Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 15

Right, hello. I think I'm live. I've just watched the Arsenal game and it's a bit rubbish, so let's go and do some beekeeping. So first off, massive, massive thank you to everyone who came and said hello at the beekeeping show. That was a little bit weird because no one knows who I am. I go and just live a normal life and do my job and go to the shops and. No one knows who I am, and I live in a little Welsh village and rarely go out. And then went to the beekeeping show and everybody knew who I was. It was very surreal, and I felt very humbled by people's nice gestures and gifts and comments. It was really strange. It was like waking up in a very nice dream for a couple of days. And yeah, so thanks to everyone who came up and said hi. I really appreciate it. Appreciated it, and I'm sorry if I didn't get to speak to everyone, uh, and I'm sorry if I was a little bit, uh, quick to speak or I needed to go and do something else, but I really did appreciate it. So thank you very much. I'm also aware I've not done one of these streams for about 2 weeks, 2 and a half weeks now, and I did say that I would do them. So much so that if I count the amount of questions that I've got on my website that have come through I think we're up to about 26 questions. I've got 26 questions to answer on here today. Some of them are fantastic, some of them will not be related, but they're all really interesting. So I might not be able to get through all of them. I'm going to try my best to get through all of them. I'll probably be here for about an hour and a half today. So as always, if you've got any, uh, anything you want to say in the comments Then I will answer any questions that I've got in the comments as well. Right, where shall I start? I'll start at the top, or I'll start at the top so that the most recent questions that have been asked will be answered first. So sorry if yours are at the very bottom. As always, I have a cup of tea, very nice. And I think before I start doing the questions, I'll just give you a little update in terms of where I am. Massively behind as always when it comes to beekeeping and procrastinating and buying things that I don't need. Always really good at that. So I bought my, my hydro press for that. Now I've sold my extractor, that's gone. I bought a new extractor, so anyone who went to the beekeeping show would have seen the ginormous extractor that was there. I really wanted to buy it. I was very close to buying it, and then I, I just realized that even if I had space in the honey extraction room, I can't get it through the doors actually, like around the back to get through. No chance whatsoever. And then my honey extractor that I sold to someone else, which was— it's effectively a 30-frame drum, but it's only a 24-frame. It's an 800mm drum. I had about that much space. get it through. So I was fully limited on the width, not so much on the height. So I have ordered a new extractor, which I will do a video on, which is a 30-frame premium. So same one, same kind of style as the one that was at the beekeeping show, without the insulated walls because I don't have the, the width for them. But I got an insulated base because I wanted to keep it as chunky as possible as low down as possible, keep that moment, uh, the center of gravity as low as it can be to keep it nice and stable. And I thought by adding the heated base it would do that. And, and I think the heated base is going to heat up the whole thing just as well as the heated sides would as well. So I went for that. That was like £4,000. That was quite expensive. Well, so I bought, I bought loads of Frames and Feeders frames 300 or 400 of those. I'm going to use those for my heather. That was like £1,500. And then I just bought an— I bought a drone because I thought YouTube's going quite well, so I'm gonna treat myself to a nice drone. So I spent £1,500 on a drone, and I just thought, yeah, I love that, spend some money, why not? It's all good fun. But I have sold a lot of things, so I'd say that then I've probably broken even In terms of what I've sold, I forgot I sold my loosener as well. So the loosener is gone. The tank went. The loosener went. The valve went. What else did I sell? Sold a couple of other bits. The only thing that I've got left that hasn't sold yet is my pump that I've used once and realized I didn't need it. So there we go. We're up to date. I'm so excited about this drone. So I don't know how I'm going to fly the drone while I'm doing beekeeping, but the one that I bought apparently. can just like set it up, get it to go fly in the air somewhere, lock on to me, and then say just kind of do some circles around me, and it should film me beekeeping. That is the plan. It could go horribly wrong. Says that he loves his DJI drone. Good stuff. So yeah, it has, it has a follow mode. It's, it's a DJI Mavic 3, it's the one I went for. So it does, it has, it has loads of different modes. I'm gonna have loads of fun crashing it into trees and probably get very angry when I, uh, when I break it after the first go, but I'm going to be really careful with it. Okay, so he's saying yeah, there are no trees around. So all my apiaries have got trees around. I'm gonna do my very best not to break it. Right, enough about me just kind of talking about what I spent my money on. Let's answer some questions. So first First question from Ed says, hi, do you know if you buy the 10-liter poly feeder from Abello, if you get it unpainted, is it unpainted inside the feeder? It's a bit of a random first question. So I'm pretty certain it won't be painted. If you get it unpainted, it won't be painted inside. But I guess the general question is there, what would I paint it with? Now, the standard advice for painting the inside of feeders, and a lot of people recommend this, a lot of bee farmers still use this, It's like external masonry paint. So external masonry paint, um, forget which it's called, like Sandex, Santex, something like that, is the one that I used. It works all right, it's fine. But the one that I've used— I've got 2 different— I've used loads of different paints, tried them all out on the inside, and the ones that I found last really, really well and come up very clean year on year One, I spray painted it with like an external gloss, and that was okay, pretty good. I would say better than the masonry paint. But the one that was really good was that I used an external— couple of coats of external grade gloss. And, uh, what was it? It was like an oil-based gloss. So an external grade oil-based gloss, and it was amazing. Make sure you do a little test, test patch on the poly so you're not going to melt everything down. but it gives you a little bit of melt and then it just seals it completely and it's great. So that would be my recommendation regardless of whether you're getting it painted or not. If it's painted already, just leave it, don't paint over it. If you're getting any poly feeders, polyash forth feeders, my recommendation is external grade gloss, oil-based gloss. Did I ever get any Yolanta queens? If so, how did they get on compared to your other queens? So yeah, I've had loads of Yolanta Queens, and we, we still sell them, and we'll sell them again this year. We're not selling the imported Yolanta Queens because Murray's not bringing them in anymore, and we had a few issues with those last year, just, just in that some of the attendants weren't looking too healthy when they came over here. And it's just, again, a beautiful Brexit bonus, that one. So Murray stopped importing them, and they were nowhere near as good as the Scottish mated Jolanta queens. So in terms of comparisons though, all I will say is that Murray is— and Jolanta, I should say, more than Murray— Jolanta is creating queens for a very specific bee farming need and a very specific heather bee farming need. So they want colonies that build up to a certain size, big strong colonies. They really want a good mix of genetics in there. So that's one of the big things that they go for, is not just focusing on the color of the bees or the genetics of the bees. They want the hybrid vigor. So there's lots of different bits that go into them. They're not looking for any, any kind of pure breeding lines. And another one, they're not specifically looking for gentle bees. So whereas maybe Buckfast, you, you put the gentle nature of the bee above Its ability to go and collect honey, or its ability to withstand disease, maybe depending on the breeders. I don't think the gentleness is top of the list. Now, I've had some Jolanta queens and they've been so gentle, like the gentlest bees ever, so it's definitely somewhere on the list. But I've had, I've had some as well that have been a little bit feisty, but like cover 3 national deep brood boxes in the brood area, so like 27 frames of brood. and collected the most honey I've ever seen. So it's an unfair comparison. How do they compare to my other queens? You need to see what you're comparing it against. And I think for Mari and for Jolanta, in terms of honey crop, there's nothing that's come anywhere close to some of these Jolanta queens. And specifically, it seems strange, specifically for the heather honey crop, they do seem to do very, very well. and they give you like a really nice color of wax as well. So yeah, I like 'em. We'll continue to stock them here. So this is a great question, this one. I'm not gonna go too deep. I would talk about this one all night, but it is from Chris Matthews and he says, what advice would you give someone to improve viewing numbers on a YouTube channel which is seasonal like beekeeping? He's got a fly fishing channel. So I did go and have a look. I liked your channel. It looked really nice and what a nice calm activity, just like, oh, a bit of fishing. Yeah. Love that. So I'm no YouTube expert. I just like try things and things go horribly wrong. So what I would do, not saying this is the right answer, and this is exactly what we do, what I do with Black Mountain Honey, is I kind of mass film videos and then we have a member section and then I just drip feed them through. So I think last year we got to September and there was maybe 30, 35 videos on the member section. And then I just drip feed them through throughout the winter. Some people don't like that. I can appreciate why some people don't like that. They want the videos as soon as they're possibly available. But if I did that, you wouldn't get any videos from September through to April. There'd just be none. So I try and change it up a little bit each year. This year I definitely went over the top with the shorts. Apologize. I take it back. Accept my mistake. You're not going to get pinged as much on the Shorts going forward. I'll still do a couple because I think it's important for YouTube to have that variety there, but I promise you it won't be more than 2 a week at any point of the year. So that would be, that would be my advice, is just try and do a stockpile. Your videos are really nice. Try and do as many different videos as you possibly can, keep a stockpile going, because for people who like fly fishing, when it's November and it's rainy, I can tell you what they would like to watch on YouTube is like a nice sunny catch a trout or whatever you do. So yeah, there we go. That's— I'll stop talking about YouTube now. So Chris Matthews, also another question: what is the most common question you get asked by new beekeepers who want to buy their first nuc? So I sat down and thought about that, and I had a cup of tea while I thought about it and drink it again. And I— everyone's got different takes on what their questions are and Generally, what's their first question? It's like the first question out of 10. But the number one question I think I get asked is, should I keep bees in my garden? Or, I'm going to keep the bees in the garden, do you think that's okay? And my answer is always no, don't keep bees in your garden. And I'm as blunt as that with people. I don't think people should keep bees in their garden. And then I go on to say I've had loads of bees in my garden. I had 36 hives in my garden at one point, and having a couple of colonies in a suitable garden