Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 40
Laurence Edwards answers beekeeping questions on queen mating timing, transporting brood frames, swarm management, and hive moisture problems. He explains that brood frames can travel about 40 minutes in a warm car, debunks the metal-clanking myth for recalling swarms, and recommends making splits early to manage swarm risk.
Chapters
Uh, so I think, I think we're good to go now. So I'll start again. There we go. Start again from the beginning, and I'll just trim that at the end so no one has to listen to me just being silent for a good minute or so. Uh, right, so we'll start again. I've got my cup of tea. Um, very busy week. And what I started off by saying was sorry that I couldn't give you an exact time for this starting. I had to put my daughter to bed, and I think that's going to be where we sit now with, uh, live streams, in that I can't give you like a definitive time unless We go for like ten o'clock at night. I could probably guarantee that she'll be in bed asleep by ten o'clock, but I think that doesn't suit a lot of people. So we'll be a little bit more flexible, and I'll try and get her to bed early. So there we go. We're good. I've got my cup of tea. That's what I said. I've got my Pucker Herbs cup of tea, which is nice. And what what busy two weeks? Absolutely crazy. Busy two weeks. Busy for the bees, but also busy at home. So got a new ten-day-old baby who's very very well behaved, and we've given her a name. Her name is Lily, which I thought was quite cool, obviously linking back to flowers, maybe not so much for bees. Let's have a sip of that tea. So what else has been changing? Uh, it's been very sunny today, last couple of days have been nice and sunny but freezing cold. Like, I just can't get over how cold it is at the moment. It's either drizzly and rainy or sunny and cold, so not good for bees, really not good for bees. And I see the news forecasts of like 50 days of rain in the summer and just think, what's, what's going on? Um, I just seen the comment there, someone saying about government chemtrails not helping. Government chemtrails definitely not helping, no. Uh, but let's talk about, let's talk about bees. So first thing I should say, for channel members, which I see a lot of channel members on here, you will notice the change that I've made. So I have made a change to the channel membership, and I've been I've been kind of thinking about that change for a long time now, and I thought it's about time to bring that change in. So there is a new channel membership level called Exclusive Content, and it's basically just me going out when I'm doing like my generic beekeeping activities or just like driving in the car. I've decided just to hit record, so you'll see like very rough, raw edited footage on there. So I'm hoping that it's, it's kind of useful, useful for people. That is at the next level though, so that is kind of like an exclusive content level. And then as of the end of the season things will switch around and then that will be kind of only available to people on the exclusive content level membership, uh, section. But we'll give you until the end of the year to see if that's, if that's good for you and if people do like it. So I thought I would change it around a little bit. Um, also I just see Lynette Blackman saying they enjoy the raw videos as well. I, I quite enjoy filming those ones because it's, it's no hassle and it's me just doing what I would normally do anyway. and just almost narrating what I'm thinking about in my head. Uh, but it's— yeah, I thought I would do it, see how it goes. So let's answer some questions. Uh, saying there, good evening, Lawrence, really enjoying the extra membership videos, it works well. So I do, I do think people are enjoying them, and I am enjoying doing them as well. And, and they're quite long videos as well, so they are good. Like, some of them are a good hour long, and it's me just going through all of my colonies and basically doing my bee inspections or looking for virgins or making up splits or doing what I have to do and then not having to put hours into the editing. So I quite like doing them. So let's answer some questions, that's what this is all about. I've got like a peek up over the top there. Hello, I have a case of chronic bee paralysis virus, debating what to do but think I will probably euthanize to make sure it doesn't spread and then take a split from my other colony gutted. So CBPV is a bit of a nightmare. we've never had like a bad case of it. I've seen a couple of bees that I'm thinking, yeah, like that, that could be the very start of some CBPV. So you see them and they're like a bit trembly and they're a bit shiny and they're a bit black, but we've never had it to the extent that I see like some people have it where it is really, really bad. And I don't think there's much you can do other than euthanize them. But then I speak to other people and they say, well, If you just let them go, the colonies, and don't euthanize them, then they get through it and then they're fine. And my understanding is they will build up some natural immunity to that as well. Whether that immunity can be split or passed on, I don't know. But it's kind of weighing up whether you want to select from the colonies that are able to kind of cope with the CBPV, or whilst running the risk of it spreading. And, and I think I, I'd be with you if I, if I had like one colony out of 10 or something that got CBPV, I'd definitely euthanize it just straight away just to nip it in the bud. I would basically treat it like EFB. And I do think, I do think it will go down that route that it will become a notifiable disease because like varroa is a notifiable pest. So if you go into your BeeBase, every single colony just has the button tick to say your colony's got varroa as a notifiable pest already. And you could argue that CBPV is like considerably worse than varroa. Maybe not considerably worse, but up there with the impact that varroa would have. So I think, I think I'd do similar to what you've done and euthanize it. All right, let me jump back up to the top, go through all the comments saying that I didn't have my mic on. A bit of a shocker. I am knackered, I have to say. Uh, Wes Granger is on Facebook, so we are live streaming onto Facebook as well if you don't want to watch it on YouTube. Says, cracking set of bees, Lawrence, really happy, so calm. Had lots of good comments like that, so thanks Wes. Glad they're settling in well. A couple of people saying they like the raw videos, thank you very much. Uh, right, next question then. So Matt Burrows says, hi, I caught a couple of swarms in my garden, checked one today and it seems like it is a 2-cast. Uh, how long will they keep the queen if she doesn't mate due to bad weather? So with any virgins, like the optimum time that the virgin will come out emerge from her cell, and then with a swarm, she'll— they'll leave almost immediately when that virgin goes, like maybe like 3 or 4 days max really before that virgin will, um, after the virgin emerges, they'll go out. But in ideal situations, 4 to 5 days after they emerge, they become sexually mature and then are able to go out on mating flights. So, so the first 5 days after their emergence, they're not not going out and getting mated anyway. And then realistically, you're talking maybe 2 and a half weeks after that. Not— you don't— wouldn't want to make much more than that, say 3 weeks at the max. And then I'd be, uh, I'd be killing them if you can find her. That's the problem with letting, letting virgins or making walkaway splits or catching swarms of virgins in, is that you give the virgins a chance to mate and then you say, right, she's not mated or she's turned drone laying, so I need to fix it. And then finding them is very, very difficult. You do, you do get your eye in though when it comes to finding them. Like, my tips for finding virgins are like, you need to just be like razor— I would say razor focused, laser focused. Um, and, and you need to like get yourself into a mindset which is you just like clear everything out of your mind. You're like, I'm looking for virgins, and don't get distracted by stuff. And it's so easy to get distracted by stuff, so don't get distracted by your phone, but don't get distracted by what's in the cells. Is that, is that a larva? Is it an egg? Is there some pollen? Is there some honey? Oh, look at that drone bridge. You need to just like clear it out of your mind completely. You're looking for virgins. And then what I like to— what I find really interesting, this, this works for me, is that the distance that the frame is away from your eyes makes a massive difference. So if you have it up like really close, you're basically looking at each bee. And you're thinking, is that a virgin? No, it's not. Is that a virgin? No, it's a drone. So you need to have the frame like far enough away that you can basically see the whole frame without moving your eyes. And it sounds a bit weird, it sounds like it's almost a little bit too far. And I find that if your arms are hurting because it's that far away, that's about the right distance. And then I look at the frame as a whole, as opposed to looking for bees, trying to look at that frame as a whole and almost assess the behavior that's on the frame as opposed to looking for virgins on the frame. And it's like a trance-like state. And I'm pretty good, pretty good at finding virgins. I think you— I'll generally find virgins. So, so on one of the videos the other day, um, one of the, the new exclusive content ones on the channel member section, I went looking for virgins and I probably found 3, I think, out of maybe 12. 3 out of 12 colonies. And then, sorry channel members, I didn't film the next round of that. So I went back to fill in all the gaps and put the frames in and to find the rest of the virgins. And I found them all. And I was like, I'm gonna find the virgins today because it's too late for these now. So I found them all, found every single one. I even found the queen again in the, uh, the keeper's hive, which is dead. Even though I thought that was going to be a good one, she was, she was rubbish. Um, so I found them all. And I— it is just getting into that trance-like state, keeping it at arm's length, and not getting distracted. and then you can find them. So good luck, um, Matt, in finding those virgins and killing them if they don't mate. Wes, talking about a nuc that he bought from Black Mountain Honey, says, do you think I should split my nuc in August or should I wait till next season? So I give this advice to every single person who buys a nuc, regardless whether it arrives in March or if it arrives in June: make a split in the first year. Definitely make a split in the first year. And buy an emated queen. And I, I promise you, buy an emated queen from whoever you want. This isn't a plug to sell the queens, it's good advice to give to people, which is you bought a nuc, um, you've got a good queen in that nuc, and by making a split, you're protecting that queen from going away and swarming. Because if you make a split, it's far— the colony is far less likely to swarm in the first year. So not only are you protecting your investment, but for, for the price of £40, you basically doubled the amount of colonies that you've got, and it means that you've got a great investment going into the winter. So you're going into the winter with 2 colonies. So if one of them dies, you've still got a colony. You've not got to spend an extra £350 to go buy a new nuc for the next season. So it's definitely make a split. And I would say, Wes, make a split sooner rather than later. You don't need to make a split in August. Um, it, it will you'll get more honey by making a smaller split earlier on. So you're thinking you're going to keep that single colony together to make as much honey as you possibly can and then make a split in August. I'd completely flip that on its head and say, if I make a 2-frame split now, so just 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, and then add a new queen into it, you're going to not really have a huge impact on the amount of honey the original colony will make. And by making the split earlier means it's much less likely to develop into a good-sized colony without the risk of robbing, without the risk of wasps that become a problem later on in the season. So definitely make a split, do it as soon as possible, 2-frame split, and you'll be good to go. Uh, Tony and Liz say hello. Hello everyone. Uh, John Sylvester says, hey Lawrence, good evening and congratulations on your newborn. My nephew was born last week on Tuesday. Amazing. Is that, is that the same day? Um, no, maybe the week before. Um, Lily was the 21st of May. It's all good, very exciting. Uh, right, says, hi Lawrence, I've conducted 3 artificial swarms so far, 2 successful, 1 no sign of the queen at all, no brood, etc. I added a mated queen, went in a week later, no sign of her. Should I add another? So I, I We get a lot of phone calls and we get a lot of emails and we get a lot of WhatsApp messages on Black Mancing Honey, like 20 or 30 a day minimum, with people saying it's very similar to what you just said there, which is, uh, I've got a hopelessly queenless hive, I've added a queen into it and they've killed the queen. Sometimes they're angry at me, but I've added a queen into it. should I add another queen because they've killed her? And 9 times out of 10, there's, there's another queen knocking around in there. It is the thing that goes wrong the most. Um, so, so what I would say, Liam, is the way you've got some other colonies there, test the colony first. Frame of eggs, put a frame of eggs in, test to see whether they draw out emergency cells. If they don't draw out emergency cells, then there is a virgin or there is a queen in there that needs killing and you need to go through and you need to kill her. If they do draw out emergency cells, then you can just knock them all down and you can safely add another queen. So not all queen introductions are guaranteed, but like I say, 90% of the time I reckon there's virgin knocking around in there killing