Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 65

Hello and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I was gonna say before I started this, the first person to mention the weather in a derogatory sense is getting banned for life. And before I even got here, Lynette had put, good evening, glad this popped up. I've been checking all day and was starting to think the heat had addled my brain and I'd missed it. So I'll let you off, Lynette. Um, not directly moaning about the weather, but come on, I love the warm weather, absolutely love it. I'll take it every day of the week. John's saying it's going to be a quiet one with the weather. I reckon you're probably right. We have 7 people here today, but I've got a new cool feature here so you can see John's comment is up on the left-hand side there, and then we've also got the live comments. So all of your comments will appear on there. Hopefully it won't be too quick, but I think it probably will be. I will answer everybody's questions and I'll give you kind of like 1 or 2 or 3 final calls, and then if there's no questions, I reckon we should just all go back outside and enjoy the sunshine. Probably a good idea. Lynette's thinking it's going to be a quick one as well. John has hit the like button. Thank you very much, John. Denby Honey says, when will you start treating? So normally I like to treat middle of August, take all of my honey off around then. Nice warm day in the middle of August, take my honey off, put my treatments in. I reckon this year is definitely going to be 2 weeks early, so back end of July if I can push it out for the flow here. Loads of people I know further down south, the flow is long gone, so they're treating already. and if it's gone, there's no point trying to eke it out any further. You might as well get in there and treat it as quick as you possibly can. Yeah, I could bulk out the detail. That is a good shout. I like your thinking. Right, I've extracted spring and what we thought was summer flow honey, and now the girls are bringing in even more. This year has been the same for us. What are your thoughts? By far and away the best beekeeping year I've ever seen, by like a long, long, long way. Particularly good for queen matings. Absolutely fantastic. Really, like, I hate to be pessimistic or even like negative about what is positive thing. But I've always said, you know what, if you, if you took the UK and sprinkled on a little bit of sunshine and a little bit of nice weather, it would be the best place in the world. It really would. And Wales, Wales is kind of even, even better than that. Wales really is lovely. It's lush everywhere. I was up in the forest today and it's just very green still, and we've not had that much rain, but it holds on to the greenness well. So I really enjoy the warm weather. Absolutely love it. And Liz say good afternoon. Good afternoon to you too. Wasps are insane. That is very true. This year the wasps are going to be the worst they've ever been. So since they're active so early, do you reckon they will chill out and finish earlier than usual? Oh, you do not know wasps. No, they will not do that. So wasps, like, you can tell how bad the wasps are going to be by the size of their wasp nests at certain times of the year. Find— look at the wasp nests if you find one now, and they are huge. I've got one like way bigger than my head, probably 2 of my heads, I would say about this big, in one of the storage containers. And it is so busy, and we've not even got to like the, the bit where the wasps are kind of difficult yet. You've not seen anything coming. And so you've— I say you've not, you've not seen it coming, um, but you've not seen anything yet because it's going to get bad. And you really do need to put your defenses in place and make sure that you keep nice strong colonies and get those entrances defended well. Honeybee Keeper says, hey. Hello to you too. Are the drones from a laying worker colony fertile? Can they mate with a virgin queen? I suspect not. I don't think they are. I don't have any science to back that up, but you can see from the quality of the eggs that are laid and the larvae that hatch out from them, or the multiple larvae that hatch out, and then the one that they decide to feed, and you just think, no, that's just all wrong. But I have no evidence to back that up. And if anyone does have evidence to back that up, that would be brilliant, but my guess is no. Uh, John says no wasps in Aberdeenshire yet. Wow, they are making their way up to you as we speak, John. Uh, Leaves Bee says, evening, Lawrence, hope you're well. Hope you're well too. Hi Lawrence, is it too late to transfer a nuc into a 12-frame hive? Absolutely not, get it in there straight away. Got a few more weeks left, got a good few more weeks left, if not a couple of months left, for hiving things up like that. Definitely want to give them the space if they need it. Uh, Collector Rick's Honeybee says, stack silver, gold, and honey and protect your wealth with real money. Very good point. John Sylvester says, good afternoon, Lawrence. The postman messed up again twice in one week, so I won't get my queens until tomorrow. I had to make a complaint, but thank you once again for them. Oh, that is frustrating. All I will say is that Royal Mail are very, very good when it comes to looking after the post over the evening. And people will think, well, it's 32, 33 degrees out there. Not in the Royal Mail centers where they keep the post. They have kind of like a locker that's very well insulated, and maybe it's like 17, 18, maybe, maybe 20 degrees in there. But when you think inside a beehive, it's like 34, 35, 36 degrees. So they like it warm, um, and they're very well protected. And, you know, we'll fix any problems if they do arrive and there are issues. All things wasps, what do you use for traps distant from hives? Any other tips or tricks? I'm not on underfloor entrances and making some this week and move my new nucs to my back garden. So I did, I did a channel member exclusive on this, so anyone who is a channel member will know because I spoke about this earlier on in the week. But with wasps The best defense is a good attack, and the way that you have a good attack is by having lots of, lots of bees, huge amount of bees, big strong colonies, colonies that haven't swarmed, colonies that you've done maybe a demerare on and really turbocharged those colonies. Combine that with an underfloor entrance or an easily defendable entrance, and you should never have to worry about any guards or reducing the entrance down. The bees can just sort it out for themselves. As soon as you're looking at using traps or different baits and how far away they should be from the hives, I kind of think It's, um, it's looking at the wrong things. If you have big strong colonies, then you don't need to worry about any of that. And I think by bringing traps and stuff like that in, you almost invite the— you almost invite the wasps in. So I'm not a fan of traps, but not for— not for the reason that I don't like to kill wasps. I, I don't like to kill wasps. Wasps are the good guys. Got a lot of time for wasps. But I don't like wasps trying to kill my bees. So I, I'm not against putting a trap in place of a beehive. So if a beehive has been really battered by wasps, I would take that beehive, move it off to another apiary, and in its place I would put a trap. And the reason I would do that is I know what wasps do. They'll just buzz around there for a bit and they'll just move on to the next one and do the same to the next one. So when they've really imprinted kind of like their pheromone, their stealing, thieving pheromone on the outside of the hive, you've got to do something. Otherwise the problem just doesn't go away and it gets worse and worse. So you have to, you have to do traps at some point, but I don't proactively put traps out. But the best things you can do, big strong colonies, underfloor entrances, and go around the apiaries and look for the wasp's nest. You generally find them and then just kill the wasp's nest. That's a much, much better way of doing it, I would say. When is the best time to start 2 nucs? I'm guessing that says, um, I would say in spring around April or May. Channel member says, thank you for the members video this week, keep it up. Thank Thank you, and apologies it's taken so long to get those out, but we are back on track. Aiden says, hey, one of my queens went on a mating flight, and when she came back, she went underneath the floor inside of the— sorry, get that out— underneath the floor inside of in the entrance. Right, it wasn't just me reading it wrong. Sorry, sorry, Aiden. Right, what is the best way to stop this happening? Um, they do do that a lot, queens. They just kind of like go down underneath the entrance. I don't think there's really much you could do to stop it other than sealing up the underside of the entrance, like putting the, putting the thing in so there's no smell coming out. I would do something like that. Is it a good idea to take the supers nearly full but only half capped off a laying worker colony and put them on a strong queen-right colony to finish filling and cap? Definitely. It was going to be the easiest answer ever, I nearly choked. Definitely, the answer is yes. I'm a 13-year-old beekeeper and just want some advice. So go ahead, more than happy to help. Says, happy with my order today, definitely a shorter season. Notice the farmers are combining the fields already as well. They are certainly making their hay whilst the sun shines. Says, hi, I picked up my first nuc 3 weeks ago. Should I keep feeding them syrup to get the comb built or take it off now and add it later ready for winter? So I always recommend people when they get their nuc, feed it first. First off, feed it, give it 1 or 2 litres, but then if you're getting weather like we're getting at the moment and you're seeing lots of activity at the entrance and the bees bringing in pollen, bringing in nectar, I would definitely stop feeding because it is a waste of time with the weather that we're having. But that does depend on where you are. If you're really far down south, the flow might have stopped and there might not be anything. And if you're kind of where we are at the moment, North Wales, or anywhere across that band, and it's wonderful and there's a really nice flow on, then you do not need to feed. I would take some local advice on that one. If you don't know whether there's a flow or not going on, just ask a beekeeper and they should be able to tell you. Thanks. Regarding wasps, ominous. My hives have entrance rescuers and I've narrowed my spindles for nucs to a slither of a pie. Uh, do you like the trunking on front? I've seen people put the trunking on front so it's kind of like a tunnel entrance where the bees have to go through. It's nowhere near as good as an underfloor entrance. Like, it does work, tunnel entrances do work, and they do make it more defendable for the bees, but the underfloor entrances are considerably better, I would say. Was not an issue, must have damaged Carnie C when marking her. 10 days later, no sign of her or eggs or larvae. So next time using a marking catcher and not handling them. Future. Oh, that is not good, especially when you've named— you've named the queen as well. Oh, John, sorry to hear that. Titan Game says, hi Lawrence, your wood floors you made, could you use the entrance reducer in the gap entrance? Um, you, you could if you want to close the entrances up on the floors that I made. The easiest way of doing it is a foam