is fine. But as soon as I moved my bees out of the garden, I enjoyed the beekeeping so much more. It's really awkward when you're you're in the back garden and you're doing stuff, and the bees are getting a little bit angry, and then you notice it happens every time the bees are getting a little bit angry. And what do you hear? You hear rum rum rum rum rum rum rum. And then it's your neighbor doing the streaming, and then you hit oh little kids that bash it, and then you just think oh this is really stressful. Probably not being the best neighbor here. So that's I would say the number one question that I get asked, and the bit of advice that I give is I don't think people should keep bees in their garden if they can get away with it. Right next question easy one to answer. Someone asking if there was a possibility of me sending my F1 Buckfast queens to Denmark. So No, unfortunately it's very, very difficult to send queens out of the UK, especially like ones or twos. If you were doing a few thousand, it might be worth it, but it's very difficult to do that. And also you're in Denmark, so you can get like really good, really good queens in Denmark. So I'm sure you can get some good Buckfast queens there. Next question is from Dan. He says, have I had any problems with woodpecker damage in any of my apiaries? So touch wood, we've not had a single hole made by a woodpecker ever, but I know a lot of people do. This is one of the major selling points, I think, of the concrete hives by the Stone Apiary. He said guaranteed to get no woodpecker damage and also make you slip your back out a little bit as well. It's heavy, those hives. Someone asked a good question about those hives the other day, which is how do you heft them? And the answer was you just can't, you can't have them, just make sure they're well fed. But no, I don't get any woodpecker damage, so I'm probably not the best place to answer that one. Right, I've gone to the next one then. So the next guy has asked 6 questions, 6 questions in one, so I'm going to flash through them really quickly and give you very short answers. So he says, how many colonies can a beginner manage max on the weekends only? So if you're a beginner, 2 or 3 colonies is what I would say. There's no additional benefit from having 10 colonies or managing 10 colonies badly. You can learn everything you need to learn from 2 or 3 colonies, and definitely don't just get 1 colony because that's a recipe for disaster. But 2 or 3 colonies while you're learning. If you're an expert and you say you know everything there is to know about beekeeping and you're just asking that question in terms of how many can I manage On the weekends only. I, I did like 100 colonies as a sideline just on, on the weekend, so one day of the weekend, but it was, it was way too much work. So I would not recommend that. I would say realistically, as a sideline, no more than 50, and 50 is probably pushing it as well. And you would have to realize that you will have no life, no life outside of your normal job and your beekeeping. Job. So I just preempted his second question, which is how many colonies can an experienced beekeeper manage on the weekends while working full-time? So I'll go with 50 for that one. How much honey did you harvest last season, and what would you say is an average yield per annum for you? So we got about 4 tons last year. Best, best honey year ever, apart from 2018, which was, which was slightly better. So we got 4 tons, anywhere between 3 or 4 tons, but I'm to get it down because I've got too many colonies of bees. So tell us about your beginning. How much did you harvest when you were just an amateur? So I remember first few years of being in Wales thinking, I did the bee math, everyone loves the bee math, which was, well, if I get 4 supers full and it's £30 of honey per super, that's £120, and if I sell that in 8-ounce jars, 240 jars, and if I sell that for £5 each, that's £1,200, I think, per hive. £1,200 per hive, right? I can definitely fund all of this extravagant spending on beekeeping equipment because I've got 100 hives and I'm earning £1,200 a hive. I'm going to be rich. And then you realize that bee maths doesn't work. It doesn't work at all. So I think I averaged maybe one super per hive, and I probably averaged £15 a super. So I'd gone from 4 supers at £30 a super to one super at £15 a super, and I still sold it for £5 a jar, an 8-ounce jar. But 8-ounce jars definitely take more than half a pound of honey. I've found that out. So I didn't make anywhere near as much money, and I didn't Didn't make anywhere near as much honey either. So next question was, how much honey can you make with selling honey in a year? So that's a bit of an open-ended question. Depends how good you are at selling your honey. All I will say is it's a crowded market and it's getting more and more crowded. Gotta do something different to make sure that you can sell it. And, and know that there are many, many bee farmers out there who are struggling to sell their honey. and they're praying for bad weather. Crazy, isn't it? They're praying for a bad year in the hope that— or praying for a bad year like for everyone else and a good year for them. But they almost want a bit of a weather correction to come along so that there's not that much honey on the market. And then the final question, personal question, this one: how much money can you make selling bees? So I do think that's where you're going to recoup your money, is an easier way to make a bit more money with a little bit less risk. But I see so many cowboys out there doing this. There's quite a few of them in terms of selling nukes, and you look at, you look at the state of them, and they're not very good. And, and you can guarantee they're not, uh, paying the taxman either. But that's, I think that's where the money is, is, is in diversifying what you've got. So selling wax, selling propolis, you see people doing royal jelly, queens— definitely a good market for queens, especially if you want to tap into some of the more niche queens. So if you're gonna go somewhere quite remote and try and do a local dark bee, whatever it is, and, uh, and you could— and you can do it well, you could probably sell quite a lot of those. So there we go, that guy got— that's Andy, he got 6 questions in. Quite good. So next question's from Simon Lawton saying, thanks, thanks for all your help. Great to see you at Telford. Keep the content going, it's really useful. Did I manage to get off the stand and look around at the beekeeping show? And if so, what caught my eye and how damaged was my wallet? So thanks, Simon. I didn't spend a penny. How good is that? And I got some lovely gifts. I was— it was so nice. People gave me— I got a bottle of mead. I've got, I've got a stone beehive. I've got a lovely box with some honey, um, like gift set with some candles and stuff. I've got a hat, and, and if Rich is there, or Ollie's Honeybees, what a nice hat, fits really well, love that. So I got some really nice freebies. I didn't spend anything. The one thing that did catch my eye, and I'm a bit gutted that I didn't get one because I had a chance to get it, was was the bivouac. So I did that video in the morning with the guy at like 7 in the morning, and, and we had a chat, and then I posted the thing. And he would have sold out by 10 o'clock regardless of whether I posted because it was a really cool product, and he only bought 8 of them with him. But I said to him, oh, well, if you, if you don't sell them all at the end of the day, I'll come back and get one because, because they're pretty cool. And I was trying to be good and not buy stuff And then as soon as I saw him packing up, I thought, I wish I bought one. But I spoke to him and he's on his next batch. I've got one reserved, so I will be buying one of those. And then in terms of what else caught my eye, like, how cool was the extractor? I was saying to everyone on the day, I nearly bought that extractor like 2 or 3 times. Not that exact one, but that model, because— I love that extractor. I stupidly look, look on websites and think, I want, I want something new and I want the very best because makes your life easier having the very best of things, especially when it comes to bees. And I hadn't even measured it, and I looked at it like it was the size of a car. And I was watching them moving it around the day before, and it took 6 people to lift it. 270 kilos it weighed. And there's no way I'd get that in my honey extraction room, and there's no way that I would need it. But here's a very good but here. So I met, I met so many cool people at this show. Uh, Stoughton Park Bees is on, so I met Joe. Joe's taking me out for lunch this weekend, so thanks, Joe. He was one of the very cool people that I met, along with his wife who's also called Jo. But there was another guy that I met called David Hanson. who some people might know, who's a bee farmer who's got a lot of colonies. I think he manages or farms cattle as well, but he has invited me up to Yorkshire at some point. I think we're going to do it back end of August, and we're going to do like— I'll just spend a couple of days there doing some filming with a proper bee farmer, not a part-time pretend bee farmer like me, a proper bee farmer. And he has that extractor. This is where I was going, going off on a massive tangent He's got that exact extractor, so 24-frame, a 24-frame shallow or 12-frame deep swing cage with all the fancy gizmos and the heated sides. I think he's got the heated sides, but we're going to go up there and do some videos of him managing the heather, taking his bees up to the heather, try and do some honey extraction videos as well and try and do some heather extraction videos. So I'm really excited. I'm gonna definitely do more of that this year. Because it is good fun to get around, and I need to get my drone up there, so that's going to be good fun crashing the drone up into some trees in Yorkshire. So yeah, I, I really enjoyed it. The, the bivouac, probably the thing that really caught my eye. The honey extractor was good because I, I didn't buy it, but I still want it. And then also, I don't know if anyone else saw this, one of the really interesting things there that that you might not have realized. I was saying to Damien, he definitely needs to get some power to the uncapping machine, 'cause that uncapping machine in D-Boxer was so cool. And I don't think people might not have realized what it had. So normally on the uncapping machine, you have these blades that go like this, and you have water that goes and runs through the back of the blades. You've got heated blades that cut the wax off flush with your bars. That's the one that I've got, but it's annoying because if you don't have evenly capped frames or you have cappings that go underneath the bar, you have to manually touch it up with a knife and it's quite time-consuming. However, the one that he had there, the uncapping machine, the premium uncapping machine, has these like spinning knives that after it's gone through the heated knives, alternating heated knives, it goes through this and it grinds down underneath the wax, the line of the bar, which means that once it's gone through that machine, it's ready to be extracted. There's nothing left. I'm really jealous, and I want that on my uncapping machine. So that might be my next upgrade, but he's definitely gonna have to do it next year. He just needs to get some power to it because it would have been cool to see that one in action. Right, sorry if I'm ignoring the comments here. I've got 27 questions to get through, I've done 4 I think, so I'll start being a bit quicker. Right, Joe Murphy, doing advanced questions now as well. I'm getting a wild hive out of a dovecote— is that how you say it? A dovecote— this spring, which is a standalone dove house up a 3.5-meter pole from a friend's garden. They don't care if the dovecote gets destroyed as it's old. How would you go about getting this colony colony into a hive. It's been there 5 or 6 years. So if they don't care about it being destroyed, definitely just seal them in without a doubt. That makes so much more sense that you don't want to be working up a 3.5-meter pole doing