those queens because I introduce a lot of queens and rarely they fail. They do, they do fail occasionally, and it's not, it's not 100% success that I get, but it is definitely up in the 90%. Um, and you just got to make sure that when you make the splits, you get all of the cells. And it's difficult because when you see swarm cells, if you're going through a colony like, whoa, swarm cells, like 20, 30 swarm cells, they're generally not that well hidden. So if you've got like a double brood, then you generally find them on the bottom bar of the top box. So that's why some people just split open the box and look for swarm cells there. But when you make an— when you make a split or do an artificial swarm like you've done there, It's the emergency impulse. So they're— so they, they tuck them away anywhere, and they're really, really difficult to see. You might even just have like a full frame of brood like that, and just in the middle there's just like the outline of one that's kind of blended into the brood. And you look at it and you think, what's that? And you're like, that is an emergency cell that they've hidden away there. So it is— you have to shake off the frames. I know some people don't like it. I know Richard doesn't like it, but when you're making splits If you're— I, I don't care, even care how experienced Richard is. Richard will make this mistake as well. You have to shake off the frames so you can look at the frame properly and you can assess where those emergency cells are, and you have to take down every single one. If you miss one, game over. Uh, so I wouldn't add another queen just yet, Liam. I would, I would test to see how queenless it is. Right, Steve's Honeybees channel member says, inspected today one of my nucs, definitely queenless, no eggs, etc. They've totally depleted their stores, so put in a frame of eggs and 2 frames of stores from another hive. Fingers crossed they survive. So I hope they survive, and it will give you a good indication on that one as well, Steve, as to whether there is a queen in there or not. Um, Doug Gunn wants a baseball cap. I've got a couple left, but I'm keeping them for like very, very special prizes, the baseball caps, or just going to wear them myself. I'm definitely not selling. any more baseball caps. Sorry, Doug. Uh, Lee Leatherbarrow, channel member, says, hi, so I was trying to get ready for a demaray ready for the balsam, but I have had a supersedure cell. The queen looks fine and laying well. Would you say I'm okay to still go ahead? I always say with supersedure cells that the bees do know best. So if you've got like a queen that's like 2 or 3 years old and they're trying to supersede her, then especially this time of the year, let them supersede. Just let the colony supersede them. But if you've just introduced a queen and they're trying to supersede her, for me, you've got like— you can take them down 6 or 7 times in a row, the superseder cells, and then, and then the bees are like, okay, yeah, no, she's fine, we, we're just messing around, she doesn't need to be replaced. So they do use superseder as a way to like protect their own genetics. Just just to clarify as well, it is just one individual cell. Yeah, you've had a supersede yourself, but the queen looks fine. So you can you can take them down. It's a difficult one. It does depend on whether it's like a newly introduced queen or whether it's like an old queen. If it was an old queen, you you could could you do the demeray and let them supersede at the same time? Probably could. You could probably try that. You could do like. You could go like properly off-piste if you wanted and take the queen downstairs in the bottom of the demaray split with the one frame of capped brood, no cells, no supersedure cells, and just foundation as normal, and then put the supersedure cell upstairs and then put an entrance upstairs as well. That is, you can do that if you want. That'd be pretty cool. And if it is just one supersedure cell, I don't think that would trigger swarming. When she came out and emerged, and then you'd end up with a 2-box system. So that could be quite cool. Maybe give that a go. That'd be a good video, that one. See how it works. Tell you what, do it, Lee. See if it works. And if it works, I'll give it a go when I get a colony that's superseding and ready for a demerare. Um, but don't, don't have a go at me if it doesn't work. I don't, I don't think that would trigger swarming. I think you'd be all right with that one. Give it a go. That'd be really interesting because you would effectively have 2 colonies then. And then, well, if they started superseding the queen downstairs as well, then you know that that queen's a goner and you need to do something, I would say. Right, says, I want to make 2 more Langstroth hives from the 5 I currently have. Can I pull frames from these 5 to make up the additional 2? Basically, will the nurse— with the mix of nurse bees, fight, or will they be fine? So Textbook— what this is in the textbook is if you mix 2 sets of bees, of 2 bees, they'll fight together. If you mix 3 or more, if they don't, they just get on with each other. I've never found that. I've mixed 2 before and they've been all right. It's not too much of an issue. The big thing that I find, and it does make it so much easier— I know I go on about it all the time— is doing it in a separate apiary. Keeping the bees in the same apiary just channel members will see on that, that video that it's, it's so difficult to balance the colonies that you've got. And it doesn't matter where you put the hives, the bees will do some sort of kind of balancing by themselves. So you end up with like some colonies have got 6 frames of bees and some colonies have got 2 frames of bees, and you're looking at them thinking, that's, that's a bit annoying because I didn't want you to do that. Whereas if you make 3-frame splits and like 6 3-frame splits and then take them to a new site, close them up, take them to a new site, Then you've got 6 3-frame splits. Like, they just literally get to the new site, go out, orientate, and then just come back to whatever box you put them in. So what I, I would say, yep, you can definitely do that, John, make them up. Best practice, make a mixture from each of the 5. So make sure that there's 3 frames in each minimum of 3 frames from different hives, and then they shouldn't fight with each other. But if you've only got 2, you can do that as well, but you've got 5, so you can, you can mix and match. Hi, first time live, love the content. Thanks, Thomas, glad to have you here. Do you think your queens or nucs will be able to be delivered to Northern Ireland anytime in the future? So possibly. Um, I'm not 100% sure on what the legislation is, I'm not going to lie, because I know at one point it said you categorically cannot do it without health certificates and stuff. And my understanding is the Windsor Agreement does allow you to send them over there now, but get a lot of hate from Northern Ireland about, um, Buckfast bees and stuff. So, um, I'm— it's still on the not 100% sure list, I'm afraid. Uh, Aiden, good evening, Aiden. How's it going? Uh, Andrew Rogers, channel member, says it'll be my first Check Tuesday after popping the tabs on one of your Buckfasts. Excellent, I'm excited for you. I hope hope it goes well. I've ordered 5 queens arriving next Friday. What's the difference between the Ligustica— uh, I love that you— it's autocorrected it to linguistically, that's brilliant— and the Buckfast? Um, so they're basically just different lines of bees. So the Ligustica is like a pure race of bee, similar to like AMM, in that AMM is a pure race of bee. So I think, I think the correct term is Apis mellifera ligustica. Pretty sure that's what it is. And then AMM is obviously Apis mellifera mellifera. So whereas Buckfast are a hybrid, hybridized between coincidentally those two. So Buckfast is a hybrid of Apis mellifera mellifera and Apis mellifera lagustica. I think I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure I need to Google it now. I say stuff like kind of, um, like confidently like that. It is lagusta. Yeah, there we go. The Italian bee, Apis mellifera lagustica. Then when you say something and you think, is that, is that 100% right? I better get it right because it is on the live stream. So, so the Buckfast is the hybrid, and that's what they're trying to take the best from those 2 different pure races of bee. And then obviously everyone has their own different genetic mix, uh, and that's about it. So Andrew Rogers says, what is a Caucasian queen bee like? It's interesting you say that. So We got absolutely tons of Caucasian queen bees, and I just hit the mic there, sorry about that. And it's that— I know the reason why we sold a lot of Caucasian queen bees is because they look so black and so dark, is that I think people are just going to pass them off as local mongrels and say, I've got the best local mongrels ever. And I think 99% of people who like local mongrels will look at them and say, wow, yeah, brilliant, love that. they are super black. Uh, we sold 34 in a week, so they're doing really well on the website. So I have limited experience with them. So what I've done for this— this week's the first week that I've got like a little bit of flex on the orders, and I've ordered an extra 3 of every single line for me. So I'm gonna start making up my own nukes with each of the different lines. I'm gonna make 3, and then I'm gonna like making 3 so I can have at least 2 of each one, and then they're going into an apiary. So I will do some more videos showing all the different lines. We've got loads. So we've got Caucasians, Carpathians, Carniolans, Lagusticas, Buckfast, VSH Buckfast, Elgon, Promorsky, and then the UK Buckfast, and then the Atlanta. So we've got loads, loads of different lines. It's really good fun. I like seeing all the different, uh, different lines and different genetics. Wes Granger says, what's the lead time for buying a mated queen? So normally, like last year, you could— if you ordered before 4 PM, we'd send it the next day. But this year, we've just— we've sold out every single week before they've arrived. And we will— and this Tuesday, we will sell out before they arrive again. But it's what I say to people is it doesn't really make a massive difference because you can make your split. If you make your split and then go to order the queen, we'll deliver it before you should be introducing that queen. because you shouldn't really be introducing the queen, uh, before 8 days after making the split. So that's my, that's my marketing spin on it, on us being a little bit late with the deliveries. But what's the lead time for buying a mated queen? About a week max, I would say, at the moment. I'm gonna have a sip of my tea while I read that question. Hi, I've got a hive on commercial double brood and the queen is firing on all cylinders. How many times would you split the hive as I have 10 brood boxes are still available, or would you pop them in a nuc? So let me just say, like, commercial double brood— so you've got like, you've got like 22 frames, and, and if the bees are covering all of those, you could just split all of those straight away. But as I said before, if, if you, if you wanted to split that double brood into 2 frames of brood and a frame of stores, there or thereabouts, you'd get like 9, 8 or 9 splits out of that. Now If you took all of those to a new site, so you have to make the splits and then take them to a new site, you could make splits that aggressively and the bees would respect kind of, I'm in a new hive now and I'm not going to go anywhere else. If you tried to do that in the same apiary, you would end up with one colony where they just basically all go back to it, and then you might get a couple that stick with the brood and you'll get quite a lot that just abscond and go. So if you're going to do it in the same apiary, I would just recommend basically just almost splitting them in 2. You're on a double brood already, so just split them in 2. They'll respect that right next to each other. And then just go again, split them into 2. So go from 2 to 4 to 8 and try and kind of do it in that method, that manner, as opposed to aggressively splitting them. If you've— you, you say you've got Yeah, you've got 10 brood boxes. I was going to say, if you've got nucs available, then I would just take them out into small nucs and put them in a new apiary. But it makes sense to use your brood boxes there. If you are going to do that, what I would recommend as well is getting some empty, uh, like DN— it's not gonna be DN4, but like the equivalent of a DN4 for a commercial— and putting a piece of insulated board inside. So for each box, have one insulated— pardon me— insulated board and then use it as like a follower board or a dummy board, but an insulated dummy board. And that means if you've got like a big massive commercial brood box with 2 frames in, just dummy it down a bit, and that really does help the bees even at this time of the year. They appreciate kind of overnight being a little bit warmer, and it will mean that they'll rear the brood and get that colony going a lot quicker. Hi Lawrence, back to beekeeping after a few years away and looking forward to receiving my nuc from you very soon and get back in, back into it. Good stuff, Steve. We've got one final batch of nukes available. I can't believe how many, how many nukes are going out in that final batch. I thought we'd— I thought we'd sell maybe 10, 12 for people who missed the boat, and it's, it's nearly 3 figures now. So a lot, a lot of nukes going out that day, but I'm sure you will be very, very happy with them. Carpathian versus Caucasian. So I think these are 2 very similar-ish spin-offs from the carniolan that just kind of localized to different regions. I can't remember off top of my head. Not a huge amount in it though, and both descended from the carniolan, so both dark. Hi Lawrence, can you talk to me about honey creaming? I'm going to get an automatic creamer, but how do I use it? What is the recipe process? I like talking about honey creaming. So honey creamers are great. Really, really good. Love