bung. So if you just go down the skip and get some old chairs or something, foam, you know, like a sofa, cut it open, get the foam out, uh, you can get loads of this for free. And then you just cut big strips and imagine Imagine the slot is something like that. You want a, you want a really big chunky strip in all directions, and then all you do if you ever want to reduce the entrance is you just stick it in the kind of underfloor entrance bit and it just closes off any bit that you need to close off. You don't need to do it though. That's the beauty of the underfloor entrances. You just, you just don't need to do it. The only way or the reason that I would ever do it is if I had a colony that was really dwindling down in there, and then I would go ahead and do something like that. Um, but That technique there is— it's not really designed for that, but it's fine. But it's designed for closing up the colonies and moving them. And on a wooden underfloor entrance floor, you just take this big piece of foam, stick it in a bucket of water, get it soaking, stick it in that entrance there, and then the bees can't get out. And then where they would have normally got out, they've just got this nice big foam soaky wet bung thing that they can drink when they're getting a little bit hot. It's, it's quite a cool floor, I have to say, and it only costs about a fiver to make. Saw a post on Facebook today, Royal Mail stood a nuc on its end and put in 2 plastic Bags. Do you know what, I'll stick up for Royal Mail here. Royal Mail are really, really, really good. They are exceptional on the whole. And you know, I'll add in the on the whole because you will get exceptions where something's happened or something's gone wrong, and obviously a picture might not tell the entire story, but they really go out of their way to do the very best for the bees at every single step along the way. Like, anytime I'm moving bees or queens through Royal Mail They go above and beyond. And here's an example of like just last week, and anybody who was caught up in this situation will know exactly what happened here. So I was in a rush on a Friday trying to send out some queens, and Royal Mail click and drop went down. And I'm singing their praises, but it did go down for a little bit for about five minutes. So I applied postage to about seventy queens, I think, and I applied the wrong postage. So I used tracked forty-eight postage as opposed to the Royal like special delivery one. So this was on a Friday for delivery on a Saturday. So everyone got texts on Friday night saying. Oh, we've got your order and it's going to be delivered on like Tuesday. And I got a couple of emails from people saying, is this right? Like it says Monday or Tuesday. And I said, oh yeah, it's just Royal Mail sometimes do that and it's definitely wrong. Like they're special deliveries, they'll be there tomorrow. I woke up the next morning, I don't know what time. Does everyone else get up really early in the summer? I've been getting up like half 4, 5 at the moment. So I got up at half 4 on Saturday morning last week and I had a couple more messages and I thought, this is, this is really weird because normally get like 1 or 2 people saying it, but to have like 5 or 6 people saying that the dates were wrong. Anyway, I looked on there and I had— I'd applied the wrong postage to 70 queens, and I just thought, what am I going to do? What do I do here? Do I try and contact the customers? Do I just hope that they're going to get there on time? And, you know, I'll always hold my hands up and try and be honest and communicate as best as I can. So I sent an email out to everyone saying, this is what's happened, I'm not sure when they're going to be delivered. I can see on some of the tracking that some of them will be— some of them are like being due to be delivered this morning. So some of them have got through. So I was really confused as to what was going on. So I sent a couple of emails out, and then somebody sent me a picture saying, my Queen's just been delivered, and I think there's something that you want to see on it. So they sent me a picture of this order, and I don't know if everyone got the same stamp on it, but basically what had happened is Royal Mail at Chester— give them like a direct shout out at Chester because they deal with all of it there— they must have like emptied the bag, knowing, you know, Oh, this is the bee man's bag. We have to look after. We have to put it in special place and stuff. And they would have gone started going through the tracking, like the the the parcels and the labels, and they would have looked at it and said, "This isn't right." Like we know it says live urgent bees inside. Like prioritize this delivery. They knew that the the tracking was wrong. They knew that I hadn't paid the right amount for it. So you know what they did? They didn't do it for free, and I wouldn't have expected them to do it for free. But they went through every single Parcel that was in that bag, every single one, and they upgraded the delivery to special delivery. Now nobody told them to do that, and I guess the guy who was doing it was probably thinking like, "I could get in a lot of trouble here because you know I'm upgrading all of these deliveries," and okay, I have to pay for them, but no one's there's been no request, there's no paperwork, and I know working in you know big corporation, it's difficult to do stuff like that. But I find Royal Mail always go above and beyond to get stuff done. So they did. They I reckon they saved like eighty percent of those queens because they wouldn't have lasted if from Friday. to Tuesday in the post would have been a very long time for them. Every single one of them was delivered by midday the following day, so they properly pulled out all the stops. I'm not— I'm not picking on you there, Lynette. I just wanted to go off on a slight tangent because I, I see people saying bad stuff about Royal Mail all the time, but there is lots and lots and lots of good stuff to be said about them too. There we go. Oh, not having an early finish after that, right? Hi Lawrence, had a couple of hives that became queenless. Now they have hatched queen cells and the queen's present, but is it too late for these colonies to thrive? Should I move these colonies in with my other colonies? So it's hard for me to say. I went in and looked at a nuc today— sorry, a colony today that I saw swarm. So I saw it swarm 2 and a half weeks ago, and what is left of it is a brood box full of bees and 6 supers full of bees and full of honey, and that's what's left. And it was a big, big prime swarm that left it. So that's one example of a colony where a swarm's gone a few weeks ago, and I definitely wouldn't merge that because it would be monstrous. And then I've got examples where, you know, they swarmed and swarmed and swarmed again like 3 times and there's like 3 frames left and we're in the process of requeening because I don't like colonies that swarm multiple times. And I would— I will be merging those ones up. So it is, it is kind of up to you to look at how much resource you have there and will it do okay on its own, on its own. But I would say there's a long, long time left of bee activity, not so much of the season. Like the honey season is very much coming to an end, and then it's a real switch and focus to getting the bees ready for winter. But there's— but time is on your hands there. So as long as you can keep them fed and you can keep them protected from wasps and robbing bees, a colony like a 2 or 3 frame split even now could overwinter in a full-size hive. But getting a 2 or 3 frame split through now and feeding it and not letting it be robbed is difficult it is challenging. So you want to start off with nice big colonies. So you need to make, need to make that judgment call. But I would say if they're on 3 or 4 frames and you've got a queen in there and the queen is laying and you can keep them protected and keep them well fed, I wouldn't merge them and keep them separate. Uh, adverts are interrupting your broadcast. Thanks, Brian. Um, we do, we do put the adverts on there. They will come up every now and again. Uh, Kieran, channel member, says, I requeened 2 AM colonies using the Abello frame cage and replaced them with Blackman and honey F1 brood frames filled to the edge with capped brood. Over the moon. Amazing. That's very, very good to hear. I remember the order well, and I'm glad that it's, uh, it's turned out so positively. Uh, Jay says I have to have a sip. Thanks for that. Oh, delish. Uh, PK, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, hope you're well. Is the flow still on in your area? Very much so. Um, normally for us, we'll kind of get a flow if we get the good weather all the way through like back end of August. It kind of merges into a heather flow here as well because at pretty much all of my sites they'll get, you know, they're maybe like 2 or 3 miles away from the heather, so they, they go and get a little bit of it and then it can go all the way through into end of September if you want. And you can imagine what would happen if you took your honey off there and didn't do any sort of, uh, varroa treatments. Can I get delivery of nucs? So we sell nucs all over the UK. We can only ship them in the UK. Steve Williams says, looking to get my hives ready for next year for my first time beekeeping. I've done my courses, don't worry. I can't decide if I should go for Langstroth or National hives, poly or cedar. Please advise. Oh, they're both very, uh, subjective to different people. I would— I, I recommend— I think I'm sticky now with my recommendations, so I would recommend a National hive. That is the one that I would go for. And I only say that because I just think it's much easier when it comes to equipment in the UK for sourcing. You know, you can get yourself a Langstroth hive, plastic or wooden or poly, and I just always fall back on like that wooden national standard because a lot of manufacturers still conform to that wooden national standard, like the exterior standard. So Abelo do, the BS Honeybees— I used to have a BS Honeybees poly hive that conformed to it as well. The Paynes one doesn't, but it still works, and the Maysmore one doesn't and it still works. But I really like the fact that the, like, the Abello and the BS Honeybees ones that fit on that wooden national format. And I just find having that flexibility to, to kind of shop around and mix and match is probably where my advice would go going forward. So like, when I buy new equipment now, this is what I buy. I make my own underfloor entrance, so the floor— I don't buy a floor with the beehive. I'll have a single, um, like, national deep brood box, so not a 14 by 12, a national deep and then I just buy the queen excluders in bulk. I'll buy 4 supers per hive. I buy a poly ashworth feeder, and I buy a wooden roof with a metal top. So that's kind of like my combo, which is mix and matching like poly and cedar all the way through, but it's mix and matching it in the right way. Like, all of the supers that I buy, they're wooden supers. So I'll go for second-grade cedar supers because they're the best bang for your buck, even though they've gone up loads in price over the last 10 years. Um, so I don't buy kind of like the kits, and I think that's, that's the good advice to people, is that you don't need to buy the kits. If you go down that exterior, uh, like footprint of a national format, you have a little bit— you can kind of choose, you can mix and match. Whereas with the Langstroth one, you definitely