Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 74

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I want to start off with something a little bit fun. I'm going to present on here, if I can work out how to do it, I'm going to present my HiveWatch app. There we go, that's up now. This is pretty cool and this is saving me a little bit of stress, I would say, at this time of the year. So I got given a free HiveWatch sensor kit, I do pay for the subscription, but they gave me all the hardware and I said, I'll just set it up and give it a go and see how it goes. I don't know if it's going to be good. I'm not going to do a review or anything like that. Just let's have a play with it. Turns out it is awesome. It really, really is. I love it so much. So I've got a single HiveWatch box sensor, and then if I'm just flicking around here, it gives you all of this information. So it gives you like transmitter temperature and battery voltage and stuff like that. And then it taps into this online weather from there. So you get a nice little graph of your weather, but you can kind of get that from anywhere. Here's all the really cool things. You've got a weight scale. Scale that is insanely accurate. It's like to the, to the gram, and it goes out every minute, so you get these really nice cool graphs. You've got external humidity, external temperature, brew temperature, relative humidity, and then internal temperature, and it even collects the rain on there as well. But it's this scale bit that is— for this time of the year when you've gone and put your supers on, you're thinking it looks pretty cold out there and there's definitely not that much coming in— the ability to see at this granular level is, is really nice for relieving stress. So the one that I jump into all the time is this one here. You go View in Timeline and you can toggle kind of all of them or as many of them on as you want. But I go with that CH1, the scale. And then you can come in here and you can just, you can see what's going on. Look at that. So, um, oh, it's terrible. I'll tell you what, if I just, if I chuck it over here, it's a little bit easier for me to see it. But you can see what's going on. So that one there is the, I think that's the 7-day one. And then you can go to a 10-day one, which is irrelevant because I just added on for 4 supers here, but if I jump back to the 3-day one there, you can see what's going on and look at the level of change that you're seeing kind of throughout the day and then going up again. It's all over the place and okay, we're quite zoomed in in terms of that axis over there, but if I just jump down to kind of some of the closer looks like that, like a day let's say, I know that's doing it with the battery, let me go in there and just show you the last week on here because it is is relatively— I'd say it's quite interesting. I think this is interesting. You can see the peaks, and the peaks are when all the nectar is going into the hive during the day. And then during the night, after that nectar comes in, they fan it down and it potentially goes down a little bit like that. And then you can see those days there, it's scaling towards going down. And I've been getting very, very worried here. I'm thinking, for me, I'm probably drop dead. I think that colony will die at about 46 kilograms. But anything above 46 kilograms is okay. And kind of for me, really, 47 is going to be my buffer. And we're coming perilously close to it there. Look at that, 47.82. And that was the day before yesterday. But then the last 2 days have not been roasting hot, but they've definitely been flying days. And you can see, so yesterday we went from a base of 47.82 to 48.18. That might not seem like that much. That's like nearly 400 grams of weight on overnight, which is a huge, huge amount. Um, in, in the context of this spring, when the weather gets going, you will see these go up and down really, really crazy. But this is good for me. I can say, well, on the 18th of April, I'm in a better situation than I was on the 17th of April. And without having like accurate scales like that, you wouldn't really know, and you're always shooting a little bit blind. So I just— I will close that one down and I'll jump back to the studio. I thought I'd show you that. It's— I'm just running that on loads of different videos this year, and I want to get— I want to get another system so I can kind of compare the two, which I think would be pretty cool. But yeah, there we go. That's my— that's my intro. I'll show that a bit more, and I'm going to show that more over on HiveQ, which is the, the micro adjustments that are going on on that HiveWatch One, and it will be included in, in tons of different videos. What, what I have done on that one— so I'm doing it as a season-long experiment— I've gone in, the brood box was looking brilliant, it was on 5 or 6 frames of brood a couple of weeks back, and I think they're on about 4 or 5 frames of stores. There was a decent amount of stores, so I thought, well, I'll take the punt here. I'll put the queen excluders on. It was lovely weather back at that time as well. I put 4 supers on, which I do not recommend people to go ahead and do. But the reason that I did it, I just thought, well, if I just put 4 supers on now, I'm not going to touch that colony now until the supers are hopefully full or they swarmed, whichever one comes first. And we'll be able to see and track that in great, great detail, and you'll be able to almost see like maybe too much nectar comes in all at once and saturates the brood box and causes swarming. The interesting thing is when the swarm goes, you'll see a huge reduction in the weight because of the amount of bees, which would be an unusual thing to see in the middle of the day like that, that many bees going out. So we'll cover all of that all the way throughout the season. It's going to be, it's going to be very, very good. Well, I'll jump on to the questions. I didn't get the questions all sorted last week, didn't get to the end, and the same thing will probably happen this week, so I will finish bang on 8. Good morning to everyone. Yes, another episode of Let's Talk Bees. So let's jump through some of the comments. Got Walker Bee Honey says good morning. Morning to you too. Let's jump straight in with the question then. It's from 009. He says, or she says, good morning. I have 2 colonies both on double brood and 2 supers UK. Charged swarm cells in both hives. I have one mated queen delivered yesterday and another coming from you on Friday. How do I fix this please? Thank you. Okay, really easy fix and great to be in a position where I'm hoping that the bees have not swarmed yet. So I'm going to treat this as the bees have not swarmed yet and they're producing, you said, charged swarm cells, so you've seen inside, so I'm assuming they're not capped. Great. So your options are, you've got a number of options. I'll give you the mated queen option here. There's always so many permutations in beekeeping, but right, here we go. I would go into each of the colonies and identify the best— no, you're requeening with a mated queen. Yeah. So go in, find the best queen cell that you've got in there, No, we're doing it wrong, aren't we? I'm confusing myself here. You're— you've got charged swarm cells in both hives and they have one mated queen delivered yesterday. Okay, so it's as simple as this: take down all of the swarm cells, find your queen, make a split, and then introduce a queen into the other half like that. That's going to be the easiest way of doing it because you've got the queens coming in, um, the queen cells already are not capped, so you can just take them all down. The queen is still there. So you're going to have for each hive the queen that's still there, all of the queen cells removed, and then your new queen, and you can just split both of those 2 colonies like that. Now the, the best way of splitting it, what, what you want to do immediately with the split is to give sufficient space in the brood nest. So you're going to take, um, it's difficult because you're doing it on 2 separate colonies like that, so both colonies are going to be on a single brood. Yeah, I would go aggressive. It's the time of the year to go aggressive, I would say. So I would split both of those colonies onto individual brood nests, single brood nests, and run them like that and give them sufficient space upstairs in the supers and, and hope that they won't swarm again. So hopefully the existing queen should get the relief from half of the bees going, and then the new queen should be a much lower risk of swarming. I think that is how I would do it. Um, yeah, hopefully it fixes it. Let me know, come back next week, and hopefully, hopefully that will all be good. Walkerby Honey says congratulations on making the leap on the job change. Thank you very much. It's kind of a strange one, that, because I officially, you know, my first day at Platmountain Honey was on Friday, but I was technically employed up until then, but I've been on maternity leave and stuff like that, so there's been a little bit of overlap and weekend and evening working, but I'm now officially no longer employed by my previous employer, which is nice. I feel like free for finally. Good morning. Morning, Harry. Morning, Paul. Good morning, Dad's Honey from Georgia. Hello. Good evening. So he's in California. Hi, Gene. To work out where people are. Morning all, looking forward to the start of the beekeeping here at Loch Lomond. The season starts tomorrow, weather forecast is decent. It's interesting about the change of the weather because I really have been looking at that HiveWatch sensor quite a lot this week thinking Do I do I need to go back? It's really embarrassing going back and taking supers off when you've made the decision and said no no no this is this is the time to be going and putting them on, and it is different for everyone in the country. But I film me putting them on, so I have to film them coming back off if they do come back off. And I and I have been sitting there thinking it's pretty cold, and I don't want the bees to die, so maybe I'm going to go back in. And every time I've gone back up to have a look, the the crazy orientation flights that are going on, and I'm thinking if there's orientation flights, then foragers will be out too, because the orientation flights are going to take place kind of at slightly higher temperatures than the forager bees going out, because they're older bees. So I was thinking, I think it's okay. And then I come back in, look at the HiveWatch, and I see it just ticking up by 100 grams or 200 grams, and I think I should be less stressed today than I was yesterday. But it's— I only mentioned that because I'm looking at the weather now and the weekend doesn't look great, it's like 11, 12 degrees. But I think on the HiveWatch we'll see it kind of maintaining or maybe going