Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 75
Laurence Edwards covers late spring and early summer beekeeping in rapid-fire detail: installing nucs, timing supers for oilseed-rape honey, managing wasps and Asian hornets, and handling honey-bound hives. He shares his BroodMinder temperature sensors, his wild-comb-in-jars experiment, and a re-queening strategy for dark Buckfast bees.
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Good morning everyone and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. So I will be here for 1 hour. Look up there for the camera, but I'm going to look this way because I want to show you something quite cool at the beginning, which is my HiveWatch sensor. So let me talk you through what's going on here at this point. See this massive increase spike going on there? That's just me putting my supers on. So at this point here, we started off with a weight of 51, pretty much bang on 51 kilos, and that was a brood box. Queen excluder, 4 supers. I've got my feeder on there as well, I've got my roof, I've got everything. And the idea being, I just want to show you without confusing it by adding anything in, the entire spring. So that was the plan, uh, we started here. So that 51 kilos is, as I said, that full colony with all of the supers on. Plan is to not touch it. The weight started going down, which is, which is completely normal in, in spring when you put your supers on. You're hedging your bets a bit. You're saying, I'm going to put these supers on And my view is that there's going to be enough incoming nectar in order to get the bees through. I'm basically saying I'm not going to feed them again. So when you put your supers on thinking, oh, it's all nice weather and everything, and everything's going up like that, and then you start to see the cold weather coming in and it goes down a bit like this, and you're thinking, oh, I don't like the look of this, and it gets worse and worse and colder and colder. And I knew roughly I had about 5 kilos of stores in there. That was my trigger. So started off on 51 kilos there, and I knew if I went down to 47 kilos, like dead, that was going to be my trigger to say, I'm really sorry, bees, I've messed it up. I put the supers on too early. I'm going to go back in, I'm going to take the supers off. There's loads of bees now, so I'll probably double brood, and I will feed them. So that was my trigger. I came perilously close to it there, 47.53. So literally one bag of sugar away from not total collapse. I've probably got an extra buffer in there as well. I'm not pushing it too far, but I could see that the good weather was coming. And I thought it was a really nice illustration for people there because I say this a lot to people, which is they ask me the question, when do you— when do I put the supers on? And I say it's, it's a matter of understanding what you've got in that brood box as a reserve and then estimating how long until the good weather comes, or is the good weather already there? Don't do it when they're, they're working on nothing because you run the risk of them dying, or you run the risk of putting in a lot of extra work. But then The good weather came, and then we've probably got a five or six week period there where we've jumped up from 47 up to 55. So like eight or nine? No, eight kilograms. So sixteen, eighteen pounds, something like that increase. Not not a huge amount. Maybe only like a partially filled super. And then you can see for the past few days we've stalled. We've stalled up here at the top, and then the forecast for next week is ten, eleven degrees and very very cold overnight. So I'm expecting that that. Peak, that lofty peak of 55 kilograms, to not remain up there, and we'll probably flatline and we'll probably come down a little bit next week. But you can see how useful a system like this is because I know roughly like 40, 47, somewhere around there is going to be my absolute drop dead. That will increase as the colony size gets bigger as well and there's more mouths to feed. But it just shows I've got a few— I've got a couple of weeks now of bad weather in me before I need to think about doing anything drastic. And fingers crossed good weather comes back. I thought I would just show you that because I thought it was pretty cool. I, I like coming in. I do regular updates on that there within HiveQ. So if you're interested, 14-Day Beekeeper still comes with lifetime access to HiveQ. It's got about 2 weeks left. The IT guys told me to stop advertising it. They said you've got to stop marketing this because it's going to be, it's going to be more difficult migrating everyone over. They said wait for a couple of weeks and the system will be live. And I've seen it and it is awesome and it's going to be very good. And I should probably get on with answering some questions. So let's go. John was in first. John says, good morning for all the early risers or the night owls. I'm aware there's people all over the place watching this, so hello to you wherever you are. Good morning, Laurence. Which works better for drawing out comb on a new nuc or a split, 1:1 syrup or 2:1 syrup? That's a good question. I've realized I've not got my little comments up in the corner. That's annoying. So what I will do today is I will leave the questions up like that. So I would say I wouldn't worry too much about concentration. There's this— the textbooks tell you things, don't they? The textbooks say 1:1 for spring because it mimics nectar, and 2:1 or invert for late winter feeding because it's much better in terms of moisture content for your bees going over winter. And like, both of those things are true, so preference would be for 1:1, but when it comes to drawing out wax, there's other Prerequisites that they need there. They need enough bees, they need enough warmth. And if you've got a colony that's got enough bees and got enough warmth and got the right conditions, then it doesn't make a massive difference which one— 1:1 or 2:1— they will use it, and the difference for them is negligible. So I wouldn't worry about that. I'd worry more about setting them up and making sure they're big, they're strong, they're expanding anyway. And then I would say also the other tip is little and often. It's just easier for you to control. Um, you don't want big colonies just filling out all the frames with syrup because then it becomes a little bit of a pain. