Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 38

4 minutes early because I'm sitting here, I've got my apple juice, I've got a nice cup of tea, and I just thought I'm gonna get going with this one. So another episode of Let's Talk Bees, and oh my goodness, the season has begun with a bang. I think today has really been the first proper beekeeping day for me. You might kind of get that my voice, my voice is a little bit croaky because I filmed at least 13 or 14 videos already today, uh, and it was very warm and I definitely wasn't complaining. I loved every second of it and the bees were very well behaved, uh, but I'm knackered. There's no lying about that. I'm absolutely shattered now. So I thought I'm gonna get in 4 minutes early and finish 4 minutes early as well. So we will talk a lot about bees tonight. I know people have got a lot of questions. We've sent out a lot of nucs, we sent out a lot of queens. I get questions all day, every day, and I love answering beekeeping questions. So I'm not the expert, I'm just the, the guy who likes to play around with bees. So we will answer as many questions as we possibly can. I always answer all of the questions on the chat, but I will start off with a few kind of like general things that are going on. So what have we done this week? We have launched our loyalty program and we have backdated a lot of people's orders. So if you sign on to the Black Mountain Honey website, blackmountainhoney.co.uk, and sign up as a member, you may, you may notice that you have a points balance there. So what does that mean? It means that every time you shop at Black Mountain Honey, you get some points, and then you get some money off queens or nucs or whatever you want. And if you buy nucs, you, you tend to get a pretty good amount of points for when you buy the nucs. So I would recommend logging in and seeing how many points you've got there. The points don't last forever though, they last for 3 months. So you can't kind of stock them up forever and ever and then wipe me out when I'm not expecting it. But get on there, check out how many points you've got, and use them up. Another question that I just saw pop up at the top— where was it? It was from John Sylvester. So the question came in saying, good evening to you and your family, Lawrence. Good evening to you too, John. He says, do you still have your F1 Queen deals going or are they sold out? So I intercepted a bit of a conversation on Facebook the other day about this, saying why does he send out emails saying, oh, the bees are selling out, the bees are nearly sold out, they're 90% sold out, and then send out deals as well and discounts. Like, they're kind of contradicting one another. So I thought I'd talk a little bit about that because they're not really contradicting one another. We are always sold out. So for example, this batch— next batch of queens that comes in comes to me on the 9th of May, and they are literally getting turned off tonight. So they are 95% sold out. But a lot of those queens were sold at a discount. So what I do is that if my regular customers, the people who support me and support my company Black Mountain Honey, I'll send you cheaper deals. So if you want to sign up, you can go onto the website, there's a little button that says join as a member, and then you will get sent regular cheap deals. However, they're not cheap deals if you want the queens for next day delivery, which at the moment we can't really keep up with anyway because the demand is absolutely wild. But what it means is that if you're willing to order 8, 9, 10 days in advance, you get the queens for £35 as opposed to £40. So you get a nice about 14% discount. And at the moment, John, unfortunately that one has sold out. So we put the email out saying it will, it will sell out on Sunday night or it will sell out before that, and we— it cleaned us out, absolutely cleaned us out already. So that one has sold out. I will be launching the following week's one though, so I'll probably send that out tonight or tomorrow night And that will be for queens dispatched on Thursday the 16th of May. So if you're keen to get a bargain for your F1 Butt Fast queens, keep an eye on your emails and make sure you are subscribed. I can already notice— I'm sorry, I'm, I'm out of breath. I'm out of breath talking because I've just had a very, very busy day of talking. Um, so let's get into it then. Let's answer some questions. I've sent out a huge amount of nucs this week. So what did we send out? We sent out 84 nucs this week. Um, I'll read out the list if you want to know. Week 1, week 2, so it went 78, 80, 26, 26, 28, 78, 84, and then this week we've got 90, and then the following week there's like 120, 130, I think. And then that's it, we're done. We are done for the season. Nucs is— I love the nuc season. Best, best part of the year for me, sending out nucs to people starting off on their beekeeping adventures. Um, but it's hard work. It is really hard work. It's tough. There's a lot going on. So I'm looking forward to that finishing, and then I'm just looking forward to watching people's journeys. But I've got a question here from Alison who received a nuc this week. So she says, I received a nuc on Wednesday from you. By the way, thanks for reassuring me the queen would not fly off. Um, we, we talked about the difference between the queen excluder setting and the open setting on the Payne's nuc. Transferred into a hive yesterday, seen the beautiful queen but larva, no eggs. Same today but also a queen cup. And then she also goes on to say lots of larvae in all stages and drawing out new foundation. So I wouldn't be worried at all about that, Alison. It's very, very normal for a queen having gone through the postal system just to back off for a few days. Completely normal. I'm not sure how experienced you are as a beekeeper as well, but eggs potentially are quite difficult to see. A lot— I get a lot of people say I've got no eggs in my hive, and then they send me a picture and there are eggs. So I'm not saying that you're in that situation. I suspect the queen is just having a little bit of a rest having gone through the postal system. But the fact that you've seen Queen, and the fact that there's lava is good. So I have no doubt whatsoever that she will come back into lay and everything will be fine. Obviously, if she's not, let me know. We will fix whatever issues there are, but I'm very confident that that is just a temporary blip. Um, new channel member! Hi Jordan, thanks for being a channel member. We get lots of channel members that come onto the live stream, so I always give you a bit of a shout out. And then next question from Graham Thomas. He says, evening Lawrence, received a lovely queen from you earlier this week and inserted into my nuc. Tab popped and looking forward to seeing her running around the frames. I'm looking forward to this too, Graham. Send me a picture if you get her out and laying on the frames. It'd be really good. And then Graham goes on to say, want to make another nuc from a large double-brood colony, but going on holiday soon. Best to delay until I return or leave nuc to its own devices? Large colony inspected, no queen cells and space available. Um, when you're making splits, the way that I make splits, you know, is you, you make the split and then you need to come back after 8 days And if you don't come back after 8 days, you've probably got until day 10 before they start. Um, maybe a little bit later than that. You, you've got a couple of weeks where you need to be getting in there, uh, and taking down all of the queen cells. And if you don't, don't go in there and take the queen cells down and you let the queens emerge, then I just find that's a very, very difficult way to keep bees. So I would leave them, give them enough space, give them as much space as you possibly can, and just fingers crossed they don't swarm while you're away. Uh, John Hayes says good evening. Hi John, another channel member. Evening Lawrence, been looking at the Annell hives to start my beekeeping journey on. What's your views please? Thanks, Rob. Um, so I've only, I've only got one Annell hive that they sent me and it is, it's okay. Like, it's a good hive. I'm not, I'm not gonna lie, I'm not a massive fan of like the appearance of them and, and the latches and, and the plastic nature. I don't know, it's just not Doesn't feel like a premium hive to me, but they are cheap. There's no denying it. They are very, very cheap. A lot cheaper than the other hives that are on the market. The only thing that I have like a bit of a concern in terms of like the durability of that plastic in the sun, and I'm guessing, you know, they come from Greece, so I would think that they'll be pretty good. And the one that I've got is definitely holding up well. I can't give you like a long-term kind of review on them because I've only had one for one season and it's not really seen any action just yet. But that's it. So I'll kind of— I'll probably sit on the fence a little bit on that one, if that's okay, Robert. Good evening, had my double brood hive swarm this week. However, I clipped the queen that I purchased from you last year, found her in the grass. All the bees returned when they realized she wasn't with them. Uh, he goes on to say, did a walkaway split to stop them going again. Hope it works. So I think that's a pretty good way of doing it. Walkaway split, uh, it's nice, isn't it? It's the absolute best benefit of clipping your queens is that you don't lose any bees, and when they swarm, you, you either find the queen huddled up under the open mesh floor or on the grass. Um, I, I rarely find mine on the grass, I have to say. They generally just don't leave, and I find them in the hive, the clipped queens, or, or if they do swarm, I find them clustered up under the OMF, the open mesh floor. But it's great. It makes a massive, massive impact on your honey crop. Boosts your honey crop because it means you don't lose the bees and you can combine them back together again. But I think that's right. Walk away split. Weather's looking up now, so hopefully she get that mated. Should be good. Danit and Jack, hello, Wyoming, USA, and Danny's Bees channel member. Sorry to hear about your failed introduction. I'm sure you'll get it back on track. Graham Thomas, hit the like button. Good shout. Uh, Arctic Beekeeping says hello from the Arctic, Northern Norway. The season has just begun, now the build-up phase starts. Been very warm in North Wales today. It genuinely feels like the season has started now, looking outside, and it's, it's still sunny. The bees are still going to be flying at this time. It's like 20 degrees today, got a proper sweat on. I love it. Never ever hear me moaning about— I said, I said on the video today you never hear me moaning about the weather. That's not true. You never hear me moaning about good weather. Doesn't matter how hot it is, never gets too hot for me in the UK. 35, 36, happy with that. I'll just go and sit in the pool. Um, but I moan a lot about the bad weather. Oh, I'm really bad for moaning about the rain, and it rains a lot. Right, Joe Murphy says, good evening, found 2 Queen cells, one sealed, uh, Once sealed, assumed supersedure due to queen not laying too much before. Caged the queen in case. Checked a few days later and found a load of queen cells. Thoughts? Hmm. So for channel members, you'll see this video coming up. For everybody else, you'll see it in a few weeks' time. I had a drone laying queen, artificially inseminated drone laying queen recently, and I did a little video on it saying this queen is failing. This is what a failing queen looks like. And I was tempted just to let it go to see if they would supersede. And then I went back in the other day and I was like, I can't, I just can't do this. This queen is, is failing so, so badly. Really, really bad drone-laying queen. So I'm gonna go back today and I'm gonna introduce a new queen, show everyone what a failing queen looks like, and that's going to be the video. So you'll see where, you'll see where I'm going with this in a minute, Joe. So I went in there today to do the video And I was looking through to find the artificially inseminated queen, the pink one that you might have seen on the shorts that was going to get the squish. And I pulled out a frame and there was another queen on there, completely different queen, beautiful queen, big, long, chubby, Buckfast queen, clear Buckfast queen. And I thought, where'd she come from? So I started looking through the frames and I thought, well, this is— they've definitely not swarmed because they're all here. And I was here like six, seven days ago, something like that. Obviously didn't see these cells. Anyway, I looked and I found three emerged cells. And my rule is if there's one cell, it's supercedia. Anything more than one, I treat it as swarming. And there is a bit of a gray area in the middle, like two or three could could be supercedia. But I always treat. I have that cut off, which is one cell supercedia. matter where it is on the frame. Anything more than that, I treat as swarming. So I got 3 cells opened and a queen, so I thought, okay, maybe they haven't swarmed here. So I went through, you'll see this on the video, it found the queen. So it definitely was a supersedure. So I've got 1 colony, 2 queens, 1 failing artificially inseminated queen, and 1 supersedure queen. There were 3 cells, so I had to swallow my own pride a little bit there because I never Never seen that before, where you have 3 cells emerge like that and it's a supersedure. So looking at yours there, you found 2 queen cells, one sealed. You've assumed it's supersedure, which I think is the right assumption. You've caged the queen in case and then checked a few days later and had a load of queen cells. So my question would be, what, what were the queen cells that you found later? Were they more like swarm or supersedure cells, or were they emergency cells? Because when you cage a queen, they do sometimes pull out emergency cells if the queen isn't close to where that brood is. I'm going to assume that they're not emergency cells for this instance here. So I would go back and say, if there's loads of cells in there, probably going to be swarming. And I would just be taking the queen out, making up a nuc, knocking them all back down to one cell, and then just letting them get on with it. But I don't know, it's really, it's really thrown me, that one today, because I've never seen it where they throw out 3 cells. And it was, it was on like the periphery of the nest, which is a classic kind of place to put supersedure cells. They're not like on the bottom bar where you'd find swarm cells. But it was, yeah, a bit of a strange one. So for that one there, you found loads of queen cells, I would just make up a nuc, treat it as swarming. The thing is, is if you, if you treat it as swarming, the worst case is you just end up with 2 colonies. If you treat it as supersedure and then they swarm, you're always kicking yourself. So I just think treating it as swarming is always like the safer option. Um, but good luck. Steve's Honeybees channel member says good evening. Hi Steve. Got Ben Wong. Hi Ben. Uh, Rufus R8 says, does the marking paint come off? Um, so marking paint can come off like eventually over time. Um, I think so. I think someone just messaged me before. It might be you, Rufus, messaging saying they introduced a queen into a colony, like an F1 Buckfast queen from Black Mountain Honey, and then they've gone in to look after the queen's gone out of the cage and the paint's gone completely, but they're not laying any eggs. And like, whenever I hear that, I just think you missed a cell, you missed a virgin. Like, that's not, that's not the Black Mountain Honey Queen. That doesn't come off within a day. There's no way that the— there's no way that the colony takes the paint off the queen within a day. And then they're also not laying eggs. So it's unfortunately, when, when you see that, it's a, it's a missed cell. I watched your video about checkerboarding. What are your thoughts on it, as it seems a while since you trialed it? So the, the data sample of one, it worked. It did work. They didn't swarm. But then I have colonies that I don't really do a huge amount to that they don't swarm. So I don't think it necessarily means anything. I understand, partly understand the logic behind it, but I also think it's just not the best thing to be doing, going and messing around with colonies at that point in the year. Just seems way, way too early for me to be going in doing Manipulations like that, so I've not I've not messed around with it again, and I don't think I would either. Not not a huge fan of it, I have to say. Paul Watson says, "Hi, I'm about to purchase a BB Wear Ultra. Is it worth it? I've watched your reviews and then noticed today you were not wearing it. Also, thanks for the thanks for the Queen's tour in stealth mode." Well, Paul, you don't miss don't skip a beat there, do you? Don't miss anything. Yeah, you're right. I didn't wear it today, and there's no there's no possible way that you will realize or. Or ever guess why I didn't wear it today. Really simple. When I wear my white BB Wear Ultra Suit in videos, the exposure just goes all over the place and it, it just blows me out and everything goes white and I just can't get the exposure to work. But when I wear like the, the BB, like the normal BB Wear suit, it's fine. So that's the problem. It's a bit of an issue with filming with it. And you could see from that video how hot I was. I never get that hot and flustered, do I, with my BB Wear Ultra Suit because it keeps you so, so cool. So 100%, uh, it is worth it. Best suit going. That was the only reason I didn't wear it today, because I just didn't want to mess around with the exposure of the videos too much. But I, I have— I do speak to BB Wear a lot, James at BB Wear, and I said, you need to do it in a different color. Like, I just— I'm not a fan of white bee suits. I've never been a fan of white bee suits. And they're talking about bringing it out in like a dark green, do you know, like a— I, I forget what the color is of the BB Wear suit, but it's like a Was it like sage? That's it, it's sage. And they said that they can get it from their supplier in sage, but they need to buy X amount of rolls of it, and then they did not necessarily want to have loads of different colors on the go. And so it looked like it might work, or it looked like they might be able to dye me a BB Wear Ultra Suit into sage, and then it never got anywhere. Like, not for the lack of trying. James has been absolutely fantastic and tried everything he could to get me a sage ultra suit, but couldn't get it working in the end. But I just think, how good would that be? Like a sage, nice green sage ultra suit as opposed to the white one. I'd be much happier with that. Um, Ben Wong says, how many different suppliers do you use for your F1s and whereabouts are they all from? So we use one single supplier for all of them, um, and we, we use one single supplier for a very simple reason, is that they are a really good supplier. Top quality breeder, access to the best genetics in Europe, look after their bees, know what they're doing. There's no need to to go to anyone else, and believe me, I've tried a lot of different European suppliers, and I've quickly not used them again after seeing what they can do. So we found the best, and then we don't need to go elsewhere. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna attempt to say that because I'll get that name wrong, but he says, hi Lawrence, a week ago I did receive a nuc from a colleague and discovered brood in all stages in 6— on all 6 frames with little food. So I have double brooded them and given them some 1:1 syrup, and after only 4 days they have drawn— I've missed the rest of it. Uh, you just put it on there. There we go. They have drawn out all 6 frames and the queen— the queen has laid 4 frames of eggs, but also found a couple of queen cells on the bottom and top of the brood box. Um, okay, that sounds good. Sounds like a good nuc. Uh, is it queen cells or is it just queen cups? Sounds like queen cups to me. That's, that's generally what they do when they're kind of getting going like that. Um, sounds good though. Sounds like a nice healthy nuc. Um, John Hayes says, hi Lawrence, how do I convert my National nucs into Langstroth? Does a template conversion work? So yes, it's funnily enough, I was, I was kind of half doing a video on this today and then I, I Got it wrong again. But when you're doing any conversion from one frame to another, all you need is a piece of plywood. Simple as that. And you just cut a piece of plywood to fit both of the boxes that you want. So it needs to fit the top of the box underneath, and it needs to fit the bottom of the box above. And then in the middle, you can just have a hole, or you can have a big hole like that. And then you just need to work out how you're going to get the bee space to work. And a lot of the times, you can't actually get the bee space to work, and you just need to accept that they're going to brace comb up in the middle between the plywood, and you just kind of clear it up. But it doesn't, it doesn't really matter when you take the plywood away, you can fix that. But it is, it is as simple as that. Just cut a piece of ply to fit on the top. So when I say to fit on the top of a national box, it needs to fit on the top, like at least fit on the top of a national box. The most important bit is that there's no gaps that the bees can't get in. Any other way. So for example, the Langstroth is a little bit narrower than the National, but it's a little bit longer than the National. So you just need to make sure that it's at least as wide as the National is and at least as long as the Langstroth is. So you get this like little overhang, and then in the middle you just put a hole. Works really, really well. I do that all the time. JK Photography, good evening. Uh, Joe Murphy says, is now the right time to demerit? Really want to give it a go. Um, so I get, I get asked that question a huge amount of times, saying when is the right time to demerit, and you can only really tell by looking at your own colony. So, so the prerequisites that I put in last time were you need to have at least 2 boxes full of bees above the brood box. So your brood box should be full And then you should have two supers full to the brim with bees. And if your bees are looking like that, then you can go ahead and do a demerit. There was another prerequisite that I said last week that was an important one, but I've completely forgotten it. So I'm sure someone will pick it up in the comments because it was it was a good one. And and then Joe adds on, "Am I right in thinking you can't demerit if the bees start making queen cells, even if it's very early on?" So that that is definitely correct. Like for me. The demerite only works as a, as a, like, a proactive preemptive swarm manipulation technique. As soon as they start doing cells, you need to do— you need to split them or do some sort of artificial swarm. And like, doing the demerite almost makes it worse because you're splitting them and they just don't know what's going on and they just go before they even cap the cells. So definitely, if you find any cells, just split them, get the, get the queen off into a nuc, tap all the cells down to one, and just let them Naturally make that queen. Well, I can have a sip, sip a drink. Daryl Hancock says, hi Lawrence, hope all's well. If I've got a super of honey that I left on over winter and had apivar strips in the brood box at the same time it was on, can I score the frames and let them store it again? It's— no, I, I was just thinking, is it the frames that the apivar strips are on Or is it the fact that the strips are in when the honey is there? And it's definitely the latter because you're not allowed to keep your supers on when you put the Apivar strips in. So if you've put Apivar strips in and the supers are still on, so you've got that overwintered super with stores in, that honey is tainted. So what's the question here? Can I score the frames and let them store it again? So not for human consumption? No, it's a bit of a strange one because you— it is a difficult question, that one, because when you're using the demure and you've used it with Apivar strips in, you can score it and get them to move it again. But it just, it sounds wrong doing it with the supers on. I don't know why. I'm guessing it is exactly the same thing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna change my mind on that and I'm gonna say you can do that, but you need to make sure that the super that was put on there isn't extracted from. And then that ties into the, the advice that you can't extract from wax that's been tainted with Apivar. And then that ties into the advice as well that the same, you know, if your brood box has had Apivar in over winter, then the bees are bringing in nectar, they're putting nectar into that brood box that's tainted with Apivar, and then they're lifting it upstairs to the super overnight to a box or a frame that's not been tainted with Apivar. What you're saying there is the same. So you've got a super of honey that's been tainted, so if you bruise it, put it underneath the brood box, and then lift it up into a Into a box that's not been tainted, then it's good to go. Yeah, okay. I'm just clearing that over in my head. So I think I think you're good with that one, Dale. Uh, Brock Lay says, "Hi Lawrence, when are you having Just Alex on as your guest, or have I missed it?" So no, I've not. I've not asked Just Alex that. I'm sure Griff's asked him. I know he's been on. Was he on David? I always forget people's names as well. Was his name David Burns? There we go. I think he was on David Burns, or was due to be on David Burns. Um. I don't have much luck asking people on, you know. I have to say, I, I ask people a lot, and then when they turn me down like 3 times, I just like, I'm not gonna ask again. I haven't asked Alex because I get, um, I get, get a bit fed up with people saying no. So I'm just gonna think it's just me, you know. Let Griff interview other people and ask questions because he does a good job of that. I'll just leave it with me and my cup of tea. I might ask Alex. I'm due, I'm due to be filming with Alex. What's the date here? 10 days' time. to be filming with Alex, and it was supposed to be last week, but the weather was shocking, so we have delayed it a little bit. Oh, uh, it's— I'm gonna, I'm gonna call you Cal if that's okay. First year beekeeping yesterday, uh, done my first split and ordered queen from Black Mountain Honey to be dispatched on Friday and hopefully arrive on Saturday, but won't be able to put her into the hive until Monday. Oh, you're There we go. How should you keep her at home for 2 days? So I fall back onto caveated advice here, which is I do not recommend keeping the queens outside of the hive for any length of time at all. We always say to people, the day they arrive, you should literally have them in the hive the next hour, like immediately, because the queen will be kept at the correct temperature and she'll be fed by all of the bees in the hive. That is where you should really be keeping your bees. However, if that's not possible, best place for them: nice, warm, dark place in your house, out of any drafts or anything, and just give them every day kind of like a drop of water on the cage, and they should be okay. But we take we take no liability for that advice. Dominican Beekeeper says greetings from the Caribbean. Very nice. Greetings to you too. Denby Honey says gutted. I followed your advice and introduced one of your queens, and she's not being accepted. No queen and no eggs. Please help. Um, so, so when, when the queens don't get accepted, that there is like pretty much always a reason why they don't get accepted. And I would say 9 times out of 10 is that the colony is not hopelessly queenless. I have so many people calling me up saying, I need a queen. And, and I always say, oh, okay, um, why do you need a queen? And they say, oh, my, my colony's queenless. And I say, well, so So it's gorgeous. Talk me through how your colony's become queenless. And they say, well, I've just gone in there and there's no queen and there's no eggs and there's no brood. And that's— I hear that a lot and I say, well, that, that doesn't mean that the colony is queenless, that just means that there's no laying queen in there. And they say, yeah, yeah, but I need, I need a queen. The colony— no, the colony is definitely queenless, it's hopelessly queenless. So anyway, a little bit of back and forth. I'm trying to advise people to not waste money on queens if they don't need queens. But I find a lot of the time people just go in, they can't find the— they can't find a queen and there's no brood, so they immediately assume that the colony is queenless. And I would say 90% of the time it's not queenless when it's in that state. What's probably happened is the bees have swarmed, so there was a queen, she's gone and left some cells, and the beekeepers missed it. And then there's virgins that have emerged, and then the virgins potentially not mated. So then you've got a colony that looks queenless, and it's very, very difficult to find the queen that's in there because it's a virgin queen running around and there's no bee, there's no eggs, and there's no brood. So people look at that and say it's a queenless colony, but generally it's not. Generally there is a virgin. So if you add a mated queen into that mix, the virgin always wins. And that, and that's maybe what's happened in this instance here. is that it's kind of like a missed sale or a virgin's on the loose. It's, um, it is a shame that the foolproof way to always test, and this is what I say to people, is do a test, do an egg test. And the egg test is if you've got a colony and you don't know what the status is, you don't know if there's a queen in there, take a frame of eggs, put the frame of eggs in. If the bees do nothing to that frame of eggs and it just develops into larva and then pupa and brood, then there is a queen in there. And that doesn't mean there's a decent queen in there. That just means there's either a mated queen or a runt queen or a drone-laying queen or a virgin queen. But there is a queen in there that's being respected by the colony. So if that happens, you need to go in, you need to find the queen, you need to kill the queen, and then you can put another frame of eggs in. And if you've killed that queen, what they should do is they should draw out emergency cells. And that's the only time you should really be putting in a mated queen, is once you've put in that frame of eggs. they've pulled out all of the emergency cells, you've taken them down, and you can kind of say safely then, right, that colony is hopelessly queenless, ready for a queen to be introduced. Um, but, but sometimes people just keen to, keen to kind of get a queen in there as soon as possible. So if you, if you put in the comments further down exactly what's happened, and we'll have a little see. Is it normal for a colony to be a bit stroppy soon after adding a new queen? Mine went nuts at me initially but have since calmed down. Um, so, so it's— colonies can like be remarkably different just depending on the weather and depending on the flow. Like today it was, it was 20 degrees here, you can tell I got a bit of a burnt face, and you, you could see the nectar coming in, like dripping with nectar and really nice and sunny. And on days like that, the bees are the best. didn't get a single sting all day, perfectly calm bees. And then you'll get a day that's like, not, not drizzly, but just a bit like meh, and there's no flow on whatsoever, and the bees have got a lot of honey on the hives. And the same colony, absolutely the same colony, and they're just like vicious, they're horrible, because they're like defending their honey from all of the robbing bees. Um, so weather I find is, is the big, one of the big variables, but definitely queen rightness as well. So during that introduction phase, when they're maybe not too sure about the queen, they can get stroppy. And then once that queen gets back into lay, then I find that they really do calm down a little bit. But yeah, not good. Stroppy bees, no good. Oh, here we go. Right, Chris Matthews says, I heard in your chat with Griff that your Langstroth frames can be flat to flat to flat. Have you got some left-hand and some right? Easy to do when you don't have the wax slots to guide you like a national. Um, yeah, yeah, some of the Langstroth ones that I have, like, so, so Griff's, the ones that Griff sells, they don't have the, uh, it's just basically all flat. So those ones that he's selling at the moment from Murray, I had the big batch of those last year, and they don't have the points, so they are just flat to flat the whole time. Uh, so yeah, so, so some of mine are. Some of them also, yeah, it's like it's, it's missing it because you don't have the groove in Langstroth. So if you— when you have the Nationals, obviously you have to get the grooves both facing, both facing inwards in order to get the foundation in. So you need to make sure that you never make the mistake. But with Langstroth, you just kind of tap them in. It doesn't really make a massive difference for me. My bees don't propolize things down that much at all, so it doesn't really make that much of a difference. Um, some— somebody did send me a cool, a cool video the other day though of a jig that they developed for kind of like rounding off the corners of the frames. Looked really nice. I forgot who it was now. It was quite cool. Uh, Ben Jones says, made some splits with your queens 3 weeks ago. I did an inspection yesterday and one is making swarm cells, 4 full frames of brood, 2 food foundation. What should I do? Um, I was speaking to a lady that we sent a nuc out, um, to like last week— no, a few weeks ago now— and she was saying that the colony wouldn't expand beyond the 6 frames. So it's a 6-frame nuc that's gone into the box, foundation either side, and basically wouldn't expand outside of the foundation. And then it swarmed. So it swarmed today. She caught the swarm and she was like, what's, what's going on? That's really, really weird. And you, you do find this, some bees are very odd in that they don't like respect the foundation. So they look at the foundation, you put them into a box and you put foundation either side, and instead of seeing foundation that they can expand into, they see it as a wall. So then they're just sitting