Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 35

So we are live and welcome to another episode, episode 35 of Let's Talk Bees. What a week it's been, absolutely crazy week up here, very, very busy, very cold still. Of course I've got a delicious cup of— what have I got today? I've got Pukka Organic Feel New tea. I need to keep drinking this tea with the way that life is battering me at the moment, but all is good. So what's been happening this week? We've sent out the first 80 nucs. First 80 nucs went out this week to people, and we've got another 80 nucs going out next week. And then week 3, week 4, week 5, week 6, week 7, week 8, week 9, we've got nucs going out. So it's very, very busy at the moment. First batch of queens arrives not this coming week, the following week after that. So first batch of queens comes in, and then it's just— that's it, the beekeeping season starts again. So I've been out today looking at a lot of the nucs, and they're looking really, really nice and healthy, and the bees are doing quite well, better than I thought they would do with the cold weather that we've been having. I was carrying these 2 jerry cans along today, 2 jerry cans of syrup, and it was freezing cold, absolutely freezing cold. Like, I had to put— like, I wish I had some, I would have put gloves on. Like, blowing a gale in my face, and my hands felt like they were going to fall off. I'm, I'm built for the office really. Like, I'm not a proper kind of a proper person who can put up with the cold, but it was very, very cold out there. So I know people only come to these streams for prizes. So last week's winner— I have not decided whose last week's winner is yet because I really struggled to find when people tag me and stuff. But I did see that quite a few people tagged me in the video last week, which was how to start beekeeping. So week episode 33, the prize was a hat—Black Mountain Honey hat. These hats caused me all sorts of trouble. Never buying hats again. Never selling hats again. So if you get one of these hats, it is limited edition, like never getting them made again ever. But I'm going to give away another hat this week. So probably give away one with the tags on. Let me get one here with the tags on like this. So you want to win that hat this week? all you have to do is go onto our website blackmountainhoney.co.uk, find the F1 Buckfast queens. If you've used our queens before and you can recommend them, share it on social media. Or for people who don't have social media, leave a review somewhere where you can leave a review for our queens if you've had experience of them. So hopefully that means everybody can enter this week if you want to leave me like a nice review or something. Obviously only if you've ever had good experience of us. And then that is the way that you can win a hat. So there is one other thing to talk about before I get on and start answering some questions, and that is I posted on social media the other day saying that I'd hidden an Easter egg somewhere in the last like 20 posts and for people to go and find it. And that caused a bit of pandemonium. Like, I wasn't really expecting the amount of people that were trawling through the post trying to find things that look like Easter eggs. So Because you come to the live streams, I can give you all like a bit of a clue. So it was not a literal— it's not a literal Easter egg. It's like when people are doing code or doing websites, or do you remember on Excel? Does anybody remember? I think it might have been like Excel 95. There was a code that if you put certain buttons and did stuff on the keyboard, you entered this game. And the game— and that's kind of like called an Easter egg. So it's like a coding thing. Basically anything electronic like that, you can hide little things in them. And they're called Easter eggs, and it's probably nowhere near as clever as that. But there is something very obviously hidden in one of the pictures. So I will. I won't give it away, but I'll give people a clue. No one's found it yet. So it is still a free Black Mountain hat is going, and it is on one of the pictures that's got lots of bees on it. So on a picture that I posted in like the last, I don't know, twenty posts, it's a picture of bees, and there's something hidden. the picture of bees that no one has found yet, and that is the Easter egg. So if you find it and tag me in a post or, or comment down on here— I think, I think to be fair, I'll have to say that the first person to comment on the live stream, if they find it, I'll give the hat to the first person that comments on the live stream. So I know you're all immediately just gonna ignore the live stream now and probably just go trawling through social media to try and search and win a hat. But right, sip of tea and we'll get going and we'll answer some questions. So I see Griff has, uh, got his live stream going as well tomorrow night, which is, which is good. We have had a discussion, uh, like obviously a friendly discussion, saying that we'll kind of alternate. So apart from this weekend, we won't both do a live stream on the same weekend because I'm aware that a lot of people who might watch my streams would want to watch Griff's streams as well. So we'll never clash, and we won't clash on the day, and we definitely won't clash on like the same weekend. So we'll arrange it. Bit of organization there for you. So let's, let's go for some questions. So first question from Graham Thomas, he says, hi Lawrence, I followed your advice last week regarding adding a second brood box underneath for early buildup and splitting. Is feeding 1:1 okay? And with the next cold snap coming, should I go back to fondant? So it's funny because like I'll give advice to people and then I see on various forums and groups, like the Facebook groups, that some people say that's shocking advice, terrible advice, definitely don't do that. And I just think, well, okay, yeah, I can see where some people come from. It's like, it's not— I'm not the oracle. Like, I'm just an amateur beekeeper with a camera, but it's something that I've done, something that I have had experience of, and something that I know works really, really well. So for me, the reason that I would use it, I would use it if I want to build a colony up To make splits. And I would also use it if you're getting what we're having now, which is kind of like a quite a lengthy cold snap whilst the bees are building up and whilst you're still feeding them. And the last thing I want is last week of March for my bees to swarm because of lack of space in a single brood box. So you can do it for those 2 reasons: one, to build them up really strong to make splits, and one, to kind of stop the big ones swarming. But if you're starting feeding them syrup and you're feeding them 1:1, I definitely wouldn't go back to fondant. there's no need to go back to fondant, or all of the bees will take down syrup at this point in the year, even though it's only like 8 or 9 degrees, like on most days it is around here anyway. You'll get the odd day where it's 11 or 12 degrees and the bees will just come up and clear the feeder out really, really quickly. The only bit of advice that I would tag on to that is that it's probably, probably a good idea to add something like Hive Alive. It's the only legal thing you can add that's got thymol in it, but just to stop it going moldy. Syrup can go moldy at this time of the year, especially if they're not coming up regularly to take it down. So just add a little bit of Hive Alive in there. But I wouldn't to and fro between syrup and fondant unless you've got fondant that you want to get rid of. Syrup is best, I would say, but pretty much throughout the year, but especially now. Um, so welcome a couple of new members as well, channel members. So Phil Howes and The Morris Homestead, welcome to channel members. Channel membership's going really, really good actually. Got a lot of channel members now, nearly 100 130 channel members, so I really appreciate your support. Um, if you're, if you're a channel member, you will have seen the most awesome video today. I'm definitely the most proudest of this video. Best video I've ever done. I've got a really sore throat because of it, but I won't tell you any, any, anything else apart from that. If you want to see it, you've got to be a member, right? I'm glad you came, Peter. Peter sent me this. How nice is that? Like, I've probably got like 3 or 4 of Peter's watercolors now, and they do— they have like pride of place. I can't believe that people send me stuff, and I can't believe that Peter sends me like amazing watercolor pictures. How good is that? Thanks, Peter, really appreciate that. Peter says, hi Lawrence, I have a brood and a half, the super being in the top. Had a brief look today, the super is full of capped stores. Do you think it is best to put this below or leave it? So good question, and my immediate thoughts would be, is it feed? Have you fed bees with a super on, or is it something— or is it honey? Because I think that the way that I would deal with it is slightly different. If it is just honey, so you've not fed the bees at all and they've just stored loads of honey like that, I'm assuming you've not got a queen excluder in between the 2 boxes, in between your brood and your super. If it was honey, so yeah, if it was honey, I would take the queen excluder, I would put it in between the brood and the super and make sure that the queen's below it, and then I would just use that as a normal honey super and extract it later on in the year. Jasper behind me stirring in the background. I'm gonna guess though that it's not honey, and I'm gonna guess that it's kind of just like you've been feeding your bees through the super and you've given them that additional super to get them through. So then my advice would be slightly different. And it's good. I don't know where he got bored of me talking. It's going to be a little bit of a tricky one, that, because what you could do is you could nadir it like now, or in a few days, or a week or so. So take the brood box off— sorry, take the super off, put it underneath, bruise all of the stores, and put it underneath the brood box. And then you'd have to put another super above it. But all that's going to do is the bees are just going to take it from downstairs in the lower super And put it upstairs into your top new super, which you don't, you don't really want them to do. So if you had like an unlimited amount of kit, it's just, it's just funny because I, I put Jasper over there, made him go and sit over there because I thought it's quite cool having Jasper in the background. And he's just looking at me now, he's just thinking, why have you done that? It's way comfier where he's gone and sat there. He's got himself in a properly comfy, comfy position. Sorry, Jazz. So what I would do if I had an unlimited amount of kit is I would do this. I would take the super, make sure the queen's not in it, and I would put it underneath the brood box. I'd bruise all of the cappings, and then I would put another brood box on top when it's warm enough to add another brood box on top with foundation in it. And then what will happen is the bees will use those stores to draw out your frames of foundation. You could do that as well if you've got frames of like super frames, shallow frames, you could do that as well. And and use the stores that you've got as like a surplus to get some frames drawn out. That's probably what I would do with that one. Hopefully that was helpful. So I've got a I'm going to have a drink of tea in between each one. I do this every week and I get to like there, like don't even get a quarter of the way into my tea. Right. Dave Dwyer says hello. Hi, Dave. Hi, I found 2 of my hives knocked over. The ratchet straps had done a reasonable job of keeping the floor, brood, and roof together, but still a 1 centimeter gap between everything. The follow-up bit: could have been on the floor for up to 6 days. I put them back together 5 days ago. I'm high up in the Cotswolds. It's 10 degrees here tomorrow and 30 mile an hour winds, then rain for a week. Should I check them for eggs tomorrow and buy in a queen if none found, or just leave them alone? So sorry to hear that. That's annoying. Definitely a good, uh, vote for why ratchet straps are good, because if you didn't have ratchet straps on there, they'd be well dead by now. Ratchet straps are brilliant. I don't know how— I don't know why everybody doesn't use ratchet straps. Really strange. But I, I really do like them. Um, I'd, I'd have a check. I would definitely go in there and just have a look and see. It's, it's cold at the moment, but you, you can pull a frame of brood out. I had some frames of brood out today. You just, you know, quickly take it out, put it back down. They're out for like 2 seconds. It really doesn't make a massive amount of difference. I, I only go into colonies when there's a reason to go into colonies, and I think what you've just described there is a perfectly valid reason, which is you're curious to see whether your queen's dead. I think that's, you know, if, if the hive hadn't knocked over, I don't think curiosity is ever a good reason. But I think if your hive's knocked over and you kind of want to know and want to see what the damage is like inside the hive. I think that's a good enough reason just to quickly go in and have a look. I'm going to wager that your queen's all right. I've had loads that fall over like that, and it'd be— it'd be quite rare and unfortunate to, uh, for it to have killed your queen. So good luck with that. Family Homesteads says greetings from Canastota, New York, USA. Thanks very much, David. Greetings to you too. Marcus Walker says good evening from Manchester. Hello. Um, it's cold in New York at the moment then. Yeah, wow. Right, channel member Mick Hoyle says, hey up lad, you okay? I'm guessing that's in Yorkshire accent. You've gone from burning all kinds of weird stuff in your smoker to setting good quality red cedar hives alight. Um, yeah, I have. Yeah, so he's a— so Mick's a channel member. He's giving, giving the game away there. Uh, I did. It's cool, isn't it? Uh, I'm really, really happy with how it's turned out. I'll say no more. Went to the Welsh Beekeeper Show in the Royal Welsh Showground today and got some not bad deals. Excellent. Feel free to tell me what the deals were. I'm always excited to know more. Says, evening, Lawrence, can you let me know how I should identify different types of queen cells? So I can. I do. I've done a blog post on this, so, um, I'll try and link that down in the comments in a little bit because it's a good blog post. Let's see if I can do it now. Actually, probably kill my buffer. Here we go. There is on the Queens page of the website— I'm just going through it now and I'm going to try and talk at the same time. Here we go, I found it. So I'll stick that in the comments for you there. So there you go, there's a link, gives you some pictures. But so swarm cells and supersedure cells look exactly the same. There's nothing different about them. They're the exact same cell. Best way I can describe them is they look like a peanut with a shell hanging down. Always get this wrong— perpendicular to the frame. So if the frame is like that, the cells line up in the same way. Perpendicular— no, parallel. There we go. That's why I always get it wrong. They're parallel to the frame, whereas emergency cells are started later and they come out at a 90-degree angle, so perpendicular to the frame. So that's the differentiation between swarm, supersedure, and emergency cells. And then the way that I always— this is the way I always do it— I say if there is one, one single cell in your colony, it's a supersedure cell. And it might not always work, but like 99% of the time that's going to work. If there's a single cell in there, it is a supersedure cell. If there's any more than one, So I say from 2 upwards, I treat it as a swarm cell, and then it's quite, it's quite easy to do it. Then you'll notice emergency cells. Emergency cells look nowhere near as good, nowhere near as big. They've got a 90-degree bend in them and they're way smaller. And obviously you get them if you take out the queen. But have a look at that blog post. I think it's just looking