stuff. Go up there nighttime, completely seal them in. And if they're genuinely— you're just going to chuck the— is it a dovecote? I think that's how you say it. Just seal it in with, um, like spray foam. Best way of doing it, get it completely sealed in, cut it down, take it to where you want the colony to be sited, and then just take little holes so they can orientate back in and back out. And then it's so easy for you because you're not moving them. You can just start going in and cutting it out and bungeeing, bungeeing the frames into frames, but the bees will know where they live. That's definitely the way that I would do it. That sounds cool, that would be a good video. Whereabouts is it? If it's close, I'll come and help. Has to be within 50 miles, I think, of North Wales, of Mold. I'll come and help. There we go. Right, next question. What would you do with old dark black brood frames that still has honey stores in them? The frames are from a drone laying colony that I shook out down the field. Just gonna— he was just gonna cut the frames and melt the wax, but there's a bit of weight to the frames. Doesn't want to get the extract dirty. So this question was asked at the beekeeping show, and it just goes to show the different way that people would answer this. So for me now, I definitely don't use those frames. I don't think you're insinuating that. Definitely don't use them in, in any colonies of bees. For me, it's just too much of a disease risk, so stopping all of that now. If you've got an ApiMelter and you're happy to, to get that a little bit dirty with some Some drone brood, you can stick it in the Happy Melter and melt it out, or you could try and press it out, or you could just chuck it away. I would— what would I do if I only had like 10 of them? I don't think I'd bother doing it. I think I'd maybe try and just like crush it out. That'd be the best way of doing it. Just get it warmed up so it's not like set in the in the wax, and then just get some sieves and just crush it through the sieves. That's what I would do. And then you've got one bucket for wax, one bucket for strained honey, and then you can eat the honey. It's fine, nothing wrong with that, and no disease risk for the honey. And then you can melt down the wax and reclaim that. So I've just realized why I've got so many questions here. It's Joe Murphy asking all the questions on here. So he's he's probably not on, but he's still asking loads of questions. Thanks, Joe. So Joe says, when pre-ordering mated queens, is it better to hold off for a few weeks after they're first available to ensure they're better mated, or is this a beekeeping myth? So I think, I think there's maybe like logic behind that, but not, not that we find at all. If anything, the, the early ones, uh, maybe better. It all depends where you get the weather So as you see at the moment, it's spring, supposed to be spring in March, and it's like 9 inches of snow outside. So you could, you could get one year where you just get perfect mating weather in March for, for queens, because the queens will be out there mating now in, in Italy, maybe in the next couple of weeks. So it all just depends on, on the season and if you get good weather. So I can see where the logic comes from, but no, it's not something that we've ever experienced. Right, Joe, I'm going to come back to some of your questions because there's a lot of questions there. I'm trying to answer some other people's questions as well. So Ben Wong says— I think I met Ben at the beekeeping show. Hi, Ben. I remember a lot of people's names. Definitely met Ben. Ben, sorry. He says, I want to swap 2 queens in 2 colonies. What would be your approach? I like that. I like the simple question. There's a lot of questions here that are like 40 lines. I like the simple question. So my approach now with queens, I'm so much more ruthless with queens. I used to— I'd be in that situation previously and I'd say, right, I want to swap 2 queens, so I want to kill 2 queens and then I want to replace them with 2 other queens for whatever reason. maybe they're old or maybe they're aggressive or anything like that. And then I'd get up there and I'd look at the queen and I'd think, should probably be all right somewhere else. Maybe I'll just take a little split and I'll split them. And then I end up with 4 colonies. So I end up with 2 aggressive nucs and then 2 requeened colonies. And I've got really good now at just being a little bit militant in terms of if, if a colony is aggressive, it gets a cross on the back of it, and the next time I'm there, I'll kill the queen and put a new queen in. I've got very good at killing queens, and it sounds a bit harsh, and I bet there's people out there that would say, oh, just— I love that queen, send it to me. But that's— it's quite a lot of work doing that still. So my approach to swapping 2 queens into colonies, if, if they're aggressive, just kill them. Kill the queens. And then what my— the way that I always requeen, and I know some of my videos don't show it exactly like this, but I always do this with which is I wait for the queens to arrive. So I'd order a couple of queens, the queens would arrive, I'd take the queens up to the colonies, I'd kill the existing queen, and I'd put the new queen in the cage and leave it there for 8 days and feed them. Feeding's always good at that point. You obviously can't do that if, if you, if you've got supers on, but if you're doing it early in the season, do it while they're feeding and, and Really good acceptance rate on the queens that way. And then after 8 days, I'd go back, knock down all the queen cells, and at the same time that I knock down all the queen cells, I pop the cage. So I give them access to the fondant. I double-check that there's still a good amount of fondant there. So if they started to chew through the fondant, don't just open the cage. You still need to give them a little bit of time after you've knocked down the cells. So once I've done that, topped up the fondant, and I've popped the cage, I leave them for like a week and come back on my next inspection. And 95% of the time you'll come back and you'll find eggs. And then sometimes you go 2 or 3 weeks without eggs and you'll come back and then they'll be fine. Different queens come back into lay at different times, but that, that would always be my approach, and that's the way that I kill my queens now and replace them. Peter Maguire is the very kind gentleman who sends me Christmas cards of his amazing watercolor other skills. So thanks, Peter, they're really nice. I've not got them up here, but they're downstairs by my cooker, and I look at them all the time and think you're a very skilled artist. Thank you for that. His question is, for those of us with just a few colonies, is it worth investing in an instant vat or type equipment, or simple— or simply dribble oxalic acid? Oh, get my words out. Or should he use an oxalic acid dribble? Is one dose sufficient? So In my mind, that the, like, vaping oxalic acid or acetylbioxal, it makes it easier, and I would argue it's more effective. But if I just had a couple of colonies, I couldn't justify £400 on an instant vat. No way. Because it doesn't make your life that much easier. And I think that the bees, if you do, if you do an oxalic acid dribble at the right time, I don't think it's that bad for the bees, really don't think it is. And you could use it, you could use another treatment, you could just not use oxalic acid and you could use Apivar, or you could use like Formic Pro, or you could do what Richard Noel does and do some like queen trapping at some point in the year and then combine that with something else. So I wouldn't— it's not a silver bullet and it doesn't fix everything and you just do one shot in Christmas time. and all the varroa go away. And it is quite expensive, so I've got one because I think if you, if you're getting like 12 colonies, you've got multiple colonies, it's so quick doing it on an Instant Vap. Even on a Supplimox, it's just as quick for me. You don't have the cables and you haven't got to mess around with the generator on an Instant Vap. The Supplimox is really quick as well. But for you, Peter, no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't spend, spend your £400 on upgrading your honey extractor or buying some more hives. That's what I would spend the money on, especially if you've got like a 3-frame— so you've got a 3-frame manual extractor and you're thinking, do I buy an Instant Vat or do I upgrade my extractor to an 8-frame electric? I know you might need to add a few hundred pounds more into it, but I would definitely focus on making something easier than getting something shiny. Right, next question from Chris Fortin. When choosing a new apiary location, how do you calculate the number of colonies the site is suitable for, both in space for the hives and also local nectar availability? So I've not got any sites where you're genuinely restricted in terms of the number that you could get in there. I think my forest site, I had like 130 in there at one point, and it didn't feel cramped, didn't feel cramped at all, and it was shocking for the bees. I had about 35% losses that year. I made mistake after mistake after mistake, and it all came down to my own laziness, which was I didn't want to go— I didn't want to go and take the feed to all the different apiaries. I wanted to bring the bees back to the feed and just make my life easier. I lost so many bees, it was ridiculous. And I do think that was partly down to the fact that there were too many there competing for very little In the way of resource late on in the year, particularly for pollen. So I think in terms of the number that you can get into the locations, that's not what's driving it, but the local nectar availability definitely is driving it. And I do find, I used to— all of my beekeeping used to be driven, and it still is driven to a certain extent, by efficiency. And I have a limited amount of time, and I can't just be driving around 30 different apiaries I've got 4 or 5 colonies in. So I tried to have about 25, 30 colonies per apiary and just do 4. That's generally how I worked it. And I stopped doing that on the advice of someone who I respected, and they just said, seriously, try it. Just knock it down to 10 or 12 per site, and I bet you get loads more honey. And I did that in the first year in 2018, and it was like, whoa. I've got 4 times the amount of honey. And it was, it was an anomaly because 2018 was just the craziest year ever. But then since then, the yields really have gone up. And I don't attribute it solely to that. There's other factors in play. The main one, I think, is how well they overwinter and how strong they come out. And I've done that by cutting, having a fixed end date to make sure that my Apivar Treatments are in nice and early. But I do think there is a limit for static apiaries, and you shouldn't really go over, say, 12 or 15. That would be my personal opinion now. And we say about 10 to 12. I've got one apiary that's still got maybe 20, 25, but I will be moving some of those out of there because there's just too many there. I haven't spoken this much since the beekeeping show. Uh, I just, I've just seen Damien's question. I'll answer your question because I've just seen it and it's an easy one. He's just built his honey warming cabinet, doesn't have a fan yet. How important is the fan to the outcome? Definitely need a fan. Get as much airflow around there as possible because it will— you just get all the heat going up to the top and nothing at the bottom. Uh, you definitely need as many fans as you can possibly Right, next one on here is from David Neely saying he started beekeeping last year. Thankfully, his bees have survived winter so far. He's hoping to do his first split. How early in spring would you make a split? Do you use a particular date or a particular temperature, or do you wait until you see drones? So I don't do any splits nowadays that are walkaway splits, so I'm always to put a mated queen in. If you're going to do a walkaway split, you just wait until you see like a full frame of drone brood, or like a pretty much full frame. You know when you see it, you'll go