can't do that. You know, if you buy an NL Langstroth hive and then you put it on a licensed polyhive and try and connect the 2 together, something that I have actually done and failed with, um, it doesn't work because the configuration— um, there's no standardized format with that. So you're really locked in you go down that route with the manufacturer that you go with. Whereas if you go with the National and go with that exterior footprint, you are not locked in and you're kind of free to shop around, which I like. I marked my queen yesterday and put a little bit too much on. Will it hurt her? Um, possibly. Keep an eye on her. Um, it's, it's very easy to do that. You've got to kind of get your pens and, and dab them, you know, get the paint pumping out of them first and wipe them clean and then use them. I see I've done it, you know, you've seen the videos, very, very easy to do. No, unfortunately we cannot send anything out to the Middle East, I wish I could. Good evening. Hello to you too. My queen does not lay a lot of eggs and brood is not compact. Queen is from this year, bees are not strong, and there are a few of them, like 2 to 3 treats, could be frames. What is the problem, bad queen or just not many bees? So I get a lot of questions and queries about this kind of like over the course of the year. So it goes like this, um, I bought a queen off you like 2 or 3 weeks ago, and like she's in there, she's walking around, but she's not like— she's not doing anything, she's not laying any eggs. What's wrong with her? So I always start off by saying, you know, we'll replace the queens if there's something wrong with the queens. We will replace them for you free of charge, but let's just— let's rule out a few things first, because it could be that there's like other things going on. And a lot of the time, the colonies are not set up to accept a mated queen properly. So like in some instances, they're just under attack from wasps, and they say, could it— could it be that they're— could it the queen's not laying because they're like being absolutely blitzed by about 16,000 wasps? And I say, yeah, probably that could be a really good reason for why the queen is not laying. But it could be— we say that tongue-in-cheek— it could be wasps, it could be robbing bees, it could be drought, it could be the fact that there's no flow on, it could be that they're being attacked by anything else. There are so many reasons for a queen not laying. Queen needs to have like everything laid out on a plate for her, for her to be happy and content and then relaxed, and then she will start laying. if your beehive is not functioning properly for one reason or another, and there's not enough young nurse bees, and the dynamic of the colony is out, then it can affect and impact on that queen. So I wouldn't like to guess. I say to them as well, it could also be the queen, you know, so it's not shirking any responsibility here or saying, oh no, it's never the queen's fault. It could definitely be the queen, and if it is the queen, we'll fix it. But for you, I would say the best way to test it is that if they're not being robbed and no bees are coming in and going out and there's no mayhem, it's just add in a frame of capped brood, capped brood from another hive, shake the bees off and just add a frame in at a time, one frame, leave it 10 days, go back and inspect, and what that will do is that'll boost up the number of young bees in the colony. Young bees are what you need for that queen to lay properly, and then if the queen is good and you add on a feed, I would add on like a light feed, a 1:1 feed, and kind of kickstart her back into laying. Good evening. Good evening to you too. Hey Lawrence and hey chat, I'm having a massive problem with wasps here in Bedfordshire. Underfloor entrances, reducer on, but wasps are still getting in. Anything I can do, anything I can do more, so thanks in advance. So I always get a few wasps in my beehives, it's not an issue to kind of like go through the frames and see a few wasps in there. The big, the thing that you need to look out for is, are the bees acting normally? So are the bees just going about their business? If they are, everything's fine, or are the bees like actively engaging in combat with wasps, and if they are, it's not fine. So if you are getting that, I would reduce the entrance down. Like we said earlier on, you can get some foam and just bung it in, and it will reduce, you know, it'll reduce the entrance from big down to small like that. That's definitely going to help. The fact that your bees— the fact that there's no flow, so if your flow's finished, which I suspect it probably has in Bedfordshire, that's going to be putting everything on red alert. So I would recommend getting rid of the honey. harvesting the honey, getting your feeders on, feeding your bees, and then by feeding the bees it boosts up the number of bees in that colony. You've got more nurse bees coming through, but then it means that as the wasps get worse, you're going to have more bees kind of being upgraded to defenders of the hive. Love that. Right, Nikki said, how's everyone's season going? We still have bramble flowering in East Devon on the coast. Oh, it's pretty good, it's pretty good, I'm not gonna lie. Best year ever. I want every year to be like this now. How long after getting a nuc in a new hive should they start producing honey or drawing up the the super, guessing that is. Had mine in roughly 3 weeks and they still not completed the brood box. So 3 weeks, 3 weeks could be normal. It completely depends on kind of who you got your nuc from and how many bees are in it. It's more down to how many bees are in it versus how much brood is in it for that initial expansion. But if you, if you think about kind of like the way that the brood works is roughly on like a 3-week-ish cycle. So the queen will lay an egg and then 3 weeks later you see a bee. So for the So for the first three weeks, you don't really see like any expansion at all because all the queen is doing is just laying eggs. But once they load up that first three weeks, and I say this to people on our on our course, I can't even get the branding in there. We go. It's not there. It's the fourth week that you see a lot of progress. So week one, not that much. Week two, not that much. Week three, you start thinking what's going on? This is not good. And then week four, you come back. You're like, whoa! That was pretty extreme growth. So I think you'll see it in the next couple of weeks, and then. the bees will start to move up into the super. It's very, very, very late to be adding a nuc though and starting to produce honey. Like, it's pretty much the back end of the season now, so I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't get any honey this year unless you get exceptional circumstances. Hi Lawrence, it's Ryan, the guy with the undelivered queen. Oh, sorry about that. Just wanted to say I ordered queens and nucs from you before and they were brilliant. Just a real shame Royal Mail couldn't hold up their end. I am sorry about that, Ryan. We do have delays occasionally, 24-hour delays, and we do say it on the website as well, is we don't— we can't guarantee times or dates for queens. What I can guarantee, and what I guarantee to everyone— 2 guarantees actually. One is we will dispatch your queen on the day we say we're going to dispatch it. We are incredibly reliable when it comes to dispatching queens that people have ordered, so you can order safely at Black Mountain Honey knowing that we are going to fulfill and dispatch your queen on the correct date. We'll also send it using— I was going to say we'll also send it using the correct postage apart from last weekend where I got it wrong, but we generally, you know, we'll send it special delivery. But then the bigger guarantee that you've got, which is much better than any delay guarantee, is the multitude of guarantees that we offer for the queen. So if she turns drone laying, we'll fix it. If they turn out to be way too angry, we'll fix it. You do have to kill the queen and show me a picture of that after I've given you approval, of course. Do not take it from this video. And then the final one is that if the queen arrives dead in the post, we'll replace it for you free of charge. So we kind of underwrite that service, uh, many times over. And I see it all the time— queens get delivered 24 hours later and they're absolutely fine. The bees are really well set up for that. But I do appreciate for people who have stayed in waiting for their queen, it is frustrating, and I do, I do apologize for it on their behalf. Evening, Lawrence. Have you noticed more supersedure this year than usual? I've had 3 2024 queens supersede, caught both and took the queens into a nuc and doing well still. Seen others saying similar. I think that the nail that you've hit on the head there, Harry, is that you, you've taken the queens off and they're doing absolutely fine. So it's not, it's not an issue with the queens. it is the weather that is playing havoc with these colonies here. They don't know whether they're coming or going. And remember I said about like feral colonies and AMM colonies, or near-native, whatever, whatever people are calling them nowadays? They have this real desire to kind of like convert back from any imported Buckfast genetics like that for some strange reason. We, you know, we're on to, onto a good thing there, trying to sort the colony out and turn them into, into a productive unit, and then they go back on it. And I, I find the, the weather has turbocharged their ability to do that. So you've laid it out very nicely there, which is that the bees have tried to supersede the queens that have gone in, you've taken the queens out before they've actually killed them, which is what they do. Whereas if you'd have gone in and just taken down the supersedure cells, they would have tried to create more supersedure cells. But if you'd have kept on going to the point where the new brood from that queen had emerged, they stopped doing it. And we see it all the time with the ones that we introduce, hundreds of them. And I would say, probably seen a few more supersedure cells this year, but I do think it's just a function of the heat. I've seen more swarms this year, we've seen more honey this year, we've got better matings this year. Like, good weather just turbocharges beekeeping and you just see more stuff. So I do think it's that. It's not like— I'm in exactly the same boat as you where I see the supersedure cells, I take them down, I go back, I see them again. Doesn't happen on all of them. I reckon it's about 10% maybe, and it does depend, like, the darker the colony that we're introducing the bees into, the more they seem to do it. But we just know that if we go in every three or four days and take down the super seizure cells, they never get to the point where they kill the queen because they know that the queen's their only hope. As soon as that brood emerges from the queen, they just stop doing it completely, and then the queens go to live on for like another two or three years. So it's not the queens. Titan Game says, "At Terry Endersby, I use pest." Sorry, I use no pest wasp law. It works on German and paper wasps with a standard one-way wasp trap. Good advice. Thank you very much. Demby Honey says. Thank you for doing the live, Lawrence. We really appreciate your time. I know you're a busy guy. Thank you very much. JK Photography, long time no see. Hi, Lawrence. Hello to you too. I had to split my 2-deep hive that was almost 70% drawn out due to capped queen cells. How long would you let a new queen occupy before recombining the colonies? I'm in the States and season ends in October. So whenever I split anything out, I like to wait 4 weeks. 