at pictures will give you all the information you need there. Good evening, Rick. How you doing? People people made it. It's still awake. It's a little bit later tonight. I did it at nine o'clock instead. I was going to watch the England game, and then in the end I was just making up some frames. Bored with the football. It's not real football, is it? International football. You like a proper bit of Arsenal. That's what you want. Aaron Cornish. He won last week's hat. week before's last hat, I think. You've got Adam. How you doing, Adam? Well, I'm going to stop clicking on people just to say hello now, but hello everyone if you've commented. Hello. Right, says, hello, any tips to get my nucs up to strength? I can't believe yours are so strong already. Mine are only on about 2 frames. Wondering if they were too weak going into winter. So yeah, it, it does, it does come down to winter prep, definitely. And I think the genetics of the queens as well. Like, we keep queens specifically— not specifically, but one of the main things that we look for is overwintering strength. And you'll see, like, all of my colonies of bees are, like, bubbling over. But you do— we sell so many nucs, so all of my nucs don't look like that at the moment, and we can only send them out when we think they're ready. So the ones that you're seeing are the ones, like, they're the strongest ones, but we've not got many. We've not got any that are on, like, 2 or 3 frames, but most of them are kind of there or thereabouts. I think in terms of tips to get them up to strength now, you can't really rush bees at all. Like, you can feed them syrup, but without good pollen coming in, they're not really going to do a huge amount. And even giving them syrup and having pollen coming in, if you don't get good nighttime temperatures, they're not going to want to rear loads of brood. Being in polynucs does make a massive difference to all of that though, because if you can get them into a poly nuc and keep the— it keeps the temperature so nice and warm and consistent for them that it means that they can rear lots of brood if they've got sufficient nectar and pollen coming in. So I wouldn't do anything to force them to try and build them up as much as you possibly can. But like what we do with our nucs is they're built up so strong so early in the season, and then I like cram them in. And I— it's a, it's a risky game so late on in the season because you do do lose the odd one or two through to swarming. But we're not— no, we're not scrambling around in September and October trying to kind of take a 3-frame split out of something and let it build up. Like, they're— come June, maybe back end of June, early July, they're on 5 frames. And then they're just left to their own devices and they build up, and they're very, very strong going into winter. So I just— strong nucs in the spring is as a result of, like, what you do in the middle of the season. or like the back end of the spring in the previous year. It takes quite a lot of planning to get them that strong. While I'm on, putting another brood box under the original to double brood is not the best option here in urban Surrey. It works better the other way around. Interesting, interesting to know why it works better the other way around. I would say it's definitely safer doing it that way, and I guess the argument that people make here is that bees do like to travel upwards. So it, in the best situation, putting the brood box on top of the original brood box will naturally kind of work the way that the bees want it to work. But if it's 6 degrees at nighttime and you're putting this big massive cold void above the bees and then distancing them from the feeder, in my views and in my experience, it's not the best way. And so it's quite risky and you can really set them back doing it that way. So although putting it underneath is slightly counterintuitive and not exactly what the bees would expect because you keep them so warm. They'll just continue to rear brood, and then when they're like, we're out of space, we've run out of space here, they'll just move downwards. And you'll find come 3 weeks' time, the whole bottom box is completely drawn out, full of bees, full of brood. And then all you need to do— you don't even need to switch it at that point because the bees have naturally switched it over for you anyway. Probably a good idea for me to do. I'll do a video on it, and I'll show you what it's like because it might be different in Surrey to what it is up here. But for up here, like it gets so cold at night, and we're not urban, you know, very, very rural, very cold. So it's yeah, we like to put them underneath. Steve got his cap. It's good to hear. Right, Matt Burrows. Hi, if I want to split a hive in the same location, what would be the best way of doing? Right, sip of tea first. So I always say to people— I know this is a massive cop-out to your question here— I always say to people, if you're going to split your bees, split them in an apiary 3 miles away because it makes the process so much easier and it effectively eliminates everything that can go wrong. However, appreciate your question is asking specifically what to do in the same apiary, and I know a lot of people do just have one apiary. So you can, you can make splits in the same apiaries, there's no problem doing that, but the main risks that you'll have are when you make the split, the bees just don't pay attention to where you've put them to, so they just all go back to the original hive. And then what can happen to that is that all of the brood that you've put in there, your new queen that you've put in there, like the brood just gets not tended to and the brood dies, and then the queen fails because there's no queens to feed the bee. So you basically lose all of your expensive brood and you lose potentially your expensive queen. It's not really annoying. Um, I've just realized that I've just put my daughter in my bedroom watching Mary Poppins on the live stream, and I think she is hammering the bandwidth. That's annoying. I can't really do anything about it now. Hopefully the bandwidth is okay. It's showing up a little bit low for me here. So you don't want to lose your brood, you don't want to lose your bees, so what people do is they'll get sticks, they'll get grass, and they'll kind of stuff it into the entrance to try and fool the bees into reorientating to the new spot, and that does work with varying degrees of success. So take the split, make the split as you normally would. I could— if you're gonna— if you want to know how to make a split, I would follow the video on how to split a colony without finding the queen. I find that's probably the easiest one for people to do, so which is basically take a split out, just bees, brood, and food. Take that, put it into a nuc, add your queen into it, and then take it off, put it somewhere else in your apiary. Put your sticks, put your grass in front of the hive, in front of the entrance. It's got basically like half block it so they really have to struggle to get out, and then that should avoid the majority of the bees just going back to the original hive. But you will get A lot of drift back still to that original hive. So overstock the colony of bees. Then the number one thing that people will get wrong here— I've got it wrong, this is how I know people get it wrong because I did— is they make the split and then they put feed in the split. And all that does is like the bees just go wild for it because they feed, they go back to the original hive, they tell all their mates, they say that nuc there's full of feed and they just go and rob it all out and you come back, there's nothing left. There's no feed, there's no brood, there's no bees, dead brood, there's nothing. And that's how you fail at it miserably. So whatever you do, don't feed. So make sure that you give them sufficient stores. And if you do all of those things, it can work, but it's not scalable at all. So if you wanted to make like 6 splits in an apiary and do that, you'll come back to those 6 splits and you'll have one that's got loads of bees in it more bees than you put in. You'll have one that's got no bees in. They've just— they seem to— when you add more nucs in and do it on scale like that, it just doesn't work at all. So my advice is get another apiary and see if you can find yourself another apiary. It does make it loads and loads easier, right? Marcus Walker says, Lawrence, I've watched many of your videos. Possibly a daft question, you have mentioned a kangaroo queen. Google has failed me. What do you mean when you call it Queen of Kangaroo. So Kangaroo Queen is a line of— I always forget what they're called. They're not Lagusta because they're, they are a la something. Basically Kangaroo Island. It's an island in Australia, but it is an Italian form of queen. I want to say— no, Ligurian, I want to say. I'm going to Google it now. Sorry, it's really, really boring for people, me just Googling stuff. Yeah, that's not that's not right. Kangaroo Island—that's where they come from. Kangaroo Island. So I got them from a guy whose name I'm not going to say because I'm having real issues with the queens that he's given me, and yeah, I'll say no more. But I would not recommend those queens, let's put it that way. Another person saying hello. Hello. Oh wow, look at this, Frollies Bees has left a £9.99 tip. Thank you very much, that's very kind. I love it when people leave tips, that's brilliant. I'll definitely answer your question then, right? So I put the second brood box on my hive the other day. Hopefully I'll be able to split them 8 ways at the end of April. Fingers crossed for a good season this year. So yeah, so you've done, you've done the same thing. Second brood box has gone on there and you've split them 8 ways end of April. So I think that's, that's realistic if you double up 2 broods and you've got like 11 frames in each and you're gonna fill both of those boxes, so you'll have 22 frames. You will, you can make, you could easily get 8. So we like 3, 7, like 6, 6 and 3 and 2 and 2 and 2. That's probably about right. And then just make sure when you make that split And when you take the 8 splits away, if you can take them to a different apiary site, that makes it loads easier. And if— this is the huge benefit here— is if you take them to a new apiary site, when you do that, you can feed immediately. And that's what helps little nucs like that. Feeding immediately really does get them going. And keep the feed going, just keep pumping feed into them little and often. It makes a massive difference. But thank you for the tip, I really appreciate that. Very kind. Right, let's answer some more questions. So Demby Honey says, hi Lawrence, I'm away at the end of next week. Can I put a super on top of the crown board just in case they run out of room? That's an interesting one. I don't think it would make a huge amount of difference putting on top of the crown board. I guess you, I guess you mean like leave the holes in the crown board open and put like an empty super or a super with frames in above it. I guess you could do that. Yeah, I'm not sure whether they'd respect the space in terms of like stopping them from swarming, but it's— it— we, we do have to remember that it is still like just gone past the middle of March. I'd be very, very surprised if any colonies are swarming with the weather we've got at the moment, even if they are hugely restricted for space. I, I'm sick. I've got colonies like that. I've got like a couple of nucs that are on 6 frames that are heaving, and I mean heaving. There's not a single cell that is available. It's either brood or stores. And, and like, they're building brace comb everywhere, and they're building brace comb like at the bottom. The feeder's full of comb. And I'm just thinking, what do I do here? Do I like— because in the nucs you can't switch the boxes around the same way, so you can't do like my technique of lifting the brood box up and sliding another one underneath. I'd have to go in there and like properly manipulate the frames, which I don't really want to do at this time of the year. And I don't want to put another box on top because they'll just lose all of that heat upwards. So I'm like sitting on my hands a bit, but as soon as it like gets sunny and I'll be looking out the window and thinking, all right, it's 13 degrees, right, go getting the boxes out there. But I think, I think that's— it's quite a nice idea that you leave the crown board on but you put a couple of holes off the crown board and then you're giving them like a buffer space that they can get through if they need it. I'm not sure. I'm not sure it would work, and I'm not sure it would do a huge amount of difference. But what I do think is that it wouldn't make— it wouldn't negatively impact them that much. So I don't, I don't think it will hurt them, but I'd be interested to see on that. So it's a good idea. I like that. Very important. I'm terrible at asking people to hit the like button. If you do enjoy the streams, you can pay me with a like button. There we go. Really appreciate that. Hi, how many supers do you need per hive? So depends how many times you're looking to extract your honey per year, and it depends what kind of bees you've got. So with, with my bees, I like to say 4 supers is what I'll say to people is like the absolute minimum, and that is extracting honey twice a year. So if you do a spring extraction and a summer extraction 4 supers should see you through. That means like the best colonies you're going to get 8 supers from of honey each year. But I don't think, I don't think it's realistic to have 8 supers per colony. So I think if you're just going to have one extraction per year, I would say like 6 is probably a realistic number of supers to have per colony. It's quite a lot. You need a lot of storage space, especially if you start getting into big numbers of colonies. Bee farmers don't have 6 supers per colony. I think they'll go for like 3 or 4, but they will do like regular extractions of those. Because if you think you've got thousands of colonies or hundreds of colonies, it's not realistic to have 8 times that amount of supers. So I'd say they probably go for like maybe between 3 and 5 is the bee farmer's average, but I would recommend for people who've just got a few hives, 6 supers. That's what I'd go for. Heaven Chip says, hi Lawrence from Southeast England. I ordered my first nuke in October. When can I expect to receive it? So it shows the demand that we've had from for people ordering ordering early. So I'm looking at my calendar here. I've got my calendar, got my dates on it and everything. So if you've not received confirmation of when it is going to arrive, it will arrive on if it's national. be the 24th of April or the 1st of May. And if it's Langstroth, it will be either the 1st of May or the 8th of May. But I'm not, I'm not confirming those dates to people yet because I just like— the cold weather's playing craziness with us in terms of scheduling. Um, uh, so there we go. I'm just reading the next one down there. I've had queens from you and left a review already. Sorry. Okay. I need to think of a more inclusive way to give away these hats. Orca Bee Ranch, how's it going? He says, I need some F1 Buckfast here in the States. How do they do in the heat? So they do very, very well in the heat. They're really good. They kind of got like a lot of Italian genetics in there, so they are very used to good warm weather. Um, but it's weird that they do, they do perfectly well In cold, damp weather like the UK as well, so they're quite robust. They're good. But obviously we can't we can't ship to the US. Loads of loads of people asking me to ship to the US, but apparently you get told off if you do that. So definitely not doing that. Demby Honey says he stayed awake for this five pints of Guinness in. So I hope I hope it's worth your while. I dread to think how bad I sound after five pints of Guinness. Ben Davis says, hi Lawrence, if the weather's over 13 degrees now, will it be all right to inspect my bees? So I did a video on this the other day, which is what you should look at— what should you look out for in your first inspection? And I started at the very beginning, which was, why are you inspecting your