and you'll be like, wow, right, they're ready to go. And then you can make a split. But there's precursors to that as well. Definitely not a particular date, definitely not really a particular temperature. I don't say, right, it's 15 degrees today, I'm going to go make splits, because you'll get odd days in March that are 15, 16 degrees where you could make splits, but you're not going to have any drones. For me, it's more about the, the strength of the colony. If you see them and they're bubbling over— and if you've seen some of my videos, you'll see what I mean— when they're really bubbling over, you know they're strong enough to split. And also the number of frames of brood. So you're going to be going through, maybe you've got 10, 11 frames in your brood box. If you've got 8 frames of solid brood in there, you're in a good position. You can definitely go and make a split there. If you've got 3 frames of brood, you're probably not going to get that far with 3 frames of brood. And what can happen is you can really damage a colony at that point of the year if you do it too early, because there's like a switchover day where loads of bees die. You'll notice this if you've not noticed it yet. You'll notice it. It's like April, end of April. You'll see so many dead bees outside the front, and it's all these bees, the winter bees that have gone through and done nothing for 6 months, and then they have to rear a little bit of brood, and they're just hanging on for dear life. They rear this first, maybe second round of brood, and they're just thinking, I just need to get through, I just need to be here and survive and provide some warmth to this brood until it hatches, and then I'm gonna die. And they do, they just go out and all of them die. But if you make your split before that, you've only got 3 or 4 frames of brood, and all of these what looks like loads and loads of bees that are just about to die and you make the wrong split, once you make it, you, you just end up with like too much brood and not enough bees to keep it warm, and you set them back so much. So my advice would be, it's very, very rare for bees to swarm in April. Not to say they won't swarm in April, they definitely will. But if you're looking at making a split, just double brood them. Double brood them as soon as As soon as they're able to. So as soon as you've got a box full of bees and they're on like 4 or 5, 6 frames of brood, get another brood box on there and build them up that way. And then you can get them into May easily at this point, and then you can just make a really fun— do a walkaway split. You just separate the 2 boxes, put them next to each other, or you can make like 5, 6 nucs out of that. It gives you loads more options doing it that way. So that's what I would do. Don't do it too early. You're much better off pushing it a little bit later and getting closer to them swarming than going early. If you want me to commit to a date, I'll go no earlier than the 1st of May. Right, next question from Alex Lamb says, when he takes the crop, the honey crop off, he checks the moisture before extracting and again after it has settled and strained. It is jarred within 48 hours, then kept in a cool space to naturally crystallize. Despite checking the water content of the honey when he allows it to naturally crystallize in the jars, it later seems to ferment, present with bubbles and separation. How can I avoid this while still keeping my honey raw? Follow-up question, how can you recover the jars that look to be fermenting? So it's, it's a slightly difficult question to answer that one, because are you 100% sure the jars are fermenting? What I would do is Maybe have like a little test and put some in a, like, a plastic bottle and see if you're really like, you're getting that expansion, see if it is releasing some CO2 and see if it actually is fermenting. Because I've seen honey like that where it looks, it looks like it's separating and it's crystallizing and you get like, you get these weird speckles on it and it looks like it's going off and you think, oh, it's going off and it's not, it's just crystallizing and you're just getting a little bit of separation. And you take a jar like that and you put it back through the warming cabinet to warm it up a bit, and it just goes back to liquid honey. Now I know you've put there, how can you avoid that while still keeping it raw? I guess you probably can't because taking it up to 38 degrees takes quite a while to do it. I think you'd be safer bringing it up to like 45 degrees quickly and just getting it back to runny again, so then it's not technically Raw, whatever that means. Raw doesn't even mean anything, and that is a joke. But if anyone's listening, I know what raw means, but I'm just not allowed to say it. So that's what I would say with that one. Different honeys crystallize at different times and different rates, and sometimes it looks like they're naturally crystallizing and they look a bit odd. But if you're checking the moisture and you're getting a moisture, maybe double check. And calibrate your refractometer to make sure it is correct. I've never had any honey ferment apart from heather honey. I've had heather honey go a couple of times, and it's really annoying when it goes, and, and you can really taste it in the honey, like it is tangy. There's no doubt whatsoever that it is fermented. Could probably sell it as like a unique health product, fermented heather honey. I think there'd be a good market for that with incredible health benefits like Wainwright Bee Farms and their Crunchy Heather Honey. It's like the best marketing ever, but I would just double-check to see whether it is actually fermenting. Right, Jason Jeffrey has asked a question that I get asked a lot, which is regarding demerare splits. How do you ensure that any syrup from the brood box does not end up in the supers? So If you're feeding your bees syrup and you're getting them through the winter feeding them syrup, I really wouldn't worry too much about any of that syrup getting up into the supers because the first thing that the bees will do when you put your supers on in the season is they're going to clean them up and they're cleaning them up really, really quickly. That takes resource and then at that point of the year when they're trying to keep the expanding brood nest as warm as it can possibly be, When the outside temperature is quite cold, they burn through their stores really, really quickly. And if the stores are fully capped, they're not going to waste their energy just trying to take that up and put it up into the supers. If you were to go through and bruise those overwintered stores, they might have a go at trying to lift them upstairs, but just don't bruise your supers. So I don't— I personally don't have any issue, or I think there's any risk with overwintered stores going up into the Supers because I think the bees just get through it really quickly at that point of year. However, I think the other interpretation of this question is when you, when you're doing your Demaray split and you're lifting up that top brood box up to the top, how do you make sure that you're not taking any contaminated honey up there? It's kind of like the follow-on bit of the question. And I always say that it— the, the bees will use the wax to the best of their advantage. And as long as you're not extracting from the wax that's got the Apivar strips in, then there really is no issue, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to use Apivar. Because what do bees do with their honey? They go and take the— they go and collect the nectar, they bring it into the brood nest, they temporarily store it in the brood nest, and then overnight they lift it up. That's what they do all the time, so there's no issue with it being temporary. Early in there. So as long as you end up at the end of the year not having your Apivar-infected frames at the top and they're underneath at the bottom, then there's no issue of contamination. Right, I'm going to skip a couple of questions there because they're just really, they're really long questions. So I've got 3 more questions and then I will answer some questions from the chat. So first one is from Erica Griggs, who I missed one of her questions before. She's submitted it again, so sorry for missing it. She says, hi Lawrence, love the Q&A. She submitted this question last week, but it must have got lost in the rush, so again, sorry for that. So her bees have got the dreaded chronic bee paralysis virus. They're holding their own, but any ideas about giving them a helping hand? So I know you had to ask this question twice, and I'm going to give you The worst answer ever, which is I've got very limited experience with CBPV. I know it is an issue, and I know a lot of bee farmers have gone through a number of different ways of trying to fix it. So some of the ways they say is just to remove the mesh from the floor and then the dead bees will fall out. And I'm pretty sure that's been debunked now, it's not doing anything. So I'll have to go away and speak to some bee farmers because I've not had a single colony that's infected with that yet. So I'm not really in a position to give you any good advice, and I know that there's not much that's going around the bee farming community in terms of, oh, you could do this, or this works. And I know there are some things that have been tried and that have been proven to not really do that much. So I would cross your fingers and hope that they get through, maybe put them into their own apiary. Away from everything else because it's still not clear how that's transmitting from colony to colony. And I hope they get through. So next question from David McDowell saying, do I shoot on a GoPro or the like, and how much time does it take to edit the videos, or do I just go with what I shoot? So definitely don't just go with what I shoot. Oh, there'd be so much swearing in the videos when I get like stung in the face. And also, yeah, some of my early videos, you could see where the edits weren't very good. So I do, I do put a little bit more time into the edits now. And this year, this is one of the things that I'm really doubling down on in terms of trying to actually take the time to make the B-roll— I'm sorry, excuse the pun— but the, the background images and video that accompany me just talking a little bit more detailed, a little bit more relevant. And that takes time. So previously, if I, if I film, say, a 15-minute video And I just want to edit the ums and the ahs and the ers out, that maybe takes 25, 30 minutes max. But if you want to start overlaying it and doing slow-mos and putting drone shots in there, which is what I'm going to do this year, 15-minute video, you're talking maybe an hour. So it's not— doesn't take ages. And I do— I film all my videos, like I'll do 10, 15 a day, and then I'll just do like one a night, and then not too bad. I don't mind just messing around on a computer doing one a night. That's not too onerous, and I quite enjoy it. It is quite fun. In terms of equipment, I'll tell you what equipment I've got. I've got loads of equipment. So I do have a GoPro. I've got a GoPro Hero 8. I've got a DJI Mini Pocket 2, I think. I don't use either of them really anymore. I used my phone for a lot, and the phone was fine. But I don't use my phone anymore. So I've got a Sony A7S III, which is not that one. Uh, I've got a Sony— but that— the Sony is— the Sony A7S III is really good. That's the one with the proper like 4K 120-frame slow-mos. I really like using that. I've got a Sony A7— I forget what they're called now. I know Sony A7 IV, I think it might be. I've That's what I'm using in my webcam here as well now. So it's really good to have 2 different cameras so you can kind of film yourself and film other stuff. And then I've got my new drone as well, and then I've got them all on a gimbal. The gimbal helps keep everything nice and smooth. I like talking about my YouTube equipment, it is good fun. Right, so the final question before I go into the chat, and I will come back to any of the ones in here that I've missed, um, It's from Alan Ransom saying, have you ever used a full-frame queen introduction cage? And if so, what