my honey creamer, but I use my honey creamer as almost— I basically use it as a place to jar honey from. So you can make soft-set honey without a honey creamer, but doing it like on a decent scale, honey creamer is way, way easier. So there's 2, 2 different methods, and I use both of the different methods. And I, I started off with one and I moved to the other And I'm slowly but surely moving back to the original one again. And I'll tell you why I am doing that. So the first method I used was called the DICE method, D-Y-C-E, which effectively means you take 10% of a seed honey, and it can be more than 10%, can be like 50% if you want it to be, but it can't be any less than 10% or it doesn't really work. And so you've got to get some seed honey from somewhere and you can buy it from places, but you basically wanna like test the honey. taste it and it is super smooth. You can't taste a single grain of crystal in there at all. That's your seed honey. And then you take your kind of like donor honey, which can be, which can be any honey, and you need to bring the temperature up of that honey to— I think it's like 47, 48 degrees off the top of my head, but double-check that. And it's a very specific temperature. And I know it sounds like you're heating the honey too much, and you, you kind of are, but the reason that it needs to go up to this temperature, this extreme temperature, is to reset the honey crystal structure in that honey. So even when honey is runny, it basically has like a crystalline structure inside it. So when it sets, it reverts to that crystalline structure. So if you were to take your runny honey straight from the beehive and mix in 10% of this seed honey, the honey would still revert to whatever was in like your beehive's honey. And that depends on the mix of kind of like fructose and glucose and sucrose and all the different -coses that are in it, and any sugar that you've got in it if you've got sucrose. But so by heating it up, you reset that and you basically say, right, we've not got a crystalline structure now. All right, seed honey, you've got one. Okay, we'll use yours. So that's, that's how it works. I know they don't engage like that. So then with a creamer, it's really simple because if you have a heated creamer, the heated creamer allows you to get up to that temperature. I think it goes up to like maximum 55 degrees C, so it's enough to get it to reset the structure. So then it is dead simple. It's basically put fill your honey creamer up 90% with just honey, heat it up to whatever it is 47, 48 degrees. Once it starts to cool again, you add in your seed honey, and then you just turn the creamer on as slow as it will go. Don't I see people with machines going? I think oh. you're going to whip that honey, and they do, they end up with big thick meringue at the top. The slowest whip possible. And then with the dice method, you basically just stir it a few times over a few days, and then the idea is you decant it back into buckets and you're supposed to leave it at 14°C. That's the magic number to get really nice transfer of that crystalline structure. That's not the method that I use. Um, because I don't like to can it back into buckets again. So we just— I leave it in, um, in the creamer for a few days, and then I put it into jars before it's kind of gone back to solid again. So it will come through the bottling machine kind of like not, not semi-solid, but you can see it's just starting to crystallize. And then I put the boxes of jars in a room as close to 14°C as I can possibly get it. I make all of my soft set in the winter. So I don't even bother trying to do it in the summer because it's difficult to get the temperature right. So I do it in the winter, and I recommend just bulk do it because once it's in the jar, it's fine. You occasionally get a little bit of like frosting or flashing on the jar, but I don't think that's the end of the world. You can see that I'm giving you a very detailed answer to this question. I quite like talking about honey. So the other method is— hit the mic again— all-seed rape. So if you've got all-seed rape, you can basically just stick it in the creamer straight out of the beehive and push the button and, and come back, and you'll let it churn for like 6 days, 7 days, and you'll come back and it's done. It's way easier. But I find that I'm not entirely happy with the consistency of that honey and that it's not perfectly smooth every single time. So sometimes you get it perfectly smooth and sometimes you don't get it perfectly smooth. And the reason will be is because even oilseed rape honey, it's not 100% oilseed rape. There might be some dandelion, there might be some apple blossom, there might be any of these other kind spring blossoms in there. And if you get that mix of the cozies wrong, then it can influence what crystal structure it reverts back to. So that's— I moved away from the dice method and went to that method a few years ago now, and I'm moving back, and I'm going back to the dice method because although it's a little bit more tricky to get it right, I think when you get it right, the end product is far, far superior. And the big and as well is that you don't have to use all seed rape honey, which I find is— I don't dislike all seed rape honey, but I find it a little bit boring in terms of flavor profile. Whereas the dice method, you can use any honey. The only one that's a bit tricky is heather, but you can use like any basically wildflower honey. So if you've got like a nice lime honey or a nice borage honey, works really well with the borage honey. You can get it to set in like a perfect spreadable soft set. So that's the method I'm going to use this year, and I'll do a video about it. In terms of different machinery for this one, the, the Abello creamers are good. The, the Carl Frits creamers are really good as well. Really like the Carl Frits creamers for that. They are more expensive and they have a very different creaming paddle. It's kind of like a spiral paddle as opposed to like a fixed paddle. Um, so Carl Frits ones are really good. Let's have a look. I like that question. John Sylvester says, is buying beehives cheaper in winter? And yes, it was the same week as your newborn the week before. Okay, very nice, that's good. So yeah, buying beehives, definitely cheaper in winter. Everyone should buy them in the winter, kind of even back end of the season from like October onwards, you'll get very good deals. And it makes sense that the demand is huge in the summer. Why would Why would they discount stuff when everybody needs it and there's like a 3 or 4 week lead time delay on everything? Um, so yeah, buy all your stuff in the winter. Did you get told off for making frames in your living room? I did that once and my wife went mad. So no, my wife's, my wife's pretty chilled about the, uh, about the beekeeping, and, and she's not too fussed about like stuff getting battered either. Like our house is quite old and the stuff, like our furniture is quite old, so it doesn't really matter, but Ivy draws on it or I make holes in it. Um, you just look around the house and there's beeswax and rubbish everywhere. It's great, it's pretty chilled. Uh, yeah, I, um, I was gonna say something else then. I'm probably glad that I didn't. But yeah, that's just pretty good. Hi bud, I bought one of your Buckfast queens mid-April for one of our queenless nucs. Just rehived it from a double Nuke and it's already filling a super. Excellent, excellent news. Glad to hear it. Uh, Tapestry of Souls Baker says, good evening, Lawrence. Congratulations on a new addition. Can't believe baby Lily is already 10 days old. I know, it's, it's a bit surreal. It's gone very, very quickly. She's quite cute. She's really well behaved as well. She didn't cry or anything. It's— I know she's lulling us into a false sense of security, but, uh, she has been— she's been quite well behaved, which is nice. Robert Bone, channel member, says, evening, Lawrence, got a nuke coming from you in a few weeks. I bought some plastic pallets. How many pallets high is comfortable to work, please? Congratulations on your little girl. Thanks, Robert. So for me, 3 pallets, really nice, 3 plastic pallets high. And a little tip that I'll give you on the plastic pallets as well is if you get some ratchet straps and then in between basically the top of the first pallet and the Bottom of the top pallet. I know it's like a proper mind— it's like this again, isn't it? Um, the top of the first pallet and the bottom of the top pallet, if you strap them together, so 2 ratchet straps in between, they're just like rock solid. Because the plastic ones can like shake a little bit— not shake, but like slide against each other. Whereas if you ratchet them together like that, they're just— they're pretty much bombproof. And also, when you put them down, go to the effort of leveling them. I've got loads that aren't leveled, and, and leveling them can be as simple as just getting like a bit of wood under one side, because no, no ground is perfectly level. Just get— take some offcuts of wood with you and, and include that on the ratchet strap. And it just— do it at the beginning before it gets grassy. And then the other tip that I would give you is get some weed, like, suppressing membrane and cut that out the size of— telling you all the stuff that I haven't done, by the way. This isn't me saying, oh, I did this great thing. This is me looking at my pallets and thinking, I wish I'd done that. get some weed suppressing membrane and cut that out the size of the pallet and then put that down underneath so that when you strim around it, it's nice and neat. Because all that happens is the grass grows up through it and it's just impossible to, to cut it and it just never looks neat. So I wish I'd done all those things and I probably will get around to doing them this winter. It's worth it. But plastic pallets are great, but go 3 high. 3 high is good height, I think. By the way, we did our first demaree last week, checked today and it's looking amazing. Few emergency cells in the top, loads of stores in both supers, 6 frames drawn in the bottom box with eggs already. It is brilliant when the demerare works, isn't it? And that is textbook demerare. So they've made the cells upstairs, you've given them enough separation. I love how quick they get drawing the frames downstairs. They're just like, right, we've got a job now, we need to draw these frames. And the queen's like, what? Where's all that brood gone? You see, I had like 10 frames of brood in here. I'd basically done my job. I was kicking my feet up thinking Things are easy now, and now I've just got like no frames of eggs, no frames of brood. Right, that's it, head down. And they do. And what's the best thing about the Demerare is that what you're seeing now is like the pre-work, and as all of the brood in the top box emerges, it's kind of like joined up with all of the brood at the bottom box being created. So you just get almost like 6 solid weeks of numbers going up. of bees going up because all of the top brood boxes submerges, and then just as that finishes, you move into the bottom brood box emerging again. It's great. And then you get some serious, serious honey. And, and then the UK weather just looks at you and just says, no, no chance. Just turns the, turns the heating down and turns the light off and just thinks, yeah, right, UK summer, here we go. Good evening, congratulations, and hope all is well with the family. When swapping brood box sides, when the queen is laying in the new brood box, can I add an excluder and swap the boxes around? So yeah, that sounds— I think you, when you're doing kind of like any movement between different box formats, I think it's wise just to use the queen excluder to your advantage. At the beginning, I would say don't, don't use it and just let them go wild, but as soon as you get any action in the box that you want So you like— they've started drawing it out. Don't— I know you wouldn't do this, Adam, but saying it for other people's benefit— don't just trap the queen down in a box of foundation and say, well, you must work. But as soon as they naturally start to draw out that frames and you see the first batch of brood in there, then I would just go and pick up the queen, just pop her in the box that you want, put the queen excluder in, and you know that they will just go down and join her down there then. Um, so I was going to say I hope that answered your question, and I saw the follow-on bit and then realized it didn't. So, so it means that in short, then use the old box as a brood super. So yeah, that is what it will in effect do, is turn the old box as a super. So yeah, that'll work. What's your opinion on grafting? Do you not think it is no better than emergency queen cells? I'm trying to rear new queens from swarm cells this year. I think they're better quality Queens. So there's no doubt that swarm cells are going to be better than emergency cells. So I just thought I heard myself, my daughter shouting out there once, if it is, we have to cut the stream. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure, I know we're good. Um, lost my train of thought. So swarm cells and supersedure cells better than emergency cells. The only thing that I really don't like about swarm cells though though, is that it's, it's like breeding in that swarming. So if you've got a colony that's just like, right, we're going to swarm 3 times a year, and then you're saying, right, okay, I'm going to use those swarm cells, then you are— it's Lily that's crying, that's what's got me— then you're basically breeding in the fact that they're going to be swarming. So that's, that's the only reason that I'm not a massive fan of it. And, and I just think grafting is, is pretty easy. it's really not that difficult to set up that one colony. Like, I've got a couple of videos showing, showing one, the way that I do my queen setup, which is like the Michael Palmer method, same method that Richard Nowell uses, which is a little bit resource intensive. But then the one that Richard uses, like, anybody can do that. That is basically just get a strong colony of bees and do something, and then 2 days later you can— I think it's 24 hours later you can graft your queens in a side of the colony. So it's not, it's not a huge amount of effort and it's not a huge amount of like resources required to be able to graft. And then you're able to do that selection. So you're not saying, right, gonna go into my— oh, I need to find a colony that's swarming, right? They're swarming, so they can now be the colony that I'm using for effectively breeding. You're able to go into your colony and say— into your apiary, sorry— and say, right, what is the very best colony here? That one's got loads of honey, that's the calmest one, they're angry, keep away from them. It might be the angry ones that swarm. So you, you're able to choose, you're able to select a little bit more than if you're just waiting for the ones to swarm. But I would agree the swarm cells are going to be better than emergency cells in terms of like the nutrition that's being given to those cells. Um, but it just, yeah, it restricts you a little bit in terms of any selection. Uh, Tim Gates says, having— I've recently bought a nuc from my local association, just had a call from the bee inspector to say EFB has been confirmed at the club apiary. He wants to come and inspect and check. What should I do? So you've got to let him come and check. That's— wow, that's pretty— that is really, really bad. I'm, I'm, yeah, quite taken aback with that, that it was confirmed at the club apiary. You'd have thought that someone The club apiary would have noticed that. So the bee inspector wants to come and inspect, definitely let the bee inspector come and inspect. So let's, let's take 2 scenarios here. One, you've not got EFB, but you say, no, no, you're not coming in inspecting my bees. That's not, that's not the best scenario. I don't know why I said that scenario. Let's just go with one scenario. You've got EFB and you don't let them come and inspect. Like, you're just going to infect all of your equipment. And let's say you've got EFB and you do let them come and inspect, they'll come and they'll euthanize the colony and help you clean everything up. So I would definitely choose the latter. Like, I'd want the help and I'd want to know. And like, if you're, if you're able to identify EFB yourself, then you might be able to identify it. But if you're not then I'd much prefer the experts to come in and check and kill the colony and then do like a safe cleanup for me and help me. And they're pretty good at that. They'll come along and they'll scrape all your kit for you and show you what to do. They'll kill your bees as well. But at least you've got a fresh start then. And there's no point— I'd much prefer to know, and I'd much prefer to know early on. So say like, if it's your only colony, you're thinking, that's my only colony, That's kind of for the best, that it's the one— it's only one colony that you've got to kill. Just imagine if the scenario is that you've got EFB but it's asymptomatic and you don't let them come and check, and then you make some splits and you get some other boxes in and your boxes are infected and you get up to like 10, 12 colonies, and then, and then they come in and they say, right, we're coming in, because they can force their way in and they will, they will be like persistent. They won't just like if you say you're not coming in, they won't just say, all right, they'll eventually come in. And you've got 12 colonies of bees and they say, right, they've all got EFBs, so we're killing them all. Then I'd be way more annoyed than them just coming in and killing one. So sign up to BeeBase and let them come in. They're not the bad guys. They do know what they're doing. But that's pretty rubbish that it's From, yeah, Club Apiary. Hopefully they get it all sorted out. EFB is horrible, right? I have some strong colonies but they have produced very little to no honey. Is that a sign of the colony or is it the recent dreadful spring weather? So it could be both, but I would say it's more likely to be the weather because this year has been absolutely shocking. Really, really bad weather. So It, you could also— it could, it could also be rubbish bees as well. But it's— you see a lot of people say like, oh well, like local Mongols, you know, they, they produce bees in no matter the weather, they're, they're locally adapted for our damp climate. And I don't think they've got a honey crop either. And, and then I, I posted a video, a little short, saying about like some of the Buckfast bees, some very orange bees, like out foraging in, in the damp weather. I was like, it's pretty good, like it's not, it's not put them off. And then someone posted saying, well, they've just obviously not got used to the weather. And I thought, well, you can't— whoa, whoa, you can't have it both ways. I thought it was— I thought you were saying it was good that local bees foraged in the rain, but if the orange bees do it, oh, not, not locally adapted. No, no, no. So it made me laugh a little bit. I have a very— I had a very small colony going into winter last year which died. Too I think I treated for varroa, and so my question is I have full frames of honey which they had left from the hive, which was their winter stores. What is best to do with the honey I've left from last year's colony, as I don't think it's safe to eat because of the varroa treatment? So it's definitely not safe to eat because of the varroa treatment, and it's definitely not safe to give to the bees either because you don't really know why they died. So, uh, sorry, but what I would do is I'd dig a big hole in the garden and get a nice big hot roaring fire going. I just chuck them on, burn it all, and then fill in the hole. That is best practice with what to do with any frames that you don't know what they— you don't know what the disease status is of them. Uh, Hollow Oak Stores says, evening, sunny days in East Devon, inspection day tomorrow to see if the hot hive have accepted a Buckfast queen. Say a little prayer to the bee gods. Yes, that'd be very, very good. Fingers crossed they do well. Oh, I'll just— I don't know why it does that sometimes, it jumps me right down to the comments. So there we go. Um, so Matthew says, do you have a different introduction method for queens raised in your apiary compared to postal queens? So not, not really, because I don't really tend to take queens in the apiary and, and like do anything with them except put them in cages, send them out. But you can and I've done that, I've shown this on a number of videos, I did this again the other day. You, if you've got, say you've got 3 colonies in your apiary and one is hopelessly queenless, has to be hopelessly queenless, can't be just a bit queenless, 100% hopelessly queenless, and you've got a queen, the 2 other colonies are queen right, so queens that are, they're there and they're laying eggs, have to be laying eggs, you can go Into one of those colonies that's got a queen that is laying eggs, pick up the queen, and just place her into the Hopeless Equinus colony with no cage, no nothing. And she needs—it needs to be literally instant. You pick up the queen from one, a laying queen that is in the process of laying an egg, and you can just put her in the other colony. And it's amazing. I'll do another video on it because it is—it is quite fascinating. The bees like look at her and they're like. Yep, she would do. And they just— and she just goes into the new colony, she starts laying eggs immediately. So you can do that, and a lot of people do that. And Brother Adam, that was the method that they used a lot of the time. But what you can't do is you can't take a queen from one apiary and like keep it in the back of the car and then go and put it in. Needs to be like instant, and that does work. But like I say, we don't— I, I'll do that in instances where I need to do that, if I've got like a mismatch in terms of numbers or that there's something wrong, or I'm combining colonies or doing something kind of a bit unique. So I very rarely do it. I'll do it for like a video, uh, but in terms of when I am introducing queens, it would be like to make up splits. So I'll just follow the same process because they're coming in caged. Uh, so yeah, I, I use the— I use the exact same process that I recommend to people, which is getting them hopelessly queenless and then introducing them. And it is a good process. Bee Enthusiast Peter says, hi Lawrence, I've enjoyed the latest videos. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Peter. How are your bumblebees doing? I was doing research into how they rear bumblebee queens. They use a dark shaded red light to produce them. So they are dead. Sorry about that. Um, I've, I have emailed my complaint to the company, which was a bit like, they're dead? I followed your guidelines exactly and they're just dead? And appreciate there may be a slight amount of irony there because I get a lot of emails saying, I followed your guidelines exactly and they are dead. But I genuinely did follow their guidelines like to the letter and rested them down as soon as they got here, put them in their new box, left them for half an hour, opened them up, and they all came out and flew and they just buggered off. So I was a little bit disappointed by that, I'm not gonna lie. might get some more. I've got some red mason bee cocoons that I am putting into a little insect hotel tomorrow with my daughter, so that should be fun. I'll do a little video on that one as well. Hopefully they don't die just quite as quickly. How did you start beekeeping? For me, it was my daughter suffering from hay fever, and using local honey can cure this, which is now starting to work. So glad that it's working. We had swarm land in the back garden. and it was pretty epic, so we thought keep some bees, and it got well out of control. Hi Lawrence, I'm having hip replacement surgery next week, so I want my hives to have the best chance of not swarming for 2 to 3 weeks after that. Double brood, do you think? So I would— I can give you a method, Gareth, that will guarantee that they will not swarm, literally guarantee that they will not swarm. You'll need some nuc And the method is just make a split. Make a split, take the queen out, 2 frames of brood, and just take them off to another apiary. And so you've got 2 frames of brood and a frame of stores with the original queen. Take that to a new apiary and then add frames of foundation in there. And if you've got extension boxes, put the extension boxes on so you can just say, right, they're done, not even gonna have to worry about them. Give them one feed when you get to the new apiary. and they'll be good for 6 weeks. They're not going to fill that box in 6 weeks, so you can forget about them. And then the other colonies, just leave them. Like, let them— 8 days, take down the cells, let them go hopelessly queenless. And then depending on whether you want to put queens in before, you could probably just wait until after you get back out, put the queens in. And then, like, none of them are going to swarm. That'd be the best way of doing it. If you don't want to do splits, then double brood, like, is not the silver bullet for you. Like, it definitely helps. So giving them space will help, like, alleviate any worries in terms of space. Um, you could demare them. Demare is probably going to be the best way of doing that. If you— when you say, you know, so you're going into hip surgery next week, so ideally wanted to do this, do the demare like at least 10 days before you go in so you can do the demaray and then go back in after 8 or 9 days, take down the emergency cells in the top box, and then that would, that would definitely buy you 3 weeks. I reckon they wouldn't swarm unless they were looking to swarm before you went in to do the demaray. So few, few different options there. Hopefully one of them is going to work in terms of time. Uh, Mark Burrows, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, received your queens last Friday, into hive Saturday, open the tabs on Wednesday, not planning on checking them till the weekend come in. Do you think I should check sooner or the longer the better? So as long, as long as it's like 3 or 4 days minimum after popping the tabs, it's fine to go in and check them. 7, like 7 days is best really, but if the queens are stuck, you might want to go in and just, and just double check. Like, do I, do I follow that religiously? No, because sometimes I have to force things through and sometimes I'm not going to an apiary, so I'm like, I want to, I want to get the queens out of the cages as quick as possible. But what I definitely don't do is I don't like open the tabs and then go in the next day, because either, either you can say the queen's definitely not going to be out in that time, or if they are out, they're going to get balled when you open up the roof. And it does happen. I did a video of it the other day, going in too quick and they just balling the queen. And I, I can guarantee they weren't balling the queen when I opened the lid, because you can see it on the frames, you can see it start to happen, and it just gets out of control really, really quickly. So Yeah, three or four days minimum. Seven days, yeah, great. But whatever suits. Don't don't leave it like two weeks and don't do it after twenty-four hours. But somewhere in the middle should be fine. Stealth, new channel member. Welcome. Evening, men, and good evening, Dave. Stuart Campbell says evening all watching in the sunshine outside making frames. Very nice. I was thinking when I got to get my new phone this week and I can do live streams with my cameras from the April. So maybe that's going to be the best way, is I just get outside, do a live stream in the sun with the bees. That could be fun. Uh, Douglas Hunter says, how do I become a channel member? So if you go on to the Black Mountain Honey homepage where it says subscribe, next to it it says join, and then there's a number of membership options there. Uh, Terry Endersby— hi Terry— he says, hi Lawrence, thanks for the advice the other day. The weather in Bedfordshire here still sucks. Sorry about that. That. Hope you— hope your bees are doing well