4 weeks is a really good time to wait for most things in beekeeping because it's kind of long enough for a virgin to go out and get mated and come back and settle in and start laying, but then also if, if all of that goes to plan, when you come back you can see the brood. So 4 weeks is always nice for that. And then also, as we said with the brood earlier, the kind of 3-week pattern, so going in on the 4th week you see a big, a big impact. So I like to leave colonies like that 4 weeks before going in and making any decisions, because a lot of the time you go back in after 4 weeks on 2 colonies you thought you were going to merge, and if you've had successful matings, you'll go back and be like, definitely not merging those 2, they're huge. So I would leave it for the time being. I think that would be my call there. My bees are building a cross comb on my top bar hive, how should I fix it? Oh, top bars are good fun. So you just need to get your spacing correct and take down any incorrect combs that they build, and then only give them enough space to build a perfectly drawn out comb. Top bar hives are very good fun, very challenging as well. Channel member, says, thinking about taking my honey off soon. If I do, how much syrup you reckon a colony would need to be fed on a weekly basis at this time of the year. So it is impossible for me to answer that one, but you will really get the hang of it very, very quickly because you'll just be able to see how much they're storing in the frames. And if you know that you kind of want like maybe, let's say, 3 or 4 frames of stores at any time at this point in the year, if you feed them— if you take the honey off and feed them 2 litres of syrup and then they've kind of gone from 3 frames to 3 frames, you're thinking, okay, well, they're just like eating that, which is what they will do with syrup at this time of the year. They'll just consume it and then use it for rearing, queen rearing. So you find you'll feed them the syrup and they just turn it into brood. So definitely don't feed them 2:1 early feeding once you've taken the honey crop off, all the way through until kind of like mid, back end of September depending on the temperature. I just feed them 1:1, feed them 1:1 pretty much all the way through, and then it's only with the last, definitely the last feed, but maybe the last couple of feeds that I'll move over to 2:1 once I know that all the winter bees have been completely born and living and are doing well, and then there's not much brood in the colony, so they'll backfill it and make it super heavy. So it's trying trial and error. Go in, maybe go in with 2 or 3 liters for the first one and see how they respond to it, how much they store, and then if it's too much or too little, you can adjust it for the following week. But keep an eye on them, and if in doubt, give them a little bit more. 2 questions, Laurence. Which one of the wooden hive bases do you recommend? Second question, sorry, which of the wooden hive bases do you recommend? So I like that I make my own wooden underfloor entrances, so that would be my wooden hive base. And then the second question is, where do I buy the mesh from? So I buy the mesh from a company called— I can't remember their name— what they're called, like Tech, what they're called. It's a, it's a, an extractor brand, Titan Tech. They're not called Titan Tech. What are they called? Someone will know it in the thing. Uh, but they, they gave me a roll of a stainless steel mesh. I've got a couple of rolls of that actually. It's really good. I don't know where you'd get it from in New Zealand. Uh, JK Photography says, got a guy buying some hives. What's the longest they can travel for without travel screens on? I'm concerned they will overheat. I would not be transporting any bees at this time of the year, full stop. That is it, just don't do it yet. It's not the right time to be transporting bees, they will die, and they can die in 3 minutes or a minute. Really, really bad idea to do it. The only way I would do it is full travel screens, top and bottom, lots of water being sprayed through, and do it at like 1 o'clock in the morning. That would be the only way I'd recommend it this time of the year, or with the weather as it is at the moment, Lynette says, I've only had good experience with the Royal Mail and the Bees too. I was shocked to see that post. Yes, I've not seen it. I'm gonna go and look at it afterwards. Our postie is the best. He comes to us early. He knows when we have queens coming. They really are, they go out of their way. They're brilliant, aren't they? Following the demerit, the brood frames have been backfilled with nectar and pollen. The queen can't lay in that now, so how do I get the frames back to drawn comb, please? Um, well, so she, so she'll let, like, pollen in the brood frames is, is normal. And if you put nectar, if you just put frames of nectar in the middle of 2 frames of capped brood, they'll just remove the nectar and lift it upwards, and then she can lay in it again. If you want to do that, or you can just nadir the whole box and put it underneath the original brood box with the queen excluder in the middle, and then again the bees will move it up. You don't— it's not perfect, the demo, you can't get everything out of those frames, but you can get them to a point where you can kind of just like recycle them back into the brood nest if needed. Hey Lawrence, some of the stubborn colonies refuse to lift demerara bruised honey up and just recapped it. Any tips? How many spare bee boxes do you keep for each demerara hive? So I keep one extra brood box, so each kind of hive setup I have, I have an additional brood box. So I limit it now, I only ever have 2 brood boxes on a hive at any one time, never 3. 3's too much, I think. And then the bruised, I, do you know what, if they're doing it for me and they won't lift it up, I'll get a few frames like that each year. I just put them in a nuc, just make up a nuc, or kind of like put it on top of a double brood. Just, I'll get like 3 or 4 boxes of it and just double brood and just stick it on top and say that can be their winter feed. I don't fret too much about the ones that won't come out. Most of it will though, and you find kind of like later on in the year they'll do it a little bit better than now. It's quite early to be doing it just yet. I know your flow's probably finished, so it's the right time for you, but I think for the bees they're still probably finding Something, and maybe if it's— I don't know, I think with it as well, it really does help if you get the box there early when it's nectar, you know. Once it's honey, if they've capped it over, they are much slower to kind of move it, I find. A bit of water sprayed on it as well does help though, because it gets them in there, you know. Even on that top layer, it seems like it's nectar, and then they'll start working it. So that's a shout, kind of bruise it all again, give it a little spray with some water, and then the bees— it'll get the bees right on it. work in it. I heard a new virgin queen piping and then watched the new virgin queen emerge. Will they sort themselves out or should I be worried about cast swarms? Oh, it does depend. There's not really a huge amount you can do with it now. I think I would leave them to it. Yeah, I wouldn't worry. Like a cast swarm, you don't lose that many bees really, so if they start casting then you'll have to go in and find any more, but I think you should be okay. Andrew Cook says, hi Lawrence, it's Andy, uh, it's Andy and Luke from Hampshire. Your queen overwintered nuc you sampled us for my WBC hive, 60 kilograms of honey plus 3 splits, all queens supplied by you, uh, well happy, a really special hive. Excellent, I'm very, I'm very happy to hear that. And I like your Komodo Joe as well, it looks exactly like my one. I love my Komodo Joe. Richard Mallion, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, what are your thoughts on just using oxalic acid for varroa treatment? For instance, 3 treatments 5 days apart after the honey has been taken off. So apart from the fact that it is not legal, and it's not actually even legal to use apibioxyl multiple times like that— apart, like, we'll park that— apart from the, like, the fact that you're not actually allowed to do that, it's a really, really good treatment. A lot of people do it. And I think it's— I think to make it work as a, a single treatment without anything else, you probably go like 5, 6, maybe 7 treatments. You need to really kind of keep on pumping it in to combat it like that. But you It's good plan, good plan. A lot of people do that. You know, you see it across the USA. Tons of people do that. They do it with the supers on. They're allowed to use just like standard oxalic acid as well. It's a lot easier for people over there, but they they have they have a number of other issues to deal with in terms of you know colonies collapsing and stuff. Jean says, "Good evening, Lawrence. Thank you for all your videos and knowledge. I love your live chats. Thank you for answering our questions." My pleasure, Jean. Thank you for coming every week. Jay says, "Of the five of the five queens I got from you last week, four are good." and it looks, and it looks like one was bald or something, is found dead on the nuc floor. All were introduced correctly. My theory is wasp pressure caused it. They do get the, they do get the queens. Like, it is difficult. And this is why I said this is funny when I send out like the emails and stuff saying you should make splits now. Like, you can make a split now, back end of May, one frame of brood, one frame of stores, and chuck in, chuck in some bees and chuck in a queen, and you're just going to put it somewhere, leave it, and come back and it's mega nuc. And you can't do that now. It's like beekeeping in July and August is so much more difficult and resource intensive versus beekeeping in like April and May. So I do— you can see why a lot of people make up their nucs. Like all of our nucs at Black Mountain Honey, we've made up over 1,000 nucs for next year, they were made up weeks ago. Like weeks ago. And they were made up weeks ago with 3 frames of brood, 2 frames of stores, and a frame of foundation. And that was weeks ago. And we were probably cutting it fine doing it then, but you know, by the middle Middle of June, maybe like the seventh, eighth of June. All of the nukes were made and ready for next year. It kind of the later you leave it, the more resources you have to put into it, and the higher your mortality rate we find, and mostly due to the wasps. Lynette says any update on Splodge and how Smudge is doing? So so Splodge is not there anymore. I went. Back to do a video and she had— do you know what, fair play to her, she'd swarmed. They'd gone, uh, which is remarkable considering how many times they tried to supersede her. I, I've been meaning to do the, the sad tale of Splodge and, uh, Smudge. Smudge is— I, I like Smudge. Smudge is doing well, um, so we can do some updates on Smudge. Uh, Andrew Headley says, can I split a hive or is it too late? Uh, it's on— it is D, it's on double Bait bread, right? If you're watching that on or listening to that on a podcast, that did not make sense to me. I'll read it again. I'll try and make sense. Andrew says, "Can I split a hive or is it too late?" I'm going to say it's on double brood on two step, or is it too late in the season to get a new queen? Yes, you can definitely split a hive. It's on double brood now. You can split a hive, no problem whatsoever. Jay says, "Can get some of your equipment?" We don't sell any equipment, so we just sell nucs and honey, and we have just launched. Launched 14-Day Beekeeper, which is pretty cool. If you want to be the first in line for that, go over to the website, go on to the products, and it is there. 