is the best way to configure the setup? Do you just open the plastic queen cage and place them in the frame cage or so to add more nurse bees? So I've got a few of these. I've got like a full queen excluder cage, and then I've got a full one of the other ones. So one of them can let the bees go through and one of them can't. It's like a complete like bee excluder. And I've also got pinning cages as well, and then my homemade pinning cage is just made out of mesh, and I don't like any of them. I've tried, I've tried to like them, and I've tried to use them, and I speak to so many different bee farmers on this and different people on this who swear by these cages, all the little mesh ones, and they hate the postal cages, and I love them. They're my— that's my favorite way to introduce any queen. Even like expensive breeder queens that I get, I just, I release them, excuse me, in the postal cage that they come in. That is my preferred method. It never fails if the colony's hopelessly queenless. And I've heard people saying that, saying that I say hopelessly queenless too much and it is all a load of rubbish, but that's what works for me. So you can only talk about what works for you. And for me, if you get the colony hopelessly queenless, you can release pretty much anything into them. Right, I'll come back to my list there. I needed to do this just to kind of get through some of those questions that were building up. So I'm going to come back through the chat now and see what people are saying. Oh, I'm just reading through some of the chats. Right, so Joe Murphy, surprised that you've got a question, Joe. But thank you. Right, there's a farm shop that wants me to— that wants to stock his honey. What sort of percentage markup is typical to offer a farm shop? If he was to sell 227 grams for £5, what should I sell them to him for, for example? So definitely don't work it out like that. Work out for you how much you think that honey's worth and then sell it to them for what you think the honey's worth at wholesale. And also, the wholesale thing is You can run before you can walk. I'm not suggesting that this is you, but if you've got, say, I don't know, 500 jars of honey to sell in a year, your target for selling that honey needs to be that you sell it by April, April or May. You want to run out in April or May because then you can make more honey and you can sell it again. There's no point selling all your honey in November because then you're going to just not have any honey to sell for the rest of the year. So you want to kind of eke it out as long as you possibly can. And I would work on the basis that how much do you think that honey is costing you, and what is a reasonable markup for you to earn some profit on your honey regardless of whether you're selling it retail or wholesale? And then let the farm shop see what they sell it for. So we, we sell to a number of farm shops and they sell the honey for like £7 or £8. So you can kind of work, work back to work out where you are. A farm shop can sell a 227-gram jar of honey for loads more than a fiver, but depending on where you are, you could, you could go £8, £9, £10 if it looks nice and it's nice honey. I forgot to say, and I'm probably going to say this in all my videos now, if you enjoy the video, please do hit the thumbs up. It really does help me out, helps the algorithm. and it shows that you're enjoying the video. Right, Hi Lawrence, when is the best time to graft eggs for queen rearing? So just let the drones tell you when you should be doing that. If you want, if you want a date, we don't start doing it until 15th of May, middle of May, and we did it a little bit late last year. But just to make sure, we do it once you've got a frame full of mature drones that are emerging when we start grafting, and it works quite well. The beekeeping show was great and a great opportunity to meet Lawrence and many fellow beekeepers. Good to meet you too. My drone won't crash, it will stop short of crashing. The only problem you will have is lack of time with the Hongyu 2. Yeah, I hope so. I'll take that— lack of time and a drone that doesn't crash. I have read that they're pretty good at not crashing now. So that'd be good fun. Hi, why do you paint the inside of the poly feeder? So I think it was your question, wasn't it, Ed? It goes mouldy. It goes really badly mouldy. If you have a poly feeder and you just put syrup in it, come back in a couple of weeks and it is black and minging and mouldy and almost impossible to clean because poly's so porous that the syrup gets in, the mould takes hold, and then the mould just between those balls of poly, just takes over. And no matter how much you scrub it, you're not getting rid of that mold. It's going to be there forever. But if you seal it with paint, then you're all good, and you can just pressure wash them off and bleach them, and they come out as new. Uh, Ed Butler got a fancy channel member badge. Thanks for that, Ed. Uh, so his question is, if I was given a choice between using the frames and Feeders plastic frames or the conventional wood and wax frames for your brood box? Which would you use? So I'm like properly scared about EFB now, and that's the only reason I wouldn't use the frames and feeders plastic frames in my brood boxes, because it's quite a big investment, and if there were to be any issues with EFB, it becomes very expensive trying to get rid of it all. You can't just burn your hive. just burn all the equipment, you have to take it away and get it incinerated. It's not cheap. I think they give you like a couple of times of we'll do it for you, but I think if you went to— if you went and said, right, I'm making a decision to have all of my brood frames as plastic, or even with plastic foundation, I think it would end up being very, very expensive. If that wasn't an issue, oh yeah, I'd probably go for it because I do think they're, they're very good. And it would make my life very easy, and it would make replenishing those frames very, very easy. You could just scrape them down, and probably, I don't know whether I'd scrape them down and go again. It's a difficult one. It's not a straightforward one, but if I had to make a decision, I would go with, yeah, conventional wooden wax. I genuinely haven't spoken this much. My throat's Throat sore. Uh, says he's traveling from Virginia, USA to Chepstow at the end of the month for Winter's End Music Fest. Do I have a storefront? So no, we don't have a storefront. We just— we've got a front room, uh, and it is based by business out of my front room, which my wife loves. Uh, but, but also Chepstow is quite far away. So it's— Chepstow is maybe like 3 and a half hours away from us, which I know for USA is not that much. They think like, oh, they'll drive across to California from New York. But yeah, 3 and a half hours in the UK is quite far. But it would be nice. I'd like to have a storefront and to be able to welcome people, but it would be a lot. It would be a lot of time. So Joe says he doesn't mind that I drip feed the videos into YouTube, but I should start saying what the date is. So always open to feedback like that, and I have taken that feedback on board. So I now, in my Adobe Premiere template, I do have a today's date. So I'll put that on all the dates going forward. I'll put the dates on all the videos going forward even. Uh, Pure Yorkshire Honey said it was good to meet you at the beekeeping show. You too. What was the best product or bargain I came across? So I do, I do think the bee vac was, was the coolest one. And then, yeah, the extractor was my second favorite. But in terms of the best bargain, I don't know. I don't know. The best bargain that was definitely missed— there were some bargains missed on that show, I tell you, because like speaking to Damien at the end, oh, he was so annoyed that he had to take that extractor home and the uncapping machine. And there was a— I think there was a 42-frame classic extractor there. He did not want to take them back. So I genuinely think if you, if you turned up to one of those events in a van, you, you could get a really good deal. He's gonna hate me saying this, you could get a good deal at the end though because people don't want to take stuff back, especially like the European manufacturers. You imagine like having to like take stuff back to Denmark, or they can just knock another 10% off, maybe another 15% off, and do a good deal if you're going to buy a a few bits. So I think the best bargains were the bargains that weren't had. Really do think if people turn up to those shows in a van with the ability to take home big chunky bits of kit, like mega bits of kit, you could get something good. How long do you feed pollen patties once spring comes in? So I've stopped feeding, feeding any pollen patties because I didn't, I didn't find it made a massive amount of difference. And what really annoyed me with them was that I'd go to all the effort of making them up, and then the bees would like, you know, have a little sniff and be like, yeah, this is all right. And then as soon as the sun comes out and there's real pollen, they just shun it, and then you've got to get rid of it all. So I wasted loads of money on Ultra Bee and Bee Ultra and all the different ones. But, um, so I wouldn't— I personally wouldn't feed it. But if you're gonna say, how long do you feed it? Just Just make the patties quite small and just give like 1 or 2, 1 or 2 small patties each, and just don't keep on feeding them. But also just be aware that you can do a bit of damage. The general rule of thumb that people say with patties in the UK is middle of Feb. That's when they say if you're building up for the OSR, you go around middle of Feb-ish for pollen patties. If you'd have done that this year, you'd be really in trouble now. because you just started feeding in the middle of Feb, and then the bees would have kind of thought, this is— this— oh, do you know what, I just clicked skip ads. It said there was going to be some adverts there, so I thought I'd skip the adverts for people. But you— the colony would have been building up and stimulating that queen to get ready, saying there's protein coming in, we need to get going now. And then you would have had this like beast from the east coming in and ruining everything. So you can do a little bit more damage, uh, by, by going and actually feeding them, uh, with pollen. So Jim says, evening Lawrence, hope you're well, good to see you at the beekeeping show. With your new drone purchase, are you going to use it to track, to follow, track swarms? That could be, could be quite cool, but I just muller them, wouldn't I, with the rotor blades. But I do, I do want to do more filming other stuff, and the drone purchase is for stuff like that. I want to film more people doing other stuff so it's not just me all the time. So I mean like other beekeepers. I really want to film some cutouts and some people doing some— if there's bees in trees or anything like that and they're relatively local, like I'm up for coming along and filming some stuff. I've reached out to a few different people and not too keen, not had much response back. But you'd get a nice video out of it. So if anyone's up for doing local-ish cutouts or even swarm collections— it's difficult to do it with swarm collections because they're so reactive, but cutouts are planned. And I think it would be— I think it would be a good video. You see, they're the videos that tend to do quite well on YouTube. But I'm gonna— I'm gonna use my new drone just to have some fun. It comes tomorrow, so I'm gonna get it tomorrow. I'm gonna take it out in the snow. you can probably break it. Hi Joe, he says he's got to take his bees to pollinate cherries in 3 weeks. Can I start trickle feeding this weekend when the weather warms up? What do you think? So no, I wouldn't trickle feed, not when it's snowing. They're not gonna— they're not gonna take it down. It needs to be at least like 12 or 13 degrees for them to go up into a feeder and actually start taking the syrup. But bees will— bees will naturally build up, and if you're going to pollinate you only need them on, I think it's on 6 frames, 6 frames of brood you need them on by the