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Sophie says, good morning, how soon after the brood has emerged in the top box of a Demeray can I nadir the box? I'd like to use it again for a second Demeray later on in the season. So as soon as all of the brood has emerged, you can just take it off straight away. There's no, there's no kind of right or wrong answer in terms of nadiring it. The only difficulty that you will have is that you'll go in— this, this is what happens all the time— you go in and there's bits of nectar, a few bits of nectar dotted around, and still a little bit of brood, so you think Give it a few more days, and then you come back in and all the brood's gone and it's just full of honey. So I would say if you're nadiring it, as long as, as long as the brood is all capped over, so you're not taking any open brood back downstairs, you could nadir early. You could just go back in. So even if there's a little bit of brood up there in that box that's at the top with a little bit of honey and you want to nadir it, as long as there's no open brood, you can just go back down, put it underneath. And it should be okay. It will, it will slightly interfere with the, the feeling of space downstairs. It's, it's better if you can let all of the brood emerge, just slows down the expansion downstairs, which is, which is what you want. That gives you that swarm suppression. Um, oh, so, so what I've done also, I, I shared it on HiveQ because it's not a fully tested system yet, but I will, I'll see if I can explain it off the top of my head because I've written it down. I get confused with the demeray, yeah, because the demeray brilliant. It's like a one-off 3-week do this and it will help you. But then there's questions kind of before and after in terms of how do you set your bees up for winter, should you double brood over winter. If you're going to demo ray, you really need to be starting the season on a single brood, otherwise it becomes very complicated. And then you throw in the June gap in there as well, and it does become a little bit of a minefield. So see if you can keep up. This is, this is the plan for my demo ray split. So next, 7th of May is when I'm going to be doing my demo rays, around there. Um, so basically this coming week, which is fantastic because it's a busy week. But I'll be going in, doing my demarays, lifting the top box— the bottom box up to the top, putting a brand new brood box in underneath, letting it run for 8 days, going up, taking down all the emergency cells, letting it run for the full 3 weeks. And then the plan is to roughly align that with the June gap. So after 3 weeks from the 7th of May, it's going to attempt the 1st of June, which for us, we're about average. We do get the June gap on quite an average time. For other people, it will be earlier than that. Yeah, That. I think it's about average for us. But then on the June gap, the plan is to do what Sophie's just said then, to nadir that top box that hopefully is going to have a decent amount of honey upstairs in it and take off all of the supers. That's the plan. So you think about that, you're taking off all of the supers, taking off all of the honey, but you're giving the bees access to a full pretty much 40 pounds of honey if they filled it up upstairs. And you're going to put that underneath the brood box. So you're going to have all of the honey there underneath, and then you're going to have the brood box with the breeding up there. And I'm not even— I'm not even sure whether I'm going to put a queen excluder in between the two at the moment. The plan there was to not do that. And then I've forgotten where I got to, so I'm gonna have to— I'm gonna have to write it down on HiveQ. Where did I get to with that one? It was a brilliant system. It was complicated. The idea was to get myself through the June gap. So I'm pretty sure this is it. You leave it like that for the June gap, double brood configuration, just for a few days. And then as soon as you get the June gap back up again. This was it. You add the supers and then you put the bottom box back up at the top and you redo the Demaray. Then in the winter, you go in around February after overwintering on double brood and you remove the bottom box. There will be a carousel because that is horribly confusing. I like pride myself on nice simple beekeeping and I've just confused myself massively there. So it will come out in the next maybe week or so. It is written down. people in HiveKey will vouch for me that it is written down and it is confusing, but as a nice little graphic, it'll be really, really super easy. I've already gone on to the next question to make myself stop talking. I'm doing a video on that one as well, so it's going to be called the Full Season Demo Ray, and it's going to show you what to do with your 2 brood boxes all the way throughout the year. That will be released later on in the year. Right, Dave and Ella say, morning, Laurence, when you said expand the hive when bees are using 80%, does that include drawn comb or just field? Thanks from sunny Mid Wales. So the 80% rule, and it's a useful one, if you have a look at the, the video that I released— we're going to release tonight with Zane, Zane's First Nuke Episode 3. We talk about this a bit. So we talk about the top-down view, which is the view that I'm talking about there when I'm talking about 80%, which is very much like look down from the top, how many frames of bees are the bees covering? Don't worry too much about like what's drawn out and what's not. You can see, you can see where the first frame of foundation is where they've not drawn it out, and you can see where they have actually drawn it out because the bees are on it. That's what I'm using for my 80% rule. And then the bit that I go into with Zane is saying, well, you know, you pull some of those frames out, they're not, they're not entirely full frames, they may be 60 or 70% full, they've still got a bit of expansion on them, but for the 80%, well, you can just use the top, you can use the top-down view, knowing that if your frames aren't full, full of bees, fully drawn out, you've kind of got a bit of a buffer there as well. My advice to everyone in May is just go a little bit early. The damage that you'll do by going early and introducing maybe like slightly less favorable thermal conditions is nothing in comparison to going too late and your bees just swarm and there's nothing left. And yeah, kind of picking up the pieces early on in the season. I'm gonna have a sip of coffee. Hi, I have colonies which were laying— sorry, which were without laying queens for a few weeks and have backfilled the brood nest, have checkerboarded the brood nest with foundation, but still being filled with more nectar. Any advice? So Yeah, good