-August. So happy I did. Everything seems so much easier with little effect on honey crop. I won't miss an extra super. A lot of people have followed that advice, and I think a lot of people will have very healthy bees come April next year. Halex2 says, joining the local beekeeper association this month and looking to start with a colony or 2 next year. What will my startup costs be realistically for a setup? It's, it's a good question. Uh, I would factor in probably like 2 or 3 times what you think it's going to be because the startup cost, there's quite a lot to get. You know, you've got, you've got to get your nuc, which is cheap. You'll get your beehives and your frames and your wax and your smoker and your bee suit and your hive stands, and that's just all just getting you ready. And then at the end of the year, you're going to be looking at honey extraction equipment, which I think you should probably try and borrow in the first year, or see if your association will have like some kit that you can hire out just to keep the cost down. But I think, like, if— I'm not sure if you're in the UK I'd say if in the UK you've got to be looking at at least, at least £1,000, £1,500 for the first year if you're going to get maybe like a couple of colonies. It's, uh, it's not a cheap hobby. David says, what price should you sell bulk honey at? So sell bulk honey at the price that you are happy to sell it at. I know that's rubbish advice, but don't, don't sell it— don't just sell it cheap. Don't— work out like what your labor is worth to you Because, you know, like each bucket of honey is like a huge amount of time and effort and expense that's gone into it. So don't sell it at a loss. We sell ours at £4 a pound, and we get a lot of people ringing up. We sell quite a bit of bulk honey now. We get a lot of people ringing up saying, you sell bulk honey? And I say, yeah, we do. And they say, how much is it? I say, £4 a pound. They say, that's far too expensive. And I say, well, that's what it is. And they say, well, I'm not paying £4 a pound. And I say, well, It's £4 a pound. It's not— we're not haggling on it. I'm not. And they said, but you won't sell any of it. I said, well, just sit in the garage then and wait until it goes into the jars. It's not going to go off anytime soon. And then they get rid of some— some people get really angry and aggressive, and it's like, I don't have to sell you the honey. Like, that is the price. That's not even that expensive. It's probably on the slightly higher side, but I'm not I know the worth of the honey, and I know how much I sell it for wholesale and retail. And four pounds a pound, like that's that's pretty good. If you stick it into eight ounce jars and sell them at six pounds each, you're kind of like trebling your money almost, excluding your jar costs. But yeah, we sell a bit four pounds a pound, nothing less. Vera Giles says thanks for answering regarding the mead. Sorry about the shocking hangover. We should. Follow your example. Yeah, I know. I'm not. I'm not whiter than white. Don't worry. Landon Epting says, "Hi, when would you recommend using candy boards?" So I'm not. Not like against them, but I see them as like an emergency feed. So some people, I see some people on like Facebook and YouTube saying, "Right, I'm getting my bees set up for candy boards and fondant and stuff." For me, if you set your colony up right, you shouldn't have to feed candy. Or fondant. And then if you do need to feed it, I would feed it in like March, February or March, when they're not going to take down syrup but they need a feed. So it's, it's an emergency feed for me only. Paula says hi. Oh, didn't say hi, I just, I read hi. She says, she says, I did a split in June and bought a Buckfast queen from you. She got out of the hive and went into my second hive and got bald and was killed. So back to one hive. Want to do another split next year. I'm sorry to hear that. I thought that was gonna— it was gonna be all positive reading that. David says, I think local beekeeping associations help so much. If anyone is new to beekeeping or wanting to start beekeeping, they should join their local association as well as subscribe to this channel. I very much agree, David. David says, get some beanie hats made up for winter giveaways. First in line for the idea. Cheaper than those, those dastardly Black Mountain honey caps. Uh, it's a good idea. I, I've actually had some beanies made. I'm, I'm still undecided on whether it's just— oh, I just get it wrong— this logo, or whether I should put the text on it as well. And I'm inclined to put the text on it. I will, I will do some beanie giveaways because they're much cheaper than— than hat thing is a thing, keep it going. The hat thing is a thing, it's true. Uh, Cub Rider says my missus was very happy she's in the lead. She is in the lead by like a Very long way. I think the next one is on like 20,000, and you're on 170,000. But you know social media, like I put on a post two days ago, and it's got 1.6 million views. So there could be another one that goes on that just wipes the floor with everyone. Tapestry of Souls Baker says, "Hi Lawrence, thank you for another great live stream." My pleasure. UK Honey Marketing Board says lower flying temperatures. Is that in relation to the fact that there's darker queens, darker bees? I'm still baffled by that. I don't understand the logic, or are you responding to something else? I'm not sure. Hi Lawrence, I noticed a meadow last week that had been cut. This week it is awash with flowers again. Also noticed a lot of plants having a second flush. You always get this in the weird years where