bees? I never inspect a colony of bees unless I've got like a real proper good reason to actually go in and inspect them. And in the season, the reason is the same, which is I think they're going to swarm. swarm. So I'm doing my weekly inspections to make sure that they don't swarm. Early on in the year though, much like, I don't really have that reason. So inspections that I'm doing at the moment are few and far between. I'm inspecting for a very specific reason. So at the moment, the main one is I'm hefting, they're dead light, and I'm like, right, I'm gonna have a look inside, see if there's any piles of dead bees in there, and I'll pull a couple out and see. But for everybody else, and for main, like, big production colonies, I still wouldn't be inspecting at the moment because I just don't think you've got any real reason to be going in there apart from— this is a big one— like curiosity. I'm really keen to see what the colonies are looking like inside, but I won't go and inspect just because of curiosity. So yes, the answer is yes, over 13 degrees is fine. 10 degrees is fine to go and do like a quick inspection. You don't want to be pulling frames out and holding it up and getting chilled brood or anything, but if you've got a genuine reason to get in there and you can get in there quick, it's fine to do. an inspection at 13 degrees. Shout out to Lee, channel member, stuck in the kitchen making candles and balms but couldn't miss the live. Is there anything better than coming into your house like after you've been doing something with beeswax? It's just like the best smell, isn't it? Love it. Lawrence, what do you do with the second brood boxes once you have finished with the Demeray splits? Do you use these for overwintered nucs? So the, the idea with the Demeray second brood boxes is that they do they turn into like supers, and that's what we use most of ours for because we'll recycle them each year. So I just— that's what I'm doing at the moment. Got boxes and boxes of them up there, just brand new, brand new boxes. No, sorry, like used boxes, brand new frames, and then they're just my demerare boxes. And then instead of buying new supers, I just buy new brood boxes and then demerare them in the first year. So then when they get taken up to the top, they just become a super because they've never been treated. And it's great, you get bumper, bumper honey crops doing that. If you have treated them, then yeah, you can just break them up really, really quickly. But there's kind of— there's not a huge amount of point in doing that though. I wouldn't just take the bees out because for me, like, the Demerara split is to stop the bees swarming and to get bumper colonies to get lots of honey. It's like both of those things. So I don't like to take too much away from them, although there is like useful resources up there. I like to let all the brood emerge, and then all you've got then is a box of honey, and you can pinch some frames of honey if you want to make up some splits. But it's— yeah, I don't generally use them for splits in that way. Channel members, loads of channel members, it's great. Like I said, 140 I think now. So if you're wondering what that nifty little badges next to Mark. He is a channel member. I do appreciate the support, so thanks again. Hope you're well, Lawrence. Thinking of raising some nucs for sale next spring. Any tips? I know a good queen supplier. Very good. For people who can't see the winky face, I think he means me. But yes, very kind. Uh, we'll be using the Abelo 6-frame poly nuc. So tips, yeah, I've got, I've got some tips for making up nucs. So, so number one is use good queens. And, you know, we, we like to think our queens are pretty good. But the number one thing that I find is people want good quality, calm bees. So local mongrels for me just don't cut it. For other people, they may be okay, the color of them might be acceptable, but I just— yeah, I won't go down that rabbit hole at half 9 on Saturday evening. So good quality genetics, very, very important. I would be using first generation Buckfast queens, and then you know what you're selling to these people. You can actually say it is what it is. So, you know, with AMM queens, you can't sell someone an AMM colony of bees because how do you know unless you're going and getting them tested? And you could say this is a 94% AMM queen or 60% AMM queen. I suspect most of them are. But with F1 Buckfast, you can genuinely say this is an F1 Buckfast queen. So this is the first generation after a pure Buckfast Queen, and here's the certificate for the pure Buckfast Queen breeder. If anyone wants that, we can give, give you the breeder queen certificates as well, for, for the breeder queens, not for the, the F1 generation. The next one bit of advice I would say is you've got to make them up earlier than you think. So I, I got caught in this trap really early on, which was you'd get to like July, back in July, early August, and you think, right, make some splits. and you start splitting out like 2 or 3-frame nucs and they just get killed, they just get robbed, the wasps absolutely batter them, and then they don't have enough time to build up sufficient amount of bees to winter properly. So then you might make up 10 and you might lose 8, and you just think, what a waste of time and resource and money. So we make up the splits really, really early, and I think you need to aim to get your splits to sell in the spring. you need to have your splits like finished by the end of July, like completely finished. And I say finished as in like they've reached full strength. Um, the other tip that I'd give you is get some— and, and the, the Abello 6-frame polynuc is perfect for this— get the double ones. So they, they overwinter so much better on a double brood configuration like that. So 6 over 6, they love it. I've got some this year that are overwintering— not Abello— they're overwintering on like a 4 extension box configuration, and they're in already, all 4 boxes, all the way up in like a big long line. And they're not filling all of the boxes, they're just in the central like 3 frames all the way up. They love that really nice like tall cylindrical, like rectangular— I kind of trying to say, just chucking out shape names now, but I've still not come across what I mean. You know what I mean? Like a tall like a tall column shape is what they really do like. And then get your treatments in early. So that's the final tip, which is don't leave it till September or October to do kind of Apitraz or Apivar. Like, you're not taking any honey from these bees, so do it really, really early. You can do it with these back end of July. That'd be the good time to do it and leave it in for the good full 8 weeks, and then you'll have some very good nucs come next spring. Jeff Goosen says, why do no UK beekeeper suppliers sell wax capping spinners like they have in the USA? So they do. I bought a wax capping spinner in the UK and it was, it was good for spinning cappings. I didn't buy it for spinning cappings, I bought it for, um, like filtering honey, filtering heather honey. And the way that I was doing it didn't work and I sold it to someone. It was good, really good kit. It was, it was like properly robust and stainless steel. And he— and the guy bought it, and I said to him, what are you buying it for? And he said, oh, to spin heather cappings— to spin heather honey, as in like to filter it. And I was like, oh, that's what I was doing. I'm just not sure it's the best for doing that. Like, I was honest, and he seemed to think he knew better, and he did. He did. He said, yes, brilliant. And the way that he's doing it is just like a completely different way to the way that I was doing it, so I was a bit gutted. But we don't have a huge amount of heather, so it was fine. But— and it was taking up too much space anyway. But it just— it just goes to show there's more than one way to skin a cat, and the way that I was doing it was not good. But they— yeah, they're not hugely popular over here, I guess, and I'm not sure why because they are pretty good. Bob says, what is the major bottleneck in extracting honey? So for me, space, because what I would like to do is go and get 100 supers and bring them all into the room and like extract them straight away, but I don't have the space to do that. The next one for me, if— I don't know, like I've got, I've got pretty good setup for kind of extracting honey. We're quite quick. I would say like the uncapping is generally the biggest bottleneck. But I'd say for me, the biggest bottleneck, because we've got an uncapping machine and it's pretty rapid, is having one extractor. So I see a lot of bee farmers do this. So I've got a 24, and I've got 30-frame now. 30, I've got one 30-frame extractor. And you could argue that 2 20-frame extractors would be way quicker and probably take up like a similar footprint, or not that much of a different footprint. And then having 2 people is going to make it not only even makes it like quicker or more efficient, it just makes it like way less boring. I hate honey extraction. It's, it's really, really dull. The only thing that gets me through it is having like watching YouTube or like watching— I watch cricket. So if I extract, I'll watch like the England Test match. And I know some people will be thinking, oh my God, could that be any more boring? But I love it. I'm well into my cricket. So watching, I don't know, like the good, good, uh, Ashes Test match or something while the— while we're doing honey extraction. For me, it's brilliant. Perfect excuse just to watch cricket all day, and that is how I get through the boredom of honey extraction. But I would say, yeah, so the biggest bottleneck generally is for people uncapping. Uncapping with a knife is pretty slow, but for us, it's, it's having a single honey extractor. Hello, how you doing? I just, I'll just go back to JK. I'll be— I've been liking your TikTok, by the way. I was having a look at your TikTok. Brilliant, brilliant videos on there. Love the editing as well. It's cool. Matt Burrows says, "Hi, great show as normal. Could you tell me how I could use a queen cell if I wanted to use it to split the hive?" So you you can do like a walkaway split without a queen cell even being there. So if you if you've got a colony of bees, all you need to do is just take the brood box and split it into two. So say you've got like twelve frames in a brood box. If you just redistribute those frames, so you've got six. in one hive and then make up another hive and put 6 in there. So you just share all of the resources between the hives, and you don't even need to find the queen. Just, just split the resources evenly between the 2 hives. One hive will end up with the queen and the other hive won't have the queen, and then they will produce emergency queen cells and they will produce themselves a queen. Now, I'm not a massive fan of doing that. I don't think the queens that are produced in that way are the best sort of queens that you can produce. But it does work, especially in like decent climate. Walkaway splits are relatively reliable. But if you come across a colony that is swarming, so you find loads of open swarm cells— let's say you come into a colony and there's, there's 20 open swarm cells, none of them have been capped over, and you've still got the original queen— then it is quite easy to do like an artificial swarm. So all you would do— what I like to do in that situation is find the queen first, make sure I found the queen. put her, like, pin her in cage, right? Queen's safe, so she's not going to fly off anywhere. And then I'll go and find the cell that I like, and I always go for an open cell. And it's weird because you think surely you'd go for the one that's like the most capped, because then you know it's capped. But generally, if they— if it's capped, you're not going to find the queen at the same time. So you go for an open cell, because then I can get a good visual on the larva that's inside. And then I put that frame off to one side. And then every other frame in that colony I shake off. Yeah, so don't shake the frame with the swarm cell that you're going to use. Shake off all of the frames so there's not a single bee on it, and then I take down all of the cells. So that's my method. And then I come back to the frame that I want that's got the swarm cell on, and then I'll brush them off with my hand, and I'll take down all of the other cells on that frame just to leave one single cell. Don't buy into leaving multiple cells. and don't buy into leaving 2 cells and one as an emergency. If you've got one good open cell, you can see the larva inside, the larva's not dropped, and you don't shake the frame, like, that, that cell will be absolutely fine, definitely will emerge. And then it's as simple as just take that frame and just go and add it to a colony that you want to requeen or a colony that you want to make a split with. So the caveat, of course, being if you're going to put it into a colony, there can't be another queen in there at all. So you just take, take some bees, take some brood, take that frame with that cell, put it into a nuc, preferably go and take it to another apiary. If not, take it to somewhere else in that apiary, put some grass in the entrance, put some twigs there, let them reorientate. Do not feed them, and then you should make a little nuc with that queen cell. Uh, Kushtrim says, hi Lawrence, when Do you come in Malta, or when can I buy queens in Malta? I'm confused. So what, like, so we've been posting like videos from Melita Bees, so he's WhatsApping me the videos with our queens because I've said, come on, show me some videos, I want to see what's going on. Um, so, so our queens, our F1 Butterfly queens, come from Melita Bees in Malta. Very good queens, and we are like their UK supplier, but we don't, you know, we I don't know if he sells them directly in Malta. I'm not sure. Right, I'm getting down to some of the guesses now for the Easter egg. So John says, "Is the Easter egg the shape of the swarm in the They Are Coming video from Malta?" So no, it is not a good guess. Dunny's Bee says, "Got my new Nucci hive now set up. When would you move the nuc in in West Yorkshire? So weather still up and down. So I would I would delay it for a good few weeks. It is cold at the moment." and then when you, when you get it, just put the nuc right in the middle, keep it nice and warm in the middle. But I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be switching anything over just yet. I too went to add a brood box to do walkaway splits, but I've been advised by another Facebook group it's too early, that the bees could chill with the extra space. So this is the exact reason for why you put the box underneath. Like, if you, if you kind of imagine like where the warmth is going in that situation. Like, you've just got a box and all you're doing is just adding space below the box. So if you're like— if you're upstairs in the room of the house, so you've got like a— so you've got like a 2-story house and you're upstairs. Like, I'm upstairs, this is our upstairs room. It's always warmer in the upstairs room, and then the room downstairs is colder. So if I added another floor above me now, then I wouldn't be in the warmest room in the house anymore. The room above would be the warmest room. But if I added a floor below me and we had a 3-story house, but I'm still in the top, which is the warmest, it makes no difference adding the, adding the space underneath. So like, they're confusing the advice, which is don't give too much space, but it's very important where that space is. The space is below you has no difference to the, the impact of kind of, or the effect of the heating. The space is above you, you lose all of the heat upwards. So adding boxes, adding brood boxes underneath, you can do it any time of the year? Absolutely any time of the year, and you actually get an additional byproduct of doing it, like an advantage of doing it as well, is that you move the colony of bees where the brood is further away from any potential wind chill. So if you've got like an open mesh floor or you've got the entrance open and the wind's coming in, you'll find at the bottom of the frames the bees won't rear brood because you get the wind coming