question, and what you will see, the way that bees arrange themselves in a beehive is pretty much this: they put the brood nest where they want to put the brood nest and then they just build honey all around it. That can be building honey outwards like that or it can be building honey upwards like that. Now if you've got a big strong brood nest and the colony's there, maybe you put a 6-frame nuc in and they've expanded up to 8 or 9 frames, then you're going to see the more normal configuration which is all of the brood at the bottom in the brood box and then the honey above that. If you've had a colony that's been without a laying queen for a few weeks, then the, the brood nest has dwindled down to nothing, but it's still there if you've got a new queen in there. Now she might have gone in and you're trying to make up some space downstairs in the brood nest, but she can only go as quick as she can go, and she can only lay as fast as there is enough space. So you're doing the right thing trying to make space for her, but until you get to that position where the the brood is occupying the space that you want it to occupy as opposed to the honey or the stores, then you will just be in this kind of position where you need to get them to move it somehow. But the way to get them to move it is by building up that brood box. So the, the, the short answer is you need to be taking any capped frames of brood, moving them out to the edge. You need to be taking any open frames of brood and just continually checkerboarding them. If there is a— not— if there's not enough space for her to lay in there because every single frame is now just full of honey, then you need to artificially stimulate that brood nest by going and putting in some frames of brood from elsewhere, and then those frames of brood from elsewhere, if you've got them, will facilitate the removal of the rest of the stores from within the brood box and then moving up. So it's a bit of a slow one, the best advice is to not get in that position in the first place, which I know is rubbish advice for you, Tom, sorry, but it's a useful one for everybody else because it shows how difficult it can be to get that brood nest back up, but chip away at it. Once you've got a frame or 2 of brood in there, you can start moving it. over a couple of weeks you'll get it out. Good morning. Good morning to you too. I should have said at the beginning as well, I got a hard 8 o'clock cutoff this morning because I've got lots to go and do, um, and I've got someone coming, gonna be knocking on the door at 8, so I want to get out at 7:59 if that's all right with everyone. April has been mad for me. 2 out of 3 colonies got very big very fast. One swarmed at least once. I've done 2 demerays, also seen my first queen spawn. I think a lot of people are feeling this one here, which is— it is good And it's bad at the same time because it's, it's good, it gives you the chance to get some sort of honey crop. It's bad because it's a bit quicker than most people would like. I have to say, even though the weather's turned, like it rained loads yesterday and I was looking at and thinking, quite glad for a bit of rain here, we desperately needed that up in North Wales. And I know you should never, should never wish for the rain because you wish for it and it never comes, it never goes away. And it looks like it's going to stay for a week. But I think in the long run, a week of rain and then some nice warm weather back will slow the season down a little bit. Hopefully it won't trigger the June gap for many people, but if it goes on for a week or two, it's, it's well and truly in June gap territory, and then that will be it. That will be the spring crop done, and whatever you've got is, is it. Um, it goes quickly. The season in the UK is— it didn't last very long. Right, Steve says, morning Lawrence, just wanted to say thanks. I started watching your channel a year ago, inspired me to take up beekeeping, and now I'm a month into my journey and absolutely loving it. Oh wow, Steve, I am over the moon. That's a great comment. Um, I love seeing people getting into beekeeping because it's— I know how fun and therapeutic it is. Like, I love being up by the bees, and then you kind of give that gift to someone else, which is, there's a cool hobby here, you might want to get involved. And then they get their own bees, and it is— it's just a nice, peaceful, tranquil place. I saw a really interesting opposite view to that, I guess, and one that never really crossed my mind because I get lots of interactions kind of day to day. But they were saying about bee farming being a very lonely, a very lonely career and something where the mental health of bee farmers, it can be a challenge because they're out doing the work on their own for such difficult hours and it is a hugely demanding role. And as soon as I read it, I thought, well, that is, that is very, very true. I've never thought of it that way because for me that, that being on your own out with the bees is— that's, that's my therapy. Like, that's the thing that's good for me. But I can see, I can totally see how for other people, if they're getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning and going out and just slogging away doing bees all day and then going to bed at 10 o'clock at night, 7 days a week, that could be a very, very lonely existence. So as, as always with everything, is there's, uh, there's a balance to be had. But it's, it's worth— it is worth saying it. Like, if you're, if you're out doing bees on your own and you're struggling, then reach out. You can reach out to me, drop me a message, like email. I'm always around. Don't ever let, um, yeah, don't ever let things get too bad. And there's— I, I know people have mental health struggles when it comes to just life in general, but definitely within beekeeping circles too. So shout out to anyone who is having those troubles, um, and the best advice I can give you is just talk to someone, and you can talk to me, it's cool. Right, we're going to Mike. Good morning, we have to move county. We have 16 hives, all of their low kit. I was thinking to just sell them after the June gap. Hive plus bees and all to give people a summer crop. Is it better to split into 2 nucs or just to sell in the hives? Interesting question, that one. Oh, I'll take a sip of my coffee before I answer it, make sure I get a good answer. I always knew what I was going to say there. It's a really strange phenomenon, this one, which is it's quite difficult to sell colonies in full hives. It really is. And I did it for a while and thought