everything's delayed, but I know so many people in England, a lot of bee farmers in England, just having incredible years, bumper honey crop years, because of all of the environmental stewardship planting schemes or whatever they're called now, where farmers get paid quite a lot of money for planting specialist mixes, and it has resulted in bumper honey crops. And I think that they couldn't have picked a better year to do it as well because all of the other insects are dead. They're not all dead, but you know, that they're peaking at different times, so there's, there's not as many other pollinators to go out and get it, and the honeybees are just like, yep, we'll do that and take advantage of it. Richard says a black bee can warm up faster than a golden bee. I would agree with that, simple physics. Dickie Mint says, thanks for the answer on the Paradise Hive. I was getting worried that they may have had copyright issues again and you had to shelve it. Good luck next season as we've been waiting many years. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. It was, uh, it was annoying when I found— I thought, well, I get 2 because if one goes— something goes wrong with one, then at least I have the other. And, uh, something went wrong with both of them, but they were, they were both of my fault. Says don't forget to click the like button and Lawrence, have a drink of your tea. Thank you very much. Uh, Mia says they tried superseding a few times and I knocked them back. We went on holiday for 3 weeks and I didn't check for for a week. All my colonies are BMF genetics. I don't do swarms. BMF all the way. Okay, so they, they superseded after you went away. Okay, that, that sounds, that sounds like stubborn bees. But I'm guessing that, uh, they, they are all mated now, so hopefully they're doing well. Well, I know they're doing well. Lots of honey. Got the free membership. Excellent, very kind of you, Neil. I'm sure you'll take advantage, JK. Lots of videos there. 48 videos on the channel membership section at the moment. Uh, David said Splodge seems like a perfectly good queen. Obviously the bees see the paint as a disability. She would seem the perfect queen for Ivy, a very good layer, really identifiable, and so sweet and gentle. Oh, that is a really, really nice idea. Maybe we should rehome Splodge into Ivy's nuc. I love that idea. Let's do that. I'll, I'll run it past the boss Ivy, but I think that's very, very nice. Always one cell in the middle of the frame, definitely not swarm loss. The supersedure colonies are very nice and strong. Yeah, that does— it does sound like the middle of the frame thing is definitely a beekeeping myth. I know I'm doing the suspect scratching of the ear there, but it is. Supersedure frames, you get them anywhere. You get them kind of just the bottom of the frame, top of the frame, middle of the frame, side of the frame. It is just the number of cells in the colony. But it is, it's very odd to have so many queens supersede. Like, supersede is like relatively rare unless it's being controlled by external factors. So like other bees or something else is going on. Very interesting. But Mia is up to 21 colonies, so watch out, Mia's coming to get you. David says submersible pump. Yeah, so like a submersible pump, like a groundwater pump, the kind of one that you'd empty a swimming pool with, or you stick in— you'd empty like a pond out with. But get like a big one, like a, you know, proper big one, one that will churn out crazy liters. Best extractor please, my 3-frame Vivor has fallen apart, got 35 BS frames left to extract. So it's— I always feel bad with the extractor one because the only experience I I used to have a— I had a 6-frame Vevor extractor and it's not very good. That was my first ever extractor. I think a lot of the Chinese ones are kind of made in the same factory as well. But then apart from that, I've only ever had licensed ones and I've been happy with all my licensed extractors, but I've not had the kind of range of experience that I've had, say, with beehives as I have with extractors. So, but I'll give you generic advice. Upgrade as much as you can possibly go, get the biggest one you can, get an electric one, uh, get a nice wide one, get one with splayed legs. Splayed legs on an extractor are really, really good, kind of like widens the base, which means it's more stable. Should be good. Says, I've switched from nationals to massive double commercial brood, used to get swarming every year, hardly ever swarm now. Good to hear. Any reason why Apivar rather than Apibiox or gas vapor, gas vap, at this time of year? It's used later in the year but not so at the end of the honey crop. Does Apivar absorb into the brood? So Apivar does, it does penetrate into the wax, so it is absorbed into the wax. Apivar is the same as apibioxal or oxalic acid in so much that it doesn't penetrate the brood to kill varroa underneath the cappings. So using apibioxal or oxalic acid at this point of the year, if you did it once, you'd kill some of the phoretic mites, but then all of the mites will just come back out of the cells. So you need to do like repeated cycles. So that's why Apivar is good, because it's left in for 8 weeks, so it's left in for like up to 3 cycles of brood. So all of those mites that come out of the cells, they just get zapped because the Amitraz levels in the colony is kind of like kept up at the same level. But the question, any reason why Apivar rather than Apibioxal? Just, it's lots easier. it's just one visit, pop your strips in, one visit to take it out, as opposed to 5 or 6 visits to constantly go over and over again doing