in. But if you lift all of that up by adding another brood box in, it means that the bees will use more of the space in the top brood box because it's further away from the wind. So I have done it for years and it works really, really well. I wouldn't recommend it to people if it didn't work. Hi Lawrence, hello, the bees arrived safe on Wednesday. Thank you, you've got the best customer service and fast delivery of the bees. Could not be more happy. Excellent. It's like it feels like I kind of basically asked you to write that, but no, that's genuine. I'm glad. I know it's cold up in Scotland at the moment, that they will be very warm in in that nuke. So that's good to hear. I appreciate the very nice positive feedback. Thank you, Stacy Richards, channel member, says, "Hey Lawrence, really enjoying the lives." Thank you. Question: Want to order a couple of queens from you? I don't know when I'll be doing a split, so can I wait until I'm ready, or do I have have to pre-order? Now that is a really good question, and you can definitely wait until you're ready. And I recommend this to everyone. Like, we sell our queens and we, we buy stock ahead of time, and we say to people, you do need to pre-order your queens if you want them for a specific day. But that's more for people who want like 10 queens or 15 queens. Like, if you want like a big batch of queens, you're better off pre-ordering. But if you want like 1 queen or 2 queens I'm not going to say every time, but like 9 times out of 10, we will have it available to order it on the day, and then we'll ship it out for you for next day delivery. Our cutoff is 4 PM, so if you order, if you order a queen when they're in stock, which they will be in 2 weeks' time, if you order a queen like 10 to 4, you get it the next day. They come really, really quickly, so it's good. We've got a good late cutoff, but it's really important for people to do that. You don't need to order the queen book the queens in before you kill the queen. What I would say is find your old queen, kill her, and then wait the 8 days before you're ready to introduce it. And then just kind of like 6 days in, you can order your queen, or make your splits and then, you know, wait 8 days and then knock the queen cells down. And then once all the queen cells are down, then you can order your queen. The queen doesn't have to go in on day 8, it just can't go in any earlier than day 8. So you can go in on day 10, day 11. But so it is a really good question. A lot of people, I think, get caught out on that and think they have to like pre-order and book it like 2 weeks in advance. No, you can order it just the day before, and generally the stock is there for for like ones and twos. I I'm literally like up to here. I just I drink my tea very. It's pretty cold now already. It's a nice tea. It's it's um. fennel, cardamom, and something else. Chamomile. It's nice though. I never thought I'd be drinking— going hardcore with the fennel tea on a Saturday night. Oh, right. Says, I'm hoping to start splits beginning of April. Is this too early? So it's very, very difficult to say if that's too early or not. I would say on an average year, it's probably about right, maybe a week or so early in terms of averages. But it's completely weather dependent. Like, if it's, if it's like the weather is at the moment for the first week of April, I definitely wouldn't be making splits. But it's the same thing that happened last year. This is exactly the same weather pattern that we had last year, which was surely it's going to get sunny soon. Like, it's just been rainy and cold and 8 degrees, and oh right, it's 17 degrees, and then it just got nice. Like instantly like that, and I think the same will happen this year. I think someone middle of April will flick a switch and it'll be all right for a couple of weeks. But it's like ballpark middle of April, I would say, is a safe bet. You could probably go seventh or eighth of April if the weather plays ball. Jan Swanwick, hello channel member, says hi. Second year beekeeper and last year was on 14 by 12. I'm pretty convinced that Langstroth is the way. Way to go. Moving from national deep looks easy. Any ideas for moving from 14x12 to Langstroth? So my question would be, subsequent question, put it back at you. What are you going to do with your 14x12 frames afterwards? Are you just going to chuck them out? Because if you're just going to chuck them out, you're probably best off just shook swarming them onto the Langstroth when they're strong enough. That, that's like, that's gonna be the easiest way of doing it, is building them up nice and strong on the 14x12 by 12 and just shaking them all into the Langstroth box and feeding them. It's funny because I do read what people post on like beekeeping forums and stuff like that, and shook swarm's got a really bad name, and people are like, oh, shook swarm every year, it's brilliant for the bees, and some people just hate the fact that people shook swarm. And for anyone who doesn't know what a shook swarm is, like, you basically just take away all of the brood all of the frames, shake the bees on their own onto new frames and foundation, and then feed them, and they just basically start again. So it's like an artificial swarm called a shook swarm. And I was kind of in that camp, which is like such a waste, and it is, it does feel like a massive waste of brood and resource and stuff like that, but you're giving your bees like a completely fresh start, and in the wild that is what bees do. Bees do not live in the same cavity of a tree for 30 years. Like, they don't. It might look like they do because they're constantly reoccupying that space, but generally what they do is they will just swarm and they just chuck loads of swarms out and they go and find somewhere new and they build new comb. And they, they use it as like a method to cope with varroa, but there's also— they use it as a mechanism to avoid and combat disease as well. So you might be sitting on like a case of EFB that's not showing, and a shook swarm could clear it up for you. So like, for me, whenever there's an option to like recommend something and that the option is a shook swarm, I say go with the shook swarm. I think it's a good idea. If you don't— if you can't just give up all of that brood but you are just going to get rid of the 14 by 12 frames, I would look at cutting out some of what you need and like bungeeing it in with rubber bands into the Langstroth brood, and then that way you're not getting rid of all of the good brood and just burning it. You're actually kind of making, making good use of it. And, and I can see, I can, I can see why people would want to do that, and I'd probably have done that earlier on. Um, and then the other way, and probably like the, the easiest, neatest way, is you just— you can do this from any frame size to any other frame size— is you just get a bit of ply and you just cut a piece of ply and into a, into a square or a rectangle that is big enough to both cover the top of the 14 by 12 box and the bottom of the Langstroth box, and there's a hole in the middle, and then you just, you put it on top. So you've got, put your floor down, you've got your 14 by 12 box full of bees, you put this kind of multi-purpose board on top so it covers all of the 14 by 12 box, but it's got a hole in the middle, and then you just put the Langstroth box on top of that, and then the roof or whatever, and then you just wait for the bees to go up, and then once they've drawn it all out, you just get the queen, put the queen upstairs in the Langstroth, and put a queen excluder in between, and then they'll all just go upstairs. That's— that is the neatest way of doing it. But 3 good options there, hopefully, for you. Bob Bob says, just after an experienced opinion— so I'd have to look around, someone with experience— so I can give you an answer if you like. I will have 10 colonies this year, plan on having 30 colonies in 2 seasons. Would it be worthwhile getting a 20-frame extractor now? So definitely yes, I would say so. 20-frame extractor, like, it's, it's a good investment. It is a good investment, a 20-frame extractor, and it's something that you'll easily be able to sell if you don't kind of carry on with beekeeping. But the bigger the extractor gets, like the kind of better it extracts the honey. Does make a massive difference. Like, a 20-frame electric extractor is, is way, way better than a 12-frame. So I would— I'd go for it, definitely. I do like honey extraction machinery. Just wondering if you were interested in Randy Oliver oxalic pads, bring left in the hive to keep mites always low. So I love the idea of it, and I do Anecdotally hear that it works, but it's not legal, so you can't do it unfortunately. Which is just is annoying because I know it definitely works because I've seen Randy's videos. But it's yeah, can't do it. Lorenzo says, "How do you balance bees with other aspects of your life, such as work and family? You said you had a baby coming real soon. My wife is due in August with our second baby." Congratulations. Uh, how do I balance work? So I'll tell you, I'll tell you this, and, uh, I've not, I've not got the screenshot here. I could— oh, I might have the screenshot actually. Let's find— see if I can find my screenshots on here. I'm always wary of doing stuff while talking to people, and I'm, I'm, I'm a man unfortunately, and it's quite relevant to what I'm about to tell you now about being a man. Um, And you'll see why in a sec. Uh, let me see if I can find it. Uh, oh, I can't find it. I can read it out. I don't know how to— I don't know how to share it here. So the video that I did the other day about, um, the bee suit— so the bee suit that I had loads of mold on it and I cleaned it in bleach— and somebody commented on that video and they commented saying, don't you have a woman do that for you? And I got really annoyed. Yeah, you can go find the comment and I'll read the comment out. So I, I wrote back straight away, I really don't appreciate this comment. Don't put women down like that. We are all equal. Your sexist comments are not welcome here. And this is the relevant bit here, my wife works 10 times harder than I do and I couldn't even begin to attempt to replicate what she does. So I, I hate sexism. It's, uh, like, I just— I've got no time for anything like that. But that, that is the reason I can do so much. I've got a very good wife who just doesn't stop. She's brilliant. She's really, really good. And she allows me just to get on with all— you know, it is hard work, but like fun stuff like videos and burning beehives and doing live streams and making up frames and doing all of that other stuff. So like It's my hobby, and I do it all around a full-time job. But she she backs it up, and she does all of the the difficult stuff that I literally couldn't do. So I get annoyed when people disrespect. I took it as him disrespecting my wife. I was like, "Why on earth would I ask my wife or get angry that my wife hadn't cleaned my suit for me? Like she does absolutely everything for me. Clean my own suit." But yeah, so it's how do I balance the other aspects? I don't, I don't have much of a work-life balance. That's also the other thing. I don't really go and do anything else apart from get up, go to work, do bees, do live streams, sell queens, sell nucs. Like, I have— luckily for me, my hobby is my second job, so I spend all my time doing it. I get up quite early. My wife wouldn't agree. I go to bed quite late and I don't stop in the middle. So there we go. Frolly's Bee says, I have done the grass thing 3 times and it has worked for me each time. So that's good, it's good, it definitely works. But I don't think every single bee goes back there, so I do, I do still think that you need to overstock. Uh, be interesting, I'd love to know, I'd love to know the facts on that. If you put like 100 bees in a nuc, 10,000 bees in a nuc and then you did the grass in the entrance to reorientate them, how many of those 10,000 stay there and how many go back? Because you'll definitely get like a few going back and then a few more bees emerging out of the capped brood to like balance it out. I've done all my splits in the same apiary and it worked okay, but only did 2 or 3 at the same time max. Would love another apiary. Need to get another apiary, Aaron. Definitely need one. I could see you rocking like 3 apiaries this year. It's good fun. Uh, John says, when splitting in the same location, I put the nuc in the original spot so it gets the flying bees and move the hive so the bees that take over the flying jobs reorientate. Yeah, I think that that's a very safe way of doing it. Uh, and if you— the, the way that I balance it as well is that if you do it, if you do it that way around and you put the nuc in the flying location I don't put too much brood in there. I'll just put the— I'll put the queen in there with like hardly any brood, just let them have all the flying bees, and then move all of the brood somewhere else. So then the flying bees are attracted back to where they're used to going, and then all of the other bees are attracted to stay in the new spot because of all of the brood that's in there. It's a good way of doing it. There's tons of different variations, but that, that is a good way. I'll just post this again because, David, I did say it before. So, Hi Lawrence, I purchased your nucs and it arrived on Wednesday faster delivery and good customer service. Was nice to speak to you on the phone and email. Colony I received is very strong. Excellent, good to hear. Here we go. Everything you just said then about splits in the same place totally conflicting to what Griff says on one of his YouTube videos as he does a split and just moves it a few feet away. Yeah, you'll get, you'll get beekeepers saying different things. You watch Griff's videos as well, he, uh, he introduces, he introduces queens, he kills the queen and then goes back the next day and just puts the cage and takes the tab off, and apparently that works for Griff. I can only, I can only, I can only go on like what, what works for me. And with the queen introduction one, like, I'll give you like the belt and braces method. Um, and it's not, it's not to say the other methods don't work. Like, I've done splits and put them a few feet away, but I know doing it in another apiary, I can like guarantee it works. Not just once, I can guarantee it works like every time, whereas doing it in the same apiary sometimes works, sometimes doesn't work. And that, that's like my experience that I've had. Um, and I'm sure, I'm sure if you ask Griff, he'll say that he's, he's done some and they've not been that successful by doing it in the same apiary like that. Harry's late. No problem, Harry, we'll forgive you this time. They are expanding so fast. As soon as the weather warms up, they will swarm. Tons of pollen on the hives, new comb and nectar coming in, 8 frames of brood already. Excellent, that's good to hear. Uh, Shabby says— sorry if I've mispronounced your name— what maximum split could I do with one strong hive with 2 deep boxes? So if you build them up so they're completely full and you've got 22-ish frames, like, as a combination of those 2 boxes, I would say the maximum you should do is 7, given 3 frames in each. Anything more than that's a bit greedy, I would say. Yeah, seven would be the maximum that I would go for. Stuart Henderson says, "Hi Lawrence, my son and I are new beekeepers going into our second season. We don't have any supers with drawn foundation. Can we add supers and feed a little to get some supers drawn out?" So you can do that, but I wouldn't. I wouldn't do it. Wouldn't risk contaminating any of the honey that you've got. The bees will draw it out like a strong. Net to flow. Just let them do it. And I think as well, if you like, second season, last thing you want is your bees to swarm. Adding in foundations, like, a good thing. It slows the bees right down and it gives them something to do, and it means that they're way less likely to swarm. So I would just embrace the fact that it kind of slows them down a little bit and just let them draw it out on a good flow and just time it. Like, if you just have them all stacked up ready to go, and when you get a serious flow, they'll do they'll do a