up 100 or 200 grams a day, and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday goes to like 15, 16 degrees, and I think we'll get a nice warm spell coming in, and then it will all kick off, won't it? So the last thing I want to do is go and take the supers off. It's probably, probably going to be the closest I would say that I've come to taking them off since the time that I had to go back around a few years ago and actually take them all off, um, which is quite embarrassing. But hopefully most people got it right with the timing. This is good timing. of like back end of April, nice warm spell coming in. Fingers crossed everyone gets a good amount of honey in their supers this year. Good morning. Niamh says, good morning, Laurence, love from the Highlands. Oh, love, sending love that way as well. Laurence, what type of solution do you use to clean your frames? Thank you, appreciate you sharing your information with us. I have to say, not only have I lost my hearing kind of at a very early age, I'm losing my eyesight as well. I'm struggling to read a bit here. I might have to I might have to put it on the big screen over here. There we go, you can have a side-on, a side-on view for this episode. So what kind of solution? So it's just a simple washing soda solution. There is a— you can use caustic soda as well, but not, not on my recommendation. Only if you know what you're doing, use proper caustic soda, but washing soda is fine. And then you can— it depends on the strength that you want, but I just, I kind of know each of my containers by the amount that I just chuck in. So my big boiling one that I've got though, I chuck 10 in. And it's 10 kilograms of washing soda into— I think it's a 100-liter tank, but it's not full, so it's probably a ratio of like 12 to 1, something like that. It's quite, it's quite a strongish ratio. Don't, don't, don't count me on that ratio. 100 liters of water to 10 kilograms. There we go, do the maths. Um, and then boil it up, and it's the boiling that sterilizes it, so don't, don't do it with just steam on there as well, but it gets them super, super clean. Uh, Denby Honey says, good morning, Lawrence, I'm back from my holidays. Guess what? The very first hive I inspected had 10 capped swarm cells. I managed to find the queen just in the nick of time. New Black Mountain honey queens ordered. Well, it is— I was doing a video with Zane. Zane's doing My First Nuc, so I'm redoing the My First Nuc video series, but I'm, I'm on the camera a bit and Zane's doing it, which is good fun. And Zane, um, it's— Zane said, what do you do if you go on holiday? Like, what do you do with your bees? Who inspects them? And I say, well, What you do is you just go and pray that they don't swarm, and then you come back and they have swarmed. That's what's happened to Paul. So I'm very, very sorry, Paul, that's happened to you. It is sod's law, isn't it? But you do go on holiday an awful lot, so my sympathies are limited. Okay, uh, Paul, we did that one there. I think I'm jumping around. Um, David says good morning. Uh, Lawrence finally managed to make a Saturday morning. Good morning to you too, David. Uh, Niamh says, can I please ask what you think to the Suyenti hires? Absolutely. I'm gonna have a sip of coffee first. So I've got a lot of Suyenti hives, like a lot, probably 80% of my beehives are Suyenti, and it was more than that at some point. And the reason that I bought them was because they were— they had the exterior footprint of a wooden National, which is great for compatibility. They were based on bottom bee space, which the wooden National is. It's a bottom bee space like that because they weren't always bottom bee space, and it introduces a lot of problems into the design. The curved bullnose lip at the top is Terrible, terrible design. It really, really is bad, and the bees just chew through it and eat their way through and create entrances wherever they want them. However, they have fixed that, so the new plastic runner that goes in kind of completely fixes that issue and doesn't give bees access to it anymore. The spacing inside is off, so you get odd spacing. You can't get— 10 frames is not enough, 11 frames is too much, so it's— you get these really, really weird odd spacings in there. It's a straight— I'll give you really honest advice: don't buy the Suyenti beehive. It's not a proper National beehive, it's a botched hive to work with the National, and the spacing's not right on some of the different components. It's a little bit cheaper than some of the other ones, and in my view it's far inferior. And that's not to say that I don't like Suyenti. Suyenti, really good company, make tons of brilliant products, but I don't think they make a very good National hive. So no, I wouldn't not go for it. Sorry if you bought one. I've got loads, so I feel your pain. You're in the club of people who bought the Suyenti hive and then had buyer's regret. Lawrence, I'm having an issue with small hive beetles. What do you think I should do? Stop feeding fondant? So I'll always hold my hand up and say if I don't, if I don't know the answer, and I'm not an expert on it, and I'm most certainly not an expert when it comes to small hive beetle, so I will, I will not answer that one, I'm afraid, Jean. It's only because there'll probably be someone who gives you a much better answer, and I just don't want to regurgitate the limited information that I have on small hive beetle because we don't don't have it in the UK. So I kind of— I know what it is, I know what you shouldn't be doing with it, I know, yeah, stop feeding fondant's probably a good idea. My understanding of it is it generally stems from not poor management of colonies, but colonies that are dwindling, something else that's wrong with a colony, a colony that's got a queen that's turning drone-laying, and then the colony's dwindling down because of that drone-laying, and then the small hive beetle come out and they get in and they'll start feeding on the fondant and it will go slimy, and people might say, oh, it's because I was feeding fondant, where really it's probably because the queen's turned drone laying, shrinking the colony down. The fondant starts going a bit slimy with the small hive beetle on it, and then yeah, people put two and two together. So I think I would look kind of like for an underlying cause as opposed to blaming the small hive beetle for it. It's probably there as a— they are there as a result of something else that is going wrong. Laurence, where are swarm cells normally Where normally are they in the hive? So this really is a common misconception, this one, and everyone gets it, and I see it, it's peddled all the time in terms of location of cells dictating what kind of cell they are. So what they generally say is if it's on the bottom bar like that, it's a swarm cell. If it's on the face of the frame, kind of in the middle there, on the center, it's a supersedure cell, and then emergency cells can be anywhere. It's not true. I've kind of had multiple examples disproving both of those theories there. So I've had— I've opened up a hive and I've had 40 cells in the hive, and the bees were definitely swarming because I watched them swarm, and not a single one of them was on the bottom bar. So it kind of disproves that one. But I would say, if the bees have the option of putting them on the bottom bar, 9 times out of 10, that's probably where they would go. But it's not always the case. Um, similarly with supersedure, you might find them just a single one or 2 cells on the face of a frame, that's maybe where they would go, but a lot of the time, like, so I found 2 supersedure cells on the bottom bars at the edge of a brood nest, so they're on the bottom bar, so you might look at them and say, well, they're swarm cells because they're on the bottom bars, but there are only 2 of them, and it was definitely supersedure because the queen was still there and she was slightly damaged, so they were trying to supersede the queen, cells that are on the bottom bar. So for me, I just take no notice to where the cells are. I determine, are they, are they swarming or supersedure or emergency, and then kind of go, go from there. If they're emergency, it's quite, it's quite easy. They can appear pretty much anywhere and they'll have the 90-degree kink in them. And then the swarm, supersedure, for me is just based on number, and my magic number is 3. 3 comes up a lot in beekeeping, and 3 being the most unhelpful number in the world because 3 is kind of one where I'm like, Could be both, but anything either way from that, I treat it as either swarming or supersedure. So if it's 1 cell in a whole colony, it's supersedure. If it's 2 cells in a whole colony, it's supersedure, regardless of where they are within the frame. And then if it's anything more than 3, I treat it as swarming, and again, regardless of where they are on the frames. Morning, Laurence, will waiting 3 days be too long to move our nucs from you to their hive? So no, they are fine at this time of the year. It's difficult for me to kind of judge fully the conditions that you've got where you are, but as where it is where we are at the moment, the bees kind of go into a little bit of a stasis where they don't really do a huge amount, they don't consume that much stores, or if they do, they go out and they replenish it, but they don't move too much in terms of space. But as soon as the good weather comes in, or if you've been sitting there and it's like 15, 16, 17 degrees and the bees have been flying all of that time, then yeah, I would get them out after like 3 4 days. But I've, I've got some nucs, so from— it's handy to do this, it's the 18th of April today, so from this week's batch— sorry, it's from last week's batch, so it would have been— I have to go to my little calendar, where's my calendar? It's up there. So, so ones that would be— I've got some nucs from not this week's batch, the batch before last, that have been there for about 10 days and they're still in the nucs and they're not being fed, but they're getting a little bit light so they could probably do with the feed. So I just do that just to give me a little bit of kind of a or the ability to make a judgment call on somebody else's nuc, but I would say yeah, it's fine for them to be in there up for about a week. If you're lifting them up and you're thinking that feels light, give them some syrup, 1:1 syrup, half fill the feeder, make sure the float comes up to the top or you'll kill a lot of bees, and then that'll see them good for another few days in there, I would say. Good morning, I want you to— where are we going here? Rebecca Taylor. Rebecca says, can I use a couple of frames from one hive for a nuc from a hive that has 7 frames of capped brood Need to do something as seeing play cups. I've done 3 demarays already, I've been busy. Very good. Well, people are on it with the demarays. I