though. Uh, Mem says congratulations on the new baby. Thanks, Mem. Uh, Steve's Honeybees says, I noticed in one of my hives some of the worker brood is not totally sealed. There is a hole in the cappings. It's not emerging bees. What's the cause? So it, it could be that they're just not capped it over yet. So they will, you know, they'll work from the outside and cap in and cap in, then you'll notice that tiny little hole, and then finally it's closed. Or sounds more like bald brood to me. So bald brood, there's a couple of different types of bald brood, and one is if you've got wax moth larva. So if, if they're doing it in like a line, so like multiple cells all in a line next to each other, it's generally wax moth larva or the remnants of a wax moth larva cocoon underneath the cells. So you can tell if it's a line. If it's just random spotty ones, it's almost certainly varroa. and then it's like a, a hygienic response from the bees that they don't want to cap it to aid the varroa, so they leave it open. It's like bald brood. If it is the latter there and you've got like spotty bits, then it's probably a varroa level. So I'd do a varroa test, see how many varroa you've got, and then potentially treat for varroa. That should fix it. Hi Lawrence, I've been looking for green drone Langstroth frame to help with varroa mites but not found And in the UK, hoping you could help. I've not heard of that. The green drone Langstroth frame to help with varroa mites. I, I've never heard of that, Sean, so sorry, I can't help. Um, but I'm really interested, so if you, if you've got any information, stick there, send it to me on an email. I'm gonna have a look at that. You may notice that I'm a bit tired. It's getting late, so we've been on for an hour. I will do— I will go until Ivy wakes up. Um, but yeah, sorry if I'm a bit tired, shattered. Uh, John Hayes says, so after mocking how careless you would have to be to get a bee inside the veil, I gained my badge of honor today. The little ninja somehow got inside and stung me on my nostril. Yep, serious pain. So it— there, that bit of the nose there is, is one of the worst places in the world to get stung. So if you've got stung like either side there, John, consider yourself lucky. But if you got stung there on that bit there, I reckon that's probably the worst place. It your eyes go immediately, not in like swelling but tears, and it's just like it is intense. I'd say that's I'd say that's the worst place to get stung tip of the nose, but like underneath on that little bit is a killer. John also says, "Please can do a video on converting both national hives and nucs into Langstroth." Yeah, so I need to. To do that. I've got that on my list, that one. And there's, there's a couple of different ways of doing it. I'll tell you who does a really nice method, and I'm just working out as you do the question here. Converting both national hives and nucs into Langstroth. Yeah, so what, what— this is a really good method. Yeah, Richard uses this, and I will do a video on it. But imagine you've got a Langstroth nuc and you put all your Langstroth frames in and they fit really nicely, and then you get like a national frame And you obviously go to put the national frame in, but it's it's not long enough. So basically, it doesn't sit on the lugs. It just there's just nothing for it to sit on. So all you do is you just where it would sit, you just get a screw or two screws. You just screw it into like into where the lugs would sit. It's a big screw on either side, and then you just put like your five Langstroth frames in, and then you go to put the national frame in, and because you've got the screws. it just balances on the screws. It's like, that is bloody brilliant, Richard, what a great idea. And all it costs is 2 screws. And then by the time the bees have expanded and all the brood in the national has emerged, you just take the national frame out and recycle it and put— take the screws out and put a Langstroth frame back in. It's a really, really nice neat system. It's not so much for like converting a whole national hive into a Langstroth hive, but it gives you the ability to make splits from Langstroth International nucs. So it does, it gives you a way to move things around a little bit, and I just thought it was a really nice neat solution. So I will do a video on it. Luke Taylor says, if you were to start now with a business mind, would you focus on splits over honey production in year 1 and 2? Difficult, that one. With like making splits, what are you making splits for? Not, not in a not in a patronizing way, but what would I be making splits for? Would I be making splits to make more honey, to kind of just build up colonies with the intention of like doubling down on honey? Or would I be making splits with the intention of selling the splits to make money through the actual bees as opposed to the honey? And I think that's the bigger question here. It's not should you double down and make the splits now, or focus on honey production with a smaller amount of colonies, should you try and like diversify and actually just not be so focused on honey production and focus on the sale of bees? I'm really glad I did that. I'm— I wouldn't like to be in a situation where I'm trying to make a living out of selling honey because the honey market is pretty dead. And it's not— it's not dead in the sense of, you know, if you've got like 10 or 12 hives, you'll sell all your honey, no doubt. But if you've got a few hundred hives and you're reliant on selling honey by the bucket or by the barrel, that market is dead. And it's a— it's like a pretty dying market, that market. Um, whereas the queens market and the nucs market and the bee products market and education market and the beekeeping experience market, they're all doing really, really well. Bulk honey market is not very good. So if I was to look at that a business mind, I'd say, what's my end goal here? Is it the bulk honey market, or is it just building up a number of colonies for for whatever reason? So let's assume you've got that reason, and the bulk honey market isn't dead. Don't don't do it so aggressively that it becomes not enjoyable. And don't do it so aggressively that you kind of like neglect the bees or mess the bees up, but do it as much as you feel the bit you can get away with. And the reason I say that is beekeeping, when you're making splits, is so easy. It's the easiest thing in the world making splits in beekeeping. It's way more easy than trying to keep— come out of winter with 10 hives and go into winter with 10 hives and not lose any swarms and make loads of honey. That's really, really difficult. But just splitting beehives, it's like a piece of cake. You just feed them when they need to feed because you've not got to worry about contaminating them. So making splits is really, really easy, but it gives you time to learn about bees as well. So that— it's, it's a double-edged sword, that one. You can get yourself into loads of trouble by making splits, but it also does take the pressure off and make it easy. But don't just make splits for the sake of saying, I want to build up my numbers as much as possible and then get them up to a point where you're like, right, I've really built them up and I just don't know what I'm going to do with— don't know what I'm going to do with all these bees. And I don't know, I don't really have a market for all the honey. So I would— I'd have a think about that first, Luke. Uh, JSCFB says, what's this unplanned stream? Champions League night. We'll watch after the football. Ah, this place, Real Madrid versus Dortmund. It's not— what's the score? I hope Dortmund win. Um, Um, but it was, it was kind of unplanned, and it's in defiance of the fact that Aston weren't there. So there we go. Lawrence did a split 20th of April, queen emerged in original hive by the 4th of May. Haven't spotted her, but still no signs of eggs and lots of bees, really calm. Is it too long? I'd say it's too long. That's like 4 weeks now, 4 weeks since the queen emerged, and the weather's not been great. I would— if it was me, I'd be killing that queen and either giving them a cell if you've got cells available, or giving them a mated queen. A bit too long for me. Just an FYI, folks, the amount of knowledge Lawrence passed on from the uncut card journey is immense. Lawrence, long may it continue. I'm glad you enjoyed that, Luke. Uh, sorry, Lee. Um, it's— I really do like doing those videos because they're like freebie videos for me. And as I said on some of the videos, in that, you know, like a 10-minute YouTube video might take me half an hour to film, but then it takes me like 3 or 4 hours to edit it. It does take a long, long time to edit stuff, especially when you're telling like a story— not like a story, but you've got all the different pieces from different times, and then you're like looking at stock footage. I keep loads of my own stock footage. You've got to go in and get it. It takes ages. But me driving to go and drop some nukes off And just putting the camera in the car and then just like talking as I go, like I would talk to my wife and just talking about stuff. It literally takes me no— it's no additional time because I was driving there anyway. So it's just me talking while I'm driving and I just upload it. So hopefully it is useful. It is just me garbling on a bit, but what's useful, I think will be useful, is that it's relevant. So it's very relevant to the season. And people always say on the videos, can you put the date on there because we want to know when it's happening. So what I'm trying to do with the exclusive content is give people the heads up in terms of like, this is happening now, but in 2 or 3 weeks this is going to be an issue. It's like, look ahead. If you've not done this, do this now. And obviously talk like we spoke about, like diseases and EFB and, and sacbrood and all the, all the good stuff that's just, yeah, sitting there that I I'm happy to talk about, um, but glad you found it useful. Uh, Lee— sorry, it's like the Ronnie Barker sketch. I'm doing everybody's name from the one before, right? Ian Oliver says, last year I bought a queen in a similar situation, and when it arrived, went to put it in only to find eggs. Oh, we get that a lot. I get a few cancellations saying, yeah, ordered the queen, but now I've gone back in and there is— there's loads of eggs. So is what it is, but it's good. Make a split and you're good to go. Is it Dewey? Says, do you have any suggestions for getting a new colony up to speed as fast as possible? So that is one of the things I just don't think you can rush. There's really nothing that you can do. The, the only things that you have control over in that situation is making sure that they have like adequate protein and adequate carbohydrates in the form of nectar pollen or sugar syrup. So as long as there's like a good natural flow on, that means you've not got to do anything. And by feeding them, if there's a natural flow on, they'll probably just shun it anyway. But they can only go as fast as they can go, and they can only cover as many frames as they can cover. And they— the queen can only lay as many eggs as there are bees in the colony to cover those eggs. So she can't lay 10 frames of eggs if there's only 3 frames of bees in there. So the queen is very Um, like good at adjusting the amount of eggs that she lays to the colony. So what you obviously can do is add in frames from other colonies, but don't add in frames of eggs. So if you're, if you're trying to boost a colony, do it one frame at a time and just give them the best, most fully capped, close to emerging frame that you can possibly give them, because that just gives them a big massive boost of heat. because it kind of retains its heat quite well, that capped brood. So you're not giving them a huge amount of work to do, but also a huge boost of nurse bees. So then you get like kind of exponential growth as opposed to doing it on their own. But if you've not got any other frames of brood that you can add to them, you've just got, you've just got to let them go and have a go at it and let them go at their own speed. Lee's saying, yeah, livestream, not editing at all, it's a winner. But it's— I've got, I've got to do that, haven't I? I've got to do the livestream. It's going to take me 2 hours and it's something else that I could be doing. Whereas if I'm driving somewhere else, I've got to drive there somewhere else anyway, so it's like I'm getting something for free. So it's— I like, I like efficiency. I do like efficiency. Hi fella, my bees are so quiet. The weather is a bit crap and numbers are down too. Yeah, I'm hearing that a lot. It's rubbish weather. We need some good sunshine. Are saying in response to the, the Varroa, I suggest the ball brood, if they can smell a mite, they will open up the cell. Um, yeah, and they'll leave it open. Is off to become a channel member. Thank you very much, Doug. Hope to see you on the other side. Uh, right, Gary Wheeler says, hi Lawrence, what's your video with the chap with all those hives in the back garden? You were brave wearing shorts. Totally enjoyed it, and thanks for all your advice. You're a star. I enjoyed that as well. It was, it was good going up and seeing, seeing Carl. I, I have, I have to say, with, with Carl, like, I was a bit— I don't want to say disgusted, the wrong word, disgusted— but there was, there were some bad beekeeping practices going on up there, and I was maybe a little bit too polite to not call some of them out because I, I respect him as a beekeeper for for what he, what he's doing with his bees and stuff, but there was some seriously bad beekeeping practices going on up there. And, and the queen that I got that superseded— I've had about 6 or 7 queens, artificially inseminated queens from Carl now, and every single one of them has died before I managed to take a graft off them. And it's— yeah, that's not right. Mm-hmm. So, uh, yeah, I can't recommend Carl's Queens, unfortunately. Sorry, Carl. Uh, Brock Lay says, evening, Lawrence, congratulations to you and your wife on your new precious arrival. Thank you very much. Uh, Steve's Honeybee says, is the bulk