box in a week easy. And if you get a good flow running over like 3 or 4 weeks, you'll get all of your supers drawn really, really quick. Hi Lawrence, when do you take your mouse guards off? So I do not use mouse guards because I use underfloor entrances, and it's very, very rare that we just basically don't get mice going into the underfloor entrances. But oh, I looked at a colony today, so my fake Flow Hive I didn't have the entrance light reducer in it. Um, it— I basically put together like a makeshift mouse guard, and I went there today and it had just been moved. Like, I was thinking, oh, what's going on there? Who's moved that? Turns out a mouse has moved it because I went in there and like 2/3 of the frames had just been wrecked, chomped through. So when it's a bit better weather, I'll do a video on it. I would say there's no need to— you don't need to take the mouse guards off until you get like copious amounts of pollen coming in, because if you're not getting pollen coming in, you might as well just leave the mouse guards on. The bees, the bees will navigate it quite easily. The only risk of leaving them on too long is that it knocks the pollen off their back legs as they come in. So as soon as you start getting loads of pollen coming in, I would take the mouse guards off. And if that's now, then take them off now, that's fine. The bees are active enough to protect themselves from Nice. Now Daryl says, I'm torn between a 20-frame or 30-frame Lysan extractor. I run all deep national boxes for brood and supers. Do you think Lysan would bring out a 20-frame premium that would take 20 deep? So if you're torn between the two of those, I'm gonna— you're gonna hate me for saying this, but I've had experience with the 20-frame and I've had experience with the 30-frame, and the 30-frame is loads better. It really is loads better. It's, uh, it's just so much wider, so it's so much like more stable. And what I've done on mine as well— I'm even more annoyed now— but I've got the heated base, and the heated base like gives you that ballast which lowers the center of gravity, which means it doesn't move at all. It makes— it really does make a massive difference. It's probably the biggest upgrade in the Lyson catalog because like anything above 30 is just irrelevant. doesn't really make a massive difference above 30. It's just a number. But from a 20, because the 20 is relatively narrow, but then the 30 is massive, like in terms of width, it does make a big difference. Go with the 30. Sorry. Oh, and when can we expect to see reviews of the Lyson 30? So yeah, I'll do it this year. We'll definitely do one this year on that. I just, I figured out how to sort out the filming in there in terms of the lighting So I'll do, I'll do some more honey videos this year, but it is good. Uh, Harry says, when is the earliest I can split my beehive? I'm thinking over the next week with one frame of brood, what, uh, one frame of brood, one frame of stores, and drawn comb and mated queens. So I'd, I'd be careful going that quick, Harry. I know we spoke about queens early on in the year, but if you're making little mini splits like that, you need to make sure that the bees can keep the brood that's there warm. And I— you're way further south than I am, but I would definitely not be making 1-frame splits at the moment. I'd probably go with like a 3-frame split, 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, good shake of bees, like more bees than you think that you'd need, err on the safe side if you're doing them that early. As you get to the point, like maybe middle to back end of April, you could do 1 frame of brood one frame of stores. But the very, very early first ones that you do, give them a bit more brood because it like, it retains the heat because you've got all of those kind of like bodies in there, self-regulates the heat a little bit more, um, especially if you've got 2 of them next to each other like that. Yeah, I'd leave it a couple of weeks or add an extra frame of brood in. So Ben Davis says you should do a video with just Alex the Beekeeper. I know I know this isn't my real calendar with things on, but basically like there, me and Just Alex doing video together. He is brilliant, isn't he? Love Just Alex. He's like the best, uh, like best YouTuber ever. He's absolutely amazing. He's doing tons of beekeeping videos as well. Really, really good. Lots and lots of time for Alex, uh, and it's amazing what he's done. So good man. Happy Hounds in Ireland says, is the Flow Hive better to get than traditional hives if you have back issues? It's funny you say that. I came back, I checked in about like 30 colonies today, and I came back and said to my wife, oh, my back's knackered. But do you know what, I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference. Like, it's not a, uh, it's not the kind of hive that causes my back issues. Is it like leaning over doing the inspections in the brood box, so you still have to do that with the Flow Hive. It's what, what is interesting, I've got so many different hives that I've been given this year to do reviews of. So I've got like the Nucci Hive, that horizontal hive out there. Um, I've got the Paradise Smart Beehive, I've got that now, that's painted in the apiary ready to go. I've got the Keeper's Hive, which people in America will know, uh, but I don't think anyone in the UK will know, and it is absolutely brilliant. I'm so, so excited to do the Keepers Hive video. It is so cool. And the reason that it's, it's, um, relevant to this question here is that it means that you don't have to take the supers off to do your bee inspection. How brilliant is that? I'll repeat that: you do not have to take your supers off to inspect the bees in the brood box. You can take every single frame out of the brood box whilst not moving any of your supers. Absolutely brilliant. So that might be— that's probably equally as good as a Flow Hive. Um, but yeah, I'm getting excited. I'm exciting myself about the Keeper's Hive. It's so cool. They sent— they sent me one from America. They had to fill in all of like this UPS paperwork. They had to write 101 things about all of the different wood that was coming over here and get all these certificates. They had to pay the import fees. They had to pay all of these different fees to get it over to me, and they did, and it turned up. I was like, it's brilliant. And then I messed it up putting it together, but I fixed it with like a Zoom phone call, and it's in the garage, and bees are going as soon as it's warm. I've got bees to put in it, so that will be a video very soon. It is well cool. Uh, Lee says, hi Lawrence, I have 2 hives moving into this year. To 5 hives. I've got 2 nucs arriving. Could you advise the best way of taking the first split from the 2 established hives or straight from the bought? Oh, so 100% the established hives. I had someone, um, ringing me up— no, no, emailing me saying they got a couple of nucs, got a couple of nucs coming, and they want to get 4 queens, I think, to split the nucs basically on the day that they come. And I can see, I can totally see why people would think that's like a good thing to do, because then instead of having 2 nucs, you've got 6 nucs or 8 nucs. But oh no, you can't do that with nucs, especially not early in the year nucs. Like, you'll just knacker them out straight away. Like, you need a lot of bees in order to build up the brood, in order to get the colonies going. So I would just be taking splits from the established hives, let the nucs build up. until they're, until they're ready to be split. And I wouldn't be splitting a nuc until it's been put into a brood box and it is completely filled, that brood box, from side to side. And then I would do a single split, split them back out into 2 nucs. It's weird, they just, they seem to take like a long time to get going, and then once they're up to full colony strength, you can, you can split them down a bit more than that. But like the first split, I wouldn't, I wouldn't go wild with it at all. Someone asked this question last week. We don't get our AMM bees tested because we don't have AMM bees. John, if John's still on, John did mention that there was somewhere who was doing AMM testing, but it's not something that we've ever needed to do because we don't keep the bees. Oh, just looking over, my dog's farted and it absolutely stinks. Oh my God, I can't believe he's done that. Right, Ben Davis says, if I want to stay with one hive and not do a split, what's the minimum amount of honey the hive will produce? So it's like the absolute peak of beekeeping is keeping your numbers steady. So if you've got one hive, just keep one hive. Never go to 2, never go to 4, and just keep one hive going the whole time. If you can do that, you get a lot of honey. It's an interesting one though, what's the minimum amount of honey? Normally the question is what's the maximum amount of honey. So the minimum, I don't know, these questions are always very, very region dependent, weather dependent, but I'll give you my minimums and maximums. So minimum amount of honey that one colony that hasn't swarmed, that hasn't been split in a year, will produce is zero, and the maximum is probably like 250 pounds. So like somewhere in between That, um, you'd be surprised the amount of times that you'll get zero on that though in the UK. Like, it's especially if you don't take a spring crop, because they might produce £100 spring crop and then they might eat all of that in the summer. That's— I'm being a bit cynical there. You wouldn't get— it wouldn't be that bad. But if you, if you do manage to keep one hive without splitting it and without the colony swarm swarming and you've got decent genetics, you're probably expecting like 50, 60 pounds, I'd say, as a minimum. I'd be annoyed if I didn't get 50 or 60 pounds from one colony throughout the whole season if it didn't swarm with average conditions. I've got a split from last year on double brood and double super, 6 over 6 over 6 over 6. Ha! Right, yeah, okay, Aaron wins. That's pretty cool. Uh, Lee says, when do you know the When the time is right to sell the nucs? I'm worried of selling a nuc and the week after having queen cells. So it is difficult. Like, I'll let you in on what's happened this week with one customer, which is like, we inspect the— we have lots of nucs to send out here, so we can't inspect the bees the day before they go out. Like, there's quite a logistical stream of activities that needs to take place, and the nucs get inspected like a week, maybe like 8 or 9 days before they go out. We'll do the inspections, we'll check to make sure they've got the right amount of brood, enough bees in there. Obviously the queen's there, the queen's marked, there's eggs, nice laying pattern, sufficient amount of feed, right? That nuc's good to go, happy with that nuc. It gets taken to like a holding yard and then we take them out and we send them. So what can happen in that time is like, it's a dynamic object, that nuc, in that it's not going to— if you've got 4 frames of brood in it 10 days ago, it doesn't mean you've got 4 frames of brood in it 10 days after. And the same with the stores. If you've got 2 frames of stores 10 days ago, doesn't mean you've got 2 frames of stores after. So what can happen is it can change depending on like the weather. And what happened in this instance, we've got a bit of a cold snap and all of the brood has emerged, and the emerged brood has eaten a lot of the stores. So a nuc arrived maybe not in the exact configuration that it probably should have been. And like chatting with a guy about how that's happened. So I think what you need to do is you just need to have good after-sales care. So if something like that does happen, you fix it. You've got to fix the problems when they arise. One of the nucs that we sent out last week arrived, and someone sent me a picture yesterday of them transferring it over, and basically every bee was dead. Every single one. and clearly died in transit. So we've got to send them another nuc, and it's, it's hard, but obviously that's my problem. Like, I've got to deal with that. That's not the customer's problem. So you just, you do, you do need to have good after-sales care for your customers. I'd say, worried about selling a nuc in the week after having queen cells? Depends the advice that you give them, I guess. If you say to them, right, here you go, here's a nuc that needs hiving up today because it's really big strong nuc, and then they come back in a week's time and they say, well, it's swarmed, but they didn't transfer it out of the nuc, then it's not— not that it's not your problem, but you haven't really followed your advice. If you— if they did put it into a hive and then it swarmed 10 days later, I would say maybe you've left it a little bit too late. It's a real— it's a real balancing act, not gonna lie. It's— and it's a difficult balancing act to get that right on scale. But yeah, you just got— you've got to make things right when they go wrong like that. The Bacon Wizard— love that name— The Bacon Wizard says, hi Lawrence, please can you remind me what the national nucs you use are? I think I might grab some bits for it, supers, feeders, etc., for future use. So we send our nucs out in the Payne's Poly Nucs, uh, both, both for national and Langstroth. I wouldn't get the feeder because it has an integrated feeder in it already, so you will have the ability to feed quite a lot of syrup at once. If you want to get something for it, I'd get a solid roof. That's always a good upgrade because they come with a ventilated roof. I personally wouldn't buy the solid roof for it. I would just get a piece of insulation. So we send all this out a couple of weeks in advance so people got a chance to get stuff. I just get like a bit of insulation board. and you just put that on top of the vent, and then that seems to work pretty well. Uh, I wouldn't get supers for it either. Um, the thing that I would get, it's a really handy thing to get, is they do like an extension box, a brood extension box. So it means that you can have, like we said before, like a 6 over 6 configuration. That's a really, really good configuration to overwinter your nucs on, and it means that you kind of got loads more space when you're doing those manipulations. So if you want to buy something, I'd buy a solid roof and I'd buy an additional brood box for it. Daryl Clements, just about what you mentioned earlier, would you say buying 2 20-frame lysin extractors would be better than one 30-frame? I only use deep, so would only be able to do 8 frames per extractor. So the, the doing 2 extractors versus one extractor conundrum is only applicable if you've got 2 people doing it, like the extraction. I, I personally don't think I could do that. I definitely couldn't do it in the space that I've got, but I don't think I'd have the speed order to run the uncapping machine, transferring all the frames over from one to the other, deboxing, reboxing, and loading the extractors and tapping off the honey at the same time. There's no way that I'd be able to manage all of that. So if you've got help, I would go down the tube route, definitely more efficient. But if you're doing it on your own, like, there's nothing— it's quite luxurious having the 30-frame Lysan with like the auto function because you just basically just load the frames up and then you just like press the button and it just goes one way, goes the other way, goes fast, goes slow, does like all the different cycles like a washing machine. And then you just come back and it's done. And you don't need to like hold it down. It's not shaking all over the place. It's really, really good. So for one person, it's way easier having one good, like really varied functional, like license 30 frame. If you've got more than one person, I would go down the 2x2 route. Grant says, for a queen delivered for a spring split week commencing 15th of April, would you do the split 8 days before the queen arriving or make the split when the queen arrives and insert the cage in at the same time? So that's a really good question, that, and I think I've potentially confused people before. So if I'm doing it, I kind of do either way. Yeah, so if I've got, if I've got additional queens, so something