will— I'll touch on to the demarays in a little bit just to make sure people aren't doing any of those too early. But on your question there, Rebecca, absolutely. And this is what one of the channel member videos was talking about the other day, which is just playing to your advantages, which is if you've got a big strong colony and you think they're going to swarm and you want to make a split at some point, then make the split now. before they try and swarm, and it helps to stop them swarming as well, which should give you more honey. Like, it ticks all of the boxes. It's just a case of learning how to do it at the right time. So a colony that's got 7 frames of brood now, if you took a frame of brood, a frame of stores, a good shake of bees, and took it to another apiary, fed them, and added a mated queen, it would almost do no— have no impact on the, the colony that is the donor colony, the colony that's giving you the resources. But it will knock down that swarming impulse just a little bit. those 2 frames are going to be replaced with foundation and the bees are just going to focus on that and they're going to draw it out, the queens are going to have space to lay, so it will give you a little bit of buffer in terms of timing as well. And then that small tiny little bit of resource that you've put into the new nuc will be bursting with bees kind of come the end of the year, probably needs to go into a full beehive. So it's a very, very sustainable way of limiting the amount of swarming that goes on whilst kind of creating your nucs at the same time. Steve's Bees Wales says, hi Lawrence, I hope your season goes well. Same to you, Steve. I like your logos, very cool. Rebecca is saying, it's killing me down in southwest Sussex. I think, yeah, we all, we all feel the weather pain at the moment, right? Sergeant Snitch says, morning all. I like your outfit too. Morning Lawrence from Somerset. Is there any way to demo over the WBC? So WBC Hive is kind of exactly the same as a national really inside in terms of boxes, so you can do anything that you can do in a national, you can do in a WBC, it's just way more expensive because you need to get all of the lifts just to make it look nice from the outside, but you can definitely do it. I'll double down on this recommendation, I think that every single person for every single beehive should have a backup brood box, especially in the UK where the national brood box is very, very small, so I think people should either run double brood or run a kind of single double brood demarée management system. I've just come to the conclusion now that running single brood all the way throughout the season isn't enough for prolific bees like Buckfast. You might get away with it with AMM bees, but it's just too small. It's interesting because Langstroth, you can kind of just about get away with it, and then it brings single brood management back into play because it's a much bigger box. Uh, so, whoa, yeah, is there any way to demo with the WBC? Yes, it's expensive and you need— you'll need as a minimum just an extra brood box, but it's, it's perfectly doable. Uh, Ben Robinson says, good morning, Lawrence. I'm just gonna have a sip of coffee. Uh, he says, could you give us some advice on increasing the chances of queen acceptance when introducing your Buckfast queens into an AMM colony, please? We made 3 large AMM colonies, all Double brood, hopelessly queenless. Following your day eight method, removing all queen cells before introducing the queen. We waited 48 hours before popping the caps. All three colonies successfully ate the candy and released the queens. We inspected a week later and only found one. Oh, where's the rest of the stuff in there? So we only found one of the queens. I want to know. I want to know what happens next. Where's the rest of? Where's the rest of Ben's message? That is it. We only found one of the queens. Okay. So sorry to hear that. What I would first say is I wouldn't lose hope. Just because you can't find the queen doesn't mean that she's not there, and I'd be looking for eggs. So normally what I do after adding a queen in like that, I'll go in 7 days later and I'm not looking for the queen, I'm just looking for eggs, and if I see eggs, all is good. So hopefully you might have some eggs in there. The other thing I would say is that if you don't see the queen and you don't see eggs, I still wouldn't lose hope because it's very cold. I've got so many colonies where the queens are just saying no. laying in that. It's like freezing, absolutely freezing. We're cutting out the laying for a little bit. New queens are especially susceptible to that, so a light feed and some nice warm weather might bring them back into lay. There is a chance that they just killed them because AMM sometimes do do that, which is very frustrating. The other thing that AMM do when it comes to introducing Buckfast queens into them is they, a lot of the time, unnecessarily supersede. So they let the new queen out, they let the new queen lay, she lays some eggs, and then as soon as the eggs kind of hatch out into larvae, they just bump off the queen and kill her. So like 3 or 4 days after she started laying, and then raise supersedure cells from the larvae that she's produced, which is really frustrating and really stupid as well for the bees because I don't know, I don't know why they do it. I guess it's, it's an attempt to preserve some, at least, of their genetics. But the way to mitigate that one as well, so if you know you're going into particularly difficult AMM or dark colonies or native feral bees, Go in every 3 days. So it's a case of pop the tabs, and then instead of going back a week later, go back in 3 days later, and you might be able to intercept that laying where she's gone in, she's laid some, and before they bump off the queen, you can go in and take down the supersedure cells. They do tend to give you like a little bit of time to do it. And then the idea is that you're lengthening that out, doing 3-day inspections all the way until you get to the point where the eggs that the queen, the new queen, has laid have emerged into young Buckfast bees, and then they stop doing it. It's like just instantly stop doing it. And then somebody gave me a really nice tip. I've never done this myself, but they said that they tried it and it really, really helped them, which was you, you introduce the queen as normal. So as you put the— as you pop the tab— Sorry. You pop the tab and then normally you go back in 7 days later. With the AMM, go back in 3 days later and you want to see the queen running around on the frame. And at that point, go and take, if you've got one, a frame of Buckfast capped brood, preferably emerging, shake off all the bees back into the beehive that it came from. one and just place in the capped frame of brood like that. And if you can get the queen, put the queen on that frame. And they said that that's it, you kind of reach that point where Buckfast genetics are emerging almost instantly. You don't have to wait for them. And they said it worked, and they said that they never had any issues with supersedure or bumping off queens after doing that. So that was a nice little tip. I thought I'd share that one. Fingers crossed it all goes well. Let me know, drop me an email. Hopefully, hopefully there's a happy ending to that one. Okay, let's go to the next one. We got Ben. Good morning. You doing? It's instant that I call you Ben now. I don't know why I do it. Your name is Tom. It's because it's our boy B. So I read our boy B's and I was Ben. It's not. And we have lots of people that do stuff for us called Ben. So it is not Ben. It is Tom. And Tom has been swatting up this week. So good morning, Tom. Blue Lights B says, do you put a small amount of bleach in the washing soda? Very interesting. That is an upcoming video. So there is, there is new guidance out by the NBU. We— it's funny because I did a video about, I don't know, a year or so ago which was cleaning polyhives, and the way that I'd always been taught to clean polyhives was to do this mixture where you have the combination of sodium hypochlorite, so like really strong bleach, and the washing soda mixed up together, and then it kind of goes in for like a washy soak, and then you dip it just in the bleach. That was always the way that I was shown it, and then a number of people messaged me or commented on that video saying, oh, the mixture of bleach and washing soda, one's alkali and one's acid, and they cancel each other out and stop each other working properly. Sounds good, doesn't it? And I foolishly didn't challenge it and didn't say, is that actually true? 'Cause that just sounds like really good, but is it actually true? And they said, yeah, yeah, definitely true. So I challenged it with the MBU and said, what's the right way here? And back then, I think, I'm pretty sure, yeah, that they were of the same opinion, which is you shouldn't mix bleach and washing soda. Whether that triggered anything, I don't know, but then they came out and said, we've just, we've done some tests and we now, this is our new system, which is for cleaning, you can mix washing soda and bleach. And then someone said, well, hang on, if you're, can you do it in your washing, in your washing bucket, in your tool bucket? Because that's a real, like, that's, that's useful if you can do that. Normally, if you just have washing soda in your tool bucket with your hive tools in, you're kind of washing them, you're getting them off clean, but they're not sterile because it's just washing soda, it's just cleaning it, there's nothing to kill it. So what they've said now is, and this is the National Bee Unit of the United Kingdom's advice, which is you can have washing soda and the right amount of bleach, and they give you the— pardon me— they give you the correct dosage in your hive tool container. Chuck a few hive tools in there, give it a shake around, and then in between every single hive, you chuck your hive tool back in there, get a new one out, give it a little rinse, and you've got a sterile hive tool You've also got your gloves, which you can go in there and just kind of like wash up like that, so you've got as good as you can possibly get sterile gloves as well. And then they say give them a little wring out, and there is no impact going into the brood nest doing that, like it's minute traces that are going in. So that's the NBU's recommendation, and that is, that's kind of what I do now. So I put a, a small amount of bleach and the washing soda in the hive tool bucket, and that's it. Yeah, so I'll do the video on that video next week on that exact thing. That's why it's relevant. Good morning, congratulations on making the huge step with your job, it's massive. I'm planning to do a demo ray on one of my hives this weekend, the first one I've done. I'm looking forward to it. Well, thank you, Nessa. It is massive, it's