time they're up to that. So even if you start trickle feeding this week, you're not going to make a huge amount of difference. So I would just leave them and hope that you've got nice big strong colonies that you can take there. How you going? He says, cheers for that, Lawrence, good to meet you at the beekeeping show. I won't say which manufacturer's stand I was on, but the us to say we'll be back next year and stuff. Uh, Greg Wayne says, hi, can you treat using apibioxal via a gas vat while feeding fondant? So yep, you can definitely feed any oxalic acid product, sublimation's fine while feeding fondant, no issue at all. Bjorn says, good evening from Norway. Good evening. Joe Creaser says, did that B-vac come with any other batteries than the Makita one? So no. So I did, I did say to him what made him think about going down the Makita line, and he just said that they're the batteries that he uses and he provides. He can say he sells them with the batteries, but I— it's exactly what I thought, which is a lot of people have their own batteries. But it's kind of like a do-it-yourself kit. It looks so simple. I reckon if you went on AliExpress, you like a DeWalt connection and just swap it out yourself. I don't think there's anything fancy in there. And the guy was amazing. Like, he was— I know I was maybe a little bit unfair on him leaving a couple of the unedited clips in there, but I just thought, you know what, I'm gonna do it. They're my videos, I'm gonna put them in. But it was, it was— I only did that because he was such a nice guy and he was so a bit like, oh, what's going on here? And me just going over, say, yeah, let's film a video and we'll do this. I didn't know what was going on. And then as soon as I said, right, talk about your product, he was all over it, knew exactly what he was doing, and so well versed in the product. It was great. He was probably— he was probably— I won't say he's my favorite person I met there, but he was, he was in the top 10. Uh, right, let's go on. Someone's retracting messages. I'm really— I'm always curious when people retract messages. Oh wow, I've missed so many comments. So I'm I'm so far behind, right? Right, let me get back to where I was. I think I've missed some. Right, George Nichols says, good evening, I hope you're well. Better late than never. Yeah, so sorry, I know, I know this was a long time coming. Uh, Bill Gartner says, when am I going to do a follow-up on the anal hives? Guys, so anal hives, uh, not until I put some bees in them. So I'll probably make a split. I've got, I've got my concrete Langstroth beehive with Langstroth bees in, so bees on Langstroth frames. I'm going to split from them and fill another 2 Langstroth, so my hempcrete and my other stone apiary concrete hive, and then I'll split and do an annel one as well. So I'll probably just make small splits and build them up. I've not got any supers for them yet. But I will, I will do an update. Uh, Mark Guja says, can you advise on a good cost-effective company for website creation and hosting? So we use Wix. Wix are pretty good. That is— I wish I'd used— no, I was going to call it Spotify. It's not Spotify, is it? Shopify. That was the one that I wish I'd gone with originally because you can link your products at the bottom of YouTube videos, but it's It's only for that reason. But I have to say, Wix is really good. Should get a little sponsorship there. This chat is sponsored by Wix. But no, I'm not going to get sponsorship, am I? But they're good. They're really good and really, really easy to make your own website. So my website, I know I'm not saying it's the best website in the world, but I think it's all right. Like, I'm quite happy with it. It's quite— I did that and I have no— like, I'm just about— you can write my Microsoft Word and do like a sum formula on Excel. So it's really simple. But what's great with it is like you get all this feedback and marketing stuff, and you can see all the analytics for traffic and sales, and everything seems to be linked in— not linked in, but you can use like your Google Ads and you can do your email marketing. Sorry if you get bombarded with a few emails. I'm gonna refine my email marketing strategy going forward. While we're on that point, one of the things that I was thinking I might do, and if you think it's a good idea, maybe give it— give this video a thumbs up if you think it's a good idea. See what I did there? But I might do a newsletter. I'm aware that I focus very much on videos, but some people do just like to read a little newsletter as well. So I might, if I get the time one evening, just kind of write down what we're doing and you can read that. But I do think Wix is very good, and it certainly handles the amount of people that we get on it, and it's very seamless. It's great. Right, next question from Bee Folk says, hi Lawrence, what would your plan be for varroa treatment on a colony with no previous treatment? I've inherited a colony with no previous treatment. So I'd just have a look at them first and see kind of like Are they okay? Do a mite drop test, see what the mite drop actually is. If you're going in and looking and you've got like patchy brood, brood with holes in, deforming virus, visible varroa, then I'd be thinking right straight on to numerous vapes of oxalic acid, 5-day intervals, just to get the number down to a level where it's tolerable. But it's, it's an interesting one you say that because Apivar like this time of the year, today, tomorrow, is a very, very effective treatment for a colony that's struggling. And I don't think a lot of people realize you can use Apivar at this time of the year, and it's really good. So Apivar, you can't put your supers on at the same time as using Apivar, but you can go double brood. So if you're going to double brood your colony anyway, you'll easily get them through to the middle of May. And it's an Apivar, an 8-week treatment, or or 2 brood cycle treatment. It's not clear the guidelines, they say between 6 and 10 weeks. I always say it's an 8-week treatment. So what's the date today? It's like 9th of March. So if you did an 8-week treatment, it's probably going to take you to the first or second week of May, which on a double brood means you're not going to be supering up by then. And then you can take the strips out, and then the day you take the strips out, next day you can put the supers back on, and then there's no contamination. So I'll probably go with something like that, maybe a vape Get a vape, get all the phoretic mites down with some oxalic acid, and then go straight in with some Apivar. Uh, Ugar123, I think that's how it's pronounced, says, I'm going to start, uh, get some bees, one hive or 2 to start with. It's only a hobby, so honey from one is more than enough for me. Any thoughts? So I would always go for 2, and not, not necessarily saying you buy 2 nucs But just in the first year, go from 1 to 2. So if you're going to buy a nuc, build that nuc up, and then I would suggest buy a queen and make a split and get yourself up to 2. It just makes everything a little bit easier when you, when you've got 2 colonies, especially if you start getting the colonies that swarm. So you get the colonies that swarm, and then you think they're making their own queen, and then before you know it, it's 6 weeks have gone and there's no brood in that colony, and there's probably a virgin running around, and you're thinking, well, what do I do? Like, you can be a little bit stuck at that point. And what you need to do there is you need to go in and find a virgin and add a mated queen in. That's always my recommendation at that point. Go and add the mated queen in. Not— you're cutting your losses and you're saying, right, I've messed up a little bit here. I've got a colony that's dwindling, the bees are aging. Not got any brood, got a virgin running around. So my view is go in, kill the virgin, add a queen in, mated queen. But the other option, and the option that a lot of people will go for, and this is definitely what I did this so often in my first few years of beekeeping, which was, well, I just had an— I just had a frame of brood in, and then they don't do anything with it because there's a virgin running around. You think, oh, there must be a queen, so I'll give it another— I'll give it another couple of weeks for that queen to get mated. And before you know it, you've not got a colony anymore, they're dead. So you've got— you have to be quite quick and reactive. But to have the ability to pinch brood from the other colony when one colony dwindles, it does give you a lot more flexibility in your beekeeping. So you're never going to just keep— you're never going to stick to 2. It'll be 2, 4, 8, and then before you know it, you're into double figures. But definitely not one. Knowing what you know now, how would you set up for extracting heather without spending a fortune? Thinking along the lines of using frames and feeders frames, scraping them off and pressing them out. So that is exactly what I'm doing. I did that, that was my first 2 years of heather. I did that, but not with frames and feeders frames, just with normal wax foundation. And the slowest bit was trying to get the honey out of the frames, like onto the midrib of the foundation, really slow. And I thought at that point, if I'd have used plastic foundation here, this would have been really easy. And going with a stainless steel, almost like a paint scraper, or the Abello plastic ones. But I'm going to get, I'm going to get a stainless steel one made. But doing it with the frames and feeders, frames perfect. And then definitely go with the hydro press. And they're not cheap. There's a guy selling them. Have you seen? There's a guy on Facebook selling a couple of 250 liters Hydro presses, typical, isn't it? Like the week after I bought one. But I think he was selling them for like £500 each. But 250 litres is massive, like that's way too big. I think you almost want a smaller one. So you— they, they generally come— the one I had previously was 40 litres and I sold that one when I got my, my new extractor and my header loosener. And 40 litres was really like sweet spot, I would say. Don't go for the 20-liter one. I've gone up to, I think, a 90-liter one now, and even though I'm looking at that and thinking it's not, it's not huge, but I think 90 liters is going to be good for me. But it's a really, really good system, and what I plan to do is get the boxes. I've gone for 14 by 12 frames as well on mine, thinking, well, I'll put the 14 by 12 waxed Framedom Feeders frames on the colonies when they go up to the heather and just see what I get. And they might fill the boxes completely, or they might just fill 2 frames, or they might just fill the top third of a frame, but I don't care. They'll just— they'll get what they get. If I get a 14 by 12 box full of heather honey from each of my colonies up there, I'll be well happy. And it's not— I've had that before, it's doable. But probably realistically, I'm going to get maybe a third or half a box of that full, but it doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter even if it's not fully capped, because at that point I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take everything off. So I'm gonna scrape it all back down into the heather press, and then I'm gonna— because I reckon I'll be able to do my whole heather extraction in a day, where previously it was like 4 or 5 days, took forever. And then at the end of the day, I'm going to take the 14 by 12 boxes with the, the scraped off honey back to the apiary. I'm going to put them underneath the brood box for one day, one day only, and the bees will go down, they'll clean everything up. They're going to think that there's like a crazy little flow going on, lift it all back up to the top brood box, and then what I'll do is I'll just switch the boxes over again and shake out the bees, and I'll probably store them. I'm still undecided about where I'm going to store them. I was thinking originally, well, I'll just leave them underneath, kind of like a nadir, but I don't want the bees, and I don't want the queens going down there and drawing them back out and then laying brood in them, because then I'm