like, because we've got queens on tap, this is the thing here, we just like got queens here like all the time. So if I want to make a split, I'll just, I'll just pop them in, pop them in the cage, and, and let the queen live in that colony whilst they're becoming queenless. I think for everybody else, you're much better off doing it 8 days before, because as long as you introduce that queen to that nuc after day 8, then it's fine. So day 8 is fine, day 9 is fine, day 14, day 15 is fine. Day 5 is not fine. So it's any, any time after that really is good. So I would do the split, make the split, wait 8 days, and have the queen arriving on the 8th or the 9th day, and then introduce her, and it'd be very safe. Uh, H says, hello, hope you're well. I'm very well, hope you are too. What should I expect to see in my hives this time of year? I haven't inspected any of my hives yet, but I fed and sugar syrup. So I hate copping out with these. It does depend what— it does depend where you are, and it depends kind of what kind of bees you've got. I'll tell you what I expect to see in my hives at this time of year. I expect to see the brood box basically full. That's me and that's my bees though, but at least covering 50 or 60% of the frames. If they were covering less than 50 or 60% of the frames, I'd be really worried that there's something wrong. I'd expect to see at least a bit of stores. I'd expect to see at least a bit of pollen. I'd expect to see a pretty decent amount of brood, and I'd expect to see the brood in a decent pattern. That's, that's probably about average, I would say. I know some people, they'll have tons of stores left. Some people have tons of pollen frames left that the bees haven't gone through. Some people that the bees are just clustered up because they're just like, still winter, we're not doing anything yet and there's no brood. But for me and for my colonies, that's kind of what I would expect, right? Another channel member, he says, should I treat a gifted hive that's not been treated in 4 years as it's my starting hive that I'm feeding so I can do maximum splits? From the Gas Bottle Guy at Telford. Oh, Gas Bottle Guy, thanks very much. Yeah, nice. I, uh, I've been, I've been using your gas bottles It is featured on the video that you will see because you're a channel member. Thanks very much for the gas bottles. Um, so yeah, I would, I would treat any hive that's been gifted that's not been treated, just treat them. Definitely. I think we spoke, didn't we, at the show about putting Apivar in? Uh, probably a bit late for that now, but I would, I would definitely do something if you're going to feed it and try and make maximum splits from it, because they just won't build up. If you've got a colony that's not been treated for 4 years, even if they're in some way Evolving to tolerate varroa, which is madness. You don't get one colony that evolves in 4 years. But if, if they've inherited some form of like resistance against varroa, it still doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be like a thriving colony. They might just be able to not die. So to get them to build up to do maximum splits, you need like super, super healthy bees, no viral loads from carrying too much varroa. So I would do Repeated oxalic acid sublimation is probably a good way of doing it now. But you can, you can, you could do Apivar now. It's still not too late. I know we said before about you wanted to take the Apivar out by the middle of April because of putting supers on, but if you're just doing maximum splits and you're not putting supers on for honey, then you can do Apivar now. So I would get some Apivar or Apitraz and treat them now. And you can, you can build them up whilst you're treating them. You can feed them whilst you're treating them. So it's kind of like it's basically not there, but it's just getting the constant drop of mites. What's always interesting, what I like to do if I ever see a colony like that, put the monitoring board in. Put the monitoring board in and take a picture like after 3 or 4 weeks and see how many mites have dropped. It's really interesting because there's like thousands. Horrible. Uh, Dave Pimlott says, hi, I took your advice on putting the brood boxes below. Should I feed them syrup? So yes, I would feed them syrup, especially if you put drawn comb underneath. Don't, don't give them loads of syrup, but just trickle feed them, maybe like half a litre a day-ish, or like a litre every 2 days, something like that. If they're taking it down, they're doing something with it, uh, so I'd keep feeding them. It's interesting. We're going to find out whether it was a good maneuver and manipulation. Loads of people are taking that advice and they're doing it, but I'm confident that it'll work. Grant says, thanks for the podcast and converting all your previous ones too. Love listening to them in the car whilst traveling. No problem. You have Angus to thank for that. A guy called Angus who pestered me three times and wouldn't let it go, and convinced me that it was a good thing to do. And I'm really glad that he did. So thank you, Angus, great advice. Hi Lawrence, just in relation to swarming, is it okay to buy a mated queen and requeen a hive, as I lost a few hives to unmated queens and the weather can be unpredictable? And how would it work? So yeah, I know so many people that are having problems with colonies dying over winter, and I speak to them and they— I say, did So they ring up and say, we've got a problem, my colony's dead, found it, there's like no bees in it, or like a tiny little patch, a bit of drone brood or something. And I was like, oh, sorry to hear that. Uh, did they, did they swarm the back end of last year? And he said, yeah, about July. And then, and everybody is the same answer, which is they swarm in July and then they're trying to get mated in August, and the weather was just shocking, wasn't it? and they didn't get mated. It looks like they might have got like partially mated, but they've obviously not got fully mated, and then they're just dying off. But sorry, the question is, is it okay to buy a mated queen and requeen a hive? So yeah, if you've got colonies now that are looking a bit iffy, definitely okay to, to kill the queen or whatever's in there and put a mated queen in. It will, uh, it's amazing the transformation a good quality mated queen make. Stephen says, how good is the Lagustica Queens for Wales, or is Buckfast better? So the Lagustica Queens are excellent if you're looking for, above all else, copious amounts of brood. And if you get them in the right situation where you build them up, basically Lagustica will give you huge amounts of bees and huge amounts of brood. And if you couple that with very good weather and good nectar flows you'll get lots and lots of honey. The, the downside is, is that if you don't couple that with good nectar flows, they do need a lot of feeding, and they need a lot of feeding over winter as well. So for North Wales, I wouldn't say Lagoostica is the best option for North Wales. I would say Buckfast is, is a bit better for you there. But some people do like the Lagoostica just for making splits, very good for making lots of splits. Hi Lawrence, first colony coming in a couple of weeks. I've seen a very interesting video by Peggy DeSanto Ventilated versus condensing hives, what are your thoughts? I'm leaning to condensing now. I've not seen the video, so I'm thinking like, again, all I can say is what I know and what I do. I love condensing my hives down, I really do, and I don't like ventilating my hives, so it's a really easy one for me. I've never been a fan of adding any sort of ventilation into my hives apart from the open mesh floor But even now I'm kind of thinking with the open mesh floor, maybe it's letting a little bit too much air into it. I definitely don't like top ventilation, never liked top ventilation because it creates a chimney effect and the bees do not like chimney effect. You look at all of the ways they set themselves up in the wild, they're never getting that. But condensing them down like a I get a lot of people say you're, you're just condensing them down too much going into winter. Like, you can't take a double brood with 7 supers on it and smash them all down into double brood. Like, there's not enough room for them. And you see the videos, like, he'll do it. I'll take the 7 supers off and put them all into the double brood, and they're just bearding out the front. But I make sure that I do that in good weather conditions. And then after like 3 or 4 days, they find their way in. They do. They kind of like cluster up. And I said the reason that I do that— I do it for a couple of reasons. One, because I like these big strong colonies to be formed over winter, but 2, I time it for the Apivar treatment. And the way that Apivar works is that the bees will walk over— sorry, I tapped the mic there— the bees will walk over the Apivar, so the Amitraz, it gets on their feet and then they walk that all over everything in the hive, so all over like the open brood, and they're the carriers of that chemical. So if you're That's why they always say that the Apivar strips need to be close to where the brood is. You need to put it in between the brood frames because basically that's where you're going to get the best concentration of the chemical, Amitraz. And by having these hives so condensed down, like completely packed in, you get a better distribution of the Amitraz throughout the hive and you get a much better mite drop that way. So that's the reason I like combining them so aggressively at that point in the, in the year and condensing them down is because it— you do, you get mega colonies going into the winter and they can rear a lot more brood at that time of the year because there's so many bees in there. But it is, it's the dispersal of that chemical that I have as well. But very, very much like that. Smash the likes to show your support for Lawrence. I can't see how many likes I've got at the moment because I'm in StreamYard, but I do I would like people to hit the like button, much appreciated. Right, I'm gonna do a few more questions. I'm gonna get to the bottom, gonna go into, go into super quick question mode. Right, I've got 2 nucs, when can I put them into a brood box in a full hive? So when the weather improves, uh, when it's about 14 or 15 degrees, I would go roughly middle of April. Channel member says, I put an additional brood box underneath last week with fresh foundation, Realistically, how long does it take them to draw those threads out? So this is the caveat that I will add to this. It is slower putting them underneath than it is putting them above, but you get all of those additional benefits that you get. So don't worry if they're not— if they're not looking like they're gonna go anywhere down there, don't worry about it. You've not lost anything because they're all upstairs in that box. Basically, if they're not touching it, it means that you put the box on a little bit too early. putting it underneath has no difference. If you put it on top, then you're setting your colony right back. You've got to remember the rule of the, the rule of like 3 when it comes to brood frames. So a full brood frame, 3 weeks later, is 3 frames of bees. So for every full brood frame that you've got in your colony, fast forward 3 weeks, you're gonna have 3 additional frames of bees in that colony. So if you've got like a brood box on top and you've got 6 frames of of brood in there. Fast forward 3 weeks later, you're not going to have an empty box below. Trust me, the bees are going to be completely filling that box. So it is dependent on the amount of brood that you've got in there, but I would say realistically middle of April, I would say it'll be— they'll be well on their way to getting that drawn out. Once spring finally arrives, do you normally add 1 or 2 supers to your busy hives? So for me, I always add 2 straight up too, but I sit on my hands for probably a little bit longer than I should do. Don't like adding supers early, but when I add them, I add 2. Ben says, what do you do for a first job? I am project manager, um, chart project manager actually. Says, exactly, that is deeply disrespectful to women. We definitely are equal. Without them, uh, we men are nothing. So true. So I— that was ages ago, so I'm way behind on the comments. I'm just working my way through. So yeah, I'm glad you agree, John. Uh, The Morris Homestead says, good Saturday everyone, glad to be here. Thank you for being a new channel member. Uh, he also says, I have chilled brood from a cold snap we had here in New York. Oh no, that's not good to hear. Uh, Angus says, hi, is it okay to produce honey in frames that were previously treated with Apivar? So no, definitely not. You cannot, uh, you cannot harvest frames that have been used, uh, that have been treated with Apivar, but what you can do is you can transfer the honey out of those frames into new frames, which sounds like ridiculous, but you can do that. So take the frames that have got honey in that have been treated with Apivar, you bruise the frames with like a hive tool, just bruise them, put that box at the very bottom underneath the brood, and then put supers above, and the bees will move all of that honey up into the new box. Sounds like you're cheating, but you're not. That is exactly what happens in The normal state of play in the hive, which is the honey comes in, they stick it in the brood box that's been treated with Apivar, and then overnight when you hear that humming, that's them moving brood upwards and that's them fanning it down, getting the moisture content correct. So they do, they do move it in. If you go into your bees at like 3 or 4 o'clock on like a warm Saturday afternoon, go into the brood box and you'll see that it's covered. You'll see it's covered in nectar. And then go there like first thing in the morning and there's generally no nectar there at all. So it does— they put it in there, first available cell, they chuck it in, and then it's overnight it goes up. Hi Lawrence, I bought a couple of NL hives this month and I will get frames and equipment after payday at the end of this month. Would the end of April be too late to order bees? Uh, so from us, yes, we are fully sold out, I'm afraid. But, um, from other people, other people might still have them end of April. I think people are surprised how early a lot of people send out. I think, I think Griff's sold out as well now, but we take orders early and we sell out early. But I'm sure you'll find some bees from somewhere. Okay, 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, drawn comb, and a good shake of bees, and move to another site. When do the split— when I do the split, should I feed them syrup at what strength or fondant? So yeah, definitely go straight in with syrup if you're taking them to a new site, 1:1 syrup and little and often. How you doing? Hope you're enjoying the hat. He says, hi Lawrence, I'm excited for the beekeeping season. I have bought 5 flat pack hives from Thorns, wondering if you'll be at the Honey Show in October. So unfortunately I will not be in the Honey Show in October. It's a bit far away, it's like Sandown Park, isn't it? I think so. It's like 6 hours drive for me, so I won't be at that one, I'm afraid. Oh, this is terrible news. So Harry's come on here a number of times before saying about his like best queen that he had from Black Mountain Honey and how brilliant she was and how long she's lived. Uh, but he says now, my best queen wasn't there first inspection. So sad. She was amazing and even had some of her F2 daughters have 8 frames of brood. So hoping to carry on her line. That's really sad. Oh well, I'm sure we'll get you another one. get another good one. What do you think a good number of hives one can grow to, to have as a sideline income, uh, alongside a full-time job and 3 kids? So I can tell you from my experience what, what, where I got up to and then where I went back down to. So I, at my absolute peak, was running about 150 as like a sideline, and that was taking me— so we, we finished like, we have half day on a Friday, so I started doing it about like 2 o'clock Friday afternoon and then inspected all the way through to like 9 o'clock in the evening on Friday, and