quite exciting. With the demo ray, the, the bit of advice that I want to give people on the demo rays, do not do it too soon. The, the idea for a demo ray, the best way, the way to get the best out of the demo ray is to— I feel I should be talking up here now, I don't know why— that is to perform the manipulation just before they're going to naturally swarm. And when I say just before they're naturally going to swarm, I mean just before they're going to naturally start to prepare to swarm, so they're going to start charging the cells, not when they're going to leave. And the closer you can get to that, the more honey you're going to get. The further away you get from that, i.e., doing it too early, the more risk you introduce in killing your queen, and this is why. So on the Demerara, you need to have at least 2 supers there, so you have your brood box and then you have 2 supers and then you have your extra brood box and then your roof at the top. The idea is that you've got 2 brood nests, one that's going to be fully formed up at the top and then one brand new one with the queen underneath, and then as— I get it right— as the top one, get it right, top one dwindles down, the bottom one opens up like that, so you get these 2 simultaneous brood nests running next to each other. And, and this is what gives you the bumper amount of bees later down the line as well. So it's, you're preparing for like a good May crop by doing the demaray at the moment, May, back end of May. The risk that you have is that when you have these 2 different brood nests here, one starts off really small, one starts off really big, you need enough bees in the middle to fill the gap. If you don't have enough bees, what happens is they all go up here and you just get left with a queen here, and then all of the bees are up here and the queen's here, and if it's cold, she just dies. and then you just get left with no queen and loads of swarm cells— or sorry, not swarm cells, loads of emergency cells up there, because that's what's going to happen in the, um, if you, if you kill your queen like that. So is it too early? Probably not for a lot of people. All I would say is just double-check to make sure that you've got at least 2 supers full of bees. That is the prerequisite. And if you've got 2 supers full of bees, you can connect everything up together And then if you do it preemptively so there's no swarm cells present, then it is a very, very reliable technique. So give it, give it a good go. Hello, is this first time catching you live this year? We are every other week at 7 AM, and I'll do it for an hour, and I love it. It's brilliant. I've been up for hours already, and I've my second coffee of the day. Morning all, hoping this isn't a silly question. There is never any silly questions. She says— I don't know why I said she says, and I'm guessing Entab35 is a she, but could well be a man, not that it matters at all. I need to move my weekly inspections from Tuesday to Thursday. Do I go in twice a week, i.e., Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then Thursday? Thanks. Oh, that's a good question. I'm very, I'm a very lazy beekeeper. If that was me, oh, I don't know what I would do. I think at this time of the year it's fine, leave a 9-day gap. There we go, it's no issue doing that, and that is what I would do. So I would, I would go do your inspection on the Tuesday, and then the next inspection you do is a week on Thursday, so you have a 9-day gap. Good question, that one, not silly at all. Hello from Manchester, thanks for the suggestion about getting the bee inspector out to look at my adopted Zander hive colonies. They came out this week, clean bill of health, just waiting for a good day to shook them into nationals. Excellent, that's cool. It's a very odd style of hive, that one, the Zander hive. You don't, yeah, you don't see many of them around. I had to Google it to see what it was, but cool, I'm glad that they came out and glad that they gave it a clean bill of health. Very responsible beekeeping there. And shook swarm, shook swarm is good fun, and interesting that you're saying just waiting for a good day to shook swarm. My experience with shook swarms is the later the better. You almost want to sit on your hands for like another 2 or 3 weeks, and it's interesting that the alignment of when to do the Demaray, I would say, is a really good alignment on when to do your shook swarm as well, because you're looking for that colony to build up to kind of critical mass just before they swarm, which is like the maximum number of bees you're going to get out of that current cycle the queen in order to do the demerare, but it's also exactly what you need when it comes to doing the, uh, the shook swarm. Be interesting when they come and do the shook swarm as well, because I, I, I changed the way that I did the shook swarm a little bit. I don't know if it makes a huge amount of difference. I never liked kind of burning all of the brood like that, and I can understand why burning the brood is useful from a varroa perspective as well, but I just like the idea of caging the queen and then letting all of the brood emerge and then and then keeping all of the bees. But I guess I'm keeping all of those bees anyway, I'm just sacrificing the new brood. But yeah, it's interesting to see the way that they do it now and if they continue to do it that way, whether they cage the queen or not. I suspect they won't because they'll come and do it in a day, but it might be worth going in 8 days before and caging the queen. They do it, they do it both ways. I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference, to be honest, but good, good luck with the Shook Swarm. Elusive, he's the most elusive person in the world. Simon, for anyone who has asked me where do I buy the Abello Castellations, this is the man that you need to find out. Simon, just put your, put your email up so people can get in contact with you. I did a first short with your Castellation this week, it was pretty cool. My bees have started building comb under the hive, is this a space issue? I'll be doing a demaro today. So yeah, any, any additional comb outside of where you think it should be at the moment, either on the top or the bottom— the top's a real good clue, it's like, yeah, give me some space up there— but on the bottom as well, if there's no space elsewhere, New comb indicates, yeah, they want some space. Uh, Niamh says, I'll stick to the Nationals and a Bello like you recommend on the 14 BB keepers. Thank you, highly recommended both of those. Yeah, Norfolk Nigel says, morning, all is good this week. 2 supers on the hive, 3 on 1, made a split, has had a capped supersedure cell. The queen was a 2024 but appeared to be laying eggs still. Congrats on going full time. Thank you very much, Nigel. That's nice. If I'm assuming that is the case, capped supersedure cell in spring on a 2024 queen We like those genetics, they're reliable genetics, those ones, because you've not lost the bees to swarming and they're doing it at a nice, nice, nice time of the year, as opposed to doing it in November or something silly like that. Laurence, what is the longest amount of time that you've ever done a hive inspection into a hive? Oh, I've been there for hours before looking for a single hive— sorry, looking for a single queen in just huge hives and going through again and again and again and thinking, I can't do what I need to do until I find this queen, so you have to hang around. So I would say, yeah, about an hour before I kind of give up on it. Morning, bees— or channel member says, morning, bees are settling in well despite the weather. Thanks for a great nuc and planning of underbrooding and then splitting. When would you think would be right to order a queen? So thanks for being a channel member. I see you signed up recently, and I'm glad that the nuc arrived safely. So in terms of ordering queens, I would say this to most people, which is There will be queens available for you when you think about how the queen system works and the splitting and the time that's taken between the processes. So let's go through your one there. You're gonna have a— you've got a nuc in place now, it's building up on a single brood box, you're gonna underbrood it, but I would say at this time of the year you can probably get away with just sticking the brood box on the top if you've got good nectar coming in and there's a good flow. It doesn't make a massive difference, and my preference would be to put the brood box on the top. I only say to underbrood if you need to continue feeding the bees, and I would say get it, get it in there and do the underbrooding first if the weather's like it is at the moment, but then don't worry too much about that as it gets to 16, 17 degrees and the flow's coming in and there's nice weather. Top or bottom will be fine. But then as you get to a point where both of those brood boxes are building up, you can just go ahead and make your split. Go ahead and do it, and at that point say, right, this is day 0, I've made my split. 8 days later, I need to come in and knock down all of those queen cells. And then any day from 8 days onwards, say day 8 to day 20, you can add the queen in and recontinue the process. So you've got this nice big 12-day, or even like a 2-week buffer, I would say, to find when your queen should be delivered. And I wouldn't do that now until you've made the split. So sorry, it's a little bit long-winded, but it makes sense. A few people have said that, which is, when should I order the queen for the split? And I say, well, just see how they build up and then— you'll be able to get a queen. I know, I know it seems like the queens are very like, well, they're in high demand, and they are in high demand, but I think we'll be able to keep at least like 1 to 2 weeks behind. So, so no one should have to wait longer than 1 or 2 weeks to get a queen, and it will get a little bit easier as the season goes on as well. So see how they go, let them build up. Once you've made the split, then book the queen in, and that should work well in terms of timings. Hi, it's Andy and Luke, the Nectar Seekers. We have capped honey in 4 hives. Can we take it off now? Probably 2 supers in each hive. We have 3 supers on each. Absolutely, yeah, so if the honey is properly capped, you can take it off, and it's a good point to make about what are people going to do with their strategy for honey this year. So many beekeepers, so many beginner beekeepers will go in at this point and say, well, just managing the bees at the moment, see what we can get, and then they get through to September and they think, anything, and they look back and they think, I had 4 supers in spring, I wish I'd have taken some of that, and I recommend everybody to do that. So don't bleed them dry, but if you've got, if you've got 4 supers on a colony and 2 of them are capped, it's