It doesn't, it doesn't make sense. Like, the value of the full hives is not there. I'll give you, I'll give you my honest advice. So if you can get 2 nucs out of the hives, definitely sell them like that. Split them up, get 2 nucs out of each hive, and then sell the equipment on its own. And you'll get good value for the equipment as well on its own. So people don't want the big colonies in the hives for some reason. And I think the reason, the, the reason that I came to, or like a conclusion that I came to, was generally it's beginners buying nucs, and for a beginner, like, a 6-frame nuc is much more palatable, it's much, much more easy to manage, and it is much, much more easy to manage as opposed to big strong booming colony with a couple of supers on, and it can be like, oh, I'm not going in that, that's just, that's way too much. So that was the reason that we, we just stopped selling any, any full-size colonies at all and focused on the nucs. So I think, I think you'll find you're much better off selling them in nucs and then selling the boxes on their own. You're gonna have loads of people contacting you after this. Mike, whereabouts are you? No, I'm joking. I don't need any more hives. Definitely don't need any more hives. Philip says, can I checkerboard this week? Definitely can checkerboard this week. I've been checkerboarding for the last couple of weeks, just a little bit here and there. Not the one which was setting it up in the supers and doing all that crazy stuff at Christmas, because I've not got time for that, and I'm not— I don't think it's the best thing to be going in and doing stuff at that time of the year. When I'm talking about checkerboarding now, I'm talking about just moving frames of foundation within the brood nest. So if you've got a 6-frame nuc and you've got 2 frames of foundation on the outside and they're starting to draw it out, you can safely take a frame of foundation from further out, just put it somewhere in the brood nest and continue feeding, knowing that the bees are going to start working that out. It helps build them up, so it does speed things up a little bit, but it also just gives them something to do. Bees love drawing out foundation, it really does help suppress the swarming urge. But the Uh, I was gonna say that, it's gonna say something good there, but yeah, it's gone, it's gone. I'm gonna move on to the next one, right? Morning, how do you manage varroa with a heather honey crop in mind? Obviously can't put Apivar in mid-August. Do I use Formic Pro during the June gap? Good question, that one. And it is, it is a heather, so it's a honey crop that falls outside the kind of basic management system. So you need to do what's right for you, and you need to focus on whether you're just going to exclusively go for that heather honey crop or you're going to try and move colonies through different crops throughout the year. If you're going to go for a spring crop like an oilseed rape and then onto a summer crop like just a general summer crop and then onto a heather crop, it is very, very difficult to do any sort of mite treatment. And the only one you can really do, like you say, do I use Formic Pro during the June gap? I think that's quite a sensible one because it's annoying. Max MiteAway Quick Strips allowed you to do it with the supers on, and then the new formulation, which is just same product different label, says you have to take the supers off. So you do have to conform with what it's telling you, but the June gap does give you an opportunity to do that. If you take all of your spring honey off and maybe you're on single brood and then potentially double brood, that's, I think, the only way that you'll be able to do it, is double brood for that period and then put the FormicPro on. Otherwise, you've just got, you've got too many bees in a small box because you can't, you can't take your supers off, go and harvest them, put more supers on, and then treat with FormicPro during the June gap. So you'd have to either on single brood, which is just— it's too many bees, too much formic acid in one box like that, or double brood them to give them space for the bees. And then formic acid would be a really good, really good treatment there, I would say. It means that you've got a week just to leave those strips in, knock down all of the mites. And then all I would say is that I would definitely supplement that treatment there with either a later season Apivar treatment or a later season Apivar treatment and an oxalic acid treatment. as well. Formic Pro is good. Formic Pro is very, very effective. It impacts the colony a bit though. Old queens don't tend to survive, and it will knock the brood back a bit. So June gap as well is a nice time to do it because it will, it will stunt their growth a bit, and then they've got time to build back up for the heather. So that's probably what I would recommend. Other people, if they didn't want to go down that route as well, could go down some sort of caged queen. So you could be caging the queen in that summer period, getting them to a point where they're broodless, and then doing oxalic acid-based treatments, sublimating them multiple times. Um, but if you, if you cage it and get them broodless, you only need to do it once, and then that could be a way of doing it. But it's, it's working out, does that impact your heather that much? Like, when would you do it? Again, around the June gap wouldn't be the worst time in the world to do that. And then speaking to other people who do cage their queens, they say once the queens come back into lay, it's like they're turbocharged for the rest of the season, which again would work very, very well for a heather crop. So there we go. Maybe do some of that. Jason says, morning Lawrence, I reached out on WhatsApp back in September. We had a chat about a queen on an extensive brood break. She never made it. I did reach out again on WhatsApp and web AI wasn't working. Um, if anybody's reached out on WhatsApp, like, it's— our WhatsApp does not connect to us for some reason. I was not aware that people were still messaging us. It is on my to-do list. Drop us an email. Any questions like that, always drop us an email, blackmountainhoney@gmail.com, and we will help you as best as we can. Sorry if anyone's messaged me on WhatsApp and I've not got back. It's, um, yeah, it's been turned off for about 9 months, I think, on my phone. Not, not that I've turned off WhatsApp, the WhatsApp had to connect to Buzz, so you should have— there'll probably be some back and forth, but we are, we're reconfiguring again to try and