opening myself up for disease risk. I want to keep them only as supers. So I'm still slightly undecided how I'm going to do that. I might just lift them up above the polyashwath feeder and leave them there, and I might leave them up there wet, but heather honey is quite high moisture content, they might ferment a little bit, but bees will still clean that up. So I'm a little bit undecided on that. However, the one massive benefit that you get, and this is what's driven me back to going down this process, is once you get the honey through the heather press— the hydro press, sorry— it's filtered, it's ready to jar. It really is ready to jar because you use a really fine mesh around the hydro press. that once it comes out is filtered. Whereas what happens normally with the Lucina and the other line— and this is why I say I'm not geared up for this— is that you get, you get to keep your wax, you get to keep your wax frames, but you need to filter it again. And I'm just not going to set up for filtering heather honey. It is a pain in the backside to filter. So that is why I'm going down that route. Right, Joe's just been given 330 acres of forest, as you do. So Joe's got 330 acres of forest. How many hives would you aim for on that site? So if it's one site, I'd still go for the same, just like 10 or 12. That's what I'd go for. I'm interested to see what you've got in your forest. Uh, Paul Watson says he's looking to do a demerit. When is best, and can he do another one later on in the year? So, so yeah, you— I always say with a demo, 2 supers, give yourself 2 supers gap. That's best for me. So get your brood box going, get it nice and big and strong. When they're on, when they're bubbling over and they're full, get your queen excluder on, stick a couple of supers on. I never mess around at the beginning here, I stick 2 supers on all of mine. Get your 2 supers on, and then as soon as you see the bees working in that super, like maybe like 30-40%, you can go and do a demerare from there, preferably when they're filling up that second super. I like to have the 2 supers like full of honey. Doesn't need to be capped, but don't just have 2 supers full of bees, have 2 supers really full of honey. So we're talking middle of May, something like that, completely dependent on where you are. But don't do it too early, could do a lot of damage doing a demerare too early. because you're just splitting a small colony and they just don't know what's going on. You need to have, you need to have big strong boxes full of bees. And then yeah, you could definitely roll it. So it's called a rolling Demerare, and that's, that's generally what we do, which is you're constantly moving the box and you're just repeating the process again and again and again with the boxes that you've got, with the aim of like rolling and rotating the brood and making sure that the honey keeps on going up. But you do end up with mega stacks Like, you need— you do need a stepladder doing the rolling demerare. But I think it's such a rewarding thing going into your apiaries middle of August, sorry, back end of August, and seeing the colonies that big. And I've had challenges before, people saying there's no way there's bees all the way to the top of those boxes. And I've shown it on a few videos. It genuinely is like 7, 8-foot hives and it's just full, full to the brim of bees. I've still got my marked, clipped queen in there. They've not gone anywhere. It's quite rewarding to think I've— that's, that for me is the art in beekeeping. Bumper honey crops, your bees haven't swarmed, and you haven't made splits. You do those 3 things, really good. If you can do those 3 things en masse, like you're some sort of god, I've not worked out to do that yet. Pure Yorkshire Honey says, if I'm coming up to Yorkshire to see the bee farm you mentioned, pop over and see us. More than welcome. We're wanting to expand our hive count. Be nice to have your input, maybe video opportunity. Sounds good, definitely up for that if you're, if you're close by. Makes sense to do, do more, uh, more than one. You want up for that? Thanks very much. Um, Michael W's asked the same question there, so when would be the best time to demo a split split for the July flow? It's an interesting slant on that question there. So for me, doing a demaray, I don't focus too much. I think I did say this previous videos, which is you're building up your colonies for the flows and you can work back from it. But as I go through like my beekeeping, I'm realizing I don't do— I don't do my demarays to build my colonies up for the flows because it— if you're building up your colonies anyway, say you're not doing a demaray Colonies are building up, they're going to hit the flows. But I do more than— for me, it's the swarm prevention. That's why I'm doing the demarays there. And then I get a really nice byproduct, which is tons of bees that generally coincide with the flows. But I'm not doing it to get bumper honey crops. I'm doing it to try and keep as many bees as I possibly can, which indirectly gives me bumper honey crops. So just, it's a slight nuance to the way that I do it and the reasons that I do it. But I would say still, kind of, if you time your demarays to give you the best chance of your bees not swarming in that like mega swarmy period from May to the middle of June, then you'll hit those July flows really good. Arctic Beekeeping says, from what From what configuration do you get the most honey, single or double brood chamber? So that is really interesting because I started off single brood and then I went to double brood and then I went to single 14 by 12 and I've settled now on my favorite is doing a Demaray with a National deep. So like a relatively small box. I don't know if you have those in the Arctic. And that gives me the most flexibility. But the problem that I had was with the single boxes, the bees were swarming. It was too difficult to manage my bees on a single box. In a double brood, I lost a lot of honey, and it was— it's quite easy beekeeping. I think if you're not too fussed about getting as much honey as you possibly can, double brood is the way forward. You don't get as much honey, but it gives you loads of flexibility in terms of swarming management and swarm control, and it also means that come the end of the year, bees don't need feeding. Very, very rarely fed my bees when they were on double brood because they just stolen all my honey back down to the brood nest. So for the question though, what configuration do you get the most honey? Single brood, you get the most honey, but it's very, very difficult to stop them swarming. So this is why I like the Demaray, because you're using like 3 brood boxes generally come the end of the season, it's 3 brood boxes, but you're using some of those as supers and you're not using the ones that have been infected with Apivar. But if you're bringing in like a new box into the system for that year with wax foundation in it, then you just use that as a super and then it starts off as a brood nest. You get the benefits of the bees drawing it out really quickly down there and then it just goes straight up, and then you can just extract your honey out. So you're kind of getting the benefits of double brood or treble brood in that you get monster brood nests with lots of bees, and then you're, you're stealing that box to have it as a super, which is just anything above the queen excluder. Gem League says, do I insure my apiary sites? What kind of insurance can you get that covers fire, theft, or damage. So it's— so no, we don't, we don't insure our sites because the only policies that we've seen are just incredibly expensive, and understandably so. I wouldn't, I wouldn't insure someone for fire or theft or anything on an apiary site, which is just kind of leaving some stuff in a field and hoping no one nicks it. So you run the risk. So we go down alternative routes, which is Just putting them in really awkward places and places that have lots of dogs, patrol dogs, stuff like that. So you kind of have to insure yourself. Right, let's have a look through more. Oh, Ben, it's great to meet you too. Right, Damien Parsons, any plans to do any more supplier visit videos? A few A few years back you did Siwin Jones, Griff recently did Thomas, and all fantastic insights. So yeah, so I, I would do more, happy to do more. Like we did, did that kind of thing down at the beekeeping show, and I think I would like to do more. I would definitely this year do Abella because I'm up there doing— I'm doing DASH accreditation in York like back end of April, so I'm booked to go up there. Um, I'm going to see another beekeeper up there as well. Carl Lockyer. I'm gonna have a little tour around his garden. Got loads of bees in his garden, quality. And he does artificially inseminated queens, but I don't think they'll be ready to be filmed. So I'll do a little film with him, but I will do the Abello one. Going to have a look around, maybe do a live stream with Damien. Uh, next question: can you move a queen cell an hour and a half away without an incubator? His dad's hive is hopelessly queenless and And he has 3 hives, wants to produce a cell, how to get it to him? So yeah, you can do that. I see people do really simple stuff like that in terms of you could use like a hot water bottle in an insulated box with like a wet towel over the top. I've seen loads of different ways of people being quite ingenious with how to keep the box relatively warm. You're not going to get like a consistently perfect temperature But I'm sure it would be fine. All I would say is just make sure that— make sure the cell is as mature as it can possibly be. That'd be a good way of doing it. You can— it's quite easy to shake the larva out if you do them when they're not that mature. So get like— do it a day or two before they're due to hatch, and you'll have a much better chance of getting them through. Hi Lawrence, when adding supers to a hive that already has 3 or more supers on Would you place an empty super under the full supers or just keep on stacking them on top? So I've got lots of experience of doing both of these, and I've come to the conclusion that it does not make a massive difference either way. I really don't think it does. I think it's easier for you, for the beekeeper, just to put them on top. Much easier if you're doing the inspection anyway. I sometimes put them underneath. I genuinely don't think it makes a huge amount of difference. What's the minimum amount of hives do you think it would take to be a full-time beekeeper? Oh, that's interesting. Generally the question here that's asked is like, what's the most hives that you could have as a full-time beekeeper? That's what I thought the question was, which I— you hear the number 400 banded around a lot, and I think speaking to other people now, they think it's maybe a little bit less than that, maybe 250, 300. But the minimum amount of hives? That's an interesting one because there's a general number that's banded around a bit for the Bee Farmers Association, which is you need 40 colonies or more, but it's not true. I don't know where that number's come from, but I think you'd struggle to make a living on 40 hives. Like, I run 100 hives as a sideline, but I do think it depends kind of what stage you are in your life. If you're, you're thinking, I was going to say you're 55 or 60 and you're going to retire, retire, but you want to do something and you want to be a full-time beekeeper, then maybe 50 hives would give you, give you a good income. But if you're younger and you've got a mortgage and you need to have to pay for your cars and all stuff like that, I, I would say you need a minimum of 100. That's what I would say. Uh, Richard Allison says, do I have any experience with electronic hive monitors? So I've used one and it was rubbish, absolutely rubbish. So I'm really keen, and I've spoken to a couple of companies saying I'll do some videos on one. Like, I don't— sounds bad, I don't want to buy one because I don't need one, so I don't want to spend £200-£300 on something just to do a couple of videos on it. But I'd quite happily do a couple of videos on it if someone was to give me one. But I think they're