then all of Saturday, and then like most of Sunday as well. But I wasn't supposed to do Sunday as well, but it was most of Sunday as well. So that was 150, and that— it was way too much. I just, I just could not do anywhere near— like, could not manage those bees properly and made decisions that I shouldn't have made. I would say realistically 50 I think doing like a full-time job, you can probably just about cope with 50, and, and that's like, you need to take a bit of leave to do like honey extraction at certain times as well. Uh, but yeah, I wouldn't go any more than 50. There you go. Uh, that's the answer for John. Bee Bites in Scotland offer genetic testing. The SBA chairman Matthew Richards Johnson is one of the team. Thanks, John. I don't know whether to split my hive or keep one. What would your advice be? I want to maximize my honey crop. So advice I give to anyone, if you want to maximize your honey crop, do a demerit split, preemptive demerit split. There's a video on my channel, I think it's called How to Stop Bees Swarming. So if you go on my channel and search How to Stop Bees Swarming, it's like a 35-minute video and It's a really simple, easy process called a Demeray split. Make sure you do it preemptively, not reactively, and it's brilliant. You've got loads of honey doing that. Ah, Walker Bee Ranch has a 30-frame license as well. Very good. Love that. Pat the 14th says, "How early can one start queen rearing?" I'm going to try it for this year for fun. So definitely try it. It's good fun. We go like first or second week of. May, but you need to have mature drones flying so you can kind of work it out from when you're pulling out frames. If you're pulling out frames like, well, I've got a frame completely full of drone brood there, and you know that's just been like, that's the first frame, you want to fast forward about 4 weeks from there is about like the absolute earliest that you can do it. But we kind of know around here now, we know like first or second week in May. We start grafting. The further south you go, the earlier that will be. Oh, I just got a new channel member during the live stream, so there you go. Dave Pimlot, the channel member, thank you very much. Marie says, hello, I love it when you meet other beekeepers. Are you meeting any new and different ones this season? More unique the better. Oh, that's a good question. I've not— I've never— I've never had that one before. I meet beekeepers every single day of the week. It's brilliant. So I kind of have contact with, say, like people like Murray McGregor, who, who's commenting on a lot of my tweets at the moment, giving some good feedback and advice, who has got like 7,000 colonies. And then I speak to a lot of people who've never, never kept bees before but kind of getting bees for their first time this year. And then everyone in between, literally everyone in between. So I get to speak to like a real wide range of different beekeepers, and I love it. I love chatting to beekeepers about bees and how to do things differently. And it's a perfect example, like that double food system. Everyone has their own different way of doing things. Everyone does. And some people are very passionate about it. Uh, I'll never like kind of talk down about somebody else's technique for doing something. All I'll ever say is, well, this is the way that I've done it. Like, I can talk confidently about this because this is the way that I've done it. This is the reason that I've done it. This is the— this is my rationale for this decision. Um, I do, I do hate it when people kind of talk down about other people's techniques or ideas. I just, I don't know. I always, I always had in my mind beekeeping was— and this is like quite stereotypical, so I, I'm apologizing in advance if I offend anyone— but you know, it was like, it was kind of like an old person's hobby, you know, but like a nice friend, like an old person, like a friendly way, you know, like your aunt or something. And or like an old man with a pipe, and then everyone like sits down, has a cup of— a slice of cake, bit of tea, and it's all chats about seeds and stuff. And I know that's like very— probably offended everyone, but I mean that like a nice way. Like, I was thinking, that's a, that's a nice hobby to get into. I bet everyone's really friendly and lovely. And it's a bit cutthroat, beekeeping. Like, the amount we get loads of hate on Black Mountain Honey, you know, people don't like Buckfast queens, they want to keep black bees. People don't like what I talk about in my videos. People say that's a load of rubbish. People say you shouldn't do that. And I just think, how can people be like so angry and bitter about bees? I don't know. I just think we should all try and respect each other as much as we can. Uh, following on from that, so Marie says, unique, like different approaches, styles, bee businesses, how different beekeepers do it. I would like to see that if possible. So it's very good feedback. I, I do try and cover much of that as possible in terms of like not my beekeeping. I love doing stuff like that, and my offer is always out there to go to people within realistic commuting distance to see kind of what they do. Um, so I'll keep that in mind. I'm the same though, I, I enjoy it, and I think channel subscribers enjoy it as well. So John's saying 76 people have liked the video versus 147 in the stream. So halfway, that's pretty good, I'll take that. How pure can these Buckfast be after so many years of mating with multiple drones, or can they be tested? So they're artificially inseminated, so the lines are kept pure through artificial insemination. So, uh, it— but you, you could do it from, uh, kind of like remotely as well if you had like remote mating islands and you knew that the bees could only fly within a certain mating distance. But all of the Buckfast lines that good breeders are using artificial insemination to keep the lines pure. And you can, you can tell, like, when you get an artificially inseminated colony, it's brilliant. Like, you open up this big massive colony, double brood colony, you open it up and you're just like, not a single bee flies up, like, not one. And you're just pulling out frames like this close to your face and they're just like, yeah, whatever, just, we're chilled, we're pure, it's fine. Do you manage your bees according to the weather and the climate or follow traditional beaks who insist it's all about dates in the calendar. Oh, 100% weather and climate. And like this, I will, I will give dates for things because I think it's important to give people like a rough estimate of like when's realistic. Is, is the back end of February realistic, or is the middle of April realistic? So I'll say that this is roughly like the dates we're talking about here, but always take it with a pinch of salt. Always look at your local kind of your local weather or the climate kind of like on a wider scale and make an informed judgment on like the season that you're in and the kind of the weather on that exact day. Don't just be like, right, middle of April, I'm going to crack open the colonies when it's 3 degrees and snowing. You have to take it all into account. But if I had to pick one or the other, I'd go with weather or climate. whole time. I'd look outside and I'd say, is it a beekeeping day today? And then it's probably not. Thanks so much for great info tonight. Have a good Sunday. Looking forward to the queen bees arriving. Good man, Harry. We'll be in touch. Got another channel member as well. It's brilliant. 2 channel members in a live stream. That's got to be a new record. And it's Aiden as well. Hi, Aiden. Good man. Hi. Hey, Lawrence and chat. Happy spring. Happy spring to you too. Marie B says, my husband is a new beekeeper and he gets a lot of stick. Yeah, it's not good, is it? When is the best time to remove the roof insulation? So for me, roof insulation should stay on all year round. I know some of them you put them in just kind of like specifically, but for me, I did away with my crown boards and I use polyashworth feeders as my crown boards. So like basically a big massive polystyrene feeder that sits on the top of the colony the whole way through the season. It's always there. I do that for a couple of reasons. One, that I never have to take the feeders off and clean them because they're only ever on a single colony. But 2, it's, it's like, it's like kind of your house. I use the house analogy again. So you put insulation in the roof to keep the warmth in over winter, but then having insulation on the roof is quite good in the summer as well because it keeps like the heat of the sun out from the roof. So we leave ours on all year, uh, and I would suggest if you've got it like stuffed in like a super, you could, you could, you could leave it on. You don't need to, you can take it out if you're not going to have a polyashworth feeder, but we leave ours on all year. Just wanted to say thank you for taking the time to do these lives. I'm learning so much from you and everyone else. My pleasure, Sophie. I'm glad to do them. I do enjoy them as well. Hi Lawrence, I have 6 hives. One perished recently and another 3 have a lot of condensate Condensation in them. I think it's because I wrapped them over winter. Should I change the brood and floor so they are dry? Um, not— no, I don't— not a fan of wraps. Not a fan of wraps because you can do more damage with the wraps because you, you kind of insulate the outside and make the outside of the hive more insulative, uh, than the roof. So then the water just condenses underneath the crown board and you get very wet bees. So yeah, I'm not a massive fan of wraps, but what I would do is just take the wraps off, take the wraps off, and if you've got a solid floor, I'd get them on, get them on an open mesh floor, and then that will get the condensation and the humidity right down. Should fix it. But I wouldn't worry about a little bit of humidity though. A little bit of humidity is okay. Like this time, this time of the year, basically bees need to go out to forage water to break down the stores. That's what they're foraging for a lot, a lot of the time this year, like pollen and water. So a bit of condensation in the hive in the right place on the sidewalls isn't the end of the world. It does sound like if you've wrapped it though, there'll be a lot of moisture potentially in the wrong spot. And it's annoying, that one, because I know, you know, you've gone to the effort to go and buy some insulation, some wrap, to like take the time to wrap your bees because you're doing like the best for your bees. But sometimes it can backfire a little bit, and it's, yeah. It's a hard one because you've done— you tried to do your best for the bees there, and you might have set them back a bit by insulating the wrong part. But yeah, don't buy wraps in the future. Good shout out, thanks very much, Stacy. She says also well worth being a channel member if anyone else is thinking about it. Love it, a bit of promotion there. Thank you, Stacy. Uh, Harry says, I don't know if this is true, but I think Asian hornets have been spotted somewhere up north according to Beautiful Honey. So yeah, I've been— I've had a few texts this week, uh, there's a spotting, a sighting in Preston, which is way too close for home for me. Uh, I do— it's on, it's on BeeBase now, so we talk freely about it. So, so they're saying the fact that a single Asian hornet queen has been spotted in like an industrial unit in Preston, and they're saying that it's got ferries and stuff coming in from France, so they think one's hitched a lift over from France. And I think I have to, I have to say, I think that is probably what's happened there. There's no way it's got up. There's no way it's hitched a ride on a lorry from down south up here, because you wouldn't just— they wouldn't hold on for that long. Like, why would they go on the lorry? And there's no way that it's naturally kind of got up here in any other fashion. Like, naturally it's not flown up here. Way too cold up here for them to do that at this point in the year. So I think it's stowed away from France. But it's, it's not good because they said that there's an Asian hornet queen knocking around. I don't think they found nest yet. So if it starts building like a primary nest, could be, could be trouble. But a sing— a single queen, now if, if there's a single queen and she creates a single nest, I'm pretty confident that they'll go and find that single nest and, and kill it before it starts letting out new queens later on in the year. I'm not so confident about down south. Liam G says, hi Lawrence, I went, I went into my bees to feed them last week and they were absolutely massive. I had to double them really early. So yeah, a lot of mine are like that, and it's good. I'm happy when I see my bees like that, when I have to take— when they make me make difficult decisions. So he says, have you experienced this this year? So a lot of my colonies are looking very big and strong. Stay on top of them, make sure they've got enough feed. They are the ones that you'll come back to in a couple of weeks and they'll be dead. So I know that sounds a bit harsh, But keep, keep an eye on them because it is the strongest, biggest ones that die from starvation. I did do a bit of artificial insemination, but they didn't always take to the new queen as well as normal. No, they don't. It's what— it's a well-known phenomenon. They do not like introduction of artificially inseminated queens. They try and supersede them again and again and again, and you just have to come back and keep on taking down dog is aggressively dreaming. You have to keep on taking down the supersedure cells until you— until some of that queen— until the queen has got some of her own brood in there, and then they stop doing it. There is a tip that I was given by one of the breeders, is to rub lemongrass oil on the top bar of the frame. You just keep topping it up with lemongrass oil, and it kind of like blocks out the pheromones a bit because it obviously mimics a queen's pheromone. My understanding is that they don't have the same level of pheromone that a naturally mated queen has, hence why they try and supersede them. He's— he's not coming in there anymore. Jasper, that stinks! Oh, unbelievable. It's like genuinely difficult to breathe. It's like a brown mist. Jasper, come on. Right. Hi again, would you consider coming down as far as Kettering for a day to go through my hives and use it to show people things that you would change and mistakes I have made. Love the stream. Um, it— I'm afraid it's probably a little bit far, Kettering. It's just, it's a— it's— I've got to go there and back in a day. Um, I think it's a good 3 hours to Kettering, so it needs to be a little bit closer. Sorry about that. Beekeeping for Hope— if, if anybody's not subscribed to Beekeeping for Hope on YouTube, head over there now. Great channel. Top information as always. Just to say that the queens I had off you last year are both doing doing great, lovely queens. All my colonies survived winter, which is a bonus. Excellent, I'm glad to hear that. Uh, I have a 2022 queen, should I replace her this year? She's such a big beautiful girl. So I know a lot of people do replace queens like kind of systematically like that, but I say if she's doing all right, I'd let her go. Um, see if you can eke 3 years out of her. I know the risk is that she fails over winter and then the colony goes with her, which is, is not nice. So, so for us, we we do go two years. So if we had a queen, a 2022 queen this year, we'd kill her. It sounds harsh, I know, but it's it's to try and save the colony, and and it's a numbers game when you've got quite a lot of colonies. But if I just had a few colonies, I don't I don't think I would. I think I'd just let them go and see if they supersede her. Bada bing bada boom is a channel member. So his question is late to the stream. How could you burn a beautiful? Cedar Hive. I— it's getting— I thought it was the coolest video I ever did. Uh, you're the 3rd person on the stream today saying that, that I've burnt the Cedar Hive. I thought, I thought it was pretty cool, I have to say. I was saying to my wife over dinner, that's my, that's my best video I've ever made. Uh, but yeah, maybe, maybe