improve the experience for everyone. There we go. Uh, good morning, Laurence, how's the family? Hope everything is going well. That's very kind, thanks, Will. Um, so it's, it's going as well as it can with the alignment for the busiest kind of 8 weeks of the year. Helen's surgery went well, and then she starts chemo in about 8 days, so hopefully, hopefully all goes well with that as well. But thank you for your, for your nice words. Good morning, Laurence. My VSH queens were laying 5 days after popping the tabs. 100% I'll be back for more. Thank you. Reward yourself with a sip of tea or coffee. I love, I love people giving me a sip. It's brilliant. Thank you very much, Callum. I'm glad they arrived safely, and good luck, and I will enjoy following the journey. Good morning, Laurence. First year for me, and the nuc has been installed for 3 weeks now. Not one of yours, so I hope Sorry, sorry. No worries, it's fine. I have a field of all seed rape within 1.5 miles of me. Any tips for honey extraction for a beginner? So the tips for the first year are going to be very, very different from the tips for the second year because with a 6-frame nuc, it's going to be using that all seed rape pollen and nectar just to build up like that. You might get to a point, saying that it's been installed for 3 weeks now, so you're probably getting to a point where it's filling the brood box. Maybe you've got your first super on, so maybe you will get a super or 2 depending on what the weather's like over the next kind of like 2 or 3 weeks. As soon as you start to see the flowers going over, you probably left it a little bit too late to extract, so for next year you want to adjust it a bit more. But the, the rule normally when it comes to extracting honey is you're pulling out the frames and you want to see, you want to see the frames fully capped over. Anything kind of 80% or above is good for extraction, with the exception of oilseed rape. So oilseed rape, you can take off full crops that have not been capped at all. The way to tell with oilseed rape is that you pull the frames out and they're not capped, you shake them like that, and if all the nectar just comes flying out, then obviously you can't harvest it. But you'll see with all seed rape, it gets to a point very, very quickly where it doesn't come out, and at that point you can extract safely. If you leave it much past that point, it granulates in the combs and it is impossible to get out without heating it and melting down the frames. So just, yeah, get in there, get a little bit of honey before it all granulates, and then the following season, what I would say is you need to— you just need to be on it because the bees are going to try and swarm, or they're going to really expand very, very quickly a big strong Buckfast colony with a good all-seed rate flow, you could easily get 3 or 4 supers in the spring, possibly more. So just try and, try and stay ahead of them, but good luck. Morning Lawrence, really enjoyed your What to Look Out For in May video, will watch again, lots of useful info. Thank you Nigel. For anyone who else— anybody else who's not seen that, I did, I released that one last night. So all the questions that people should be asking themselves in May, it's a surprisingly difficult video to film that one. I know it is just me sitting here talking and doing stuff like that, but the The questions are quite hard because if I just did North Wales, if I just did, well, this is everything that happens in May in North Wales, then the information would be valid for you, but it would be like late. You'd be watching it and it's like, yeah, that was a couple of years ago, a couple of weeks ago. What are we talking about that now for? So I'm making a real concerted effort to try and get videos to you a lot quicker. And that May one, I have to guess, I have to hedge my bets a little bit for For people down further south, but I know roughly roughly the questions that people should be asking in May. So it's a good it's a good useful video worthwhile talking about that as a system as well. So now now that I have brilliant, so I fully work on Black Mountain Honey, and I was on I was on paternity leave for two years. So it's it's not like a completely new life, but now that I've done that, we have a great system me and Zane, which is. Zane works 3 days a week, so we do like 1 day or 2 days of filming. Gonna try and limit it to 1 day, I think, and then 2 days of editing. Now what that means in reality is I can film on a Thursday. So we filmed on Thursday, we filmed 5 videos. Oh, that's not true. We filmed on Thursday, we filmed 12 videos on Thursday, and then on the Friday, Zane's edited those videos already. They are done, and I'm like, my job now is to upload them this weekend. So the— so one of the ones was Zane's first nuc, so that will be released tomorrow. And then there'll be one on Sunday, there'll be one on Monday. We've got loads of videos. I think I'm just going to go up to like a day a week at the moment, the videos that are coming through. But the point is, those videos were filmed on Thursday, and I've never been at that point any, any time at Black Mountain Honey where the videos are being posted so quickly after they're actually happening. So hopefully it will be quite useful for people. It gives you it just brings you further, or kind of like closer, to the present. So it should mean that the videos are not only useful in future years, and they should be useful in future years, but they're really relevant and useful for this year as well. So that is the plan. If we demarrain now and end up with double, uh, big double brood box colonies through main flow, can we split those colonies in half in August to go into winter with backups, or better to overwinter strong and split early spring? Now that is a good question, and the whole demaray, the whole season demaray, very much focuses on that, which is what do you do after the demaray? You've got 2 brood boxes, should you go back down to 1, should you stay as 2, what configuration is best? I think the easiest one is the slightly truncated full season demaray. Gotta come up with a better name than that, the slightly truncated full season demaray. It's like the Ricky Gervais when he's naming Chubby Bat. Um, I've gone off, where am I going? Right, demaray splits. So If you, if you go through the season, you take the bottom brood box up, lift it up to the top, do the demerit, add the new brood box in underneath, and you've got the supers in the middle. Then come the June gap, take away the honey supers, take the top box, um, that's full