there in this little 6-frame configuration thinking, we've got no space, so we're going to swarm. So what I always like to do is I'll put 6-frame nuc into like a beehive. into a 10-12 frame brood box, whatever, and I put the foundation in. And I'll go back and check like a few days later and see if they're drawing out the foundation. And if they're not drawing out the foundation, I'll always take a frame of foundation from either side and put it into the 2nd and the 5th slot. So you kind of like— it's like a little bit of checkerboarding. You're bringing it inside like that, and the bees hate it. They immediately say, right, yeah, we're not having any of that. That's ridiculous. You can't separate like the brood like that. You can't separate the stores like that. So they just draw out the frames And just by doing that little technique there, you get them drawing the frames out, and you can just continually do it, keep on checkerboarding and putting frames in between. Now, you don't want to do this in like March, but at this time of the year where it's nice and warm, that you can, you can split the brood up like that, no problem, especially if you're feeding. And you'll find that they draw it out really, really quickly. So just looking at that there, could, could be something like that. You've made a split and it's making swarm cells already. It might be that they're not expecting, um, the foundation as foundation, and they think it's a wall. But bees do swarm, like some colonies are just intent on swarming, it's very frustrating. The other one on there as well though is that sometimes they do attempt to supersede, and what I always do is if I see kind of any cells being made in like a recently made split, I always take them down. I just keep on taking them down, and I've had colonies, like some of the best colonies that I've had have been colonies where they're trying to supersede early on. And you'll find if you've got like dark bees, like native bees, AMM bees, local mongrels, and you're trying to introduce like a Buckfast queen, the AMM bees are really bad for trying to consistently and constantly supersede the Buckfast queen. But as soon as you get into like a couple of cycles of brood in, they do stop doing it. So it could, it could be that. It might not be swarm cells, it might be that they're attempting to supersede the queen. But as I said, just keep on taking them down, and once you've got some of the offspring from that queen in there, they will stop doing that. Uh, Stacy Richards, channel member, says, evening all, just wanted to say a massive thank you for my first queen in the post. She was lovely, so fingers crossed she's accepted soon. Made my first 2 splits and all went successfully so far. So always like a good news story, Stacy. Thanks very much. Another channel member, Aiden, says, hi Lawrence, I watched an advert for Spyhive. They sprayed the bees with vanilla essence to mask the scent of bees. Have you heard of using vanilla essence? Yeah, so it's a commonly used technique for combining colonies. I think people use like Febreze or some sort of air freshener. It's basically like to mask the smell of each of the colonies and they just give it a little bit of a spray and it works really well. I know a lot of bee farmers that use that. It's good. So you could use vanilla essence or you can use pretty much any kind of non-toxic air freshener. Uh, Pink is Honey channel member. All the channel members in today says good evening, looking forward to the live session. We're plowing on with it, right? It's 8:04. I'm way behind on the comments there, so I'll have to speed up a little bit. It is worth saying at the moment, I've had lots of people signing up for channel memberships, and you're probably thinking, what's going on? Where are all the videos? Uh, it's just been the weather. The weather has been shocking, but I filmed 14 videos today. and I'm going to film another 14 videos next week. So if you want to sign up to become a channel member, now is a really, really good time to do that because you are going to get completely, uh, like, well, you're going to get way too many videos coming through, but they are all very good, very relevant videos for this time of the year. So there we go. Sorry, sorry if there's been a little bit dry as of late. Rubbish weather. Hi Lawrence, good evening. Received 2 queens from you on the 6th of of April, released on the 15th of April. Released on the 15th of April, I'm guessing you say. They're not doing as well as expected, also a slow layer, lots of open comb. You want a picture? So as always, we take full responsibility and own any problems that we have with any queen. So yep, send me an email, Paul, we'll fix that. You know, our, uh, if any of our queens die in the post, we'll replace them, no quibble. And if any of them turn drone layer in the first season, we will replace them. No quibble as well. So you just got to send me a picture. The only, the only like sad thing that I do make people do, and you— I hope you can understand why I do make people do this— that if the queen isn't up to scratch, what we need before we send out a replacement is we need to see a video of that queen being killed. Um, because otherwise it could just be people wanting to get free queens, which I'm not suggesting at all is you there, Paul. But we will, we will replace them if they're not, if they're not up to scratch. We will replace them. We underwrite the quality of our queens. So send me an email, blackmountainhoney@gmail.com. Luke says, quick question, buddy. I was planting potatoes in the field today and the landowner had 4 old hives on a pallet. I then watched 2 swarms move in. Should I alert him or will they just move on? Um, it sounds— you get a lot of this, people just abandoning colonies. Sounds like you've got some abandoned beehives there and the swarms have just moved in. And you hear people saying there's been, there's been bees in those beehives for the last 30 years, and you just think, not really, there's kind of been swarms moving in and moving out and dying due to varroa or foulbrood or something else that's nasty. Um, I think, I think alert him, it'd be, it'd be nice, nice to alert him, just say that you watched a couple of swarms move in. I love watching swarms moving into abandoned hives, it's pretty cool. How are your hives looking after this wet weather? Any filling up supers? So yeah, they are looking absolutely brilliant, but I have been feeding, I have been feeding a lot of colonies just to get them through, but they look superb. Couldn't, couldn't ask for them to look any better, and they are slowly filling up some supers now. There's not, there's not a huge amount going on there, I'm not going to lie and say there's loads of honey coming in, there's not, but they're looking healthy, the bees look good, and I'm priming myself for a summer harvest, I think. channel member, says, what's a typical day like juggling your full-time job and your beekeeping? I sometimes struggle juggling both and only have 8 colonies. Um, so it's pretty tough, I'm not gonna lie. Uh, I, I am on, I am on parental leave as of last week, so I've not got to juggle it at the moment. But I've got a new thing to juggle, which is going to be like a newborn baby that's due in 2 weeks. Um, but I am off for, I'm off for a year, which is quite nice. But a normal typical day is, is pretty full-on, you know. I get, I get up, I go to work, I do Do quite a lot of work from home, which is good. But then in the evening, once work's finished, I'll go out, I'll do some videos, I'll go and do the bees, and then that's kind of it. I go to bed. I don't, I don't really have a life outside of work slash bees, but the bees are my hobby as well, so it works. It works quite well. My wife does a lot of the—I don't want to say admin because it's—it's not like my wife's doing the admin. My wife basically runs the business and makes everything work. So she's very, very good. Uh, Jordan says, no problem, uh, thank you, I'm a big fan of your videos, I've learned a lot from watching them, just performed a Demeray split and it's looking to be a success so far. Excellent, a lot of Demeray splits I think going on at the moment. I had a colony swarm on Friday, managed to catch them in a nuc, but I couldn't find any queen cells in the original hive. Is that normal? Should I reinstall them? Thanks, love your live streams. Um, someone else said this to me the other day, that a swarm had left the hive and they didn't leave any swarm cells behind. It's very unusual for them to do that. I, like, I've never had a colony that's done that. You do, you do get colonies absconding, uh, for, for one reason or another. It could be like exposure to certain chemicals, or it could be that the hive's set up in the wrong way and it's too hot, or something's going on in there. So it's worth keeping an eye on the fact that it might not be a swarm, it might be absconding, in that they don't want to be in that hive for one reason or another. One of the main causes of absconding is like really, really old comb. So if the comb is like jet black, like in the wild bees don't live on the same comb forever and ever and ever, that's how they've developed, to move on to new homes all of the time and to be able to build new comb. So it could be that they're just not, not liking the comb that they're on and they just wanted to get, get out and get away from that comb. If you're, if you're thinking, if you're looking at this and thinking, yeah, the comb's like jet black, I'd shook swarm that colony. So I would take out all of the frames, all of the brood, anything that's in there, and just shake them all onto brand new equipment, new or freshly scorched boxes, and then brand new frames and foundation. And that would be my advice there. I love a shook swarm. I've said this before on a stream, like, shook swarms have got a really bad name and a lot of people hate shook swarms and they think, oh, it's the BBKA, so you always shook swarm everything and you should shook swarm every year. And I used to, I used to think, yeah, that's, that's complete nonsense, you don't want to shook swarm every year. And I wouldn't advocate shook swarming every year, but there's definitely a place for shook swarms, I think. And, and where you've got a colony that's like that, maybe you like inherit a colony and they've got an issue, issues of varroa, or you've cut close to maybe an area that's got foul brood, or the combs are just completely jet black and you're thinking, I'm not going to do like a Bailey comb exchange because it's going to take forever to do it, do a shook swarm and then the bees will bounce back amazingly well. And then the following year they'll do really, really well. I'm gonna drink some more of my tea. Joe Murphy says, thoughts on splitting by box of foundation plus queen in original spot with some bees shook in, original box with queen cell moved elsewhere in April and shut in for a day or so for reorientation? I'm not sure, I'm gonna have to read that again. I'm not, I'm not 100% sure I understand that. So box of foundation plus queen in original spot plus some bees shook in. So that would work. Um, original box with queen cell moved elsewhere in apiary and shut in for a day or so for reorientation. So yeah, they both work, both of those scenarios. I'm really not a massive fan of splitting in the same apiary, loads of issues there, but I appreciate a lot of people just have one apiary, so it does work. I just— especially late on in the season, it causes so many issues with robbing. So I'm not, not a fan of it. Right, I'm going to speed up because I am way behind. I'm still on like the 8:05 comments and it is 8:39, so I better get a move on. Suits seem to, uh, vast so much in price. Are cheaper suits comparable? Is a Sherwick suit worth the cost? So I've never had any experience with BJ Sherwick suits, but I know a lot of people like them. Um, but without a doubt, spend your money on a decent bee suit. Because all that happens is you spend your money on the rubbish ones, and I know some people say that the cheap ones still do a good job. I've never had a cheap one do a good job. They just fall apart within a few months. Zip goes, elastic goes, something goes on them. The veils are rubbish. It's the veil that you're paying for a lot that you can't see through some of the rubbish veils, and they fall on your face, and they're just— they're not good. So I think, yeah, invest in a decent quality bee suit. I can vouch for the BB Wear ones, and I, I've seen the BJ Sheriff ones. The BJ Sheriff ones are Probably of equal quality to the BB wear as well. I would invest in a good quality suit. South Saxia says, "Hello from Sussex. I have a hive that's just turned into Saint Trinian's Super Naughty Gales. Advice? I think I know what you might say." Yeah, so I won't even say it. I won't even plug the queens, but it is a quick fix when your colonies go super aggressive like that. And it's not, it's not so much a quick fix in that once you put the queen in and get her laying that they, they instantly become much nicer. You do tend to see like a slight improvement, but you need to wait a good 6 to 8 weeks to really get the full, full effect of it. Uh, and it does, it does make a huge difference. I've done a video today, so you'll see, channel members will see this one coming out very shortly, which is I had one colony, it was the old queen that I forgot his name, it was John something, John White gave me that was supposedly good against Varroa. And I persevered with it and persevered with it, and they're just, they're just too aggressive. I just can't handle them having, having one colony like that in the apiary, and I just get blitzed every time I go there. And I just think, for, for YouTube videos, like, I just can't have them in the apiary because they're just so aggressive. So I killed the queen, and she was a yellow queen as well, so she was getting on a bit. And I put a new queen in there, and then today I went back to check and see how they were, and they're just like the most chilled out colony in the world. So it does work, and early on in the season it works a bit quicker than when they're mega-sized colonies as well. So I would go F1 Buckfast from Black Mountain Honey, of course. Uh, Luke says, we hit serious temps in Whitchurch today, you could hear the bees in the trees. That's like my favorite thing when you can hear the bees in the trees, and, and normally you get it like on the willow. That's probably my favorite one because it's like the first one of the year and you can sit beneath like a pussy willow and just listen to the bees. I love it. There's like some crazy energy going on when you hear bees in trees like that. 628 Dirt Rooster, good evening. I love it, I love it when other YouTubers come on to here. Uh, and I'm gutted because you, you probably came on like 40 minutes ago and then you've gone now, but I've— I'm really— I like it when you come on. So hi, how you doing? Good to see you, Randy. Um, uh, I'd still wear your hat. Where is it? I've got it here, look. And there's no way that this could be— there's no way that that could be set up either, could it? Look, I've got my 628 Dirt Rooster hat there. Let me see, I can do that. There we go. Can you see that? Oh, can't even work it out. But yeah, I do like your hats and it was good to meet you at the show. I hope you're well. And I just hit the mic again. So Andrew McMahon says, artificial swarm queen removed to nuc, intends to tear down all queen cells, and a week later can I then reintroduce the original queen? So you can. A lot of people do that. And the thing is, is that it— all you're really doing is like kicking the can down the street a bit though. I don't I don't think they'll not try and swarm again, but it's worth a go. And if you, if you, you've removed the queen to a nuc, I would just leave it for a bit. Or, or the best way of doing it is I would say tear down all of those queen cells except for one, and then let that queen try and mate. And then if she mates, then you've got 2 colonies and you can merge them back together again at the end of the year once you've established which one of the queens is best. Or you can just kill one of the queens and merge them back together anyway. I know that's a little bit grim, um, but then if the queen fails to mate, then that's the point that I would merge the colonies back together and kind of like not really lost anything then. That's generally the advice that I would give for that. Nearly made a mistake with the queen you sent me a few weeks ago. I didn't realize there were 2 tabs. I popped or pooped the wrong one. Luckily the bees got in and fed the queen for 2 weeks. So I take that advice, I take that kind of feedback on board, and I've filmed the correct queen introduction video today showing the 2 tabs of the Melitta bees cages. Uh, so sorry, sorry if the instructions weren't clear on that, but you're all right, there are 2 tabs. One of the tabs is only big enough for the queen— for the worker bees to get in, and then one of the tabs, the longer of the 2 fondant tabs, is big enough for the queen to get out. You need to open both of the tabs. Hi Lawrence, I've set up a couple of swarm traps this year in areas that have been well visited by swarms in the past. How long after a swarm arriving should I wait until