really good just to take those 2 supers off that are capped and get 2 new supers on, preferably with some foundation on there. It helps suppress the swarming instinct. So doing that, taking that honey away and giving them additional space, and they think, oh, this is nice, you might delay it for a few extra days. But it also then gives you the ability to say if, if everything else goes terrible for the end of the year, 2 supers in the bank. So no one's going to take those 2 supers away from you. The really important thing to caveat that with though is to say if you're taking away 2 supers, make sure they don't need it. The June gap will be here sooner rather than later. I know, I know it's only April, but it's probably like 5, 5 or 6 weeks away, and the June gap will be that period where there's no nectar yielding. Don't be that person that goes in the day before the June gap and takes all all 4 supers off and says, beekeeping is easy, isn't it? Geez, that's the easiest thing ever, just didn't do anything, got 4 supers, took them away, go back to do your next week inspection and all the bees are dead. Most people have been there, it kind of hits hard, that lesson there, so don't take all of it off, but definitely take some of it off, and I think that's a good approach throughout most of the season really, just as and when it's there, take it off, and as you take it off, keep an eye on the colony. and make sure that there's good weather and there's nectar coming in and they're rebuilding back up again, and always leave them a really nice good buffer of stores. Simon says, in my opinion, swarm cell position depends on the state of your comb. If you have gaps, it's easier for the bees to place them where they want. Yeah, it's very true that, so they'll go to where there is space to do it, and I would say if you leave them space, and on most hives if you've got a kind of like a standard configuration, you're going to have a space in between the frames, like the top, the top of this frame at the bottom of the other frame, so it always leaves them that good space in there to swarm and to put swarm cells in there, but if you restrict that space and they can't get into that space, then they'll just go somewhere else and stick them all over the place. So bees definitely have a preference, and I would say on the whole that the advice that they're on the bottom for swarm cells and on the face for supersedure cells does, does hold water, but it's not always, and you cannot, you cannot look at a cell on a frame and say, that's a swarm cell because of where it is, and I think, I think you'll agree with that, Simon. Morning, Laurence, have you ever had a colony remove a supersedure cell? I removed the queen and pushed them into emergency response. So I've not, I've not seen that myself. I suspect they could do it, I don't really see why they would do it, but sometimes they raise supersedure cells spuriously, and sometimes they raise them, you'll see it with queens going into colony or colonies going into winter with 2 queens, they kind of just raise an extra queen going into winter and then see if it gets mated, and then they'll go through the whole season, the whole winter season, with 2 queens. And then in the spring, sometimes they bump off the, the supersedure queen, the new queen, because she's not as good as the old one, and then just try and do it again. So they will have multiple attempts at supersedure. It's— I've not seen them push themselves into the emergency response. I don't see, I don't see any reason why they would do that. They, if they wanted to go into the emergency response, they just kind of go into it and leave the supersedure cell there as well. It's interesting though, I've not seen that. If you, if you've seen something happen like that, yeah, drop me an email, that'd be quite cool. Following on from Andrew's, we're on double brood now on all hives. We will be under higher swarm pressure as the season progresses. Our bees are very busy and filling supers. I've been watching all the stuff that you're doing, it's so interesting. Great, great videos, by the way, but it's good to see the difference, the difference in climate. This is what's important Because where I am in North Wales, I wouldn't dream of putting supers on kind of at the time that you did. When you put your supers on is obviously the right time to put the supers on, so well judged. And yeah, it just goes to show the difference that we get kind of even within the UK, but around the world everyone's going to have their own unique set of dates, and it's up to kind of people to work out what, what the date is for them. Right, where are we going next? Uh, why is it Mark there? Mark says, Bora Di Lawrence, uh, butchered the Welsh accent there, sorry. He says, I have some colonies that are on standard brood and a super, they require more space, would you underbrood? No, so yeah, maybe. It's difficult, people get confused with the underbrooding and try to use it all the time, but I would say for you there, you've got some colonies that are on a standard brood and a super, is there a queen excluder in between? So they're not on brood and a half, they're just on like standard brood, queen excluder, then super, they require more space, would you underbrood? I would say this time of the year, I'd be more inclined just to give them more supers and try and push them that way and work them towards kind of like normal management on a single brood box, queen excluder, and there's space going upwards. And then ideally, like, if you're going to go down the Demaray route, wait until you hit that bees in 2 supers and then do something different with them, or go ahead and make a split at that point as well. I wouldn't— I think underbrooding, unless you're going to go ahead and do a split, gives you a different problem reduces the swarming impulse and you lose all of your honey downstairs into the double brood. So it kind of depends what you want. If you want as much honey as possible, I wouldn't double brood. If you're looking to split the beehives out, then double brooding at any time is always a good idea. Hi Lawrence, sorry, hi Lawrence, thanks for sharing our pictures, proud beekeeper this morning. Thank you, I would be proud with a frame like that, that was a beautiful frame, and the same goes to anyone. If you've got a nice frame or a nice picture of a queen or a nice frame of capped brood, then definitely tag me in it. I will, I will share it. For anyone who's not seen it, go and have a look at Sam's Honeybees on Facebook. He shared a beautiful frame of brood, and it was— yeah, I just love it when you get the brand new frames as well. So it's not like an old frame, it's a new frame completely laid up. Yeah, that was a very nice frame. Weather has been cold but sat in the sun at the Spring Convention, so going to be a nice warm day today. Excellent, I'm glad the weather's nice for the Spring Convention. Anyone going? time. Unfortunately, I wasn't welcome to go, so there we go. That's why I'm not there. Categorically told not to attend. I didn't really get that, I just, I got the impression I wouldn't be welcome there. So Andy says, we use the 14x12 National Brood. Do you use another 14x12 to do a demo ray? No. So on a 14x12, I would say it's similar to a Langstroth, which is, that is a big box, and I would limit any double brood management on a 14x12 system for a number of reasons. One, you lose too much honey to the brood box, an unhealthy amount. And then the second one is the boxes become way too heavy to lift, so if they fill the top box of a Demerare and you run it as a super, trying to pick it off is like 60 pounds up above your head, it's really heavy, it's nearly 30 kilos, so I wouldn't recommend a Demerare if you're doing it on a 14 by 12. Laurence, how soon in the spring do you put honey supers on a double brood box hive? So It's difficult and it's not as straightforward to say it's this date or you do it at this time, because normally my trigger for putting another— any box on top of another box is for it to be 80% full. So if you look down from the top and there's a 10-frame box and they're on 8 frames, you say, okay, it's 80%, you can have another box on. But in the first one going in of the year, doesn't— it can't apply to that because it could overwinter just on 80% the whole way through. So it's more about the understanding of the space stores conundrum. Do they need space or do they need feeding? Like, what, what's going to keep that colony intact, stop them from dying? And if you've double brooded them, they're probably not going to be having many issues with either of those 2 things, but it will give you a bit of a false impression from the top that you, that you don't need to do anything. So you have to work it out for yourself. I know that's a real cop-out, that one, but you have to understand your flows are roughly going to start, how much stores are in the colony, and then I put the supers on, on the basis that even if it's cold for the next few weeks, the weight of the colony, the stores that are within it, are going to sustain it until the natural nectar comes in, and that gives you your window for putting supers on, on any beehive. And this is what I was talking about at the beginning, so I put the supers on my beehive, what's it, 18th of April today, it was like first week of April, maybe in hindsight it was a few days early, but it's, it's been like 2 weeks since I put my supers on now, and since I put the supers on, the weight of the beehive has reduced. And I can show all of this on the HiveWatch. It's probably gone down by about 3 or 4 kilograms, um, which is like 2 or 3 frames— was it £4 per frame? So it's, yeah, it's probably like 2 frames of stores it's gone down by-ish. And I know that there were 4 or 5 frames of stores in there, but also the weight of the bees is going to have gone up as well. So I'm going to be teetering around the low point, hoping for the good weather to come in now and to vindicate my decision to put the supers on. Should have been a little bit later. You need to work out where that is for you, and, and I can't do that for California, but you could work it out quite easily when you just start to write down the dates of when things are happening year on year, and you'll be able to refine it. Um, be interested in doing that in California, that'd be cool. Dr. Search says, do you reuse moldy frames comb from drone layers? So no, I have a rule. If any colony that fails for any reason just gets sealed up and then quarantined, and then everything gets melted down. Any wax gets melted down if we can get some good wax out of it, burnt if not. All of the frames go into the cleaner, everything's sterile. Boxes get scorched, boxes get scraped, boxes get dipped if they're poly and sterilized, and we start again the following year. So a definite no to that one there. Says, congratulations on becoming