of honey, put it back underneath, bruise all of the frames so they're nice and open, and then leave them in that configuration for the June gap. The bees are not going to starve in that configuration for the June gap as long as you've got a big box of honey. And then almost just— I would just leave them. like that for a little bit. If they need space, add it in the supers. They probably will need space at some point. Get it up to 2 supers, and then as soon as they're reaching the 2 supers, I would just split them. You're going to have 2 brilliant colonies there. You've got 2 brood boxes and 2 supers. Just split them into 2 colonies with a brood box each and a super each. And doing that to both of those sides of the split at that time of the year will almost certainly stop any further swarming. And then you've got your 2 colonies. you've got like decent amount of honey on both of them, I would definitely do it that way as opposed to overwintering on a double, because overwintering on a double doesn't really bring about any benefit, um, other than the back end of the year. Like, you, you come in in April and they're just in the top box, just like a box of bees in the top box, and the bottom box is empty. And you look at them, you're like, it's supposed to be double brood, what are you doing? And they say, yeah, we're just— we're, we're small at the moment. So there's no real benefit to doing it, and then you've got all of your eggs one basket, so if it fails, it fails and it wipes it out. You're much better off to build them up nice and strong, take 2 splits into winter, I would say. That's a cool name, says, morning, yesterday one of our hives swarmed and returned within 10 to 20 minutes. What would be the best to prevent swarming again? Does that mean we should be acting quickly as they are likely to try again? So if you're seeing swarming activity at the entrance and you're seeing swarms leave and then coming back in like that, you're— you've almost certainly either missed the swarm already or they are actively trying to swarm at that moment. So whatever happens, you need to go in and do something. Go into the colony, you're probably going to find loads of swarm cells. What you're looking for here is you want to see the queen. Can you see the queen? Yes or no. Can you see eggs? Yes or no. If you're going in, you can't find the queen, you can't see any eggs, and you're seeing multiple capped swarm cells, that means that the colony has swarmed and you are left with the resources to get them back on track, but you've not got a queen at the moment. So what you need to do, if that's the scenario for you, Oh, identify your very best— no, the first thing to do is identify if any of the swarm cells have emerged. They've got little holes at the bottom of them— sorry, with a frilly, a frilly little bit of wax around, which means that a virgin has eaten her way out. If that is the case, then all you can do is just take down every single cell, put it all back together again, and hope that the virgin that's loose goes out and gets mated. Leave it 4 weeks. If you go back in and all of the swarm cells are completely capped over, identify the best one. it off to one side on a frame, go through the rest of it, shake off all the bees, take down all the— take down all of the swarm cells, go back to your one frame and manually take down all of the swarm cells on that frame barring the one. You don't want to shake that frame that you're leaving, and then put that cell back in, leave it for 4 weeks. They, they are the only real 2 options that you can do when it comes to swarming like that. Nothing else works. I, I give, um, I give the advice— I give that advice a lot, you can probably tell. 'Cause it just rolls off the tongue. And a lot of people don't take that advice, and they come back and they say, yeah, I took down all of the swarm cells, just took them all down, trying to stop them swarming again. And I was like, they've already swarmed, like they're gone. There's no point taking them down now. Taking down swarm cells does not stop bees swarming. If you see swarm cells, you have to take action, and the action, 9 times out of 10, is making a split. Morning, Laurence, I hope you're well. It's not my predicament, but I know someone who is clearing their supers, all seed rape, How do you manage the compression this time of year? So that is a good question, and that is a question that I answered in a video that I did yesterday that will be released later on, which is talking about what is your what is your strategy for the June gap? And June gap's terrible name. It should be called them. It should be called the spring summer gap or the May gap or something like that. The June gap is so misleading because people people stroll in sixth seventh of June and say right June gap let's. Let's talk about it. And it's like, nah, you're well too late for the June gap. It's the, the middle back end of May gap for a lot of people. But it's, it's talking about this there, which is what is your— what are your strategies when it comes to harvesting honey? Are you going in when the June gap is hitting and you've got a colony with a brood box and 4 supers on? Are you just taking off all of those 4 supers and going and harvesting them and giving them a brand new 4 supers from somewhere else? I've said that's terrible, terrible thing to do because you'll just kill your bees because you've not got any incoming nectar and you're giving them empty, uh, foundation. So then if you, if you just take off all of the supers and leave them on a single brood, like, almost certainly going to trigger swarming. So it is a nice, it is a nice system to go in and take off all of the supers and then double brood at that point if you know you want to expand later on. If you don't want to expand, then I wouldn't recommend doing that because it further complicates things. So my advice to people is to just take off the absolute kind of minimum that you can get away with taking off and leave some of the, leave some of the more open nectar on for the bees. The problem is with oilseed rape, oilseed rape massively complicates things because it's, it's not something that you can leave on for any amount of time because it does granulate. So you'll find a lot of bee farmers use the oilseed rape in that way, which is they'll go there on a single brood box, they'll take a nice big honey crop off, um, so build up 3 or 4 supers of oilseed rape honey, they take that off, they double brood, they feed, and then they just break all of those colonies up for their splits or their nucs later on in the year, because the, the amount of pollen— it's not, it's not like the best pollen coming in, but the amount of pollen coming in and the amount of nectar coming in, you couldn't get better conditions for its like really aggressive brood growth like that. So those 2 things align very, very nicely, and I would say if they're in that same position, which is they're making nucs or they're making splits, then it makes their life a lot easier just to combine those 2 activities. Morning all, last week I inspected my hive and I did not see queen cells. 