requeening? Um, so you don't have to requeen swarms. I know, like, I should give you a balanced and impartial view. Like, if they're— if it's a good swarm, it's a good swarm. So give them a chance to prove to you that it's a good swarm. I would also say as well, with swarms, get them off into a quarantine apiary, and you want to run 2 rounds of brood in order to do like a full disease inspection for both AFB and DFB. And you don't really want to be messing around queen introductions within that phase because it might give you like a broodless period and you might not identify some disease. So I would give them 2 rounds of brood, so you're talking maybe 6 or 7 weeks, and then that gives you a chance to look to see if there's any infection there. And it also gives you a chance to see if the queen is mated well or if they've got a nice temperament, how well they're building up, and then you can make a decision. And then after that, feel free to replace the queen at your will. Bees already producing honey in the super which I added, which is amazing to see. Looking forward to receive one of your queens on Saturday as the bees are becoming aggressive. Amazing customer service. Thank you very much, Ben. Hi Lawrence, I have next to no spring honey. Are you feeding? My bees have eaten almost all of what they have made so far. So you are well and truly in the club. Jay, I don't think anybody's got a decent honey crop for the spring this year. A lot of people are feeding, and, and you've got to feed, and there's no point trying to chase a spring harvest that isn't there. You're much better off feeding your bees, building them up, getting them nice and strong to try and target kind of like the post-June harvest. And if you get a good summer crop, you, you can easily get more than you would get on an average spring and summer harvest. So, you know, you kind of hedge your bets a little bit and put all of your— put all your money on black or red, and then it'll just rain all the way through in July and August, won't it? I'm not a pessimist, I promise I'm not a pessimist, but no, I've not got any honey yet either. Hi Lawrence, any advice on securing sales for nucs, bees, and a queen included, of course? Um, Yeah, good queens, definitely good queens, good temperament. I find that people want nice, good, calm colonies. What we've tried to do, and I think the advice that a lot of people give is like, you should be able to go there and inspect the bees and say, right, come to my apiary and you can inspect the bees, and if you like them, you can buy them. And I've always realized that that's completely impractical. There's no way that I can invite people into the apiaries to see the bees Like one by one. So I thought, do YouTube. And that's not the reason that I did YouTube, but YouTube really helps with that, is that people can see what you're all about and they can see the bees and they can kind of see that you're there and you're a real person. So some way of giving them visibility of the bees would be a good one. But then also just having a, having a USB, having like a unique selling point. What are your bees? What are your bees good for? I, I tell you what, someone can make a killing on the UK market if they could get some good quality AMM nucs out there that were not swarming, produced a bit of honey, um, and weren't covered in chalkbrood. But it's— no one seems to be filling that niche because I get a lot of people ringing me up saying, I want to buy a nuc of AMM bees. And I say, we don't sell nucs of AMM bees, I'm afraid. And they say, oh, why not? They're the British native bee. And I just say, well, they're, you know, they're just not— Really aggressive when I tried to keep them and didn't keep any honey and just swarmed all the time. Had loads of chalk brood, and they say, "Oh, right. Okay. Well, we'll go and get it from someone else." And I say, "Okay, fair enough." I don't know. I don't know who you're getting it from because there didn't seem to be anybody selling them. But people tell me that AMM are brilliant, so I would expect there to be loads of AMM nucs on the market. But try finding them; it's very difficult. So if you can fill that niche, I think you'd sell a lot of nucs. Miroslava says, "Hi Lawrence. You said you can combine the bees after you find your clipped queen." with the bees after an attempt to swarm? How do you combine them with the original hive? So depending on where they've gone, so if they're literally just clustered up underneath the floor, I just dump them back in and job's done. That's working under the assumption that the bees have left queen cells that are yet to emerge. So once the queen cells have emerged, you've got a little bit of an issue there, and I wouldn't be just dumping them back in because all you're going to get is like a have a queen fight. You don't want your queens fighting. It's always the younger, less mated queen that seems to win, which is very frustrating. Um, but so, so that's, that's generally how I would combine them. As long as you're going back in and you're seeing capped swarm cells, I just take down all the swarm cells and just dump them back in. But just know that they're gonna swarm again. They're gonna swarm again. So I would just make a split anyway. Uh, where are we going here? Richie Mouse says, nearly made a mistake with the queen you sent me a few weeks ago. I've read that one already. Richie Mouse is, is trying the classic numerous comment games. It's a good game, good effective game, that one. Definitely get your comment read. But I do, I do read, or if anyone puts a question in there, you'll get it answered. You don't need to put it up numerous times. I will, I will get down to it. I'm on 8:08 PM at the moment, so I'm kind of going backwards in time, so I will try and speed up a little bit. Lots of comments and questions to get through. Steve's Honeybee says, if you know the field next to your apiary is going to be sprayed, would you seal them in on the day of spraying? So depending, depending on what they're spraying. If they're spraying like herbicide, then I wouldn't have thought there's much of a need to seal them in. You can get an app, I think there's like a farmer's app, isn't there, that tells you like the different sprays, the different sprays that the farmers are using. Wales is just sheep, so they don't use anything anything kind of nasty for bees. If it's some sort of insecticide, then you definitely need to be closing the bees in as best you can. Make sure they're well ventilated. Nothing worse than closing your bees in to try and do them the world of good, and then you, you toast them by not giving them ventilation. So make sure they've got top and bottom ventilation. So true about the weather, absolute nightmare. Hello, what a recent channel member, I think. Hi, James. Joe Murphy says, following on from the supersedure question, yeah, caged to make sure it was supersedure, and it was a week later where the new ones were made. So you think swarming? Seems weird as the original cell was sealed. Yeah, I do. I think, I think the fact that it's numerous cells, I still, I'd go inclined, I'd be inclined to say swarming, I think, on that one, Joe. Uh, Stacy Richards, channel member, says, I thought it was interesting when I posted in the No Nonsense Beekeeping Facebook group about queen cells, uh, in my hive that was preparing to swarm, and it got everyone debating swarm or supersedure. What did you think? So I thought it definitely swarmed, to be honest. You did? There was an unanswered question that I thought in there, Stacy, which was how many, how many cells were there? Uh, it was a beautiful frame of brood, and I know people said that was like, uh, irrespective, or I can't even think what the word is, but it was a beautiful frame of brood. Um, but that would have been my question, which was how many cells How many cells were there? If there was two cells, could be could be supersedure. If there were more than two cells, I'd say definitely swarming, and I think it's likely to be swarming. I don't think they're going to be superseding those queens. Damien, channel member. Hi, Damien. Says I'm glad you got the weather for the weekend. Brilliant weather, even after I properly kind of cursed my luck a little bit by putting on Instagram talking about it, and it was like a washout yesterday. But Sunday was really good. Uh, Adam says, hi, are you planning to do 14 by 12 nukes? So no, we used to do 14 by 12 nukes, but we don't do them anymore. Very, very difficult to aggressively split 14 by 12 nukes because of the size of them. So to get the numbers up there is, is a huge— like, it's really, really difficult, uh, and it's just not— can't scale it up the same way that you can with the different size frames. So not, not doing any 14 by 12. Abello sell 14x12 nucs, and Abello have got 14x12 nucs in stock at the moment with our queens in there. So if you want, uh, if you want a good quality 14x12 nuc, go over to Abello. Mem says the bees that— the bees have chewed the inside of my BS 2-in-1 poly nuc by the entrance. Why are they doing that, and would that open the debate that cedar is better than poly? So they do, they do sometimes do it. It's for ventilation purposes, and you'll see kind of like as the season progresses, they might open it up a little bit more And then get into winter and they kind of like condense it back down again. It's definitely to do with airflow within the colony. I've got some massive holes on— it's not just the BS Honeybees ones, they do it on pretty much all poly nucs. Don't do it on the Abello poly nucs, which is understandable, I guess, because the densities are much higher densities, 160 grams per liter as opposed to 120 grams per liter. But they do it on all of the other ones. Um, but the bees knows best. Bees knows best. I can't even say it second time, got it wrong as well. I'll just put this here. Steve's Honeybee says press the like button. Definitely press the like button, that would be great. Right, I'm about an inch into my herbal tea. Let's have some more herbal tea. Right, we're an hour in and I did start early. I'm gonna do another hour, so we'll do 2 hours of this. Um, and I've got— I'm 40 minutes behind in the comments, so I'm gonna go— I'm gonna up the pace a little bit more. Here we go. Purchased a nuc at the beginning of last month. 12-frame brood box is bursting, just about to put a super on already. Is it possible to take a few frames of brood and start a nuc? Absolutely, 100%, and a really good idea to do that as well. Means that you learn a little bit more about beekeeping, means that you're highly unlikely to lose another swarm throughout the season. And what's the third one? That's it, I can't think, can't think of a third one. First 2 are pretty good though, but yeah, definitely go for it. How many days do you shut them in when splitting in the same apiary? So I, I never split in the same apiary, but I don't think you need to really be shutting them in for any amount of time. Just make the split late, as late as possible in the evening, and then shut them in until it's like nighttime, and then go back and open it up So you, you can make a split kind of like 7 or 8 o'clock in the evening and then shut them in and then wait around in the apiary until it gets dark. But it doesn't need to be like pitch black, but wait around for like, I don't know, 9 o'clock, half 9, and then open the entrance and you get a few bees that come out and say hi and then they'll just go back in. And then stuff the entrance with sticks and grass and it wants to be like loosely stuffed so the bees can get out but they've got to work to get out. And that does tend to confuse them a little bit. Possibly the best question coming up next. Quick question, Drake or Kendrick Lamar? I'm an Arsenal fan, so I know nothing about this Drake versus Kendrick Lamar battle, but like, I do— Drake's an Arsenal fan, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna back Drake. Don't know if that's right or wrong. I messed up marking my queen. I ordered varifocals because I really can't see eggs or anything. I don't like holding a magnifying glass. Have you heard from other beaks if varifocals helps? So I'm guessing they would help. I've not really heard too much about that. The ClearView though, TrueView I think it's called actually, from BBWare could be a good one where you have like the Perspex in the screen. That's really good. But then I've seen as well where you can get, you know, you get the glasses that flip down with the different lenses on. So I've got a pair of them. I used to use them for grafting cells, but you can kind of do it without them now. But they were really, really good and you can get them with like light on it as well. So you have lights and then different flip-down lenses, like magnification lenses, and they were really good for seeing inside the cells. Did 3 splits today on my way to a target of 15 hives before the end of the season. Is there any chance you're going to take PayPal, as PayPal's pay in 3 is very handy with buying queens? Um, unfortunately not. I have a couple of people ask me that, will I take PayPal, and do you know how Um, like people on eBay just make a living out of scamming people on PayPal. For a business, it's the other way around. Like PayPal is the number one way that I lose money because PayPal just always sides with the customer regardless of what you've done. So people are just buying nuc, send them the nuc, nuc gets delivered, and then they just raise a case with PayPal and say, our colony swarmed, money back, and PayPal just gives them their money back. just think, sorry, not doing that anymore. So we, we did used to take PayPal, but we're not, we're not taking PayPal anymore. So sorry about that. Uh, says, reckon the Blue Noses are going to pip the Gooners? Guaranteed. Been saying it all year, we've got absolutely no chance. But I'm really glad that we're still, still there battling away. Probably lose to United at the weekend though. Uh, but yeah, bet your mortgage that Arsenal won't win the league. Uh, Vivian says, hello, thank you for the queen this week. It's our first ever split. Okay to leave all the attendants in the cage with her in the nuc? How do you open the tab when the time's come? Couldn't see it on the first look. So definitely I'm not one for removing the attendants. It's just unnecessary and things can go wrong. So leave the attendants in, they're absolutely fine. And then on the tabs— sorry, on the cage there's 2 tabs. So if you see where the fondant is, flip it up onto the side, the narrowest side, and there's 2. It looks like 3 tabs, but it's not. There's a central bit in the middle. 2 tabs and you just get like a screwdriver or a hive tool with them and pop them out. Should— when you get them and have a look at them, you should, should kind of be able to understand that if you look for the 3 tabs that are actually just 2. Uh, Cala Spa says, hi Lawrence, what's the best way to get my 2 colonies from my National 14x12 to a Langstroth and the best time to do it? So best time to do it, definitely now. Colonies are expanding rapidly as the days get longer. And then as I said earlier on, best way to do it is just cut a piece of plywood want the plywood to be as wide as the National is wide, and you want the plywood to be as long as the Langstroth is long, so you get like an overhang a little bit on both sides. And then just cut a hole in the middle and then use that as a board. Langstroth underneath— or sorry, 14x12 underneath, Langstroth above if you're going from National to Langstroth. And then just let the bees work all the way through all of those frame sizes. And then once the queen That's right. And then, and then once they're covering all of those frames, take the queen excluder, put the queen excluder in the middle, and put the queen upstairs. And then all of the brood will emerge and it will just go up like that, and you can take out the 14 by 12. Works very, very well, but get on with it soon. Evening, buddy. I just watched your vid on your honey room, very impressed. Can I ask what plastic you used on the walls? Uh, you can, but I honestly can't remember. It's Hmm, where did I get the plastic for the walls? It was just like thin two mil plastic. It's like it has got a name though. I don't know. Sorry, Marcus. I'll have to have a think about that one. It was like a standard thing. I think it might be like dentist wall. I don't know. I'll try and find it for next live stream. Luke says, Lawrence, I work on a farm but live in a built up area. I could I could keep a hive at the farm but would like to enjoy them at home on my days off. How viable are hives and neighbors? So I always say to everybody, if you've got the option to not keep your colony of bees in your back garden, take it. It's definitely the way forward. I had— I got this— this is quite funny. He's definitely not going to be watching this, so I'll tell you the story. I got a guy from Scotland who comes down every year and buys like a few nucs, and it is absolute gentleman, the nicest possible guy you will ever meet. And he brings me just like you've never, you've never seen things like it. So he came down on, uh, Tuesday night— no, Tuesday night, right, this Friday night— he came down to get some nucs. He brought 6 nucs, but I had to keep them in the garden for a little bit