a permie, up this morning for the spring Also working on an anti-wasp entrance. Stay tuned. Simon, I love that anti-wasp entrance. The quality of the Castellations are brilliant. I like the mouse guard thing as well. I'm gonna have to get one of those on there. It's really, really cool that you've got like the Abello system and then people like Simon doing little mods that I can understand why Abello wouldn't look at that because it's— I know how much work goes into it, Simon, and then the economies of scale maybe don't stack up as well, but you're dealing with all of that. But how cool would it be if other people did that as well? Little kind of beekeeper-led mods that you can put onto your Abello hives. Hi Lawrence, we split a colony a couple of weeks ago, took the nuc to a different site, then the donor site unfortunately was attacked by a badger and the queen didn't make it. I'm, I'm not laughing, I'm shocked here. I'm now thinking to recombine the nuc back to the main colony. Is this the best course of action? How would you go about this? Recombining is always a challenge and a risk, because at the moment you might have the nuc that's working well and the queen is accepting stuff, and then you combine it back together again and the bees from the other hive, if they're not rendered perfectly, hopefully the queen has killed the existing queen of your nuc, and then you're like, oh, I had 2 colonies with 2 queens and I have 2 colonies, no queens. So I wouldn't recommend putting them back together, and I'd stick with that nuc, and I would just work out when the badger killed the queen. and then if there's emergency cells in there, take them all down on day 8 and add a new queen back in, or take them all down except one and just leave them to requeen naturally with that one emergency cell. I think that, that latter option there is less risky than merging them all back together again. But hopefully— I'm sorry to hear that, it's not nice when badgers get involved. Hopefully all sorted. I'm a 14 by 12 and I'm going to attempt a demarei today. It's going to be heavy. Let us know how you get on. It's going to be very, very heavy. Not so much today, more when you need to get that top box off, so see if you get a ladder or something. Prudent Pollinator says, I like your hat. I like my hat too, it's cool, isn't it? I bought them when I was in Narby. Do it that way. I should get the hair out now, look at that. But I got given a nice badge as well. I was talking to someone at the beekeeping show and they, uh, they— I spoke to them for about 10 minutes and they said, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you one of my badges, which was very nice. And I said, well, I'll put that on that hat forever. that can just live there. But they are cool hats, aren't they? And they're neat, they're, they're UV as well. Yeah, so I was at Center Parcs and we were like— so we were raving at Center Parcs? We definitely weren't. We were at the marshmallow melting Christmas winter festival, whatever it is, and they had this UV light and all the bees— see the, the neon bits of the bee there, like the legs and stuff and the pollen baskets? It all glows. Pretty cool. I am, I am a big child after all. Morning Lawrence, what's your recommendation for dealing with OSR or oilseed rape. Do you take off each super before it's capped and extract, which seems labor-intensive, or can you leave the supers on until the flowers die off, or will that be too late? Thanks. P.S., looking forward to another Black Mountain Honey Queen today. So oilseed rape is, is known for fast granulation in the hive. It is also known for being very frustrating when you get up and down spring like this. What you want for oilseed rape is you just want a nice ramp up, nice temperatures, stays nice and warm the whole way through, no dipping down overnight, definitely not into kind of near freezing, which is what it's doing at the moment. That dip down overnight for the nectar just turbocharges granulation and really does speed it up, and it makes taking everything off at once very, very difficult. But that is what the majority of bee farmers will do. So they will just— it's not efficient to be going back in and doing harvesting like that multiple times over. If you've just got a couple of colonies, that's definitely the way to do it. Just go in, When the box is what you consider to be ripe, give it the shake test. If that nectar is not coming out, take it away. And as I said, doing that is a nice management system as well because you're bringing in new foundation into the mix or new frames, giving the bees additional space, so it helps suppress swarming, which helps boost the honey production a little bit as well. But what most, what most bee farmers do is that they just, they'll wait until their trigger comes in. Is it the flowers dying off, or is it the way that the colony looks, or is it the way that they're perceiving the flights, or whatever their trigger is? And then they're just going to take everything off all at once. They'll extract what they can extract, And then they just stick everything else in the Meliflow, and then you melt it out. So they might— it doesn't render it as baker's honey because they're not taking it up to that temperature, but they'll take it to the point where the wax will just break down enough to let the honey come through after obviously uncapping it all. And then you speak to people and they run that maybe like 40°C, something to get the honey through. So it's not going that much more than it would be in a hive temperature, but also seed rape honey is generally turned into soft set anyway, so you start heating the honey to reset the crystals later on. So a lot of bee farmers don't worry too much about that, treat it as a batch knowing that they'll be able to get maybe 80% of it off and spun out, and then there'll be 20% left that's crystallized in the frames, and they're happy with that as a management strategy, I think. Laurence, how often do you do checkerboarding? So I don't go in and do like the checkerboarding that I've spoken previously about is when they go in and January or February and start manipulating supers and stuff. I don't do any of that. I use checkerboarding as a— if I go in and see a colony that is struggling due to stores or due to space, um, or some— or somewhere where I want them to kind of like build up a little bit quicker but they have all the resources to do that, so they have the bees and they have the food, then I would, um, occasionally take a frame of foundation and put it in the middle just to move things along a little bit quicker. But I'm not strategically adding in frames of foundation to kind of do anything. Hit the like button please, there's only 8 so far, thanks to the 10% you have. Very kind, John, thank you very much, definitely hit the like button. Good morning, Laurence, I'm new to beekeeping, I've joined my local beekeeping association, I've noticed they are hardliners regarding Buckfast bees, they only have locally adapted bees, why do you think this is? I can't speak for them, Robert, I'm afraid. Whenever anybody has this hardline approach, my first question to them generally is, have you Have you tried? Have you tried Buckfast bees? Like, have you actually tried them? They say no. Do such a thing. I say how can you have such a firm and strong opinion about it if you've not tried it? Because I've tried AMMBs. I kept them for four years and they nearly killed me. So I think I can speak confidently about my AMMBs, and I can't speak confidently about anybody else's. But the ones that I had were vicious and tried to attack me all the time. And I showed that on videos. So it's kind of like proved as well. And then I moved over to Buckfast. then they were really nice and calm and gentle and nowhere near as much disease, nowhere near as much swarming, tons more honey, can have them in the garden. Showed all of that on video as well, so I got the experience of both sides and given the evidence as well. But that's not enough for some people, they still want nice aggressive bees, and I'm not sure why, to be perfectly honest. I see a lot of arguments thrown around, I've seen a couple where I've just started commenting on people's videos now where they're saying Nonsense and lies, and kind of calling out some of the mistruths. And a lot of the time they don't have a response, or they just don't get back, which is a shame. But one of the ones that they say is that the one that I saw the other day, which was a it's it's laughable really. They're saying that the collapse of bees across the UK, like all of these winter losses, are due to kind of buckfast hybrids. And then I said, "Well, what's what's the evidence for that?" Because we, we had 1,000 Buckfast colonies, 1,000 Buckfast nucs go into winter, and we lost less than 5% of them, which is really good. That's a good overwintering success. I'm pretty sure it's not the Buckfast, I'm pretty sure it's like mismanagement or varroa or poor weather conditions or all of these other things, but people say no, definitely the fact that it's Buckfast bees. I think it's like, it's definitely not, is it? You try and smear, smear the kind of reputation of Buckfast, but all I can do is continue to do what I'm doing. which is show the bees in action and then let people make their own decisions. I've got experience from both sides, so I'm able to kind of weigh up what I think is correct and accurate, and the thing that I will always, always go by, which is I'm never going to try and smear anyone and kind of like throw mistruths or lies out there. I can do that with the truth. I can just talk about my 4 years of experience with the AMM bees, they're very Nearly killed me multiple times over, and why I moved over to nice calm buckfast bees that you can see in the videos now. Nice calm buckfast bees. The confusion that I get is that they say, "Oh yeah, my bees are as calm as that," and I say, "Well, it's not. You've not shown them on the video," and they say, "Yeah, we don't. We don't do videos." It's like, "Yeah, okay, we'll move on." Robert, you definitely didn't. You win the award for the the most triggered comment, I think, of the day. Sorry, you got me. Sebastian, good morning. What you're growing this week. Look at Sebastian's picture there. Look at the giant. What is it? Like a marrow or a cabbage? I think that is a cabbage. We need to go down and see Sebastian's award-winning world record cabbage, I think, at some point. Right. Matopka says, "Hello, I want to know how I can transfer my hive from traditional mud hive cylinder to Langstroth hive." Oh, that's going to be fun. Any anything when you're moving from one to the other, the simplest way has got to be just to cut off the cut off any of the combs that you've got, and then get some Langstroth frames or wooden frames and just bungee them in. Bit of string, bit of elastic, kind of any way of