7 days later, yesterday, I found an unmarked queen 2 capped queen cells. Can I do a demaray? Oh, so interesting. Let's, let's go through it one by one. So you didn't see queen cells, 7 days later yesterday you found an unmarked queen and 2 capped queen cells. It's, it's just throwing me a little bit because that's— if it's only 2 capped queen cells and an unmarked queen, I'd say they'd almost certainly superseded your queen as opposed to there being any swarming. And then the question, can I do a demaray? So you can't do a demaray if there's swarm cells and I wouldn't do a demeray if there's supercedure cells, because if there's supercedure cells, it indicates that something's wrong. And if there's something wrong, the colony is not going to be at full capacity to be able to handle a demeray. So I would— I'd go back, I'd try and work out exactly what has happened. I wouldn't do the demeray this week. So you've got a week, a week's grace at least. But maybe ask the question again. But have a look and see an unmarked queen and 2 capped queen cells. That's— it's really thrown me. It does— it sounds very, very much like supercedure. I would have to say. And if you're super seizure, I would just leave them to it, just let them get on with it. Morning, I find bees calm my busy mind. Sat in the middle of a very busy swarm yesterday before collecting it, and I find my burnout melting away. Ed, I am with you 100%. Burnout-melting bee frequency, something like that. It is brilliant, isn't it? I find myself really I used to hate jobs like mowing the lawn or making up frames or anything like that because I thought this is really, really boring. It's mind-numbingly boring. And nowadays— you mentioned the word burnout— nowadays I look for these jobs and I'm like, oh, what can I do here? So when I have a break, other people go and do fun things, I think I could paint a wall. Yeah, that'd be nice. Or I could go and mow the lawn. I love mowing the lawn now. Or just go and sit by the bees. It is, and it's almost like I've come to that point now where my body's saying, you just got to do nothing. You're not even allowed to mow the lawn. You've got to sit there, watch the bees, and just enjoy them. And I do. It's— it is the best thing in the world, isn't it? It calms a busy mind and your burnout will melt away. Wow, kindred spirits, hey, Ed? I'm gonna guess his name's Ollie, says, good morning, my hive is on 14 by 12 frames in my brood box. Would you suggest that it would be better to switch to regular brood to maximize honey production? Oh, that, that is a really, really good question, and it's not quite as straightforward as that one. So to maximize honey production, I have found the best way is by preventing swarming. Yeah, start off with good healthy bees, treat them for varroa, stop them swarming, and you have not got to worry about honey production. You'll have more honey than you could ever want. But the way that you do that and the way that you dictate where the bees are putting the honey at different times of the year is much easier, I find, to manage on multiple brood boxes. And the national brood box is a really terrible size brood box, like it's not big enough, uh, in a single brood box configuration for a Buckfast colony of bees. But a double brood configuration with national brood frames, so not 14 by 12 but just the standard national deep ones, is probably oversized if you kept it all together as a double brood but incredibly versatile and useful space if you move it around with the Demeray. So this was my reason for moving away from the 14x12 and moving to regular brood boxes. Not, not so much because of the size of the box, but because it was 2 boxes as opposed to 1. Never forget that. Lost loads of money making that decision and buying like 200 14x12 brood boxes when I should have just bought 200 National brood boxes. However, It's not for everyone. Maximizing honey production and doing all of that work isn't for everyone. And I've got some— I've got quite a few hives that are on 14 by 12, and I run them as single brood boxes. So I just, I, I push them as far as I can, and I hope they don't swarm. And if they swarm, I make a split. And you— it does, it does really simplify beekeeping. And if you get the colonies through in that format and they don't swarm, you get a super easy winter because you've got a really nice buffer of stores all the way through, lower risk of starvation, but also it's quite a nice-sized brood box to not put too much honey down there. Like, you don't lose as much down there as you would in a double brood, so it's a nice configuration. I wouldn't necessarily switch over unless you've just got— unless you've just got one. I wouldn't try double brood on a— pardon me— I wouldn't try double brood on a 14x12. I wouldn't try demarais on a 14x12 because I tried them, and if you, if you want to have a decent working back, then Don't be lifting those boxes because they're very, very heavy. But good luck with that one. Um, Ricky says, morning, Lawrence. I have some 14 by 12— I'm sorry, I have some 12-frame 14 by 12 Abello hives. What are your thoughts on them? I find that they are so, so tight. I'm thinking about removing one frame and replacing with a dummy board. Um, yeah, okay. So I have to say, with all the Abello ones I've had, I found not the opposite, but I found like the, the They give you a good 5mm gap, which is better than a lot of the wooden equivalents, which is 12 frames is you have to really like squish 12 frames in. So it might be the frames. Have you bought the frames from Abello? Because the frames, like the DM4 frames, aren't all equal. Um, there are slight changes in them. If you've got 12 frames that are 1mm too big, you add it up at the end, it could be adding some compression. But saying that, I know the 12-frame is sold on the premise that it's an extra frame, which is good, and it is, it is good to have an extra frame, but if they're not fitting open I would put a dummy board in there. Really easy dummy board to make if you've not got one is, you know, let's