because I went out and got all the nucs to send out this week, and I just thought, I'm not taking them back up to wherever they are, I'll just leave them in the garden. So I've had 4 or 5 days with them being in the garden. And just— oh, I used to have 35 hives in the garden and it was a nightmare. And I had 6 hives in the garden for 4 days and it was just like, I don't want beehives in the garden. I want my garden to be hiveless. So anyway, it's hiveless now because he's come and gone and he brought me 4 cakes. So he brought me an orange cake, an almond cake, a cherry cake, a banana loaf, a banana and cinnamon loaf. 2 different jars of honey, uh, a homemade raspberry jam, and 2 frames— 2 frames, full frames of honey— and a haggis and a Lorne sausage. A big— I'd never heard of it before— a big massive like beef Lorne sausage. Like, these were his gifts for me. Like, the most generous person you would ever meet in your life, and just such a cracking bloke. So I love it. He comes down every year, gets some nucs. And every time he brings me even more stuff. So I've just been eating cake all week, been brilliant. And his orange cake that he makes is— you've never tasted anything like it. And he said to me, ah, you got— ah, you gotta watch out for that one. It's my shocking Scottish accent, uh, but it really was probably the best cake I've ever eaten in my life. So thank you for delicious cake. Uh, gone off on one there a little bit. So Bee Enthusiast Peter, channel member. Hi Peter. He says, hi Lawrence, done 3 splits each with decent queen cells. These will be granddaughters of your buck fast, so fingers crossed to see how they turn out. If no good, we'll get some from you. So good luck with that, Peter. Uh, see if we can debunk the generational myth of the buck fast. Be interesting to see. Watching you in the garden with a cup of tea. Cheers. I love, I love it when it gets warm enough to sit outside in the garden. I've been setting up my swimming pool today, and I say swimming pool, it's not a swimming pool, it's paddling pool. Um, but it's pretty deep, it's like meter deep or something and like 4 meters across, but it definitely is a paddling pool. But I mean, playing around with solar panels and stuff to try and get it not ice cold. But I loved— I love plodding around and tinkering in the garden. It is the best thing in the world. Uh, Philip Moore says, hi everyone, I'm weed eating streaming Lawrence. That's gone right over my head, that one. I probably was funny. Hi Lawrence, if I split my hive and it has no brood, is it the same Uh, same approach to what, Liam? But you can, you can split a hive with no brood, but you just gotta watch out when you split hives with no brood. The thing that keeps bees in position is the brood. So if you're moving it kind of like across apiaries, if you do it without any brood, they just, they go like AWOL, just turn up at other hives. It can be a little bit difficult. Right, let's have, let's have a sip of drink. Here we go. So Dale Hancock says, oh amazing, was planning on doing it when I had a fresh super of foundation in hope that they use it to draw it all out. Both queens arrived safe and both are in hives doing well. We'll be ordering more. Excellent, cheers Dale. All right, so I got it now. So Philip's saying he's streaming and listening to Lawrence's soothing voice on headphones instead of Angry Bees. Very nice. I like to, I like to think I've got a soothing voice. I'll tell you what, I'm, I'm gonna sound so hoarse tomorrow because I genuinely did like it was about 4 and a half hours of non-stop talking on videos today, and then I've been talking on the stream as well, and I can already feel— I can feel my throat going a little bit. There we go. Is there a way to get them to move honey stores from the brood box up to the super? So yes, they should kind of do it on their own. If they don't, bruise the cappings, and if they still don't move it place the bruised cappings in between the central frames of brood. Hate that, absolutely hate it, and they'll move it up straight away. How do you introduce a queen without brood? Okay, that makes more sense. So introducing a queen without brood goes back to what I was saying a little bit at the beginning, which is you need to get your colonies hopelessly queenless. And they're not being brooded there doesn't mean that there isn't a queen there. So introducing a queen without brood just means you don't have to go through that 8-day cycle, but you just need to be sure that there isn't a queen. So if you're 100% sure, 110% sure that there isn't a queen there and there isn't any brood there, all you do is you just take the queen, pop it in, 24 hours later pop the tabs and just leave them to it. Really, really simple. Are you filming with Alex in Bristol? So, so it is Alex from Bristol. Where he lives now, but we're not filming in Bristol. No, he's coming up to us to get a nuc. Uh, SimBobCraft says, hi dude, what is the best after artificial swarm? Raise your own queen or make hopelessly queenless and buy in a new queen? Um, so this time of the year you, you can do both. You can genuinely make, make your own mind up. Like, You're going to get to the point now. So I would say as of now there's enough sexually mature drones around, and as long as you get the weather— which, like, the weather we had today would have been perfect mating weather— then you can raise your own queen. And the artificial swarm is using either, like, this— what's using the swarming impulse, which produces very, very good, well-fed queens. So as long as you've got good drones in the area and as long as you've got a good nice chubby queen cell. And as long as you've got the good weather, nice warm weather and low winds, then got good chances of getting a queen mated. So, so I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say, oh yeah, definitely buy the queens, uh, because if you don't need to, you don't need to. And you can get perfectly good UK-mated queens doing that yourself. So I'd give it a go. Uh, Joshua says, I got my first nuc on the 12th of April. Sorry, not from you. No worries, Joshua. And it's only since yesterday that they have made any progress. The nucs seem like an amalgamation of bits from random hives. Am I wrong in thinking that a colony is split into a nuc before winter, then the same colony I sold in the new year? So there are a lot of bad nuc sellers out there. I'm really sorry to say that there are a lot of bad nuc sellers out there. And one of the tricks that a lot of nuc sellers play is they will They say, right, we're sending you— selling you an overwintered nuc. So I'm going to sell you an overwintered nuc, but I'm not selling you an overwintered nuc before I've taken another nuc out of it. So that's what they do. I know a lot of people on the UK market who do exactly that. So they'll overwinter a nuc on 6 frames, and then they'll just put an extension box on there, put another 6 frames on, and they won't sell you the nuc until they can take another 6-frame nuc out of it. And I just think, oh, that is a bit cheeky. Because really, like, that 6-frame split that you're taking out of that overwintered nuc that belongs to the customer, but you're pinching it before it goes out to them— really, really don't like that. That's properly bad practice. And then another one that's really bad practice, which is just trying to sell someone an overwintered nuc or a nuc and just taking brood and just getting all bits of brood and just chucking it all together, chucking a queen in, and then go, there you go, that's a nuc. You just think, not really a nuc, is it? It's just it's like an arm and a leg from there and all just kind of like stuck together. You— if I go through a colony, I can tell when that's happened. Like, you can see it when the brood nest should be like a certain shape, not just on like a single frame but throughout the colony, like a 3D shape. So if you're, if you're going through a colony and you're seeing like a frame of brood and then frame of stores and then a frame of eggs and then stores and then more brood, you're thinking, that's not right, that's not That's not how bees set themselves up. So it sounds, sounds possibly like that's, that's what you're talking about there. And I'll— I will say no more. I was going to say more there, but I will say no more. Channel member says, although we have had what seems like rain for the last 12 months non-stop, the weather looks like it's going to improve. So if we have long hot days now, how do I ensure that my bees are well hydrated? So I would say in the UK you don't have to worry about that. I honestly don't think that's an issue anywhere in the UK unless we enter a, like, severe drought situation. I don't bother ever putting water out for my bees. My bees, they just go to my swimming pool and just drink out of that. There's always something that they'll find. If you are in, like, an extreme drought situation, big tray, loads of pebbles, just fill it up with water and the bees will take what they want. And if you put one of those in your garden, you will see bees going and drinking out of it because bees are lazy. They'll just go for like the closest thing, but bees always find water. I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry about that one, Steve. Uh, Al Sok says, hey Lawrence, update on my hive. Asked a few weeks ago, bees with pollen on the floor, grass, and lots appeared dead. All good now, the colony is booming. Thanks for your help. Thankfully no poisoning. So, uh, it's interesting that one because I had a colony when you said that and I thought it's it's the cold, the cold's getting them. And I, I had the exact same thing happen about a week after you said it, and it was an artificially inseminated queen, massive colony, really big, strong, booming colony. And I went up there and like, in this apiary, it's the only, it's the only artificially inseminated queen that's in there, really expensive queen. And I looked, I looked at it from afar and I was like, that's really like super busy. So I was like, thumbs up, this is looking good. And I got up there and I just kind of looked underneath. I was like, what is that underneath there? It looked like a swarm, like a dead swarm underneath the hive. And I just looked at it and it was just full of like pollen basket bees. So what's going on here? So I opened up the colony. It was massive. The colony was just full to the brim with bees, 10 frames of brood. And, and it just must have been that, exactly the same as you, that the bees just came back, got chilled. Couldn't get into the entrance and, and died. It's, yeah, gutted, but they were fine. Uh, Cub Rider says, how do wild honeybees survive varroa? So they've developed a very simple mechanism to survive varroa, which is they just swarm. They just constantly swarm. So by swarming, they are giving themselves like a natural brood break. So the way that varroa thrive is that they thrive on kind of worker brood, but more drone brood, because the drone brood is capped for a longer time. So it means that the varroa can multiply more in the drone brood. So they always favor the drone brood. But if you take away the brood from a colony and you give them that artificial brood break, you're not killing the varroa, but you're, you're stopping the rise of the varroa, which means that they can tolerate it. And this is what some colonies have kind of like developed as a defense against varroa. It's constantly swarm, swarm like 2 or 3 times a year just to give themselves a little bit of a break from the viruses that varroa bring. But they did studies, I think there's— it's widely acknowledged now that colonies in the UK will not last for any longer than 3 years until they succumb to the impacts of varroa. So if you've got a colony that's not swarming They will die after 3 years unless you use some sort of synthetic or organic treatment against varroa, so they don't survive. But luckily, bees are incredibly good at multiplying, so tons of them are dying, but all of their offspring are kind of making up the numbers. Channel member, says, I'm actually slightly allergic to bee stings. I puff up like the Michelin Man. I remember you saying you used to be allergic. Do you used to get Do you— sorry, do you get used to the stings eventually? So I don't think I was ever allergic, but I definitely react— I definitely reacted to stings. Like, you see like a picture of me kind of like my eye like that and stuff. And I used to remember going out and getting stung— native Mongol bees, whatever you want to call them— but I'd come back and my arms would be battered, like hundreds of stings to the arms. And I remember coming back in and taking a Piraton and lying on the couch and just just be like, like all drowsy, and it would really like kind of knock me out. But both the effect of the pyrethron but also the effect of the venom. And then it was, it was weird because I, I will— like, I got stung. I got stung today. I just had a bee kind of get up in my veil and it stung me like in the neck, and I just, I just don't react anymore. But that's not— I don't think I've like built, built up an immunity. I think I've just got like quite lucky that I don't react to it that much anymore. And I think other people though is the other way around, like the more they get stung, the more they seem to react. So there's lots of— yeah, there's lots of strange things going on in terms of like allergies and venoms and things like that. I'm not— definitely not an expert on that, but luckily I do not react. Uh, Danny B says collecting and installing a 6-frame nuc into his Nucci hive tomorrow. Very good. I've still got my Nucci hive in my room there after doing all of the repairs. I know you've been doing your repairs as well, um, but that will see some action at some point. Why do bees make queen cups? So ultimately to use them as swarm cells. Uh, why do they make them but to not put anything in them is a really good question. The only thing I can think of is that they're just kind of like practicing. Uh, bees are designed to swarm, so a good healthy colony will swarm. And they might not swarm today or tomorrow or next week, but they will eventually swarm. So in order to swarm, they need queen cups or play cups. So they kind of got to prepare them at some time. And I guess they're thinking, well, we don't want to— don't want to be rushing at the last minute. We'll just stick a few, few play cups up for when we need them. But it is, it is a good question. Why do they make them when they don't put anything in them? Not sure. Evening. For 6 hives and to extract from 14x12 and Manley frames, what extractor would you advise? I would also like one where I don't have to turn the frames. Um, so you, you'll, you'll struggle with the 14 by 12 extraction to, to get something that isn't like ludicrously priced. Because if you think to extract for— to extract 14 by 12 frames where you don't have to turn the frame, so you want like a radial extractor, you're looking for something like bigger than my screen. So where am I going here? Like massive. Gonna have to be an absolutely massive one. And so you're probably going to end up with one that can extract more than 6 frames if you actually want to extract 14x12s radially on them. I would potentially think again about extracting 14x12s. It's very, very difficult extracting 14x12s to get them to not blow out because there's so much force going through the frame and not so much support in there for the wax. I've not had a huge amount of success extracting 14x12 frames radially. Way more blowouts than, than shallows, and, and a lot more than deeps. Um, but you're probably looking at like the 20-frame, 20-frame one from Abello. Like, I think I've only ever used Leicen extractors, so I can only ever go on what I've, uh, what I've actually used. But the Leicen one does— so I don't even think the Leicen 20-frame Does 14 by 12. It does 20 shallows and 8 deeps. But if you go up to the 30 frame, that will do— that will do 14 by 12s. Pretty sure that'll do 14 by 12s. I think you get 30 14 by 12s in there. So it's a really weird one. Like I say, to get one that's going to do 6 14 by 12s, you're going to end up trying to get one that does like a lot more than that. Uh, so if there's any way of, of changing that so that they don't have to extract 14 by 12s and you can just do like National Deeps instead, you'll end up, you'll end up like a much cheaper extractor. Might, might be worth reevaluating what frames you're going to extract from. Channel member says, I have 3 entrances, where would you start the colony in the Nucchi hive? I was thinking one on the end. Yeah, I'd go with the end. Start the one on the end and work the way to the middle, because you can have one on the end and then when you make a split you go to the other end as well and then work your way in. That's definitely the way to do it in long hives. Stephen Meacham says, hi, I got your queens, follow your advice with a frame of eggs. They made queen cell, so I removed the frame itself and they killed the queen and threw her out the hive. Relief after 9 days. I'm sorry, did you hear that, Stephen? It sounds like you might have missed a cell. That's that. If you missed a cell, that's exactly what would have happened. They would have killed the queen and throw her out the hive because they would have respected the, the