14-Day Beekeeper showing out of stock at the moment, but if you just hit notify when available, you will get the launch because we are launching in November and it is going to be very, very cool. Uh, right, where are we going next? Jay says, uh, can I still use a queen cell for a natural mating or combine their resource to other nucs? Absolutely, still plenty of time left for that. Uh, Andrew Rogers, channel member, says, yeah, my queens are really cut back on the laying at the moment. I'm assuming it's because of the drought. Yes, the drought leading to a very, uh, poor flow or end— and early end of the flow. Rehydration from Lynn, thank you very much. Could you tell us the rough date that you will have your queens this year until? So I suspect we're going to finish early this year, and I think we might be finishing the last week— sorry, the second to last week of August. So like not the last week, we've before that. Um, the absolute latest will be the first week of September. I don't think we're going to make it to September this year because it's, um, it's quite warm and the season's— everyone's finishing early, so we don't want to— we don't want to go too late. Frankly Gaming says, hello Lawrence, I hope you're doing well. Do you think it's too late to add an extra brood box to one of my hives? It will be new frames and foundation. I'm based in the south of the UK. See, this is where I can see, like, it's good advice, isn't it? Because When I was in your situation, I just had to guess, and I would have thought, yeah, well, you know, what harm can it make? And all that the bees will do if there is any flow left is just put honey in that top box. So I definitely wouldn't add a second brood box now. It's way, way, way too late. There's no benefit to doing it. No benefit to you, no benefit to the bees. They like to overwinter on nice kind of like compact, really well-insulated boxes. So adding a double brood for overwintering isn't a good idea. Adding a double brood for getting any additional honey isn't a good idea. Very much stick to a single brood. If your bees want to expand, stick the queen excluder on, get a super on, and you might get a super of honey off them. That is what I would do, and hopefully that is the right answer as well. Hi Lawrence, what are your thoughts about entrance reducers? Summertime off, wintertime on? So in my channel member video this year, uh, this week, I spoke about the fact that about how you need to be so dynamic with your entrance reducer if you have one or if you need to have one, and just recommending that people use an underfloor entrance because as long as you keep your big colony strong, you, you just don't need to do it. Like, I never do it, um, and the colonies are strong enough to manage it for themselves. You might get instances like Terry where you get like extreme wasp pressure, and that's probably due to like multiple nests in the area. If I was you, Terry, I'd just be hunting around for wasps. You can track You can track where they go. It's pretty, pretty easy to track where they go. Just sit in the apiary and just watch where they fly, and once they've left the beehive, you'll see them. They'll just all go like exactly the same line, and you're like, right, they're over there somewhere, and just follow that line, kind of work it out. You can even plot it on Google Maps if you want. It might not be for you plotting it on Google Maps, but you can, you can see and just walk that way, and you probably find it. And then if you find it, just take them down. 3 hives decided to make their own queens this year. All 3 hives now have a drone-laying queen. Any thoughts just bad luck? Oh, that's— that is bad luck, um, especially considering this year has been exceptional for matings. So it's, it's strange that, um, none of them have got mated successfully. Neil Phillips says, I got an F1 Buckfast queen June 6th after a queen swarm with a third of the colony. No spring harvest. Have I now missed the summer harvest flow? So you've definitely missed the vast majority of it, but depending on where you are, like if you're like Birmingham or further north than that, like Manchester, Liverpool way, somewhere like that, got a good few weeks left of the season and a good few weeks left to kind of gather a decent honey crop, so I wouldn't worry too much yet. Normally for me, middle of August, that's where we take our honey crop, but that is early and you can take it later than that and it continues to go quite a lot later than that in some areas, so I wouldn't worry too much about it yet. Hopefully you still get something to salvage the season. How do you inspect your bees when the wasps are about? Last week the hive got attacked as soon as I opened it and I had flying bees everywhere. I just closed everything up and left all the hives uninspected. So this is where, again, you've probably seen the channel member video, but this is where it comes to just making a call on what is the best for your bees. So if you're going into a colony, or sorry, if you're going into an apiary and, you know, there's a drought, there's a real lack of flow going on, the bees are tetchy, they're angry, there's wasps everywhere, what's the benefits of going in? And if the benefits of going in is that you're doing like swarm control, you don't want your bees to swarm, Then I would say, well, what is a tolerable amount of colonies out of 10? And like, as a percentage, what's a tolerable amount for you that they're going to swarm? And if you said, I've got 10 colonies, I wouldn't mind 1 or 2 of them swarming if it meant I didn't have to do any inspections for the rest of the year, I would say we're coming close to that point now where as long as you give your bees additional space up in the supers, you can just stop inspecting, stop opening them up. If it's doing more harm than good, I just wouldn't open them up and just accept and tolerate a little bit more risk in terms of the bees swarming. swarming. Now bees will swarm in July, they'll swarm in August, they'll swarm in September. I've seen bees swarm in October. I've seen bees try and swarm in November and retreat. So they will keep on going. Bees do weird things and crazy things, but you just got to think of it as a numbers game. How many numbers have I got in the game and how many am I willing to accept kind of like as a failure rate? And if you're— if you can justify it in your own head, I would stop doing the inspections. And I think we're coming very, very close to that point now. We've either just reached it or it's kind of like in the next week or two I won't be doing any more inspections. In my area, Reading, Berkshire, only a little bit of Himalayan balsam. Noticed today the bees starting uncapping the outside store frames in the brood box. Wow, so that's when you know it's going downhill quickly, isn't it? So I did say this to people and I will give people regular updates on this, but between now and say October is the biggest risk period you will ever experience for bee starvation, especially— and listen and, and do heed this warning— especially if you just started keeping bees this year, because you lucked out and got the easiest year in the world to start keeping bees. If you started keeping bees last year, oh, you will be loving this year. This year is loads better. But for you, if you started in 2025, April or March, April, May, Absolute doddle, like 10 out of 10 for easiness, because it was just beautiful weather. The bees expanded, um, brought in loads of honey, and everything was good. We had like a little period of— well, we did anyway— a little period of disruption in the middle, and then we've kind of moved into this strange summer, which is like real intense heat and then occasional downpour. For us up here, I reckon we've had either average or above average rainfall, I would say. combined, like, and coupled with really, really hot days and lots of sun, which is perfect for the bees. But when you're starting to see that now and the bees uncapping the store frames in the brood box, that is a real sure sign that they are struggling and they need access to that food. And, you know, it's— what is it? It's like middle of July, so we've still got like 2 weeks of July left, all of August left, all of September left, all of October left. We've got like 3 and a half months of Not that much available for the bees, and the bees needing a lot of food. So get yourself some readily available stores— some syrup, sorry, I should say— but store it so that you can feed your bees in an emergency. You will almost certainly need it. I buy big like pallets of, what's it called, Api Invert, and just leave it there because I know when I need it I can use it straight away. And then I buy big sacks of sugar as well, and I can make up sugar syrup. get it in stock ready to go because you will need it, definitely need it this year. Laurence, did you manage to get any filming done on your honey production hives? Be nice to see them as most of us can relate. So I have done more of that this year. I've brought a couple of the honey production hives down. The thing is, a couple of the apiaries I've got where I've got my honey production hives, they're just not suitable for filming, so it wouldn't— doesn't really work. And then the landowners don't want filming there as well, so I can't do them there. But I brought a couple down, so I've got some I've got some in different apiaries now that I can show you. So the one up at one of the farms that we're on, that's— that is like a full honey production apiary. So we're going to do some stuff there, and then I brought some up to the forest apiary as well. So I'll be— I will be extracting some honey and taking the honey off and then taking it through the extraction unit. Good evening, Lawrence. Order received with thanks. Buckfast queens look fantastic. GV Honeybees. Thank you very much, Kevin. I remember packing your order up yesterday. Is that that question yet? Uh, it's— I won't try and pronounce your name, get that one wrong. Uh, it says, I have an interesting question about swarms. What do swarms do in general? Quick input greatly appreciated. Thank you, Black Mountain Honey. Um, going to neighbors' chimneys, um, chilled out. I'm not— I don't understand that question, so we're going to the next one. I like the way you framed it though. Paul says, we've got Himalayan balsam near me, but I've lost one nuc. My other 2 hives have been under heavy wasp attack. Also lost a hive at the club apiary. Unfortunately, I don't have an outapery. Oh, an outapery is really good when it comes to wasps because it's the best thing you can do is just pick the colony up, close the entrance, take it to the new site with all the wasps inside, and then just leave it there and they can just get back to normal, get back to normal life without the issues or the challenge of dealing with all of those wasps. Jean says, Lawrence, is there a situation where you would not have to do a split? Thank you. So the demerit split. Is the, the vertical split is kind of— it's not really a split, it's just putting an extra box on a beehive and it does