honey market poor because of cheap foreign imports? Yeah, basically. And like Rouse, so the biggest honey packer, Rouse, used to buy like all of the honey, the British honey, and used to pay like a decent price. He was paying like This is like going back 10 years, £4 a pound. That's how much they were paying British farmers. And then Hilltop came along and, and basically imported loads of cheap foreign honey and just like cut the price on everything. And then all the honey packers looked at that and just thought, why are we buying honey at £4 a pound when we can probably just buy sugar syrup or whatever it is? If it's real honey, I don't know. don't want to get sued, but buying whatever it is for 30p a pound and sell loads of it will make loads more money. So it, it's definitely down to foreign imports. But then also what's compounded it is like the cost of living crisis. I do think that's, that's the bad thing, because I think if you took all of the foreign imports away, I still think there'd be a bit of a UK honey crisis because it's an expensive product. It's like a luxury product. And then when times are hard, people can't justify spending X amount on an expensive jar of honey. They just say, well, we'll just go without, we'll just get some jam. You know, it's, it's something that you can quite easily replace, I think, honey, with, yeah, something that doesn't cost quite as much. Hit the like button, ladies and gents, doesn't cost anything. Very nice, thanks David. I, I do agree. please, please hit the like button. That would be much appreciated. And he says congratulations on the little bundle of joy. Thank you, David. Just got in, been to Harry Potter Studios for the day. I hope you enjoyed it. That sounds like good fun. Oh, and he's also given me a super sticker. Thank you very much, JK Photography, always very kind. When you have your limit of hives that you can look after, how do you stop swarming and control the number of bees? So Oh wait, so we just quickly jumped that Real Madrid are winning 1-0. Annoying. Go on Dortmund. Um, so the best way that I found to do it is to make splits and sell the splits. It's a really good way of doing it. There's a lot of people that want to buy bees and sell them good bees, then, you know, they'll come back for more good bees. Uh, the other way for honey production colonies is Vertical splits. So by doing a demerare, that's for me by far and away the best method. Really, really good. The other one's clipping your queens. That's not like a one-size-fits-all. That's not what I meant. That's not, that's not something that's gonna completely stop your bees swarming, but as part of a management plan, it definitely helps, and it means that you have a chance to collect those bees before they go. that there's a few different things that you need to do kind of all in conjunction with each other, but that is the art of beekeeping, and that's what makes beekeeping so fascinating and so difficult, is that you can have decades of experience and still not nail that. And I've definitely not nailed it. Like, I lose swarms like everybody else loses swarms, but I lose fewer swarms each year, it does seem, which is good. Uh, Terry says, just out of curiosity, how many hives, yards do you guys have? So, so for us, like for me personally, I've got about 6 apiaries, and I, I only keep— it does depend at different times of the year, like you might have like 30 or 40 nucs in some at some point in the year, but I never really have that many on there. I try and aim for like 10 to 12 in each apiary is like a maximum, but then when you include like Richard in it with the nuc we're in, there's, there's lots, there's tons of apiaries, absolutely loads, like 50, 60, something like that, because there's a lot of nucs. And, you know, we're working hard at the moment for the nucs for next year. Like, the overwintered nucs don't start in August like we started. They're well, well on their way already. So we, we, we're banking on some nice weather over the next few weeks. We need some good weather, otherwise we're not going to be able to produce anywhere near as many as you produced last year. And I think we will get the weather, and I think you just got to keep on predicting that the weather's going to be good in 3 weeks. And you just say, well, we graft today because in 3 weeks the weather's going to be good. And then the next week you graft again, you say in 3 weeks the weather's going to be good. As long as you keep on grafting, you keep on getting chances for the queens to go out and mate, then you'll hit a good patch. And when you hit that good patch, you don't want to look outside and say, right, it's, it's kind of like 26 degrees outside now and there's no wind, and it's going to be like that for 2 weeks, and then you've not got any queens going out mating, and then you think, well, I'm going to graft now, and then you graft, and then when they're going out and mating, it's like 15 degrees and rainy. So you just need to constantly hedge your bets to say it's going to be good, it's going to be good, it's going to be good. And you will get some failures, and like, they're pretty easy to fix, the failures. This is the thing. If you just— you'll go in, you'll find the virgin, You say, right, your 2 and a half, 3 weeks are up, squish, chuck her out, add a new cell, and the bees respond quite well to that. So you'll get a couple of goes at that before the bees start getting old and you've just got to start replenishing those nurse bees again. So you need to be the forever optimist, which is difficult for me because I am— I'm not a pessimist, but I'm very much a realist and plan for the worst. Uh, but you know, I, I think we'll get the sun. We will get the sun. We'll get like, we'll get a few weeks of it at some point. Uh, My partner's colony swarmed last Sunday. Somehow we missed the cell. How long before we should go in and inspect the hive? So if they've, if they have definitely swarmed, you're just going straight away and reduce all of the swarm cells down to just leave one swarm cell left. So what happens is colony will decide it's going to swarm, they'll produce loads of swarm swarm cells. And then when the first swarm cell is capped, they swarm. So the original queen, loads of bees fly off. But then what happens is that as the virgins start to emerge, if you don't take down the cells, they start to throw out cast swarms if they're big enough. And they can really— they can cast swarm themselves away to nothing. So what you need to do is go in, take down all of the cells barring one, leave one really good cell, make sure you don't damage that cell. So I like to like go through, find the cell, say, right, you're my cell, and I'll put that frame off really carefully to one side, kill all of the rest of the cells, and then come back to that one and then make sure that when I put it in, there's no way that it can be damaged. So almost like I'll take down all of the cells on that one frame barring the one that I want, but turn it round and then put it back into the hive when I've got loads of space facing the other way. So then I know when I'm putting all of the next frames up to it, there's no way that I can squish it. And you've got to be careful because you can, you can take down all the cells and then damage the one cell that you've chosen, and then it never emerges. And obviously don't shake, don't shake the frames at that point because you'll just drop the larvas out. Is anyone else not seeing as many mites in their colonies this year, or is it still too early for them and they become more numerous later on in the year? I've not seen as many mites in my colonies, so you don't really tend to see that many mites anyway. You'll occasionally see like a mite on the back or a shoulder, but generally like on the front of the bee, so you don't always see that many. But also like it's quite early in the year, so the number of varroa goes up as the kind of bees go throughout the season. So in April, in May, beginning of June, you're not going to see that many, but as you get through to like July August, September, if you don't do any treatments, you'll start seeing loads. So just by kind of like seeing phoretic mites on them as well, you didn't really give you that much of an indication as to what is going on. So if you want to do like a test, you can do like a sugar roll test or an alcohol wash test or like a drop test and see how many are actually in there in terms of an infestation. But I don't do that. I just treat when I need to treat, which is Kind of middle of August and generally quite good. Paul Lewis says, oh, I went down the wrong hole. He says, hi Lawrence, joined late, I'm so behind, sorry. Hope Lily and your wife are well. Carniolan still in first week since introduction, I'll let you know how it goes. Loving the raw footage. Thanks Paul, good luck with the Carniolan. Paula Rainbird says, my first year of beekeeping, so sad on Sunday, we were at the back garden and my bees swarmed. Never seen anything like it. I was calling them back. Laugh out loud. Thorough check of the hive tomorrow. So you'll be in the same situation. You'll have numerous swarm cells and just knock them all back down to one. And then they come back quite well from a swarm. So you've basically lost some honey. That's all you've really lost there. And maybe, maybe a prized queen. But you've got to see the swarm, which is pretty cool, isn't it? I love watching a swarm. There's nothing better than being there. What's going on there? I love going into an ape— I don't love it because it is annoying, but it's exciting going into an between, you can just see like, whoa, that's— that is— that colony is going to swarm there. And they just go, and it's, it's quite amazing. And what I love about like seeing the colony leave a swarm— sorry, like a swarm leave like a beehive— is that they always cluster up like close by. They don't just come out and then just bugger off. They cluster up on a tree and then they go. So you always have like a chance of getting them, but it is pretty cool. Ian Oliver says, your Buckfast queen I bought last year is a beauty. She's on double brood after a demo with 3 supers. Excellent, that's good to hear. I have a lot of, a lot of people, a lot of good feedback coming back kind of like over the years now about bought a queen from you, and it's brilliant. My favorite ones are, um, I've had a couple of people say, I've kept, I've kept local mongrels for 20, 30 years, and you know, I saw your videos about you saying you didn't really like them. And initially kind of thought, well, he's just— he's not got the right local mongrels. But over time they thought, you know what, I'm just going to get— I'm going to give it a go. And then they just say, are you like completely converted? And they're just a bit gutted that they'd gone 20 years down the line of AMMs and has to be dark bees and ginger bees are angry or there's all— and they just wish they tried it a little bit earlier. Because they said the second that they tried it and saw what the bees could do, like in their first full season, they just thought, it does everything that I want a bee to do. It's healthy, it's resistant to brood diseases, it's a little bit more resistant to EFB, it doesn't swarm anywhere near as much, it's calm, it produces 4 times as much honey. The list goes on. It doesn't have chalkbrood. Compared to darker bees, which kind of like the only thing they've really got going for them is that it's They're dark. That just seems to be what people like about them. I don't, I, I don't understand the fascination. I don't understand the attraction, and I don't agree with the logic that's applied, which is saying, oh yeah, but they're local. It's like, yeah, they're not local though, are they? Because when we had local bees, like native AMM bees, they were wiped out by Isle of Wight disease, and they got restocked by the AMM from Holland. So they're Dutch, aren't they? And when they did the genetic testing, they're basically like saying that all of Northern Europe AMM bees are the same. And then I've even seen— I've even seen this now, which is people importing AMM genetics because they're not happy with the local AMM genetics. And you just think like, that is— that's very much pot and kettle. That is because I thought importing bees was bad, and you've been championing the fact that importing bees is bad. Well, really Importing bees is probably the safest thing ever. Do you know how many vets those bees have to get checked off by and how many certificates have to get signed to say that there's no EFB within 50 kilometers of this beehive? There's no AFB, there's no varroa outbreaks, there's no small hive beetle outbreaks, and they check them. Like, you have to get certified by vets and check them compared to the perfect example earlier on by the chap who said he went and bought a nuc Or was given a nuc from his local beekeeping association and come back home and it's full of EFB. And it's like, well, yeah, there's no vet checking that and there's no piece of paper, health certificate that is backing that up. But apparently the importing is the problem and that's where the pest and the disease come from. And it's just, it's all people just not liking the fact that you're importing it and just making up a narrative to fit. Where really it's kind of a bit the other way around. The imported queens are the safest ones that you're going to get because they are verified, they are authenticated, and they are under like a full quality assurance process that is, is managed on like a European level, not just Dave down at the local beekeeping club just knocking out EFB nucs. So I say that tongue-in-cheek, it's not that bad. And, you know, beekeeping associations are very good. The vast majority of beekeeping associations are not going to have a with EFB, and I do have sympathy for them because EFB is a horrible disease and it goes unnoticed for a long time. But they're the kind of things that people should be focusing on as opposed to how dark the bees are. There's a— yeah, sorry, I'll stop ranting now. Right, next question. Bees Honey, Alan B says, evening, love the live streams. Quick