virgin more than the introduced queen. Um, you need to shake off the frame, shake off every single frame, and make sure that you don't miss a single cell, and it can be really easy to miss a cell. Um, because sometimes you get them at the— you get them at the bottom of the frame, they're really easy to see. But when they build them in the face of the frame, it's just like a little, a little noggin like that, and you just have to make sure that you take it down because otherwise they do kill the queens. Uh, Grant says, could you also provide a link to your blue long cuff gloves please? Absolutely gutted about this. So, uh, I was speaking to Griff And I was saying, I've got some really good gloves. Like, they are the best gloves going. I know you like your orange gloves, but these are amazing gloves. I've got loads of people asking me to sell them, and we're not set up for selling. That is, we're not set up for selling stuff that's VAT registered. So like products and stuff. So do you want to stock them? And he said, oh yeah, oh yeah, in his Welsh way. Send me the details. So it turns out they're the same gloves that Griff uses. They're not the same gloves. They're made by the same manufacturer. So I spoke to the person that I was getting them from, buying them by like a pallet load, like a small pallet, 20 boxes or something, and said, oh, I found, I found somebody who wants to sell these gloves for you. And they said, oh yeah, they stopped making them now, there wasn't enough demand. And I was, I'm absolutely gutted. I'm so annoyed because they were the best gloves ever. So I've gone back to using the Marigolds from Viking Direct, which are like, I really like those ones, the fake Marigolds from Viking Direct, but they're just loads more expensive. So unfortunately I can't give you the link because the company no longer sells them. Uh, sorry. Mark says, happened to me, one hive was adamant that it wanted to raise its own queen. All others I've had never had a problem. So yeah, it does happen with the queens. Steve says the other queen is doing great, just for reference. Good to hear that one's doing well. Marcus Bug, one other question, could you explain simply the different cells, cups, and how we can spot Identify each different type. I find it so confusing. So there's only really 2 different types. I know, I know there is 3 different impulses, but there are 2 different types. So swarming cells and supersedure cells are the same cell, exactly the same cell, but used for 2 different purposes. So it's the same looking cell, looks like a peanut, straight peanut on the, like, on the frame. Uh, so they build it from a queen cup. So you'll see like a queen cup that's built out and they just extend the queen cup down. There's no kink in it, there's no bend in it, it's just a straight peanut. That's for swarming, that's for supersedure. And then you just have emergency cells, which are when the bees need to like make a cell in an emergency. So it's not made from a queen cell or a cup, it's made from just a standard cell. So what that means is the bees have to work it out and then down, so you get this like 90-degree kink in it, so it doesn't look anywhere near as long. It looks like a 90-degree bend. So they're just the 2, the 2 different types. I'm pretty sure I did a video about that. John, John P is pretty good. He might, if he's on— I don't think John is on today, but he might put it on the No-Nonsense Beekeeping group later on. There is a, there is a video showing the difference between swarming, supersedure, and emergency cells, and it's got like examples of all of them on there as well. Hey Lawrence, when do you usually pull your supers in the summer? So I used to pull them end of September, first week of October, thinking I want to get every last drop of honey out of them. And then after I got the advice from Richard to say, don't be stupid, get it off nice and early, get your bees fed, get the Apivar strips in, my honey crop's never been better and my bees have never been healthier. So I go and take all of my honey crop off no later than the middle of August now, which people say to me, what are you doing? That's way too early. And it works, and it works for me, and the bees get loads of their own food gathered at the end of the year. Makes my life loads easier, and I've got lots of healthy bees to get me good crops throughout the year. We're going to try rearing some queens this year using the Nikko method. Is there a best time of the year, uh, is there a time of the year that's best to do this? So I think any time of the year is really good to do it, once, once kind of the drones are mature. So you can start doing it now. Start doing it now? Uh, don't leave it too late in the year is what I would say. Queen rearing gets difficult as you get kind of later on into the year because you've got like small colonies that you're trying to mate queens on and they can get robbed out. So the earlier in the year the better, so long as you've got sexually mature drones, which is kind of from about now. So you can definitely start grafting now. I'm start— I'm starting grafting this week for the UK mated queens because the weather's looking nice now. What happens if you demerit and the 2 supers have only recently been put on, so aren't full of bees, but the jumbo Langstroth brood is literally teeming with bees? So you can really set colonies back by doing that. I would just wait, Joe, until the boxes are full of bees, because otherwise you're kind of just separating it into 2 colonies. You need to have that merger in between them to actually, like, balance it well. I've done it before and it doesn't work well if you leave a gap between the 2 colonies. It should be one continuous stream of bees with the brood in 2 separate locations, so I just, I'd wait for a bit. As I say to people, the demerare should be done as late as possible in the year. The later the better, because it means that you only have to do it once. If you do it early, you end up having to do it again. And the later that you do it, the more bees that you end up with and the bigger crop of honey that you end up with as well. So I wouldn't rush it. And as long as they're not creating swarm cells, then just keep on going, keep on going. And then you need to do the demero before they start creating swarm cells. So there is, there is a bit of a gamble involved in there as well. But it's early, it's only— what is it, the 5th of May? I think you've got a couple of weeks, can push it a couple of weeks, definitely. Right, I'm gonna have a sip of my tea. 1 hour 30 in and I'm still not catching up with the comments. Sorry, I am going through them sequentially though, so everyone's getting their questions answered, and I will, I will stay on until we're finished. After you demerare, what is the process of compressing back to one box at the end of the season? Do you do this after you take your honey? So I, I don't necessarily compress back to one box. I have changed that somewhat now, so I will take— if I can extract the honey from the top box, I'll extract the honey from the top box. If I can't extract the honey from the top box before the end of the year, I'll take the top box, bruise all of the frames, put it underneath the brood box, put some new boxes on top, and let the bees bring all of that honey up. So then I end up on a double brood configuration. I leave it on that double brood configuration all the way through the year now, and I overwinter on that configuration. But what I'll do is that as we get into the new season, the bees will naturally migrate to the top box. So if I'm looking at the bottom box and the bottom box is empty, I'll just take the bottom box away. So you're basically going from a double brood to a single brood at some point early in the spring. And the reason that I do that is that it then gives me the ability to demerit the colonies again, and I do like the demerit. Thank you. Is replacing the slow layer not the last resort? Wondering if there's anything in people's talking about this spring being slower than normal. I'll get back to you. So they're definitely— that's definitely correct, like the weather's shocking, it's really, really bad, but I stick with the fact that, you know, if there's something wrong with those queens, we'll fix them for you, so just keep me in the loop. Is checkerboarding supers worthwhile in the sense bees will draw out the foundation quicker? So I really like checkerboarding. in that sense. Not the checkerboarding like the actual process, the defined process of swarm management, but checkerboarding in its most natural sense, which is putting frames of drawn-out foundation in between the brood area. I do it all the time. It's just something that I'll, you know, kind of naturally do, just take the outside frames and put them in. And say I go like to the outside frame of a colony and one side's drawn and then the side that's facing the wall isn't drawn, I like flick it around, and then I'll take a frame from the outer one and I'll put it in between. I'm always messing around. It definitely speeds things up. Oh, Paul Lewis is now a channel member! Excellent. Cheers, Paul. Congratulations on the birth of baby. More life. Welcome him or her to the bee family. Thank you very much. It is a little girl. She's due in 2 and a half weeks. Have you ever had a colony swarm, catch the swarm, then that original queen turns from calm to super aggressive? Or if you move bees and they turn aggressive, seems bizarre that they change. So yeah, definitely had that. I've had numerous like scenarios where you have perfectly calm bees that go like mega aggressive. And I said about the one, I think there's a couple of streams back where they were getting attacked in the night by badgers, and it was beautifully calm colony and they turned vicious. And then I moved them to another apiary and they just chilled out again because they weren't being attacked. So there's loads of different variables that go into the temperament. A few people saying hi. Tony and Liz, hello. Got Harry, Wild West Farm, hope your ginger bees are doing well. Uh, Alex Ward saying, I'm noticing bees crawling. Let's see if you've got more going on there. John says, congratulations again, smash the like button. Love that. All right, says, I have 3 hives that have superseded. I now have virgins running around but no mature drones about, so suggestions. So depending on where you are in the country, if— I think we're getting to the point where if the virgins have just emerged recently, I think you might be okay. I think you could get them, could get them mated. But the thing is, is once, once you've got virgins running around, there's no benefit in saying, right, just get in there and kill the virgins and try and add a mated queen in, because you've almost missed that opportunity where they've superseded. I, I'll jump back a little bit here though. You say you've got 3 hives that have superseded. So I would say that is highly, highly unlikely. Supersedure is very rare. It really is very rare. It's in the, like, the 5th percentile, I would say, something like that. Maybe 5% of colonies. That is a stat sponsored by Laurence Edwards. I completely made that up. But anecdotally, it is very, very low. Don't see colonies superseding that much. I think I had 1 or 2 colonies supersede last year out of all of the hives that I manage. Um, so it's probably, it's probably a swarming. Um, but if you, if you find them at a point where you've got capped queen cells, it's quite easy just to take down all of the capped queen cells and add a mated queen in, and you know that there's no virgins running around. But once you get to the point where there is virgins running around, you might as well just see if they mate. There's no point trying to hunt virgins when they've got a chance to go out and mate. And I think the weather is improving, so fingers crossed they might go out and get mated. My Little Oasis says hello, Lawrence. Hello, JK, you are always too kind. £10 Super Sticker, thank you very much, much appreciated. Bring a smile to my face as always. Pat the 14th says, finding it hard to see if, if queen cells on frame. Would you advise shake off all the frames? Does that rile up the bees when shaking all the frames? Also, is it okay to shake queen off the frame? So I shake frames every single day. It's just, it's just something that I do now. So it will Shaking the frames potentially damages queen cells that are on there, so if you need to use those queen cells, don't shake the frames that have got queen cells on there. But in terms of the bees, no problem at all. Big shake, they're absolutely fine. And then I shake the queen off as well. Obviously I'll check the queen, see if I can see the queen first. If I can't though, I just shake the whole frame off. I think when you're doing any sort of splits or queen introduction and you're making them go through a hopelessly queenless stage, you need to shake the frames off to make sure that you're getting all of them. Otherwise, it's just kind of a bit of a useless exercise. Hi Lawrence, first queen of 2 I got from you a couple of weeks ago accepted and looks though like it started laying today. Excellent news, lots of queens go out this year. Where are we? I've got my little tracker up there. Yeah, we took 2,000 queens in so far this year. 2,000 Crazy. Um, Alex Ward says, I found bees crawling from my hive with deformed wing virus, can't see any in the hive itself, used Apivar last year and gas vapped on their so-called brood break, have a super on now, so what would you do for mites? So, um, yeah, that's, that's strange. You do get the odd bee with deformed wing virus at this point in the year. but the mite load's still pretty low. So if I see a bee that's got deformed wing virus just wandering around, I'll kind of— I'll be like, yeah, but it doesn't— I don't take any action on that. And like you say, you can't see any in the hive itself. You used Apivar, you gas vapped them on their brood break, have a super on now. So what would you do for mites? I wouldn't do anything. I just monitor them. If you wanted to, you could kind of do like an alcohol wash and actually test what the mite load is, but If that was me, I'd just be, I'd just be cracking on as normal. Harry says, thanks for the new queen, Lawrence. Looks good. We'll want some more soon. Have sold 20 nucs. Everyone's bees died here down south, so there is high demand. Your nucs sold out rapidly as always. So they did. Yeah, I put on, what was it, 2 days ago I put another batch on and we sold 30. So I've got to turn that off again because I didn't think I'd sell 30 over the weekend. But it is. I spoke to a guy called up, I think you know him, he called me up to get some queens and he was telling me about your area, that loads of people's bees have died. And having spoken to a lot of people across the UK, a lot of people struggled this year. Um, I think as a result of a very warm, very warm winter and a very wet summer, um, caught a lot of people out, a lot of dead bees. It's not good. Second queen tab opened yesterday, so fingers crossed. So I wish you the best of luck. Uh, Harry says, looking at the weather, I think we might be having some sun finally. About time. It does look good this week, looks nice now. So I've got the paddling pool out ready to go. Says, update Facebook group at the end of the year. Just come back in after inspecting my QA and my girls have gone mad and center is filled in completely with brood and have glued the foundation in place as well. Excellent. to get my Q8 sorted this week. That was part of my plan today, but I didn't actually get around to doing it. I gave up after 4 and a half hours of solid videos. Hi Lawrence, I've done an inspection today. I think I may have a drone laying queen. Would it be okay to replace with a new queen? So yeah, drone laying queen, easy one. Just kill the queen. You'd still need to wait 8 days if there's any worker brood in there, but if she is just firing all drones, then you can just go straight in and Leave the queen in there 24 hours, then pop the tabs. But you do need to find and kill the drone laying queen first. Right. Steve's Honeybee says slugs and ants in the hive. Is it a problem? And what's the best way to deal with it? So not not like in the UK, ants are not a problem. It's not like ants where you get elsewhere where they're like mega ants. So I think you'll get like a few ants in the UK. Not the end of the world. Slugs, I think as as it gets a bit drier, the slugs will go away. Slugs is just a wet winter problem, but I don't think either of them do any damage to bees. Harry says I had two super seizures today. My oldest queen is going to take down the cells and introduce two new queens. Excellent. Adam says I think I stay with your national nuke. Okay, no worries, Adam. I think we spoke earlier today, didn't we? Cub Rider says, what are the laws on what kind of oxalic acid you can vape with? I just purchased a tub of powder oxalic off the internet. Is it illegal to use? So yes, it is. The only treatment that is authorized by the VMD in terms of powder for sublimation is apibioxal, and there's a few other oxalic acid treatments that you can use, kind of like liquids or pre-made up liquids. And it's like OxyV and stuff like that. But you are not allowed to use just pure, perfectly pure