interesting. But I don't really— like, do they add a huge amount of value? I'm not, I'm not really sure. It's kind of one of those things that if you're into electronics and monitors and you've got bees, you might want to have an electronic hive monitor. But I don't think there's a huge amount of functionality there that I would— that would improve my beekeeping. It would be more around like the security element. I can't even talk. The security elements for me. So in terms of like alerts if they're picked up or moved and then tracking. I, I'd be really interested in stuff like that, and I think if someone came up with a good system for that, I think they would sell very well. Oh, I skipped loads of questions. I still not got anywhere near to the bottom. Let's have a look. I'll have to start— I should do it the other way around, shouldn't I, and answer the website questions at the end. Right, I'm back, I'm back to where I was. Right, so Patrick O'Donnell says, if you have a queenless Buckfast colony and want to switch to an Irish Black Bee, could I introduce a Black Bee queen cell and breed the Buckfast out that way over the season? So you could do that, but like, you're almost certainly going to get some sort of influence from the Buckfast drones maybe not from that hive but from other hives. I would, I would say the, the quickest and easiest way of doing that would be to introduce a mated black bee queen from somewhere where they're going to have isolated it as best as they possibly can, and you're going to have like a relatively high percentage of the genetics that you're looking for embedded into that queen. Give you a good fresh start with as high as you can possibly go with those genetics. Yeah, that's that would be my that's what I would suggest. Angela says she was telling her son about the Bevac. Does it come with a charger? So yeah, I think it's like three hundred quid comes with two batteries and the charger. So I'm just reading. I'm just reading the questions. It's just people talking. Um, right, Richard Allison, do you think there is a market for comb honey built in the jar? I was thinking it would be good for the heather. So yeah, there definitely is a market for that, but it is a niche market. And it— the problem that I've had with it is that if you do it, it looks amazing, and then if you don't sell it in a couple of months, you're basically chucking it away. It's not really got a shelf life, because if you're trying to heat it back up again to refresh the jars, it can just like slump the wax and it can just look a bit rubbish. Or if you take it too far, you can melt the wax. So if you're doing it on a very, very small scale, then yes. If you're doing it on— like I tried with the honey jars, I'll give spoiler alert, that didn't work. It was a bloody nightmare. Didn't do the holes big enough. So I'm going to try that again this year, but I wouldn't do it that way. I would do it very, very small batches, chunk honey. So cut your chunks in, pop it in the jar, fill it up with the honey, take it to a market where you know you're going to sell them or where you're going to sell out. And I do think you, you will sell, you will sell them out every single time, but just don't do them in big batches. Uh, Damian says on the newsletter comment, Simon the Beekeeper used to send out NBU updates along with a quick summary of the month etc. Maybe worth picking up that torch because not everyone will be subscribed to the MBU themselves. That's not a bad idea. I thought a lot of that was spam, you know, that came from Simon the Beekeeper. Not, not the newsletter stuff, but he definitely sent some— there were definitely some spam MBU stuff that I used to get pinged with like 6 times a day. I thought he'd been hacked. But that's not about— that's not a bad idea. I could do something like that. Uh, let's see. Oh, Mark. Mark likes the website. Thanks, Mark. Sarah Smith says, what is the best way to fix the Niko cell cup holders to the frame? Can't seem to find any tacks small enough. So this is why I stopped using them. I just, I just don't understand why they're so well used. Absolute nightmare sticking them to the frame. So when I did it I ended up gluing them to the frame using some like epoxy resin because I just couldn't get the nails to work. And I was like hammering down the nails and they were splitting. It was the fiddliest thing in the world. So I moved over to JZBZ cups, which if you don't know what they are, it's like a fully molded— you know what, the 3 different bits that you all stick together, just one bit, pressure fit into a groove. Works so well. So I'd glue them if you're doing Nikko ones, but they won't last forever, and then move over to JZBZ ones, which are loads better. Uh, JK Photography says the Norfolk Honey Company has great videos on Nikko cell queen rearing system. So I've got myself here with Stuart. He has agreed to come and do a live stream. He said he's very busy though, so I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to do that, but that is on the cards. Uh, Mem says he has 2 hives and doesn't check the refractometer. What's the best way to check the water content in your honey? So I don't check, I don't check the water content in my honey unless I suspect there's anything dodgy with it. If, if you're uncapping, if your frames are fully capped over, like fully capped over, you've got nothing to worry about. I would even go as far as to say if your frames are maybe 85-90% capped over, you've got absolutely nothing to worry about either. And then if you're getting honey that's starting to ferment in the bucket, then maybe go back and start checking it then. But we never get honey fermenting. As long as you're extracting it and the frames are capped, I wouldn't worry about it. Central Pennsylvania Beekeeper says, we've got a nice array of honey products. I'm Thanks very much. What are your most popular? So by far and away, like million times the most popular, is the runny honey, just standard runny honey. And then I would say almost the next 3 are the soft set. So All-C-Roast Soft Set, Heather, and Borage, like pretty much equal. And then the Heather Blend, we don't sell much of the Heather Blend, which is strange because I really like the blend, and we don't sell a huge amount of the Creamed Borage one, which again is like my favorite one. But I think what, what's really interesting is that when we go and do markets, they're the best 2 sellers, like by a long, long way. People love them. So I think it's a bit of education that I need to do, which is hard to— it's hard to do when you're working remotely from people. But it is interesting, especially the set honeys, because you can talk to people and you say to them, this is what the honey's supposed to be like. It's genuinely supposed to be set and it's not crunchy, it's really smooth, and we've done this to it. And they taste it and they're just like, oh yeah, that's amazing. And then they buy some. Whereas if they see it on the shelf or they see it on the website, they think, ah, that honey's gone off. So yeah, we need to educate people. Uh, Keith Jenkins says, what do you think of the entrance? So, so I like it. The entrances, they're just like holes, like plugs that go on into the beehive as an alternative for entrances, but I don't think they're like revolutionary. I wouldn't say, oh, I'm going to put them on all of my colonies because I think my standard underfloor entrances kind of work pretty well. Hi Lawrence, do you think bee size matters? I've noticed a distinct difference in sizes of my bees from hive to hive. So no, I don't think it matters, because if you think about it, and you see this on like the small cell foundation where they're reducing the cell size down, for every little bit that you reduce the cell size down means you can get more cells. So you might have smaller bees, but you might have more of them. So I don't, I don't think it's a massive issue. Excuse the pun. Right, Matt Burrow says, hi Lawrence, just a little advice. How would you, or can you, move frames from a commercial to a Langstroth hive? I know they're different sizes, but in your experience, can it be done as you have both? So I've never, I've never done that move myself, but the easiest way I found to move things between different formats is just cut some ply, cut some ply to like the side, the different sizes, and just use them as like temporary crown boards with holes in the middle. So the external dimensions will match maybe like your commercial, and then you'll have like an internal hole that will match your Langstroth, and it just means you can stack them on top of each other. And then that's a really, really good way of doing it. And just, you put your queen excluders in, you maybe turn the boxes into supers And knowing what the bees will do come the end of the season, which is condense down into the brood nest, leaving the top boxes full of honey. And then at the end of the year, you can just make sure that all of your bees are on the frame size that you want, and then just extract all of the rest of them. It does work very well. Oh wow, I'm at the bottom, and it's Joe again. So Joe says, I'm doing the small cell hive this year. What's the difference with say an old, well-used brood frame that's got smaller cells with age, like you would get in wild colonies. So I think these are like substantially smaller, but I'm, I'm really doing it as a little bit of a test. But I guess, I guess that could work. Maybe, maybe that's a natural varroa defense that they use— nice old colonies and with old frames and old wax. Right, I'll do 5 more minutes because my throat's really hurting. Uh, but I'm glad to be back doing, doing the live streams. So Chris Matthews says, Fly Fishing, if anyone's going to do chunk honey, then pick a nice clear honey that doesn't set too quickly— borage, bean, or acacia if you can get it. That'd be nice. Yeah, I think, I think it would be nice, but preferably like a UK honey— borage or bean. I've not seen anyone have bean honey. I know, I know they take it to the field, beans, and they get honey, but I've not seen anyone market it as, as bean honey. I've seen— I know I'm not, I'm not completely obsessed with Black Bee Honey, but I do, I do like that brand. But they've just started selling a new product on Amazon called Starflower Honey, which is like, again, oh, Mr. Trick, what great marketing, which is just borage, borage honeybee. It is also called starflower, but I thought that was a really nice use of the name, a nice selling product. Uh, Steve Dixon says, what, uh, so what queen rearing do you use, Genta or the Nikko system? So I, I use a bit of a combination of the two. Uh, sorry, not— I don't use Genta, but I use JZBZ cups. So I use— it's like a queen, like a standard frame with a groove, JZBZ cups, and then I, I balance on the Nikko cages. That's the system that I use, and it works well in my, in my incubator because the cages are upturned and then you can just rest on the cells. Really good. Uh, Zena says he's watched all of my videos. Oh, great, good stuff. And it is his first year back gardener beekeeping. He's expanding this year to set up an apiary with 7 hives. Any suggestions? Um, so just have fun and enjoy it. Uh, Keith says, do bees mate with bees in the same apiary? So some, some people think they don't. I think they definitely do. There's no way that they're like selective and they won't go and mate with it. I'd be surprised. They're probably mating with— you're probably getting like some crossbreeding with some of the drones in the same hive, let alone the same apiary. But I think they do, right? So I think, I think I'm done. 1 hour 37. I've still not had my dinner. I'm going to go downstairs and have my dinner now. So I'm back, we're doing, doing the YouTube streams again. I will try not to leave it so long. Maybe we'll do another one next week. If you've got any more questions, you can go on the website blackmountainhoney.co.uk and there's a box at the top that says ask a question, and if you stick it on there, I will answer it on the next live stream. But if you haven't done so already, please give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video, and I will see you next time.