question, from a queen emerging, how long before she starts laying, in your experience? So it's going to be completely dependent on when she goes out and gets mated. But from emerging, you're probably talking 4 or 5 days before she's sexually mature. So that means she's able to go out and go on a mating flight. And if you've just got perfect weather, then she'll become sexually mature, say day 5, go out, mate on day 6, come back in, and then it's like 2 or 3 days average before she'll start laying again after that. So in like perfect conditions, you're talking from laying Sorry, from emerging to laying, maybe like 8 or 9 days-ish, maybe a day less, maybe a day more. And then they could— it could be like 3 weeks before they actually go out and mate from when they emerge. So then you could talk— so it could be 25 days from emerging. So between 10 to 25, anything longer than that, she's not going to be any good, it's just too long. And anything before that is not kind of like going to be physically possible. I always think about it though. What I'd love to know why they can't mate any longer than that, because the colony can clearly cope with waiting for like a good few weeks for that queen to become mated. But it's obviously something physiological in that bee that means that once she reaches that point, she just can't. She can no longer become fertile. It's just I don't know the answer. Not really 100% sure or any percent sure why, but it just yeah. occurred to me that is a strange one. Why is it so time-limited that they become drone layers that quick? I don't know. Hi Lawrence, can I take a frame of brood from one location to another if I need to boost a weak hive? I'm just checking as the other location is 40 minutes away and not sure how long they can be out. So, so you can do it, and if you do it on like— you basically do it like the warmest, warmest part of the day and Keep it nice and dark and keep it just like in your car in the warm. Like, my truck is pretty warm in the middle of the day. You could do that. You could, you could put a box, build a little box, and like maybe like make an insulated box. There's quite a lot of heat in like a capped frame of brood, quite a lot of heat that's like retained within it. So although the bees will sit on it to keep it warm, it won't just like cool down instantly. So 40 minutes might be pushing it, but it should be okay. I'd say the majority of the the pupa in there will survive that in a in a warm car for forty minutes. So I'd give it a go. Drask One Cone says, "I've seen videos claiming clanking metal together imitates the sound of thunder, causing them to return to the hive." I've not heard that. I've not heard that. I'd give it a go then. Steve's Honeybee says, "Tuna to Real Madrid now." Yeah, I'd give it a go, see if it works. It could only really be like the bees like in like the close proximity that return to the hive because they're not going to hear it from that far away. But it is an interesting one. One of mine swarmed on Wednesday. It was amazing seeing my first swarm, the loud humming sound. Thought it would scare the neighbors, was scared. It will. It, it's pretty, it's pretty scary as well. John Hayes says, regarding demerays, can I keep adding supers as they get full? So yeah, definitely just keep, keep doing exactly what you would normally do if you hadn't done a demeray. Make sure they never hit the ceiling, which I know is a bit weird because you just put the box up there, but just make sure they've got sufficient space. So 80% rule is still there, just if in doubt, give them a bit more space. Hi Lawrence, what is the procedure you do for sending out a nuc to customers, please? And can we ask questions when we receive them? if I'm not sure what to do? So of course, yep. So we, we send out instructions the weekend before, just so it's like fresh in people's minds. We'll give you very specific instructions dependent on like the time of year. So for example, we sent the first batch of nucs out— looking up there, it's not even there anymore, it's behind me— um, on the 17th of May— sorry, 17th of March this year, and it was really cold. So on like the 14th of March, we sent out very specific instructions for those people saying it is cold, feed your bees in the nuc, leave them in the nuc for a few weeks and feed them in there, they'll be fine, they're not going to expand rapidly at that time of the year. Whereas you'll get your own bespoke set of instructions which will likely say get them out of the nuc within 24 hours, put them into the beehive and feed them for a short amount of time in the beehive, and then the weather should be good and they can just go out and forage and they'll be good. So we give instructions, and then obviously, yeah, of course you can— you love my WhatsApp, you can just WhatsApp me, you can email me, you can text me. Uh, there's No Nonsense Beekeeping Facebook group that is really good for advice as well. There's a Discord which is good for people giving advice, and if you want to share like pictures and stuff, you can do it on there. So it comes with like a full support package as well. You can ask any questions you like. All right, there we go. Neil says, we have a hive that's producing so much moisture that even in warm they're saturating the hive. Is this just a ventilation issue and what's the best fix? So that, that is interesting for this time of the year. I think that is a ventilation issue. So what would be interesting is to see where that moisture is being produced, and then that will show you kind of what the fix is. So if it's being produced on the walls of the hive there's not too much of an issue because moisture on the walls will just track out down, and then the easiest way to fix that is open mesh floor. So I would— the setup that we have on all of our hives, and we never have any issues with moisture, is polyashphalt feeder at the top. So nice insulated, like, board at the top, so your top surface is your most insulated, and then the walls can be poly or they can be wood, and then open mesh floor. So basically, if there is condensation, it has to condense on the walls because they are the least insulated. And on a vertical wall, it just tracks down and goes out of the OMF. So you end up with very dry colonies. It'd be interesting to see what your setup is. So if you tell me, but post it on there, I'm still on for a bit more. If you post it, I'll see if I can identify where the issue is. But it shouldn't— you shouldn't have wet colonies at this point in the year. Some people say about like the rain getting in the Abello, like in between the boxes, so it could be that. And again, but I wouldn't worry too much about that because that's not getting into the hive, that's just sitting on the kind of where the runners join each other, and then the bees will just go up there and they just drink the water. So it's quite handy for them, it's like a little reservoir. But yeah, put it in the comments and I'll have a look. So Andrew Rogers says, I think after 3 weeks they're spelling the sea. shrivels up so they physically can't mate yet. But it's weird, isn't it? So you just think, why, why did that evolve? So after 3 weeks it shrivels up. Surely like a bee should come along and be like, right, I've got a 5-week spermatheca now. It's just, I, I, it baffles me, the evolutionary like numbers for things like that. Just seems really strange. But thanks, thanks for the clarification. Hey, don't own any bees yet, but ready to start, would you recommend your summer nucs or wait for your overwintered nucs? Uh, good, good question, that one. So I, I do say with people, like, the demand for us is with the overwintered nucs. Like, we sell a huge amount of overwintered nucs. But the only— I don't want to say it's a problem, it's not a problem. This isn't me trying to kind of like think carefully how to word this. If you get an overwintered nuc early on in the year, you are going to have to deal with it. That at some point in the year you're going to have to deal with your bees swarming. And I, I said this on one of the— it's a shameful plug again for the channel member exclusive content, but I went through kind of like a typical beekeeping year as a beginner versus a typical beekeeping year as like an experienced beekeeper. And I'll just quickly run through it again now. So typical beekeeping year for a beginner is you get your bees early on in the year, overwintered nuc, You build them up, you think they're going well, they get to a point where they're going to swarm and they swarm. And then you just think, oh damn, they swarmed, that's really annoying. I didn't get any, I'm not getting any honey. I thought I was going to get loads of honey this year. So then you spend the next few months trying to get your colony back on track and trying to get as much honey as you possibly can. And then you might get them to a point where they kind of recover and then you forgot about the varroa treatments and you'd left that too late. And then you don't do the varroa treatments in time, which means you get a small weak colony going through winter, and they either die over winter or you limp them through, and then you get a really bad start to the following year. A lot of people, I think that resonated with them. Definitely what used to happen to me. So if you— If you get an overwinter nuc, you're gonna have to deal with that at some point, whereas if you get a later summer nuc, you might not have to deal with that. you might just get them late enough. So these people get in the colonies now Wednesday the 19th of June, get a 6-frame nuc. By the time they filled the brood box up, it's going to be realistically back end of July, like middle of July, something like that. So you've still got a chance to gather a nice honey crop, maybe like a super, maybe a couple of supers depending on the weather. Likelihood of that colony swarming is pretty much zero. I'd say pretty much zero. Let's say 10%. Whereas if you get an overwintered nuc, the chances of having some colonies swarming or having to deal with swarming is 100%. And I just think in the first year for beekeepers, dealing with swarming is not the best thing. That scenario that I just went through there, that can put people off beekeeping and just say, no, I'm not dealing with that, that's really not for me. Whereas if you get a later one, it is— it can give you a good first year and give you a good start in beekeeping. But that's not to say that people don't want the overwintered nucs. Like, if you manage an overwintered nuc, you're going to be able to get more value out of it, because if you, if you build it up strong and then you take a couple of splits out of it before they swarm, effectively got 3 colonies now for the price of 1. So it's, it's horses for courses, and I think there'll always be demand for both if I wouldn't, I wouldn't even say like I'd recommend one over the other. I just think it's, it's kind of like the time of the year. If you like, if you, if you say right now I want to start beekeeping, I probably wouldn't wait for an overwintered nuc. I'd probably just go and get one now and, and get your bees sorted because you will be able to build the colony up to a point where taking it through the next year in like a full-size hive they'll be much bigger and stronger next year than if you were to start off at that point with an overwintered nuc. So you're kind of like, you, you, then you're getting more value from the summer nuc. But either way, you'll end up with a nice, healthy, strong colony, and it is good fun. And doing stuff wrong in beekeeping is how you learn in beekeeping. They're pretty resilient. And I do say this to everyone, I know it would get a bit boring, but just make splits when you get your bees. Just make splits because There's nothing worse than buying your beehive, buying your bee suit, buying everything, buying one colony, thinking it's all going well, and then the colony dies over winter. And you just think, I've got like, I've just got to start again completely. Whereas if you just made a few splits, which you can do with a nuc at any point throughout the year, as long as you've built them up to kind of like 10, 11, 12 frames, make some splits, and then it's much easier to juggle the numbers. Uh, Wes Granger says, this is brilliant, all this new info. Is this going to be a Saturday night slot? So I can't, um, I was thinking about this. I could, if we do a midweek slot, I can kind of say, well, I'm going to do 9 PM on a Thursday every week, and I could probably stick to that because it's like a school night and get my daughter to bed relatively early. But even then, it's a bit more difficult. I think people prefer it on a weekend. So I, I've always done the live streams. I do them every other week. Griff does it every other week as well, so we don't clash. And then I'll do it either Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. So it will be Friday or Saturday or Sunday, kind of after half 8, 9-ish, something like that. I don't think it's made a massive difference to the numbers here today in terms of scheduling it in, and obviously people can watch it at their leisure afterwards as well. I'm glad you're enjoying it, Wes. You— I'll just jump back to Wes there as well. I've noticed that Wes is watching it on Facebook, so we are live streaming simultaneously on YouTube and Facebook at the moment. I was going to do Twitter as well, but Twitter's dead, isn't it? So I thought I won't annoy everyone on Twitter there. Oh, how cool is this? Oh, this is the first time this has happened, right? So first up, Simon M has become a channel member. So hi Simon, very welcome. Neil has gifted one Black Mountain Honey membership. So I think what that means is that Neil has paid for somebody to be a member for a month, but I don't know how to give that to someone. How is that working? Right, we need to work out how to do this. Neil, thank you very much, by the way. That's incredibly generous. So Neil has paid for someone to be a member, but I need to work out how to give that to someone else. So I'm going to do that in the background. Try and do 2 things at once. I'm not very good at that, but thank you, Neil. That's