the internet will not think the same. Uh, The Bee Whisperer says, hi Lawrence, do you think the BBKA, Defra, etc. are taking the impending Asian Hornet implosion seriously? Are they really prepared or just burying their heads in the sand? So I will be careful what I say here. I think they are taking it 100% seriously. I really think they are taking it way, way as serious as they could possibly take it. I think their hands are bound with red tape, as, as always in the UK. I think what happened last year, if you took all of the red tape away and they used all of the tools that were at their disposal, I think they would have killed every single hive, every single nest. And I think the fact that the red tape was there meant that they couldn't kill every single nest, which has resulted in lots and lots of queens overwintering. I think that the messaging that's coming out, that it's kind of like, oh, there's a low chance that there might be some queens that have overwintered, is the wrong message. And I think they need to take it to like the next status now, which is to say they are here and we need to move on to like the next phase, as opposed to trying to like eradicate them so they can never be here. I think we're moving to like a more of a management phase now, and I'm not sure that the MBU is best placed in order to manage that. Not, not due to competence. I think they're doing like a really good job, and I think they're doing absolutely everything that they can. I just don't think they've got the budget or the person power can't call it manpower, the person power to, to do what needs to be done. So I think it just needs to be like a separate unit that's funded from somewhere in the government to, to do what needs to be done and to take it seriously, as serious as it is. And I think that the, the byproduct of all of that is that you're going to have EFB and AFB is going to be ravaging through colonies all over the place because then the NBU, uh, are too focused on the Asian Hornet, and they can't do both because there's just not enough people. So they've got like a— I think they're taking it very, very seriously. Uh, I think they're doing a really good job. I think they're doing the best job that they can possibly do within like the parameters that have been set, but I don't think that it's enough. So there we go. Uh, I'm in Devon, but I don't think we have much hope. Surely hundreds of nests missed last year given the proportion of nests found. So yeah, unfortunately, I think you're— I think you're right. John is off to try and find a virtual Easter egg, determined to bag a cap. Night all. Yeah, you can have a cap, John. You do way more than anyone here. So if you want a cap, just drop me a message. I'll send you a cap. Good man. Uh, says, I have a white queen and she is in a 7-frame brood yesterday. Very nice. And unbelievably, I've got all the way down to the bottom, um, and I've got a couple more comments coming in now, but we're basically done. So I'll give it, I'll give it a couple more minutes. I'll answer any last-minute questions. I've been going for an hour and 52 minutes, uh, of non-stop talking, and I've got a bit of a sore throat anyway. So, uh, I, I, like I said, I'll give it a couple more minutes. So Jay says, evening, Lawrence. Hi, Jay, how you doing? Another channel member. It's amazing the amount of channel members we've got on here. John Sylvester says he understands about the dog. Same with mine. Absolutely shocking. He's not coming in there anymore. Nathan the Beekeeper says, hi Lawrence, have you read Healthy Bees, Healthy Hives? If so, would you recommend buying it for the average beekeeper? So not only have I read most of it, but I, I have got it here, signed copy as well. It's good, it's a good book. I, I'm, I'm not much of a reader, I have to say. When I say I've read most of it, like, it's Um, I've skimmed— I've skim read it, but it's really, really good. Yeah, it's a good book. It's nicely laid out and it's written by like proper beekeepers, you know. It's not written by scientists who are like, right, let's do a beekeeping book. It's written by people who know what they're talking about, and it's laid out in like a really nice simple, simple structure. It— and it's the kind of thing that you can kind of dip in and dip out of. And, and, and it definitely focuses on like healthy bees and heavy hives, so it, it does what it says on the tin. It's really good. Harry's off to bed. See you, Harry. Hi, any pros and cons between mini mating nucs and the 2 ABS honeybee nucs for raising queens? So the, the only difference between the two is like the resources that you have to put in. The mini ones don't require anywhere near as much resource in terms of bees or brood because you don't really put brood in them, uh, and, and the BS Honeybees ones require a huge amount of resources. However, like, for, like, for me, and I've been rearing queens for, I don't know, 7 or 8 years, the BS Honeybees ones are so much easier. And you put way more resources in, but you're never at risk of losing any of the resources. We do use some mini mating nucs, and I play, I kind of play around with them a bit. more than anything. But you, you have to have like a perfect system. You see the video I posted the other day, uh, maybe today actually, with the Melitta Bees, like the system that they've got, brilliant system. And, and they, they know exactly what they're doing getting them mated on that scale. If you're doing them on scale, you're doing thousands a month, then you do— you can't do them on big national frames because you don't have the resources. But the, the pros and cons are pretty much as simple as that. I would say for 99% of beekeepers in the UK, don't go with mini mating nucs, go with just full-size nucs. Thank you, John, I've enjoyed it as always. Lowest temperature that I would inspect brood frames? Again, I would question the need to be inspecting the brood frames at first because the only reason I say that is that like some people say don't open a colony unless it's 15 degrees and I open colonies way, way lower than that. I'll open colonies when it's like 2 degrees in the middle of winter to put some fondant on, um, but I'd never pull out a brood frame at 2 degrees. So, so I think kind of like 13, 14 degrees is like a realistic one. If you, if you really need to go in there at 11 or 12 degrees, you can, you can do that as well. Uh, says, seen pretty much everything of Just Alex the Young Man. Awesome to hear he's coming on. He is brilliant, isn't Should I put Apivar in my nucs when I split if I've already got Apivar in the brood box at least 6 weeks already? Um, I wouldn't, I wouldn't put Apivar in your nucs at this point in the year because it's just no, no need to really put them in. But just save it for later on in the season and then, and then get it in nice and early. So I'd start putting Apivar in the nucs in like July, good time to put them in. Says, I overwinter my colony with a super on top of a national brood box. Should I return them to the brood box only? If so, when and how? So read that again. You overwintered your colony with a super on top of it. Should I return? Um, is there stores? Is there stores in there? I'm not a fan of brood and a half. I never have been a fan of brood and a half because I just think you can manage it all within a single brood box. If you've got— basically the easiest way of doing it isn't to nadir it, is to put the super underneath and bruise any of the cappings if there is stores in there and then they'll just lift it back up all through the brood nest like that. That's what I would do. How long should it take for my native bees to fill the bottom brood empty box if I add an empty brood box under the 2 hives I have? I'm planning on splitting end of April or May and buying 8 queens. So, um, I don't want to like annoy people here. Yeah, so I'll try and say this as diplomatically as I possibly can. I would buy a Buckfast queen early on, and I'd kill the native queen, and I'd introduce the Buckfast queen in, and then I'd build the colony up, and then I'd make splits. And you'll make so many more splits doing it that way around because, because like the native bees that I've got, they probably wouldn't fill the 2 brood boxes up by the end of the season. Like, they're just No, they would get like halfway through the second box and then they'd have swarmed. That's what my, that's what my local Mongols would have done, like before they'd even got into the super. They just swarmed, they would have gone. So I would, I would genuinely think about doing that, is removing the queen, especially if you're buying in 8 queens anyway. Just kill the queen, put in a decent F1 Buckfast queen, watch them grow very, very quickly, and then, and then make as many splits as you want. Richard Atkins says, I recently started a small honey business. Any advice on building up numbers of hives and honey production? Currently running 6 hives at the moment. So my advice would be like, do it all organically. Don't take out loans. Don't chase stuff. The honey market is a very difficult market at the moment. A lot of honey knocking around. I would say you're almost better off buying honey in, but Just keeping a few hives, buying some honey in from like a local bee farmer. There'll be loads around you who want to sell honey. You can get honey at the moment cheap. You can— you pay like £2.50, £3 a pound. And I know I shouldn't be talking down the price of honey like that, but that's, that's what some people are selling it for. I'd never even dream of selling my honey that cheaply. I'd prefer it to sit in buckets. I honestly would. It's a, it's a very good product, but That's what I would look at doing is building up your ability to like stock local suppliers with good quality honey from a local bee farmer and then build up your hives kind of in the background because the big thing that people want online, online is slightly different, but if you're selling in shops, they want honey every day of the year. They don't just want honey from like September to November and they're like, oh yes, run out. They want consistency, and you'll find that if you can kind of like stock that honey every single day of the year, then you start to sell quite a decent amount of honey because every time someone goes in there, the honey's there. They buy more, they buy more, they buy more. Whereas if they just go in for three months of the year and then well, I've not got any left, so you can't have any. And then somebody else comes along and says, "Well, I can I can supply your honey all the way through the year." That's where the shopkeeper goes. So you need to be able to kind of like keep that consistency. So I appreciate you want to, you know, build up your own hives and supply honey from your own bees, but it's quite good to have like a backup. And that doesn't mean like, you know, importing cheap crappy honey. You're buying honey from local bee farms, so the bees are probably like in the same-ish locations to where you keep your bees anyway. Oh, Dave is on a herbal tea as well. What you got? What's your herbal tea, David? Hi, I'm taking over my dad's beehives who didn't get overwintered. They were left with a super with honey for winter. Do you think it's a good idea to take the supers with honey and feed instead? I'm a massive, massive fan of taking every single drop of honey from the colony and feeding them. And, and you know what, the amount of hate that you get from that when you tell people I take every single drop, I do not leave them a single scrap of honey, and they say, well, that's just not fair, like the bees have worked for all of that honey. But for me, I do it for a very specific reason. One, I want to sell the honey, and the honey sells for more than the feed does. But 2, I find that by feeding the colonies syrup at that point in the year, like 2:1 syrup, it makes them strong going into winter. And this is like, this is the technique. You build them up, you feed them at that point in the year, give them like 3 or 4 feeds from August through to October, And then you get to like the middle of October and they are just booming, big fat strong booming colonies. Whereas if you just leave them honey, then all they end up doing through kind of like back end of August through to October is they're just like, yeah, not really got anything to do, just gonna chill. And you just get these colonies that are like dwindling and then they limp through the year. So I find that feed is a really important part of my regime to get big strong colonies. So okay, I'm taking the honey off because I want to sell the honey. But even it's— so I couldn't say I couldn't sell the honey, I'd still probably take the honey off to give them that boost through feeding. Um, I find it makes a real, real big difference. Uh, Jericho's Bee says you can usually add a separate channel using software and put like, subscribe, and click the bell button overlaid when editing. Gives people a nudge. A lot of videos seem not to have them. So I do, I do have— I paid for loads of those on my videos. I'm just really lazy when it comes to editing, and I forget to put them on. And, and I, I don't like putting them on without actually saying on the video. And whenever I'm in the— whenever I'm filming my videos, I'm so like in the moment that I always forget to stop and say, can you please like the video? Uh, and I almost, I almost kind of not want to— I don't know, I don't want to ask people to like it. I almost want to— if I do a good video, I think people will like it. But maybe, maybe, maybe I should ask them again. I don't know. Have you got any more Carl Lockyer videos hidden away? So no, all the Carl Lockyer videos are complete, and I don't think there'll be any more Carl Lockyer videos either, unfortunately. So you reckon I should just remove the 2 native queens, buy 2 Buckfast from yourself, add them to my 2 hives, then wait till they're established with the Buckfast eggs, then order 6 more queens? I, I would say that'd be a— you'll end up with more bees way quicker doing it that way around. But I would, I would kill the 2 native queens, buy 2 Buckfast, but then build them up really strong. Build them, feed them, get them big and strong, and then, then make your splits. And you'll make your splits way quicker doing it that way around. Uh, David says, are Buckfast queens available on the stateside of the pond? So, so yes, but with kind of like different lineages, much more restricted gene pool. Corey Stevens, it's a good line of Buckfast, so I hear. VSH as well. Where have all this— where have all these questions come from? I was down to the bottom of the question, there's loads more now. H says, I have 10 hives in total but only 8 nucs. I wanted to split them into 8 nucs, then once established put them into 8 full hives, then maybe make 2 more nucs once they're strong enough. That sounds like a good plan. He says, I'm a beginner beekeeper, so, so just don't want to go wrong. Uh, thanks and sorry for all the questions. Excited to get the Buckfast from you. I'm sick of being attacked by angry natives. Well, it's a brilliant way to finish this live stream. I, I hope that they, they do you proud. And do not worry about asking questions, that is exactly what these live streams are all about. We're here to talk bees at Let's Talk Bees, and we've got to the end of the live stream. So if you've not hit the like button already, I think you should probably do it now because I've spoken non-stop for 2 hours 4 minutes and 32 seconds, but I am done. So everybody needs to go tomorrow night and listen to Griff's live stream. I'll be there, I'm definitely coming along. I'll have my chamomile tea at the ready. I'm really excited. Richard Noel's going to be there as well. Um, it's going to be brilliant. I'm really excited that Griff's going to start doing some live streams. It's good. He definitely won't have a fancy light in the background like that though, but, uh, but he's got good internet now, so he's catching up. But thank you so much everyone. I really like, like coming on and doing these live streams, but I appreciate all of your support, you coming along and supporting me as well. So I hope you all have a good weekend. I wish you all the best for the season, and thank you very much.