oxalic acid from the internet because you have to use the one that's got 20% added glucose into it, which makes no sense. Absolutely no sense. Drives me mad. But that is, that is the rule. Rubbish. Uh, Joe Murphy says, should you use bleach to clean poly after a winter dead out? How far with sanitizing do you need to go for poly? probably after winter dead out. So yes, 100%, that is prime suspect— winter dead out. Take all the frames out, we burn all the frames. If you want to recover the wax, recover the wax, but then you should clean all of the boxes using like soda crystals. Clean it, scrape it, get all of the gunk off it, and then dip it in bleach, sodium hypochlorite, at the correct, um, concentration, and then it is good to use again. Definitely do it though. Um, are you saying spring has now gone? I don't think so. I think spring is here. Hope so. We answered that one there. Uh, Paul Watson says, hi again. I take it you're not expecting a spring crop this year here in South Derbyshire? The white blossoms have only just come— only this week come out. I have nearly a super of honey foraged on one hive. So that's good. And I do think that there is like a glimmer of hope for a spring But I'm not, I'm not holding out for like a mega spring crop. But I'm not feeding anymore. The bees are taking care of themselves now. And, uh, what I definitely won't do this year is I won't take a separate spring crop, which I have done the last couple of years. Uh, and I think if the bees, if the bees perform throughout April and May and there's a nice spring crop to be taken before the June gap, then I'll always take it now, just because I think you've got to take it when it's there. in the UK, or it goes pretty quickly. But this year I'm not expecting there to be that much there, but I'd like to be proved wrong. It'd be nice. Uh, Liam G says, hi Lawrence, I did 3 splits 2 and a half weeks ago. Since it's early, I will have to watch the nucs for swarming. Um, yeah, you will. Colonies will always build back up to the point where they're, where they're going to swarm, so just do your weekly inspections. Flower Street Farm Bee says hello from Colorado. Hello, good evening. Stacy Richards says, with regards to my previous comment, supercedure versus swarm, there was loads of charged cells but there were 2 capped ones. I'd say 8 charged and more that weren't. So 100%, that is swarming without a shadow of a doubt. I'm, I'm glad, I'm glad after seeing all of those comments that it was swarming. I was pretty confident that it was going to be swarming, but there we go. Thanks for clarifying, Stacy. Hi Lawrence, thank you for the queen yesterday. Uh, watched a Bob Binney video where he popped the tabs on his queen cages, but he placed decorator's tape over the holes pierced with a frame now. So that is, that is the Bob Binney method. That is also the method that Melitta Bees use. Uh, it's, it is, it's a really good method, that. So if you're doing any sort of slow release where you can't get back, a lot of people do that. And, and I think one on Bob's videos, he doesn't, he doesn't go through the hopelessly queenless stage, he just Takes the queen out, puts a new one in, and says, right, I'm just going to leave them to it. And he seems to have success with that. I like to give the advice going hopelessly queenless because I know it works like 100% of the time. If you shake off all the bees, if you kill all the queen cells, you never ever get a failed introduction. And I just hate to think that people spend good money on a queen and then get a failed introduction. But, you know, Bob, Bob is the man. Bob knows his stuff. Bob is 100 times better beekeeper than me, so I'd listen to Bob and not me. Uh, he said it delayed release by a few days so he didn't have to revisit apiaries. It is a very good technique. I think a lot of people are using that technique now. Oh, we're back to the swimming pool. Wow, this shows how far I am behind. So black plastic on the pool water to help warm it a bit. Yeah, so I, I have bought these things called SolarPod Pluses. I set up loads of different ways of trying to warm the pool up and all of them failed miserably because the pump's just got too much pressure on it. I think I've figured it out. You would— you'd like it, it's up your street. Just wanted to say thanks for my 6 queens, all accepted and laying well. My main colony is bursting. Can a Demeray be done if I only have foundation? Um, so, so a Demeray works best with only foundation, 100%. Like, a Demeray, you can use drawn comb, and I, I'm updating the Demeray video this year because I'm aware that It's not, it's not perfect, the video that I did previously on it, but I would say if you're doing a demaray and you've got a choice between drawn comb and foundation, 100% foundation works really, really well. That would be the way that I would do it. Evening, Laurence, looking forward to receiving my first nuc from you this Wednesday. Would you recommend feeding them once I've transferred them into a hive? Um, so yes, definitely. I think check your inbox, there should be an email with detailed instructions in there, Brian. But certainly once you put them into their hive, get the feeder on and just feed them, even just to kind of get them going. First couple of feeders full, you want to wait until they're covering 80% of the brood box, and then you want to stop feeding, get your supers on. But I always recommend feeding as soon as the nucs go in, definitely. Right, another sip of my tea. What tea have I got today? I've got Organic Nighttime by Pukka Teas. Love that tease. David McDowell says, okay, tried requeening a hopelessly queenless hive. They would not accept them. Tried twice. Definitely no queen cells, no queen. The only way they moved forward was to give them a donor frame of eggs. And what did they— so these are stubborn ladies. And what did they do with the donor frame of eggs? Did they turn it into queen cells? Because that's crazy. Because if they turn it into queen cells, then they are hopelessly queenless. Um, but it's sometimes you get this like genetic mismatch where the bees just say Uh-uh, we're not accepting that queen. We don't like her at all. I would say in a scenario like that, what you can try doing though is when you get the, like, the actual full-size queen cages and you put a frame of brood in there, like emerging brood, and you've got the bees have got to literally be poking through the emerging brood, shake all of the bees off and pop the queen directly on that frame, and then it's sealed within the colony. So then all of the emerging bees start to come out and then the queen is there, so the queen can start to lay within the colony even though they want to kill her. And then that can work, and you can kind of like force an introduction that way. Works quite well. I put water out for my bees to prevent them going to my neighbor's swimming pool. That's, that's a good idea. But you know what, they, they go for the most horrible water possible. If you put out nice clean water for them, they just go. Like, so my swimming pool— it's not, it's not true— my paddling pool just gets left with rainwater over the year like over the winter, and they're like all leaves and stuff inside it, and they love it. It's like brown and the bees are just busy working it. And then when you fill it up and it's got chlorine and stuff in it, they love it as well. Uh, Yeah, I replied to your review email. It was a complicated reply, loud and complicated set of circumstances, and too drawn out to explain in messages. Time will tell with the outcome though. Well, okay, I'll have a look. I'll have a look at that again. I've forgotten which one that is now. Um, says bee stings, that is all. says, can you introduce a new queen with supers on and it not be a problem? So yeah, there's no— doesn't matter how big the colony is. Can be 2-frame nuc, can be treble brood with 6 supers on. I really don't think it makes a massive difference as long as you get them hopelessly queenless, then you should get a good introduction. Follow on from Andrew says, bee stings. I used to also get knocked out by pyriton, but found some new antihistamines. The active ingredient is fexofenadine hydrochloride. Game changer. One tablet a day and non-drowsy. Excellent. That's good tip. Fex fexofenadine hydrochloride. Right. Keep an eye out for that one. Harry says, I'm raising some queens about twenty and don't want to do apidays, but want to do nucs. One frame of brood and one frame of stores. Do I need to introduce the sealed queen cell when I make the nuc? Um, so no, you need to— you can, you can do it that way. So you can make up a nuc and put the introduced, like, introduce the queen cell at that point. But the way that I like to do it is going through the hopelessly queenless stage. So put your frame in there with a frame of stores, frame of brood, and the bees will make emergency queen cells I go back in day 8, tap down all the queen cells, and on the day that I tap down the queen cells, I'll add a freshly sealed queen cell into it like that. Perfect way of doing it because you just— they get like, oh, you're taking down all my queen cells, but now we are hoping to queen this immediately, but you've given me a cell. And you see them immediately drawn to it like that. Now some people will just take a frame brood, take a frame of stores, and just put them all together and say they get success. But that's not the way that I do it, and whenever I tried doing it like that, they took down the cell and they kept their own emergency cells. So I just, you know, I can only advise what I do, but I would go through that process and just time your cells to be capped at the time that the frames are going to have emergency cells on them. Shannon says hi. Hello, Shannon. It's hard to believe I've been talking for an hour and 46 minutes already, and I've not Got a third of the way down my tea, so I'm going to drink a little bit more. I'm aware that's not tea and that's my apple juice. I'm trying to get some sugars back into me today. I got really badly dehydrated today. Not used to not wearing my ultra suit whilst doing work. Edward Heathcote, new channel member as well. Excellent. I, I find a lot of people join as channel members when I'm doing live streams, and as I said before, I will plug it again. There is a huge amount of videos to come on there at the moment now that the weather is getting better, and I've got a serious deadline, which is a new child that is about to be born. I've gotta up my game and do a lot of videos, so become a channel member now. It's a good time to come. Will a frame of eggs from a good queen buckfast ensure a better queen, i.e., the bloodline? And how much does the mating process impact from the drones that are available? Um, so it definitely will. impact the, the bloodline. But what you need to remember is how pure that Buckfast queen is. So I'll answer that in 2 bits. So the drones, massively important, the drones. The drones are going to end up being kind of like 50% of the genetics that you're going to have, and it's 50% that you can't really control. So finding an apiary where you've got some sort of control over that is, is going to really pay dividends. And in the UK and, and kind of where you are, David, it's the best place to do that is the coast, is to try and find somewhere near the coast. Because when you're by the coast, you can say, right, I know that there's nothing that way because that is the sea and there's nothing coming in that way. So at least if you, if you set up an apiary like by the sea, and then what you do is you have like a ring around it and you know they're not going to go and mate out by the city, but then you're trying to kind of put these satellite apiaries around to flood the area with drones, that's going to be like the most successful way of doing it within the UK. Alternatively, if you've got somewhere that is like really, really remote, there might be the odd few colony, wild colonies of bees knocking around there, but there's not going to be thousands of colonies of bees knocking around there. And then if you go up there and you put a lot of good colonies up there and flood them with drones, you should get good success at not controlling the drones, but at least influencing the drones as best as you possibly can. But then it comes back to the pureness of the queen as well. So if you're, if you're taking like an F1 Buckfast queen and eggs from that F1 Buckfast queen, then you're only going to be getting kind of like 25% of the actual pure mother's genetics into that line. Whereas if you're taking eggs from a pure Buckfast queen, then you're getting 50%. So it does make like a very, very big difference. So I would advise to try and get a pure Buckfast queen as opposed to an F1 Buckfast queen if you're looking at doing any sort of grafting. I took the splits I did at the weekend away to a different apiary. How long do they stay there before I can take them back to the original apiary? So at least a good few weeks, like the longer the better really. Definitely not just a couple of days, but after maybe 3 or 4 weeks the majority of the bees will respect the new location that you give them. You might get a few that drift back to the original site, but as long as you've got some beehives there, they'll all find a home. I would say 3 or 4 weeks maybe. I've got a very itchy nose. Hi Lawrence, my bees seem to have stopped trying to supersede my wingless queen now, although she's really slow laying. I'll give her another week and I'll speak to you again. So yeah, we will fix any issues with any queens like that, don't worry. Just give me a shout. Uh, Steve's Honeybee says, I would like to try grafting. Do you have any videos on it? So yeah, so there is a, uh, I forget what it's called. It's basically my queen rearing video. So if you go onto the channel and Google queen rearing, then there are 2 videos and it's the longer one of the 2, and it shows I do do a fair bit of grafting on there. Good fun grafting, very satisfying. I like the Chinese grafting tool. Edward Heathcote, channel member, says, went into both my hives, double brood and double supers, starting to swarm prep. One, one is the one that swarmed already, I think, and has your new queen in it. Sounds good. Uh, Stephen says, use one of my queen cells in a nuc. I checked 5 days ago and she was running around with white stringy piece from the rear. Is she mated? Um, so, so possibly. Yeah, could be. Never seen, never seen that happen on a virgin like that, but that, yeah, could be. Uh, Gerald, I know, I don't know that I'm gonna call you Gerald just because I think that's fitting. It says if you have an old queen and swarm cells, you can force supersedure by squishing her. Uh, you can, you can do forced supersedure, but I'm not sure you could do that with the swarm cells. I don't think by squishing the queen they would stop swarming. I think they still swarm. There's a couple of ways of doing forced supersedures. I might try some forced supersedures this year because they could be quite fun. Good evening, Laurence. We got a Buckfast queen off you a couple of weeks ago. We had particularly aggressive bees and they were a nightmare last year. They survived the winter. When we inspected, they were queenless. The queen arrived, they started trying to feed her straight away. Last week's inspection, she was out of the cage and laying. Checked today and they have either killed her or she's died. That's not good. Um, I wonder why they've done that. Have they left— but has she left behind cells? Because they do some— got another bit down there, one sec. Says, any advice please? Don't want to keep buying queens and then killing them. We wanted to requeen because they were so aggressive. P.S., it's Judy, not Hunter. Um, so, so like I say, they do occasionally try and supersede them. So, so whenever I say to people, are you introducing queens, watch out for supersedure cells. And if you see supersedure cells, take them down. Because it's just, if you've got, like you say, you've got aggressive bees, it might be like dark Mongol bees, and you're trying to requeen with a Buckfast queen, like an orangey Buckfast queen, and they try and supersede even though it's cells or like larva from the new queen. The bees think, the dark bees think they're being clever trying to supersede, but you just need to keep on taking them down until you get the first round of brood out from the new queen, and then they just stop doing it. So it's a bit of a nuance of requeening darker bees, and it is fixable. You just need to keep them going back in like every 4 or 5 days and just taking down the cells. Otherwise, if they get them to the point where they're capped, they can kill the queen. It's like a failed introduction. Good evening, Adam. Hope your queen activities went well this week. Looking forward to next blog. Can you do a myth-busting video for all these old wives' tales I keep hearing in beekeeping. Some people won't be told otherwise even if you're giving them sources and they have none. And it would be good— I should, I should do some myth-busting. But I don't like just myth-busting by saying, oh, that's wrong. Let's try it. Let's kind of— let's, uh, let's prove some of them wrong. But there are some, there are some shocking ones in beekeeping. The one that I hear more often, all