exactly the same thing as a split. It is brilliant. Haram says, evening Lawrence, I bought 2 nucs, not had queens in them, and checked them last week. One of them had about 6 queen cells, no sign of the queen, and this week checked again and the other one had no queen as well and no eggs. Oh, that's not good to hear. Uh, the one— you definitely had a queen in there at some point though because they wouldn't have queen cells without the queen laying the the eggs that hatch out into the larva. Um, but yeah, that's not, that's not ideal. Who did you buy them from? Definitely not us because we stopped sending nucs, uh, months ago. Uh, just, just put that in just for everyone, anyone else who's watching it. But I hope you get it sorted and, and hopefully, uh, the person that you bought them from will, will fix that for you. Uh, John says smash up the likes and subscribe to Lawrence. Thank you very much, John. David says seeing a lot of drones getting booted out today seems very early, right? Although I guess it shows how How far forward everything is. I was I noticed exactly the same thing today. Yeah, one of my hives up at the top in the supers of a colony that had like a bit too much space. It's got big clusters of drones that are not daring to go down to where all the ladies are hanging out. But yeah, it is drone kick out time, and it is very very early. Phil Matthews says, "Hey Lawrence, discovered CBPV. That's chronic bee paralysis virus in one hive this week. Remove the UFE. Love the acronyms." Or yeah, is acronyms underfloor entrance? Hive was demerade a month ago, so lots of space. ensuring good apiary hygiene? Any advice, experience you can share? So I said this before and said it on the last one, I've never had a case of CBPV, Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus, so I wouldn't want to give like too much advice, but all I know is that it's very contagious from bee to bee, and what they say, the biggest thing, the best thing you can do is just give the bees space, so reduce congestion, so going from single brood to double brood would help, giving them additional supers, giving them dead space within the hive, apparently helps them kind of not so much get over it but reduce the transmission, which means that more of them can get over it. That's probably the only thing that I would add in there, that it seemed to be like a real positive thing or a trend that was going where you take the floors off, you know, you remove the underfloor entrance and let all of the dead go down. And then I think someone did some studies to say it doesn't make a huge amount of difference. I don't think it's— I don't think it's the wrong thing to do. I just— I've not got the experience to know kind of like personally from my own experience what, what kind of I've done in the past, just because we've never, never had the issues ourselves. 2 weeks ago the girls have pretty much set up shop, uh, I think to prepare for winter. Then we had 48 hours of rain and now I'm whacking supers on left, right, and center. Certainly perks it up with the rain, doesn't it? Hi, uh, lol, lol, I hope you're well. I have 2 current questions. I introduced a Black Mountain honey queen to a small colony. She's laying but the colony is still small. I added a frame with brood nest stages 2 weeks ago but they still seem Is there anything I can do to help them? So on that one quickly, Derek, so as I said before, use that 3-week rule. So when you add the frame of brood in, give it 3 weeks for all of that to emerge, and then kind of add on a week and then assess it at that point, because you should see a real growth at that point. On another hive, I have 4 supers of honey frames. What should I leave for them? Cheers, mate. So I never recommend ever leaving any honey for the bees in the supers. It really complicates your beekeeping. I leave a single brood box for my bees to include all of their food and all of the bees as well. It's a single brood box. You get up to about kind of like 40 pounds, between 35 and 45 pounds depending on the weight of the hive as well, and then that is a really good overwintering weight. That's the weight that we use. Jean, sorry I've got much of that one. Jean says, what is the best way to produce honeycomb? Is it a wireframe or wax sheet foundation? Oh, I, I do prefer my wired frames, I have to say. I'm not one for— I'm not a cut comb or a section honey person. I, uh, I like it fully wired, makes it easier. Congratulations, Andy, member for 3 months. Thank you very much. I get your name wrong every day. Says, hi Lawrence, what would you recommend more, wooden or poly hives? Thanks. I like a little bit of both, I definitely do. Uh, if I was I, I do. I've got like another 6 Abello hives, and I've got another 12 coming that a very, very famous artist is going to paint for me. And I do like the way they look all together. I just think they look really nice. But you know, some— it's not for everyone. Not everyone wants like really bright hives in their garden, and they want to keep them kind of like out of people's view. So they might have gone like different darker colors or camouflage. But I do like my polyhives, but I also really like my wooden hives as well. I don't want to have to pick. I don't want to pick. I said at the beginning, I like— when I'm buying a beehive, I merge the 2 now. Definitely wooden supers, definitely a wooden roof with a metal lid, make my own wooden floor, and then everything else is poly. So brood box is poly and the feeder is poly. Thank you. Thanks, Lawrence. I plan to build some other bases this year. Have a good rest. Thank you very much. I use PLUK. That was the one, it was PLUK Limited for underfloor mesh. Free delivery on 5 pieces as well, about £22 for a national. Highly recommended, the PLUK guys, very good. Get the stainless steel mesh if you can get it. Clever boards on today and extracting tomorrow. Oh, very exciting. Wants to know the mesh size. Oops, I'm in Sussex and the flow has slowed right down. Do you think any chance of a small bit more honey before final supers off and treatment in August, or better to treat now? It is marginal. Get it off if the flow has stopped. Get your honey off, give them a feed, get the treatments on, and believe me, next year you will have Really big strong colonies. BBB says, "Hey, I've been a while. Got allergic to bee venom. Not cool. Got two EpiPens and I can continue on, but still scary. I'm never alone anymore now either." How's Lawrence? Lawrence is well. My wife has also developed an allergy to bee stings, which is not good. But I hope I hope you get better. And people have offering their sympathies as well. Oh, guide about splodge. At least she still lives. That is that is the one thing she's gone off. She's going to do her own thing. R.O. says, "This year I've had a significant number of new queens." disappear, yet I can't see any eggs or find any virgin queens. I wonder if the bees this year are reacting negatively to new queens. Oh, I don't know. The weather, it's just very, very strange weather. The bees in this country are not used to, um, very Mediterranean weather like this. Uh, BBB says, does anyone know of any sting-proof gloves? I've seen hypodermic needle-proof gloves, but I think a stinger is way thinner. Was told to get some sewage work gloves. Oh, I'm Yeah, sewage work would be good. I'm not, you know, again, not got any experience in that. It's not ideal, but you, you've got to do what you've got to do to make sure that you are safe. That is first one. Ah, Sophia Dem, my one Twitch viewer. Hello, how are you? Uh, hello to you. Uh, I don't know, it says I use marigold. They changed everything for me. Marigolds are very good. Uh, marigold gloves guaranteed no stings. Hard to prevent, but still can try. Yeah, marigolds are good. I like marigolds. Give them a good clean as well. Uh, Titan Games says he used chemical Gloves, so chemical nitrile ones elbow length. Okay, very nice. Jensen's Bee says last year. Oh, apologies, Jensen. He choked right up there. Oh, definitely have a sip of water there or tea. Here we go. Right. Jensen's Bee says last year you made me a pizza at the Avello Open Day. Wondering if you're doing the same this year. Your pizza was the best. Going to make my dad. Uh, by an instructor when we are there at the 12 Frame Premium. So Jensen, you will be delighted to hear that I will be back at the Abello Open Day this year, and I will not be cooking pizzas because there's going to be 2 people there who know how to cook pizzas way better than me. So I will be there, the pizzas will be there, the people who know how to cook the pizzas properly will be there, and I'll just be there doing like chatting and stuff, which is— I'm probably better at that, you know, going around and talking to people. Damien did drop in something, and I don't know if he's making this public I think people need to pressure him to make it public if he's not going to make it public. But he said, oh yeah, well, I shouldn't— I shouldn't do his accent, sorry. Damien does talk like that. But he said, oh well, I've got this, um, I've got loads of like old bits of equipment, you know, like an extractor from 8 years ago that's a really good extractor but it's got a big dent in it. Or I've got an uncapping machine that's not got a certain bit or something like that, you know, like again, like just superficial things, little dents and stuff. He thought maybe like we could do an auction. You could do an auction or something like that, and maybe you could, you could say it and, you know, do the bids. And I thought, uh, yeah, let's do that. That sounds like really, really good fun. But more importantly, send me the list of all this damaged stuff you've got because I want to get first dibs on anything good. Now that is obviously a joke because I've got way more equipment than I ever need, but I thought that was a brilliant idea from Damien, and I said I'm definitely up for doing that. So if he's not already announced it And you speak to him, drop him a message and ask him because I'm sure he could be persuaded. Iron says yes, no stings, been using them for the past few inspections, so all good. We've got people here, Discord, Discord, Discord, people DMing each other, very nice. All right, right, let's get back to the questions on here. I like the people having a chat. Supple Mills says evening, Lawrence, can you shout out to my partner Lucy? She's now starting her beekeeping journey and getting hives next year, obviously. from Black Mountain Honey. Well, a massive shout out to Mark's partner Lucy. Good luck with everything. Um, beekeeping is great fun. Any questions, just come on here and ask and people will give you the answers. It might not be me, it could be someone else. People, uh, will help. Is 20 kilograms the right amount of stores to leave on a decent-sized colony over winter? Yeah, it's about right. Like, I weigh mine up and I get them like close to 40 pounds-ish, so 20 kilos is, you know, 40, 44 £4 or something. It does depend though, because if I've got poly hives, you can get them through on like £35, £36. And if you've got like all wooden hives and big, really deep, heavy wooden cedar roofs, it could be £50. So it's all about just knowing, knowing for you what a full beehive and bees and stores weighs, and then just kind of working on that each year. Uh, Supple Mills again, we did that one. Yes, a shout out to your partner Lucy. Oh, you wanted to put that in there? Black Dog Apiary Suffolk. Mark, how's it going? Black Dot Apris. Yeah, shout out to Lucy, and Black Mountain Honey Nook will be with