multiple treatments. Thank you, Neil. Channel member says, can you recommend anyone in the Chester area I can get advice from before I get started? So, so no one, no one specifically, but you're not, you're not that far from me. Happy to give advice on here or on email. Uh, Cujo Painting says, £4 a pound is kind of cheap really. My sentiments exactly. It's not, not expensive. Shell Shed channel member says, I'm learning about demeray splits for next year, but what I can't understand is why do you put a second queen excluder under the brood box too when there is one on top of the top brood box? So the idea behind that was to stop any virgins— it's not my idea, that's just, it's just the method that I was told— was to stop any virgins emerging from the top box from going back down. But, but you're right, there's a queen excluder there already, so I did say this year I would redo the Demerara split video, and I didn't get around to doing it, but I would definitely do it next year, and my advice will change. And I will— there'll be 2 things that I change on that. One is I'll remove the queen excluder, and 2, I'll insist on having an entrance at the top. Because what happens if you put the queen excluder on, it just gets stuffed full of drones anyway, so it's really annoying. You're picking out all these dead drones. So I'd remove the queen excluder from the top. and I'd add an entrance on that top box so the drones can fly in and fly out, and then it's much better. Wish you and all the family all the best and thank you for a fantastic stream. Thank you, Neil. Oh, down to the bottom. Beanie hats, great idea. And I would definitely buy one each. Right, we'll do some beanie hats. I've been a member of an association since I was 8. I did my first meet age 10 and offered them— offered a mentor, but they wanted me to have local bees, not Black Mountain honeybees, so I just learned from Newton Penn State Uni course. It's, um, well, I, I'm, I'm glad you did, Mia, and I'm hoping that you, uh, you're getting on well with your bees. Local associations can be very keen on a specific type of bee or a specific treatment regime, uh, and it's not for me to say what, what people should do, but I like to give people, uh, options if they don't want to go down the route of local association bees. My local council was praising themselves for doing balsam bashing on our river. I bashed them for robbing my bees of vital late feed. I do. The Himalayan balsam's really taken over around here now, and I'm not like against it, but I can see the impact that it has in rivers. And, and the damage that it does. But like people who don't like Buckfast Queens, I think like the resistance is futile because we're just way past— there's no pure bee species left in the UK. There's no anything resembling close to AMM. So stopping imports is not gonna— you're gonna get back to AMM. And I think the similar thing applies with, with Himalayan balsam. Like, you bash it down all you want. But you know what, it's probably— it is kind of developed quite a good resistance to bashing it down, which is like, have you seen the, the pods pop and how far the seeds go? So if you're bashing it down, all you're doing is just firing out all of next year's seeds and probably doing more damage. But yeah, David says Apivar strips could be designed better so that both sides get used, one side always against the Comb tight. Just a thought. Yes, yes, bee space. It is true, it— there would be a much better way to do it. What, what I'd like to see is like some sort of, you know, like the, the Quintrex queen cages that go in, but maybe not that thick, but like with like a wire mesh configuration, something like that, that you'd like pin between 2 frames and then the bees can kind of like go in and out around it. And and you you'd get much more. You get greater efficacy if you could work that out. It's a it's a good idea. I like I like that thinking. It's good design. Like you say, like a hanging case, the width of a queen cage. Oh, you've you said it there. Maybe I've read that before I started talking. The width of a queen cage you hang it in can walk both sides. I I think that's a really really good idea. Mrs. Mr. and Mrs. Brown's Animal says, "Hi, new to beekeeping first year. I'm trying to learn all I can." Enjoy your channel. I live in one of the few places that doesn't have any mites, beetles, or wax moths. Great place to keep bees. Ah, sounds like bliss. Uh, David says best performance was a Black Mountain honeybees this year. Five full supers. Awesome. Great to hear. David says I have a Viva extractor. We are not expert beekeepers, but if I'm honest, they have great customer service. They do have. They do have good customer service. They they have. It's all made in China, but they have like a proper website, don't they? And if you email them. Them because I, I've, I've spoken to them before. They're very responsive, which makes life a lot easier. But here we go, I've got to the end. 2 hours and 40 minutes. If you got all the way to the end, I would like a thumbs up. And then I will just double down on my final request, which was if you have enjoyed any of these streams throughout the year, I really would appreciate a Google review. You can just search for Black Mountain Honey and then you'll be able to see like leave a review. and you just leave a review there. You can say whatever you like. Hopefully it'll be positive though. That is it. That is the last fortnightly live Q&A stream for 2024. I will be back in one month's time. Until then, if you have anything urgent, just drop me an email. I'm always happy to answer some questions on email.