getting them in there, even, even toothpicks or bamboo skewers or wood or bits of twig, whatever. Fashion it in, and then over the course of the next few weeks, the bees will fill in all of the gaps, and then you should have some nice Langstroth frames that you can work with. Blue Light Bee says, we are keen to use the native black British bee Apis mellifera mellifera. Do you supply these or know where I can get from. So I'm not gonna go down the smearing line, so there is no native British black bee, it kind of died out in the 1900s and then it was repopulated from loads of different lines from Europe, imported, so there are kind of, there's feral stock, there's a real melting pot in the UK and some people say, oh well, I've tested them and they're 85 or 87% pure, so there will be AMM genetics out there but there's no Native black British bees, just one big hybrid melting pot. And no, we don't supply them, and we don't supply them for the simple reason that the ones that we had tried to kill me multiple times over by stinging me hundreds of times on the arm like that, and like chasing me back into the truck, and just— I couldn't, I couldn't sell them to people because I don't want people to die through beekeeping stings. There we go, we'll chuck that one out there. That was, that was the reason that I stopped supplying Apis mellifera mellifera, because were vicious and they nearly killed me. Laurence, how often do you replace the queen and why would you do so? So we, we try and replace it every couple of years, but we don't religiously do that. Like, I'll go in with some, with some queens to do some replacements, and I generally end up selling the majority of them because I look at the queens and think, ah, she's good for another year. So I think 2 to 3 years is a good time to do it. If they're on their 3rd year and you're looking to do something with that colony, like get some honey out of it or to make some splits. You just have to be aware that the speed in which the queen goes will really taper off as she gets a little bit older. But if you just want a colony in your back garden and you're happy for them to swarm at some point, you're going to manage it that way, then there's no, there's no need to do anything. You can let them naturally kind of supersede or requeen themselves. Bazza's Bees says, just had a call from a farmer where I have hives. He's spraying lambda-chlorothrin on Monday. I have 10 hives there. Any suggestions? Thank you. I don't have any suggestions because I don't know what that chemical is, but I would take all precautions. The fact that he's given you a call, it's going to be some sort of insecticide. Get on Google or ChatGPT, have a look at what it actually does, what the half-life of it as well is, because it might, it might need to be kept in for longer than that. It might be a case of just picking them up and taking them somewhere else is the easier thing. Good that your farmer called you though. Good. I didn't give him an extra jar of honey for that one because a lot of them don't. I'd say that that's not true. a lot of them maybe put the information somewhere where it's not accessible to the beekeeper. It would be nice to have a system that everyone was bought into that worked on that front, I think. I want to say Gizenable, but I've probably butchered your name, I'm really sorry, I'll just say it like I see it. Morning all, just to say that I was going to start my first beekeeping this year, due to surgery it will be 2027. I feel really bad now, but it's great to listen, learn, and plan. Things like this keep me really encouraged. It's a good, it's quite a good move I think with beekeeping to take it slow sometimes, and okay, it might be a little bit too slow going for a full year, but there's so much that you can learn without going in and looking at the bees, and I'll do my bit, there'll be lots of videos that you can get involved in and watch and learn and get all set up for 2027. So best of luck with your surgery as well, I wish you a speedy recovery. Hi Lawrence, for the second year running I've double brooded my 5 colonies and they've produce swarm cells at this time of year even with supers on. Am I doing double supering too early? Oh, that's an interesting one. Take some pictures of that one. Did you give them, did you give them enough space prior to them getting congested? Because that, that would— that's the first thing that I thought of. The second thing that I think of is like, what type of bees are they? If we're getting repeated swarming when there shouldn't be swarming cells being created, then I look at the genetics and say maybe they're, maybe they're selecting themselves for swarming, so if you're getting swarming and splitting the bees and making more colonies like that, then they're probably going to be more susceptible to swarming as well, so I'd have a look at both of those 2 things. Double super, sorry, yeah, sorry, double brooding, yeah, so you double brooded your 5 colonies and you've got double supers on, I think it'd be the double brooding either too late or the bees are very susceptible to swarming. A big fan of your work, thank you very much. If you made nucs with queen cells, they'd drawn foundation, started backfilling, how do you pull the backfilled foundation without affecting the virgin returning fly? Yeah, it's a challenge, that one. You can go in there, just go in kind of very, very early in the morning, or not even early, early in the morning or later on in the afternoon. The virgin will be there, just be quick and try not to spook her, and if you— don't even look for her, just go in, do the job, close it back up, and just hope that you've not touched her. Ideally, when you've got virgins, anything, you just leave them for 4 weeks. So yeah, if you're stocking anything with virgins at any point in the year, just try and be aware that for the next 4 weeks you're going to do nothing, so set them up in a configuration where you don't do anything to them apart from going in and maybe feeding them, but then you wouldn't have to open up any of the frames if you do that. The first time I tried to catch a swarm of bees, I put them into the box, fed them, but they swarmed. How do you ensure that they stay. So the best thing to get them doing is— best thing to get them doing is going straight onto some sort of brood frame, some drawn-out comb, but it's a disease risk, so I wouldn't recommend that. The next best thing to do is put them onto foundation and give them a feed, but again, it's a swarm, so you want to ideally not feed them for the first 3 days so they can kind of get rid of any of the bacteria that's in their gut, so they're not going to spread any disease. So then the kind of final thing that you can do is lock them in. But if you lock them in and don't give them ventilation, they can overheat and die. So you kind of need a nice little in-between for all of those 3 things there. One, one way that you can do is just put them in a good quality, like, ventilated box, good quality ventilated box in a good position, out of the sun, in the right position, nice entrances facing the right way, and then lock them in for a couple of days, 2 or 3 days, making sure that they don't overheat. And hopefully, if you've got foundation in there, they'll start drawing on that out, which will make them want to stay in there more. And then if you've got a mated queen in there, she probably started laying by that point as well. At that point, you can go open the entrance, start feeding them at that point as well, and then fingers crossed they shouldn't go anywhere. Also picking up an Abello 12-frame super today so I can work on adapters to make it bottom bee space. Oh, that'd be brilliant! I'm really up for that. Okay, so, so it'd be the same, it'll work in the brood box as well? that's like the number one thing that makes a big, big difference to a lot of people, that one. So it will effectively convert the 12-frame Abello Super and Brood Boxes into bottom bee space, which means that they'll be compatible with wooden nationals again, even though the exterior footprint won't be the same, kind of like the Paynes one. That is good news, that's a huge development, I'm very excited about that, Simon. Make sure you send me one, yeah. Morning, Laurence, I believe I have a mite problem in one of my colonies, what's the best treatment to do now considering it's full of brood and got super on. So there's not really any treatments that are suitable for now with a super on. The only thing that you can— the recommendation that I would give you is this: take the super off and put on another brood box if they need space and treat with Formic Pro. That's going to be the best and quickest way of getting your colony back down. But I would just challenge to say, do you actually have a mite problem in it? Is it— or is it you've just seen a little bit of deformed wing virus and you might get through until the end of the year? It's hard to know without seeing it. If it's, if it's PMS, like parasitic mite syndrome, and you're in trouble and there's lots of deformed wing virus all over the place and holes and bees coming out with tongues sticking out like that, then yeah, you need to do a treatment very, very quickly, and Formic Pro would be the best one. All I would say is it does bump off old queens as well, so if you've got an old queen in there, Formic Pro, it's not the best, but you're limited with your options to do at this time of the year because the majority of them have very, very long treatment times. The only other one is doing some sort of oxalic acid sublimation, but again, you've got loads of brood, so you'd have to cage the queen and make it all broodless first. I think remove the super, go with Formic Pro. Formic Pro used to be licensed to be used with supers on, but it is not licensed to be used that way anymore, which is a little bit frustrating. Jean says, Lawrence, I love your videos. I appreciate your education for us beekeepers. Thank you, Jean. I appreciate you coming here every single live stream from California, so thank you, sir. Hi Lawrence, uh, sorry, hi, good morning Lawrence. Received one of your F1 Buckfast queens yesterday, put her in straight away, 3 days or 1 week before I pop the tab? Um, okay, so good, good question, that one. If you've, if you've made the split in the way that you've made the colony hopelessly queenless first, then you want to wait 8 days, take down all of the cells, then put the queen in. And then you only need to wait 24 hours to pop the tab. And you know what, if you're not going back to the apiary to do anything else, I say to people, take down all of the queen cells, they're now hopefully queenless, pop the tab, stick it in, come back in 7 days. That's not what I say on the website, yeah, so if it's in your garden, you want the belts and braces, it's make the split, wait 8 days, take down all the queen cells, put the