you next year, hopefully. I don't know if you've ordered yet, but get your order in soon, eh? Michael Henry says, just started beekeeping this year, caught a swarm in June and attempting another. Thanks for all the great advice and videos. My pleasure, Michael. Thanks for joining. Alan says, can I feed my bees water sugar throughout the winter? So my recommendation is, if you take your honey off soon, feed them 1:1 sugar syrup to keep them going all the way through until back end of September. And then for the final few feeds, final couple of feeds, move over to 2:1 or invert sugar syrup, which is much thicker. Don't feed them 1:1 sugar syrup that late through the winter. And then the idea is that kind of back end of September, early October, you feed them enough invert sugar syrup in the final couple of feeds that will finish maybe middle of October to get them through until the next year. Then you shouldn't be feeding them. You do not want to feed bees sugar syrup like when it's -3 because they can't access it because they'll just be in cluster. I've been queenless for at least 2 to 3 months. They raised a new queen, brood and eggs in all stages, seen the queen, went to mark her on the next inspection and she's gone. They've drawn 2 queen cells now. Any ideas? Oh, it's frustrating, but 2 queen cells, I would treat it as supersedure, so I would just leave both cells there. It is frustrating and it is just bees doing very, very weird things. It's almost like They know that the weather's good, they know that the season is compressed, so they're just doing things quicker. So instead of— they're thinking we can swarm 3 times this year and like make the most, you know. We did— we didn't get any swarms last year and then they want to make the most this year. It is a turbocharged year for sure. Uh, Dilwyn says, thanks for last week's competition introduced today. My daughter's named her Podcast. Oh man, that is without a doubt the best name for a queen I've ever heard. Oh, beautiful podcast. It reminds me, it reminds me of a story where, um, there's nothing to do with that, it's just, uh, the way that I spoke about it. I've been going to the gym, been going to the gym, I mean, kind of like, not, not at the moment, this is like a couple of years ago, and I was feeling all good about myself. I was like, yeah, I'm getting in good shape here like that. And then I went on to, I went on to a video call with someone, and, and like, I could see that they kind of like looked at, looked at me as I got the camera on like that, and I thought, oh yeah, they're probably thinking, you know, He's lost a bit of weight, and they're probably going to say something. And they said, "Oh Lawrence!" They're Welsh. They said, "Oh Lawrence, you look terrible!" And it made me laugh so much inside because I love a bit of praise. And I was thinking, "Oh, they're going to say something really nice here." Oh, you look terrible! Your eyes! You look like you're going to die. And sorry if I butchered the Welsh accent there. I did it as best as I possibly could. But it always made me laugh because I was really expecting some. Something for them to say something nice, and they properly butchered me and made— and, and I looked, and I kind of looked at myself afterwards, and I said to Helen, I said, do I look, do I look that bad? And she looked at me and said, yeah, it looks shocking. Oh, I don't need any praise. Right, next question. Martin says, I found a lot of wax moth larvae while looking at my friend's house today. They are only, uh, they are, they are on the mite board and covered in silk webs. Is this a problem or normal to find them on the mite board? So It is normal to find them on the mite board. I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to see loads of them down there, and if I saw loads of them down there, I'd be going through my colony to see what's going on. The best thing you can do for wax moth is just condense the colony down to a reasonable size so you've not got lots of voids in, you know, additional space, you know, extra supers on, not extra brood boxes on. You kind of like compress them down a little bit, and then that means that all areas of the hive have got good plenty of bees walking around, and then they should take care of the wax moth. And then Martin says, and what can we do about them? So I would just boost up the number of bees, and the bees should sort them out. Brad Beale says, watching while requeening. Pretty nice. Your Buckfast are excellent. So glad I requeen. Are excellent. Glad to glad to hear that you are happy with them, Brad. Don't want that one. Ian says, when I need to feed, can I use two to one, or should this be diluted? I I feed. I tried diluting previously, and it went malter. So I tried diluting previously, and it went. Moldy, so you can feed two to one. Feed two to one whenever you want. The bees will just process it as you need them to. Doesn't give you the best bang for your buck because you can dilute it down. You get a little bit more feed out of it, and it will still do the same job. I think it's a bit bit wasteful to use it at this time of the year, but all I would do is just water it down the feeder. Is that what you said? You tried diluting it last time previously, and it went moldy in the feeder. If that was the case, you probably put a little bit too much water in. So the the the way the way that I always always water down 2:1 is I'll tip out a quarter of a jerry can and fill it up and then shake it. And I don't know what that takes it to, but I know that it works. I know that it's like, it's pretty robust and will still do well. When I get my new coffee unit next year, will it be usable for the future or will the mesh lid be a problem? Can I get a solid lid from you as well? Probably. So we used to use the mesh lids, like you can buy a crown board to go underneath it, and then on top of the mesh lids we just put a bit of like, um, Celotex or Kingspan or insulation board. So you can use it, you can use it as it is with a very, very minor modification, which is just a bit of an insulation offcut that you'll find in a skip. Or you can go to Simon the Beekeeper and you can buy the roof that goes directly on top of it, which is about £20. Um, so then you can, you can use it perfectly. Then, uh, I won't try and say it, I'm going to call you Bok. He says, hi Lawrence. Hello to you too. Dilwyn says, I use knitted cotton gloves inside nitrile gloves. They make a huge difference while not significantly reducing dexterity. Dexterity. Very nice. It's like wicketkeeper's innards. Don't know if you know anything about cricket. Don't strike me as the kind of person that would get into cricket. And and and also let's get back to deal. Sorry about the fleeting visits that you have to make because it was very busy. So sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. Everyone else is going to be thinking what was that about? Right, Jay says I've got to go. Thanks for the live. Have another sip. It's damn hot. Have a great weekend. We've we're three minutes over. Wow! But we are. I'll get. I'll get to the end. I'll get to the end of the comments. That's good. Right, Neil Phillips. Stop. Stop asking questions now. We're at the end. Right, Neil Phillips says, "It's interesting to see how many people have lost queens this year." I have one 2024 colony, two 2025 nucs, and lost all three queens in June. Thought it was just me. It's just yeah. It's a very, very, very swarmy year. Very warm as well. But I think I think this is the thing. I I hear a lot of this, and I hear people saying. a lot of like queens and a lot of supersiegers, and I say, but it's been a pretty good year though, isn't it? And they say, yeah, best year ever, got loads of honey. And it's like, we— I don't think— I think to have all of that kind of the good stuff, all of the honey and all of the like the easiness at the beginning of the year, like maybe take the fact that the bees have been particularly swarmy this year. To keep the bees in the boxes this year has been a real challenge. Watching from the start, so this may be longer— no, sorry, may no longer be relevant, but I'm a professional pest controller and this is by far the very wasp worst season I've seen. And please, please report all Asian hornet signs. It's, it's just perfect storm. I don't think you could get better conditions for wasps from, from the conditions we've had, kind of like post-January onwards. Like, it was mild January, February, after a really nice— like, for us around here, cold. Like, we had a proper cold winter, loads of snow, and the wasps would have just been sitting there just like, yeah, it's fine, don't mind cold, we'll just sit here. There was no false dawn, you know, it just got warm in March and stayed warm and dry, and the wasp queens are just thinking, yep, sweet. But also, I told you, I think I did it on the last stream, where someone was saying about, uh, when you have— I know I did, I was on the channel members video about someone who is a real expert when it comes to all things wasps, saying when you get a year like 2024 where the wasps— there were no wasps, literally no wasps last year, like a terrible year for them. He said if you get the right conditions the following year, you get wasp Armageddon. And he said it's to do with the fact that the natural things that the wasps prey on are obviously like abundant because they had such a bad year the year before. Combine that with really good weather, like dry early spring, nice warm weather, and it comes straight out of hell. And he has been proved very much right. Looks like you need a Twitch moderator or 2 on your channel to delete these bot messages. I certainly do do that. I think, um, we might just turn off the Twitch now. I don't want to turn off the Twitch. Would you like to be the moderator? You're more than welcome because you are like the only person who watches there. Uh, Hadar, Hadar, there we go. I don't know why I said it like that. He said, what should I do if I've got a nucleus of 6 frames in July? So I don't— I wouldn't expect much, if any, honey, and I would just treat them early and make sure that you're on top of your varroa treatments. Um, I know it's— I, I don't know, you have to, you have to tell me how to say it. I want to say Ionut. There we go. Uh, or we call you Callie. Callie, there we go. Callie says, and my phone battery just died while you started to explain that you like a bit of both poly and wood. Okay, we'll do it again. So I do, I like a bit of both poly and wood. Um, I like the fact that if you use it on the Abello, not the 12-frame but the 11-frame format, you can interchange it. So I use all of my supers are wood, all of my floors are wood, all of my roofs are now wood with a metal topping, and then the poly Ashworth feeder and the brood box are poly. There we go. Thanks for the advice. My pleasure. We couldn't find the drone laying queen, they were trying to supersede me but wouldn't use the eggs, uh, we added in. So I've done an experiment, split into 2 nucs thinking she'll be in one, gave them each store's foundation and, uh, one— where's that? Ah, jumped off. I'm gonna say one frame. There we go. And one frame of brood and all stages. Left them, uh, one in each, left 2 weeks, checked, and have 2 new queens. No eggs in either. Hopefully they get mated. Fingers crossed. I think you'll be, uh, okay with the weather that we've got at the moment. Says massive wasp problem this year, and have you noticed the ladybirds remind me of the 1980s with the massive ladybird outbreak, but they don't kill your bees. I