really, really nice. We'll work out how to give that to, uh, Right, so where do we get to? Oh, a lot more comments to get through, right? Hour and 36 minutes in. I'll keep on going until we get a cry in the background and then I'll be off. Uh, so James Crouch says, I did toss a couple of firecrackers out in a yard during a swarm. The bees did return to the hive. Not very scientific. Oh right, sorry. So that's what the clanging is, in that it's the bees start swarming and they're all there and you clang. Okay, that's That's quite a good idea. I quite like that. It'd be really interesting to see if that works. So they just like abort mission because they hear the clanging that they think. So that's quite clever. Sorry, I was— it was— I wasn't— I wasn't realizing that you would— I thought you were doing it in response to them just going back in. Makes sense. Um, Matt Burrows says, what would you say your biggest mistake you made and then changed in your beekeeping journey? Also, what would you say is the game changer you did to get large honey crops. So game changer for large honey crops, 2 things: clip— clipping the queens and Demerara splits. Simple as that. Because more bees, more honey. And if you lose swarms, you lose bees, you lose honey. So those 2 things in conjunction mean that you don't lose as many bees. Um, but we don't— we didn't get mega honey crops. It's, it's North Wales, so we're never going to get mega ones. If I wanted to get mega ones, I'd on the train down to the borage with my bees, and then we'd get some serious crops. What would you say the biggest mistake you made is, and then changed in your beekeeping journey? So too many colonies on one site in North Wales for us was a big mistake. The biggest single ever mistake that I made was being really lazy and not wanting to feed all of my bees at different apiary sites, so bringing them all back to one site and trying to feed them there, and then about 40%, 35-40% of them died over winter because it was a shocking sight. That was pretty horrific. Um, what are the mistakes? I make loads of mistakes, make mistakes every day, but that's probably the biggest one. I could give you a top 10 list of my mistakes. I think I actually did a video on that. Swarmed a day or two later, probably just virgin queen going in and out, caught them from neighbor's bush. Okay. It's good that you caught them. So Neil says wooden hive, open mesh floor, and again it's getting that wet. And is it— have you got a polyashworth feeder on there? Have you got a feeder, or is it just like a, like a crown board on the top? Because it might be— how much moisture are we talking here? Because you will get like a bit of moisture on the inside, but the way you said it, it sounded like they were sodden. Hmm, and, and like completely sealed up? There's no like gaps or cracks or anything, or like rain getting in? It's definitely like moisture coming in. How high are they up off the ground? Because it could be dew. So like, I'd consider like lifting them up off the ground a bit. Send me a picture, I'd like to look at that. Says, my challenge this year was to see what the Technicet Q8s are, and I just had a fabulous queen from it. I found the features really do make it more simple for the amateur beekeeper. I need to get my one sorted. How have you found it in terms of like the fact that the frames don't sit like square to each other when they fold up? It just— I, I really like the design. Like, I looked at it and thought, that is clever. There's loads of really nice features on it. I do like it as an idea, and I love the compatibility between the folding Langstroth frames as a mating nuc. and like unfolding it and using it as Langstroth, and that is ingenious. But I did find that it didn't— like the hinges weren't correctly set so that when I pushed it together into its concertina fashion, it just kind of came out and like went at an angle. So interesting what the bees made of that and if they, if they fix that for you. The moisture is on the roof. We're on double brood national, wooden national with open mesh floor. Board out of the mesh floor, deep national roof. So send the moisture is on the roof, like on top of the roof. No, but you're saying the moisture is in the inside of the hive. That is really. I need I need to see some pictures. I need to see some pictures to see how bad the moisture is, or if it's just kind of like a bit of seepage. You're gonna have to you're gonna have to send them to me on WhatsApp, Neil. I'll have a look at that. Uh, Joshua says, evening Lawrence, sorry to miss the start, hope all is well with the family. All good, thank you Joshua. Uh, Happy Hounds in Ireland said, have you had much honey production with the Flow Hives? So they're working up in the supers, but I've been taking some splits out of them as well, so I've been knocking them right back. And I put them on double brood as well. So for, for me, I, I just like to leave them, don't, don't mess around with any spring crop in them because it's much more likely to Granulate and set in them, and I'll just let them build up on double brood and then just take a late, like a nice runny dark crop from them. And I'm not fussed about how much I get from them. We'll get get a bit of honey and it's all good. Oh, so there we go. It was gifted automatically. Excellent, right? So Neil's gifted membership was gifted automatically randomly to someone viewing your live stream. It went to Stephen Amos. That's brilliant, I absolutely love that. So Stephen Amos is now a channel member. So if Stephen is— is he still watching? He might not be aware of that. So you're a channel member, uh, for— I think it is for a month, and that was gifted by Neil. That's amazing, I love that. I wasn't— I'd seen that before and I wasn't sure how it worked or if it even worked on StreamYard, but there we go, it does. So thanks, Neil, and congratulations, Stephen. When do you make up your overwinter nucs? So we start now. We start doing it now. 2 frames brood, 1 frame of stores, um, and then queen cell. And then hopefully it gets mated. If it doesn't get mated within the time frame, squish the virgin, new queen cell. And then you're constantly like upgrading, adding frames of foundation in, building them up. And then it— depending on how you're going to overwinter them, if you're going to go on a single or a double box, you'll either just give them more frames and let them build them up. or you're constantly taking frames out to like knock them back because otherwise they just get too big and swarm. But when you're making up more nucs, you need more frames. So it's, it's very iterative. So you've got to like, you do your first batch and then you get X amount of them mated and they start to build up, and then you're nicking the frames of brood from them to start the next batch and just keep them going and keep them going and keep them going. And at the end of the year, you just do a mass balancing exercise around like back in the July, early August, and then you say, right, you're good to go. Give them a last feed, Apivar strips in, and then fingers crossed you get a few of them through the winter. Uh, Jordan says, how difficult is it to clip queens? I'm scared of squashing them. So there's loads of different ways to clip queens. A lot of people you see on the videos, oh, clipping queens, clipping queens is so easy, just pick them up like this and then, and it's done. You just think, that is quite difficult. And I don't, I don't pick them up like that. I'm confident picking up queens and can pick up queens and not kill them, but I don't like clipping my queen wings in that way because it requires quite a difficult manipulation, which is you need to pick the queen up from underneath and then the, the wings are in the wrong way, so you need to like turn her around to get her on her front so you can clip the wing. So you've got 2 2 risks there. One, that like you— she flies off, and one, that you squish her. So the way that I do it that results in not as quite a neat clip, but it's just as effective, is you just pin them down. So basically imagine a queen walking along a frame towards you. You need to like lure her into your fingers like that, and then when you get— when she gets there, you get her head and like part of her body in between your fingers, and then you just get your nail scissors And just clip, clip the wing. And take your time at that point. Don't think, I've got to do this quickly, because you can cut too much off the wing, and you can cut both of the wings, and you can cut her legs. But if you take your time and you're just holding her, and you— because you've got the frame there, you can kind of rest the bottom fingers on the frame so you can get a really good, accurate amount of like pressure on the queen, just enough to keep her still, not enough to squish her. and then clip, and then just clip like that. I have done a video showing that. It's difficult to show it on a video, but it's on my list to show that again. I think that's the easiest way, and I think it's the least risky way of doing it as opposed to any, any of the other methods. No feel, no feeder, just the crown board. So it, it could be that then. That's probably what it is, is that the crown board is the least insulated part Because crown boards, you know, especially some of the cheap crown boards, it's just like a piddly bit of 6mm ply versus like a 12mm bit of nice insulated cedar. Not insulated, but cedar is quite a good wood for insulation. So your least insulated part is the ceiling, so then all of the moisture is just kind of condensing up there and then falling on the bees. So what I would try, cut a piece of insulation And just put that above the crown board and see if that fixes it. That should fix it. That should mean it will go on the walls and then it will track out. But again, still send me, send me pictures. Uh, Jericho B says, I found that the bees sorted it out by themselves. Okay, cool. I'll give it a go, see how it goes. Uh, Shane Newton, um, says, hi mate, I'm looking at starting this year. Would you recommend plastic frames or wooden. I felt really bad when I was saying all that stuff about frames and feeders frames last week and Rob came on, but it was true. Like, I'm not— I never want to say— I never want to say stuff that I kind of read on the internet. It's like, ah, bees don't— bees prefer wax, they don't really like plastic, because I've read it. Um, I like to try things out and see what works for myself, and I'm 100% convinced now And I do encourage people, like, don't, don't just take my word for it, go and test it for yourself if you want. Bees much prefer wax, wooden frames and wax. So all of my colonies will be on wooden frames and wax going forward, apart from my frames and feeders frames that I have already drawn out, which I will continue to use. And I'm happy with them once they're drawn out, there's no, there's no issue with them. It's just they took ages just to get them drawn out. Has anybody on here put another super on a Flow Hive? I haven't seen anyone do this. So I don't think there's any need to put a second super on because it's so quick to extract the first super, and then it gives them something to do to tidy it up. So there's— I'd say it's like a bit— it's a bit of an expensive waste of time. Sorry to put it bluntly like that, Wes. I would just extract the first one and then it's ready for them to fill it back up again. So you only need one. Put another brood box on though, stops them swarming, at least helps. Where do you get your new nitrile gloves from? So again, I'm going to do a video on that. It was called Just Gloves, I think, and I'm pretty sure they're called like a Protect HD. Sad if that's right, because I've not rehearsed that. Really good gloves. And my old, you know, the old dark blue gloves, I used to love those gloves, and they discontinued them this year, and I've really been struggling to find another glove that was as good as those. And these gloves are as good, if not a little bit better. And I like them more because they're not quite as dark, but the other ones are quite dark. So I've found my new perfect glove. So I will do a video on those. They're very, very good. John Sylvester says, need steady hands, not trembly jelly fingers for the queens. That is, that is very correct. Plastic frames are slippery. It's true. And that is one of the things I really didn't like about plastic frames. So if you lift up like a box, like I say, a brood box full of— like a brand new brood box full of wooden frames, the frames don't knock around that much. If you lift up a brand new brood box full of plastic frames, they're just smashing around all over the place, so they are very, very slippery. Are you planning on doing a video in your honey room when you're extracting this year? I think it would be really good to see how you do it. So yes, definitely going to do a full extracting video in there this year. I finally figured out how to get the cameras working well. So I will do one. Oh, so we got— we only got 2 left, so I'm just gonna answer these 2 questions, and then if there's any more, I'll answer them, and then I'm going to bed. Uh, Stevie Boy says hot bees, cold outside, and dew point with condensation. Real easy in my opinion. So yeah, probably that, but in, in a hive that's set up for the condensation to track out, you shouldn't really see it that much, but it might just be that it's sitting somewhere in there and not able to get out. And Neil says he shot me some pics, so I'll take a look at that when we— when I finish this. So, so we're done. I've done that for an hour and 50 minutes, did not stop talking, didn't drink any of my tea, but I enjoyed it. I will continue doing the streams. I know they're useful for people. Thank you to everyone that's kind of dialed in, and congratulations to Steve Amos who got a channel membership as well. If anyone's not a channel member, definitely get involved. The exclusive content is very, very useful, I think you'll find. Um, but thanks again. I hope the weather perks up and it gets a little bit sunnier for everyone, and I'll see you in 2 weeks' time. So take care, everyone. Thanks very much.