the time, is that if there is A cell being made in the center of a frame is supersedure, and I see people send me pictures of like ten cells in the center of a frame, not at the bottom, and it's like supersedure because it's in the center, and I just like it's madness, absolute madness. You've just sent me a picture of ten cells; there's no way it's supersedure. So we could we could myth bust that one. Ben Davis says, "Why is it you have to wait eight days to then introduce the queen?" So. In order— so my method— not my method, the method that I use is hopelessly queenless method. It means that you have to wait until the bees have no resources to create themselves their own queen. So when you kill the queen, what they still have is they still have brood. So the capped brood they can't do anything with, but the eggs and the young larvae, they can turn them into queens using the emergency impulse. So if you just go in and kill a queen and then put a new queen in there, they, they want to kill her because they're like, oh, you're not my queen. We've got eggs and larva. Like, this is the, the hierarchy: our existing queen that you just killed, eggs and larva that we can turn into a new queen, your new mated queen. So we're going to go in that order. And it's, and it's true, it does happen. I've seen it. So this is what I used to do, used to lose loads of queens. You kill the queen, you put a new queen in, and you just open the cage And they just go in and kill her and then make queen cells and try and requeen. So that 8 days is eliminating that bit in the middle. It's basically saying, right, you can't have that, you can't have eggs, you can't have larvae. So by waiting 8 days, you let them try and force the issue by creating queen cells, and then you take them all down. And on the 8th day, when you take them down, the only thing that's left is capped brood. There's no open brood, there's no eggs, there's no young larvae. So then they're hopelessly queenless. They don't have a queen, they don't have the resources to make a new queen. Basically, they are well desperate at that point, so they'll just take anything that you give them. JK Photography says, opened a hive, first frame out, fat queen on the frame, but she was vigorously piping. Does that mean anything bad? So no, it doesn't mean anything bad. And again, that's, that's a myth. Virgin queens pipe, mated queens pipe. It's just, uh, it's just a noise that they make. When we get the queens delivered, you hear it all the time. You hear it out of the boxes, you hear it in the incubator. It's just the noise that they make, so it doesn't mean anything bad at all. Be fine. Hey Lawrence, I'm from the US, have a question. Hello, by the way. In the beginning of the spring, before the bees start to make swarm cells, if you have done an early demarée split, would this stop the swarming impulse? 100%, yeah, definitely. But don't do it too early. My rule, brood box full of bees, 2 supers full of bees, go ahead and do your Demerara split. And it will— if you do it at the right time, it stops them swarming dead. Welcome Brian Salt, another channel member as well, coming at the right time. Uh, so what are we up to? 9:39. Oh, I'm catching up. It's 9:39, the comments that I'm on now, and we're at 9:53, so I'm only 14 minutes behind. And we are at 1 hour 57, but I, I'm not letting these comments go, so I'm going to get to the end. So if you've got any questions I will answer your questions, but I'm going to speed up again. Cal Despas says, with regards to my previous message about getting them to move the honey from the brood box to the super, what does bruising the cappings mean? Is it scoring them with a decapping fork? So yeah, it's basically, as opposed to, you can score them, but what I like to do is just kind of get my hive tool and just basically bash them and smush them up a bit. So you're not taking the cappings off, you're kind of breaking the cappings. You can score score it at the same time. Uh, Stephen Meacham says, my scenario was the same as David McDowell's. As soon as I put in egg frame, they made one, uh, GC after the new queen was killed. So leaving them to it. So, so it is, it is the same thing. You need to get in there before they cap over that swarm cell, that emergency cell, and just keep on taking it down. I bet you it's dark bees. Ben Wong says, did I ask my queen— my Q— my question about your queen breeder vid? If not, what's the best way to keep her knocked back in your nuc? So the tip that I found with breeder queens when you're knocking them back is you need to remove both the bees and the brood. What I used to do is I used to just take the brood out, just take frames of brood out, shake the bees off, and just go and give the brood to another hive or make up a split or do whatever. And I found that it was almost serving like the wrong— I was— you, you don't want your queen, your breeder queen, to lay that many eggs. So by just taking the brood out, what you're saying to the queen is lay more eggs. So she would just— I'd come back and there'd just be like 6 frames of eggs laid. And I don't want you to do that. I wanted you to not lay as many eggs. So don't just take out the brood. What you need to do is take out the brood and the bees, and you need to knock them back to kind of like constantly like 2 or 3 frames throughout the whole season. by taking the brood and the bees out and making splits and then just giving them foundation. And you're basically like having them teetering on the edge of death. Sounds, sounds a little bit grim, but that is the way to keep them going for a very, very long time. But then make sure that you build them up strong enough to overwinter. So they need to overwinter like a strong, nice overwintered nuc. So kind of like stop doing that maybe middle of July. earlier than you would think. Let them build up and let them overwinter properly. Uh, Jay, another channel member, says, evening, Lawrence, looking forward to seeing today's videos. I'm very excited. I, I had to send back my desktop to like a quite powerful desktop that started making horrendous noises, so I sent that back to Dell. So I'm on my laptop tonight and I'm not looking forward to editing on my laptop. It's a pretty decent laptop, but it's— it does not like Adobe Premiere at all. So hopefully I get my desktop back this week. Harry says, "Can you recommend a good breeder queen supplier or can you sell me one?" So I might be able to sell you one. Might be able to sell you one, but I can't tell you. I can't tell you where it's from, and no, I can't recommend anyone in the UK, unfortunately. That that's not to say that there's no good queen breeders in the UK. There is, but I just. want to tell people who they are. I'd say I reckon I'll be able to sort you one out, Harry. Uh, Also tried the queen in the metal introduction cage, still wouldn't accept with brood placed within it, still wouldn't accept. In Yoda voice, strong they are in pissing a beekeeper off. Yeah, that is annoying. I wonder why they did that. I'd love to know, you know, fly on the wall or bee on the wall. Why would they not accept it. Very strange. Uh, Harry says, I had a queen with a broken wing and is brilliant. 10 frames of brood and beautiful looking queen. This was last year's queen, couldn't be happier with her. Almost a pre-clipped queen. Yeah, some— like, I've got a queen like that, broken leg, which is brilliant. Some— sometimes they just— they're not that fast. As long as they can lay eggs, I think they're good to go. Uh, Alex says, I've learned so much from your channel, thanks. I wish I knew how addictive this hobby can be. My 9-year-old wanted to try it and we are both Addicted. Thank you, Alex. It is incredibly addictive, beekeeping. Yeah. Uh, Hunter the Springer Spaniel says, okay, thank you, we'll try that. They have managed to make 2 fully capped queen cells from the Buckfast queen's eggs. Should I remove them or leave them to hatch? They're very dark bees. So if, if the queen's still there, which I think you said they killed her, then, um, you just— I just leave them to hatch. They will be from the Buckfast queen's eggs, so you'll still get kind of like 50% of that genetics coming through. Um, and like you say, they are very dark bees. It is a nuance of dark bees that they do not like you trying to requeen them with Buckfast, so you do just need to go in every 3 or 4 days, constantly knock down the cells, or use a queen introduction like frame, and then that's a good way of doing it as well. Gives them a bit more protection. He says, should I try a different queen off you? I picked the Buckfast just because they seem like a lovely temperament. I don't think it's— it's not so much that it's that they're sensing that it's a Buckfast queen, they're just sensing that it's not one of them. So I think regardless of the genetics of the queen that you put in there, dark bees are just very, very picky in terms of queen introduction. So I think any of them would be, would be the same. You can, you can definitely try again. Uh, John Hayes says, what is a good amount of hives in an apiary? Is there an ideal amount? So, so I have literally gone from having 4 colonies in an apiary to having 40 colonies in an apiary, and then all the way back down again now. So I don't have any more than 12. 12 is my number now. It seems like a weird number, I know, 12, but it basically is 4 to a pallet. So in the apiaries, if you have 4 to a pallet, it's 3 pallets. But I, I don't necessarily set all my colonies up like that. That's just where the number came from. But I think you, you start to get like diminishing returns if you go above 12. for where we are. Now, where you have like arable crops, you could get probably 30 into a specific crop, 30 or 40. A lot of bee farmers do that. But just for me, it's almost like a mindset as well. I used to hate going to an apiary. You pull up at an apiary, you're like, 40 hives, that is properly hard work. If you pull up and there's only 12, you're just like, that's a piece of walk in the park. He swore there. To try and not swear on the live streams because there are children here, but 12 is what I would go for. Uh, says, if you accidentally leave a queen cell but it's very— but it's still very early— it's— sorry, if you accidentally leave a queen cell but it's still in the very early stages and doesn't have larva in it, then you add a new queen, will they then lay in the queen cup and kill the mated queen? Not, not necessarily. Who's going to lay in the— who's going to lay in the queen cup? So wait there. If you accidentally leave a queen cell but it's still in the very early stages and doesn't have larva in it, and then you add a new queen, will they then— I'm well confused by that question, Ben. Who's going to lay in there? Because if you're adding a new queen in, you should have killed the queen before. So the only one who's going to lay in there is the queen. So she should be— she should be long gone. Might have misunderstood that question. Uh, David says, where do you draw the line on chalk brood? Revived a local nuc that was full of damp, etc., moved to a new hive. They seem to now be clearing and cleaning cells, minimal now. Leave the queen alone? I'm not a fan of chalk brood. Always there. It's, it's very much queen-related chalk brood. But I do find as well, like, if you have a colony, if I like frames that are contaminated with chalk brood, it will bring it out on a queen that isn't really even that susceptible to chalk brood. So you might have a new, nice new Buckfast queen in there, shouldn't be getting chalk brood, but it still keeps on coming up. So I like to just get rid of the frames as well. So requeen, but also if you have to, shook swarm, and then it fixes it. I don't like chalk brood, really don't like it. Hi Lawrence, spoke a few days ago about possible dysentery problem with a newly arrived nuc. Just to let you know that the problem seems to have resolved itself, but that bee poo takes cleaning off. Yeah, so, so the conversation went a little bit like this, which was The nuc had been confined, and I think we agreed that it was confined over a long period. It's quite cold, the bees have been fed, and then you get like a day where the bees have just gone out and done a lot of pooing. But it does, it's quite thick, isn't it? But I'm glad, I'm glad to hear that the problem has resolved itself. And I think with the weather like you'll see next week, you shouldn't have any more poo problems around the front of the hive. It was dark bees. Like, it's dark bees every single time, and it's not you know, I don't hate on dark bees. I do hate on dark bees a little bit, but they are notoriously difficult to requeen. Hey everyone, 9 swarm traps in my yard, everyone is being checked out, so my yard is loaded with bees flying around. So cool. I love swarm traps. I know you shouldn't catch swarms and it's bad to catch swarms, definitely don't use frames, and that is me being honest, I don't use frames, but there is nothing better than watching a colony, like a big swarm, go into a swarm trap. Brilliant. And again, Stephen says yes, they are a mix of local bees. So I think a lot of these, a lot of these issues, and I promise you I'm not kind of just saying that for the sake of saying it, it's dark local native AMM bees. When you try and introduce queens into them, they do try and supersede them. It's not the queen's fault. They're not superseding because they're like, oh, like there's a fault with that queen, I'm going to supersede you. they're superseding to try and preserve their genetics. Makes no sense because they're not preserving their genetics. It's like the new queen's eggs. But trust me, keep on taking down the cells and it, it does fix it very, very quickly. One frame, one round of brood, and it's gone. My elders came to the kitchen where I'm listening and heard you talking about killing virgins. Got some funny looks. Brilliant. Sorry about that. Bought 2 Buckfast from you, one got propolis killing her. The bees are a swarm I caught last year and her admin is really dark. I've transferred frame of eggs on the split and left one queen cell. Sorry to hear that, Aiden. Does seem to be common denominator here is dark bees. Um, Paul Lewis says, will the dark bees prevent the Buckfast queen from laying? So they— it doesn't happen all the time, it's not kind of like every single time that happens, but they won't necessarily prevent her from laying, but they Let her lay a bit and then bump her off and then make emergency queen cells from her eggs, or supercedure cells, one or the other, if she goes and lays in a cell cup. But you do, you've got to keep on taking them down, keep on taking them down, and then they soon learn, and then you end up with good bees. Chris says, another trick with requeening a tricky colony is to make up a nuc with nurse bees, frame above the queen that's going to trick, introduce the queen to the nuc, and then add the nuc back to the queenless colony once laying. So that, that is a good way of doing it. And I say that there's no difference in terms of like the size of a colony when it's hopefully queenless, but the makeup of the colony does, does kind of impact it. So if you're like you're saying there, you're just getting the nice young friendly nurse bees into a nuc and introducing the queen to that, it's— it does make a big difference. Okay, great, I'll send an email regarding the queen. No need to tell me the breeder, just pure buck fast would be brilliant if at all possible. See what we can do. Harry, uh, Harry says loads of people in clubs say Buckfast queens don't work in this climate, etc., etc., etc. Buckfast are called the perfect bee for a reason. What's funny, Harry, is the people that say that local— sorry, that Buckfast queens don't work in this climate have never tried Buckfast bees. So how do they know? How do they know that Buckfast bees don't work in this climate? They definitely do work in this climate, and they outperform like local native Mongols, like by a factor of 10. But you know, who am I to say what works and what doesn't? Ben Davis says, I've been stung twice today as my colony does not have a queen. Looking forward to receiving your mated queen so they calm down again. They will certainly calm down once they get a nice queen in there. Oh wow, this is brilliant! My wife's just got home and Ivy's just got home. 5 past 10, out a bit late, and I'm down to the last question. We're 2 hours and 9 minutes in. Good evening, sorry I'm late, moving bees. Well, I'm afraid I, I'm just about finished, um, so you caught it just the very, very end. But no worries, everyone can go back and watch it kind of like at any point throughout the year, uh, or you can listen to it as a podcast in your car. But that is me done for the night. I hope you enjoyed the stream. I certainly did enjoy the stream. I didn't get anywhere near to finishing my tea, but I'm probably going to enjoy that now. Uh, thanks for everyone who signed up as channel members. I will plug it one more time, perfect time to become a member at the moment because we've got so many videos going onto the channel, very, very relevant. If you've not hit the like button already, I would massively appreciate you to hit— appreciate it if you hit the like button. But I'll see you in 2 weeks' time, and I hope you enjoy Griff's stream next week.