have not noticed that. Maybe that's like somewhere else. I've not got— I can't see any ladybirds anywhere. Do you find, uh, do you find you kill a fair amount of bees when putting the Abello polyhives back together? Any thoughts on the best way putting the queen excluder on without squashing, uh, trapping bees? No more than any other hive. It, it's always a challenge to get the hives back together without squishing the bees. Uh, judicious use of the smoker. So I think the best thing you can do— uh, BBB says the Welsh accent is amazing in my opinion. It's definitely not, but it's just that particular, particular lady is, is, uh, it's very, very good. Uh, Lees B says, what is the earliest you guys start celebrating Queens? First week of April. We're pretty reliable for the first week. Simon says, hi Lawrence, the queen you had— we had from you last Friday is alive and laying today. Thank you. Couldn't think of a name for her, so she's Blondie, the queen with no name. Clint Eastwood reference, right? Blondie. We've got Blondie on podcast. What other queen names have we got? PJ Morgan says, oh no, oh yeah, I was reading the beginning of that and I thought, oh, that could— this could be really— I've really offended PJ here, sorry. Speaking as a Welsh man, I can say that's the best Welsh accent I've ever heard from Lawrence. Hilarious. Yes, success with the accent. I— and, and speak to anyone who knows me, particularly my wife, I am terrible at accents. That could have gone really badly wrong. So there we go. Uh, Xerox says, which time is best to start buying bees? Jasper's in the background. Chaz, Chaz, come, come on, what are you doing? No, okay, he's just chilling. Jasper's in the house. Uh, best time to start buying bees? Early. So we sell out around December each year for the overwintered for the following year, but you want to get them in March and April, I think, is the best one. Hi Lawrence, does vaporizing oxalic acid work when we have high varroa infection? So yes, it does. Very effective against the phoretic mites, does nothing to any the mites that are entombed within the cappings. So you need to do it at 5-day intervals, multiple treatments. I would say 3 or 4 as a minimum. Hi Lawrence, thanks for all your content. Have you seen much improvement for your VSH queens versus the F1 Buckfast in terms of varroa resistance? Do you still treat for varroa even with the VSH queens? So I would love to have the amount of time needed to properly test all of these things, but I just can't do that. It's not something that I'm a specialist in, so we rely on our breeding partners to do this testing for us. So they are part of like a kind of like pan-European VSH breeding program, and they're sharing— they're like constantly sharing drone semen and queens all the way across Europe, um, with the aim of trying to find some queens that are very, very good at controlling that mite population. So they, they'll do this, they'll do this testing, they'll do the breeding, they test the daughters, and then once they've tested the daughters, they say, right, we tested the the daughters of this queen, we'll send you this queen so we know this queen is good. Now what that doesn't mean is that every single queen is going to have the exact same Varroa-sensitive hygiene. That's not how kind of open mating works, but the majority of them will carry the trait. To get that trait to go further down is very, very difficult, and I always say to people, what it definitely doesn't mean is that you shouldn't treat these bees. You need to monitor them, you need to monitor the individual specific queen that you've got, whilst treating them and look out for the signs of Varroa-sensitive hygiene, and then you can potentially wean them off any treatments if you're starting to see the signs that are there. They will exhibit different levels of VSH tendencies depending on the queen, but I do recommend that everyone treats their VSH queens and kind of does some research into what you should be looking for, um, if you want to go down that route. So during the winter you don't feed, etc., sugar boards? No, absolutely not. I'm done by October, and I try not to feed at all. So this year I fed in October, and I've not fed again since. So, you know, I've not fed for 9 months, but I'll definitely be feeding soon. TJ Pritchard says, thanks, mate. Thank you too. Bee Enthusiast Peter, channel member, says, bit late joining, out with the doggos. Spring nucs with queens cells doing great, even had honey from them, but a couple have nice-looking queens but poor layers, so we'll— I think we'll call it a day and combine. Lynette says, me too, Dilwyn, cotton gloves to soak up the sweat, that and a neck fan, game changers. Very nice. Uh, Mike Hinsley, channel member, says— after I've had a drink— Simon the Beekeeper does all the Payne's parts for nucs. We have got top feeders, solid roofs, supers, and brood boxes. Also, Granny Griff do, uh, uh, also has some stock of Payne's nucs and brood boxes for them. Very good. Um, I think, uh, Harry, Simon the Beekeeper said, we know, we know when you send your nucs out because like the next day we get loads of orders for the lids because I do send people out the links. Chris Honey I'm Home says, meant to add and feed them pollen. Have I missed— I missed that, sorry. He says, hi Laurence, answering Phil's question on CBPV, I discussed this with my local bee inspector and the current thinking is to divide the colony, flying bees at the bottom, queen and brood and nurse bees, meant to add and feed them pollen. Okay, so it's kind of like a Demeray split kind of thing. Okay, that's interesting. So Bleeding the flying bees or separating the flying bees away from the queen, the brood, and the nurse bees. Okay, interesting. A bit like, if that works and they see like improvements as a result of that, that'd be really good. So I will pick that up with our bee inspector. Thank you so much, uh, thank you so much for your time this evening. I hope all your family are well and see you next live stream. You are now appointed official Twitch moderator. You have to let me know I have to give you. I'll try and get on there afterwards and assign you some stuff. Thank you so much for explaining it again. My pleasure. You have to tell me if Callie is not a suitable name. What is your thought on the Nucci Hive? Could only see one video about it on your channel. So the Nucci Hive is cool, but it is very, very niche. It is very niche. They stopped making it now, um, so I can say what I want— like, say what I want about it, which I could at the beginning. It is a really cool beehive. It's nice. It's made out of a very unique wood. Uh, what is it, akoya, which is like a pickled, uh, very sustainable timber. I think it looks really nice. I like the fact that it's flat. I use it as a table in my apiary. I use it as a little mini mating, uh, nuc kind of thing, collection of nucs. It is expensive, uh, but it's cool. I really like it. I like the way it looks. As soon as I saw it on Etsy, I thought, I want one of those. They're very, very nice. Uh, Matt Page, channel member, says, uh, evening, Lawrence, hope you're well. I'm melting. Oh, you're banned. You're immediately banned. I don't know, You can say you're melting and not moan about the heat. You did put a smiley face on it, so there we go. You're not banned. Definitely not banned. I love the warm weather, if you may not have noticed. Gareth Rose says, I've made an underfloor entrance opening from the video you made. Excellent. I'm glad, I'm glad people are making those entrances. They are good. Definitely not my design, by the way. I got it from, I got it from the Beekeeping Forum, um, and I think it's based on an old Dartington floor, uh, very similar to that, but I, you know, share it with pride. Uh, tons of, tons of ladybirds in the East Midlands. Oh, maybe they're coming on the way up. Donna Morrison, channel member, says thank you so much for the live stream and videos, great as always. Have a good weekend. I hope you have a good weekend too, Donna. Eggs and Honey says ladybirds in links on the broad beans, tons of aphids. Oh wow, it is serious. Ladybirds everywhere. Jasper, hey, getting on me. If, if you can see this, I'll tell you what, let me just turn— I'll turn this off. Show you Jasper's party trick. Right, watch this. This, this is pretty special if you've not seen a dog do a trick before. You ready for this? Yeah. And what you have to do— wait, just look, look basically right here, uh, on this paw. Yeah, watch out, watch how much he moves it. Jaz, paw! Oh, that was— to be fair, that was pretty good. He doesn't normally do that. He normally does this, just like moves it like that. Jaz, paw! Oh, very good. There we go. Expert dog training there. That is the absolute height of Jasper's skills. Uh, BIBI says, hi Lawrence, first season beekeeper here. My bees swarmed already, got a new mated queen, but now they've stored up honey in the brood box. I've added a super using a brood. Any advice? So make sure there's plenty of space above it, uh, uncap anything that gets capped in the brood box, um, make sure all of the accessible frames are as in the middle as they can possibly be, and then the bees should sort all of that out for you. Simon G says don't forget to stick the thumbs up. Thank you very much. Uh, Butter Bing says do that on Twitch. Excellent. Gene says smash the thumbs up for Lawrence. Thank you very much. Terry says thanks Lawrence for the stream, I've got to run. I've lost 5 hives from wasps so far in 3 different places. I'll keep you informed. Oh no, I hope you get it sorted. Matthew says hi Lawrence, what is the best way you've found to deal with wasps? Said it at the beginning, really, really good attack. You have a big strong colony and the wasps will not not get in. When would be the latest time of the year that a queen could be safely replaced? You could replace queens in strong colonies all the way through until September, October, absolutely fine. Jean is smiling. PJ Morgan gets the last one. He says, what are your thoughts on honeydew as a late source of honey? We have loads of lime linden trees with aphids extract sugar and the bees take it. If you get it, you, you'll see it in the hives. It is really, really cool. I, I like honeydew honey in very small quantities. Because it is potent, but it is very cool. There's nothing you can do to try and get it. You just you have to be around those trees at the right time, and your bees have to find it. But there we go. That was the last one. I'll do this one again. Arro says got attacked by hornet today whilst the Amazon lady was rummaging around in her van. I wasn't able to ID it, but could this be an Asian hornet? Could this be a way Asian hornets are arriving? Oh, I love it! Just go and smear Amazon. Definitely, yeah, definitely Amazon that's figured in all the Asian hornets. Hundred percent. I laugh, and I kind of. I probably shouldn't have laughed there. They could definitely be getting in on Amazon parcels, but I think they're just getting in everywhere. You look at the situation in Europe, you look at the situation in France, and you look at the amount of stuff that comes over here from France, they're going to be in everything that's coming over here. There'll be tons of hornets coming through. Uh, BBB says thanks for the strum, have a good weekend. Kelly says thank you. Matthew Rigby says thanks very much. John says goodbye. Leesby says have a great weekend. We are done. I hope you enjoyed that. I'll be back in 2 weeks' time to do another livestream, and let's talk about some bees.