queen in, wait 24 hours, come back, pop the tab. 7 days. That's, that's the belt and braces process. You can eliminate that 24-hour step if you're struggling. Your one there, put her in straight away, 3 days or 1 week before I pop the tab. So it's neither, it would just be, it will be no days or 1 day before you pop the tab, with the caveat that you've already removed all the queen cells. If you haven't done that and you're waiting for it to go hopelessly queenless, wait 8 days, take down all of the queen cells, and then when you take down the queen cells, pop the tab. I know there's tons of different bits of information there, and hopefully it made sense. Bobadicious says, hello from Northern Ireland. I added on a super 2 weekends ago after a good spell of weather and growing brood box, then cold wet spell came, so I panicked to remove the super. Have I messed it all up? So definitely not messed it all up, and a really useful question, I would say. So thank you for kind of your honesty with that one. I've done that before. I've done that before on like 70 colonies, so don't feel bad. I had to go and take it off 70 colonies, and the risk here is, is exactly that. You've assessed it, you've said Big strong brood nest, weather's really nice, nectar's coming in, restricted for space, I'm gonna add my super. That's the right call at that time, that was the call that I made as well. And then you sit here and you look outside, you think it's freezing, it's really cold, and then looking at the HiveWatch, it's dipped down to freezing, it's gone down to actually like below 0 degrees, which is frustrating because there's loads of little wildflowers and nice plants popping their heads up above the ground, and I think— going on here, I'm going to take these supers off. You've already gone ahead and taken them off, so I would make the most of that, which is get a double brood on, get them fed, build them up, make a split, and you're kind of making the best of a not great situation there. For everybody else, the good weather's coming very, very soon, and this is the period where you sit on your hands a lot in the spring saying, don't do anything, don't do anything, just keep them fed, don't put the supers on, don't put the supers on, and then you put the supers on and you need to in the future make that good judgment call to make sure they've got that good buffer of space. And then you sit on your hands again and you say, no, I've made the decision now, I can't chop and change, I can't go in and take them off, I just gotta, gotta stick with it. I'm gonna do that with the Hive Watch one because I'm confident that we can get them just from— oh, away from the precipice of death. I think there's a little bit more buffer in there than that, but it's, it's useful to watch. And for you, no, you've not messed it all up at all, you've got plenty of options still there. For other people who are thinking about putting supers on early, maybe look at that as a lesson, and then for people like the team down at the Nectar Seeker, for them where they are, like they needed to put supers on 6 weeks ago and 3 of them are already filled up. So 14-day beekeeper and HiveQ and Black Mancing Honey, it's not about, yeah, do that on this date, this is the right date to do it on, it's about trying to work out how you can assess your bees so you can understand the very specific triggers and dates for you in your location. And this is, and this is why it's beautiful when I get the question about, is 40 Day Beekeeper suitable for North America, or is it suitable for this? And I say, well, it is, because it doesn't necessarily dictate exactly when you should be doing things, and if it does, it justifies it or caveats it and says, well, this is, this is the UK date for you, you need to look at this, you need to look at that, and you need to make sure that this is happening, or you've got this many bees, and then once you've got this many bees, you can go ahead and do it. I don't know what date that will be for you. It's likely to be in April and May or June or wherever it is. But yeah, but the course will give you that information in order for you to make the judgment yourself, which is so much more useful and powerful than me just giving you an arbitrary date because it doesn't apply to anyone or everyone. Good day, I'm a beekeeper from the Philippines hoping to find an employer here. Well, I'm sure, I'm sure you'll find plenty of beekeeping employers. Good luck with the search, and on with the search, how funny is that? After uncapping a honey frame with a serrated knife, can you use that sheet of wax as foundation for brood frames? Oh, I don't think you could get it inside. The only way that that would work, that's quite a nice idea on plastic foundation, isn't it, but you'd have to work out a way of heating it on. I think it would just get too messy. I like the idea though, it's a cool idea. So you cut the foundation, or you cut the uncappings off like that, and you get the sheet. Problem is, is like it's just in bits by the time you've cut it anyway, but if you could get it off in one nice sheet and then put it on and melt it down, it might work, but you know what, it's way too much of a faff, and even worse than that, it's going to be a disease risk as well because you don't want any of that honey going back to any other hive than where that honey came from. So yeah, I think, I don't think it would work in practice. I love thinking outside the box like that. I know thinking outside the box is like a cliché, but I love thinking of different things. It's made me laugh inside and nearly talk about something completely inappropriate, so I won't talk about that. It wasn't highly offensive, don't worry, but it was just a— it was a social media thing, which was in order to go viral on social media, you need to like connect 2 things that have never been connected before. And I saw a guy this morning connected different— I can't even say it. I can't even say it. He connected 2 things that were really, really funny. And that's kind of what you've, what you've done there. You've looked at a different way of working the 2 separate things that, okay, probably didn't work, but it's a really good idea. And I think you stumble across great ideas doing that, so I always, always welcome it. Stephen Richardson says, morning mate, I'm a big fan. If you had a spare queen, what's the quickest scenario to introduce her without making a hive hopelessly queenless? So if I had a spare queen, yeah, and it was like a queen that was in a colony that was there and she was laying, and she was actually there, I could say, right, there's a laying queen, I'm gonna pick her up. Oh look, there's an egg just coming out of her, putting her in. You can just drop live queens in like that, works really well. So if you've got, if you've got a colony, say, with a queen, like a queen that's really angry and horrible and you want to bump her off, you go in, you kill that queen, and then the colony is instantly queenless, but not hopelessly queenless. If you go to your other colony now and find a laying queen and have to pick her up like as she's laying an egg, but pick her up and just drop her in, they'll accept her straight away because she's like— her pheromone is so strong. That's the quickest, that's the quickest possible way of doing it. You cannot do that with a caged queen, it doesn't work. So if you do that with a caged queen, they'll just kill her. So with a caged queen, going hopelessly queenless is a much quicker way of doing it. If you've got like live egg-laying queens on the— within the apiary, then you can do, you can do something like that. We are, we're 10 minutes over. There's so many questions that I missed this morning. I did, I tried to kind of catch up to all towards the end, and unfortunately I, I have failed. Um, if there's any urgent questions, you can drop me an email and I'll pick them up kind of over the weekend or early next week. I hope you enjoyed the Let's Talk Bees this week, episode 74. We're gonna get up to 100 this year, definitely. Uh, My First Nuc series is coming out, so Zane is, is doing his My First Nuc series. That'd be really, really fun. The final thing that I do want to talk about— we've had this month over 300 signups for HiveQ. It is confusing for people I know that. And the only reason it is confusing is because I'm— I have my old marketing that I have to honor, and I'm just trying to do the really honorable thing to people by saying this is what's happening, this is what's changing, um, and I don't want anyone to miss out. So anyone who's bought 14-Day Beekeeper, anyone who's in HiveQ at the moment, anyone who is consuming all of that, that's it. You've got lifetime access forever to 14-Day Beekeeper and to the new HiveQ community, which I've seen in like live, and it is phenomenal. Um, but you've— that's it, you're done, you're in forever, lifetime access, no problem. When we move over, we're not offering that anymore. So it will be come and join 14-Day Beekeeper and you can have 12 months access to HiveQ included in the price, and then it will go to £9.99 a month or whatever that is. That's the model going forward. So there'll never ever be lifetime access again. Everybody who's already bought it will get lifetime access, but it closes in about 2 or 3 3 weeks' time. That's why people— that's why people are piling in. That's why over 300 people have signed up in the last month. Um, it's good value for anyone who's watching it, who— anyone who's a channel member, because it means you don't have to pay your £8.99 subscription fee anymore forever. And if we go on for 20 or 30 years, I've just saved you about £5,000, I think. So it's a very, very good value proposition. And the final thing to add is with the merger of everything going in there, and I mean every single thing going in there. It will change how the live streams are, or how they're presented. So they will still be shared on Facebook, they'll still be shared on YouTube. They might not be shared live, it depends how we're going to configure that system. There is a chance that the live streams will move over there as well. But all of the channel members will go over there, all of the existing ones, all of the new ones that come in every single week. All of the HiveQ discussions will go over there, all of the courses. You'll have the ability to communicate on the videos. I know that's something that people have really pushed for, which is, can we talk on the videos? Can we, can we put comments on the videos? And then as new people are going in, they'll be able to see all of the old comments. So the features are going to be the next level. I realize that I'm not answering people's questions and I've just gone into sales mode, so I will stop it there. 13 minutes past. I hope you all have a brilliant weekend. I hope the sun is shining, and I'll see you all in a couple of weeks.