imagine you've got, you've got 12 DN4 frames in there. If you just buy one DN1 frame and put a sheet of like plastic foundation in it, or you can even like stick plastic foundation to the sides, so not in the groove but on the sides, instead of just having like a single piece there, you have 2 bits either side of the frame. It makes a really good dummy board, like it's a brilliant dummy board. board, and then you can also insulate it as well. So you can just cut out a bit of insulation, stick it in the middle, and then affix these bits of plastic. You can use anything, any plastic at all, but any kind of bit of wood, you could use anything. So you can make your own crown boards— sorry, you can make your own dummy boards quite easily out of DN1 frames. It's good. Doug says I've wet the bed. No, this is just my morning hair routine. Let's get up, have a shower. I've actually already been up to the apiary this morning as well. I'm on my third coffee. of the day this morning. I've transported loads of nucs down, moved stuff around, been up at the apiary. I enjoyed the sunrise, very nice sunrise this morning. Get some beautiful sunrises in North Wales, especially where we are. We, um, we're the wrong side of Molfamyn, so we— I butchered pronunciation, of course— but we lose the sun quite early at night, so we don't— we miss out on all of the amazing sunsets that you get over the Caledonian Range. If we ever move house, I'm definitely moving that way. The most beautiful sunsets ever, but what we get, we get really nice sunrises here, and then our main apiary is quite elevated, so you go up there and get the sunrise, it is lovely. I've done a Demerara split and the top double brood boxes are kept over already. How much spring honey do you take and how much do you leave? Obviously I want to leave the bees plenty and add— uh, it's cut you off there. Oh wow, there's a lot of questions. Right, I'm going to go back up here. Where do we get to? So what I would say with that one there, if you're worried at all about anything to do with starvation, the best asset that you have is your top brood box. That brood box is perfect for recombining back underneath, it gives the bees what they need to get through the June gap, and it gives you the ability to take away a few supers. I wouldn't say you still need to take away all of them, but just that reconf— you can take away all of them if you're going to monitor it, But that reconfiguration, that top brood box back down to the bottom, gives you what you need. So don't just take it all. I'm not saying that to you, Rebecca. I know you wouldn't. Some people do. I've made that mistake. Everyone makes that mistake. Just easy, isn't it? Right, here we go. Sorry, I'm trying to find where we were. There we go. Bay Bees Lancashire. Hi, Jim. Jim says, morning, glad Helen's surgery has been well. Thinking of you all. Really enjoyed Zane's nuc series. Has he got to the superstar? stage yet. Thank you very much, Jim. So no, he's not got to the super stage yet, but he's, I reckon, about a week or so away. I've tried to do it to keep— I've started off deliberately with a bit of a smaller nuc so that we can show all of the stages of what's going on, because it depends, isn't it, when you get your nuc in the year. Some people send out nucs like first week of April. Ours went out this year first week of April, and then some people just got their overwintered nucs last week as well. So there's always like a difference in the timeline. So hopefully, hopefully he'll be on his supers, I would say, in in a week or so, week or two. Uh, thank you, Simon, thank you very much. Uh, good morning to Kerry. Uh, good morning to PK. Hello. Uh, Jim, we did that one. Uh, Callum says, I want to set up a hot wax dip for treating my wooden hives. What's the best budget source for beeswax? I need close to 100 kilograms. Whoa, okay, so wax dipping is cool, very cool, um, incredibly dangerous. like this. It is super. If you want to burn anything down, you're going to burn it down melting wax. But then the other one is beeswax is very, very— it's not the best wax for it, and it's way more expensive than any of the other waxes that they use. So I would— I don't do any wax dipping. I do buy some wax-dipped equipment. I quite like cheap— you get good quality cheap, or good value I should add— pine wax dipped. It lasts quite long, and I like the look of it as well. and it's like big and solid, but it's— you need to, you need to keep on top of it. I like the fact that when you burn it as well, it kind of refreshes the wax a bit, but it's not, it's not wax. And I forget, I won't, I won't say I know which, which wax it is. Um, I heard them talking about it is much, much cheaper, so look to— I would just do some research on that, Callum. If you, if you can't find it, I can probably, I can probably ask someone what they use in their one. Um, but yeah, you'll need, you'll need a decent amount of it. But do, do— I would go back to that one, please take every precaution. Don't just go and melt loads of wax. I'm sure you know what you're doing. I'd be terrible with that. Hi Lawrence, do you have any tips on how to relax when filming YouTube videos? I've been asked to be filmed and I'm a bit nervous from Tom. Oh, Tom, okay, so I have spoken to you, my friend, lots and lots of times, and you are brilliant at what you do. So you just got to talk and not be, um, not be scared or not be stressed. Do you know what someone told me this week, Tom? I had a message from someone, yeah, saying We used to really like your videos, and since, since everything's changed, it's just, it's like you're trying too hard. It's just a bit, yeah, we don't really like it. It's like you're trying too hard. And how I looked at that was, I love that someone telling me I'm trying too hard and that I'm brave enough to actually try and not be like scared of what my mates think or what people are going to think. And that is how you get better, and that is how you improve, and you just have to suck it up because nobody's first video, yeah, is ever any good. If anybody went to the North American Honeybee Expo and watched my presentation that I did over there, I showed— and I'll maybe, I'll maybe do that next week for you, Tom— I'll show you my first video. Well, it's my third video, and it was me standing there as a giant slug, and my hands were like stuck like this. And I'm not joking, Tom, this is how I did it. Please buy some of my bees because they're overwintered and they come from Wales. Like, that was it. was, it was classic. So all you've got to do is be a little bit better than that, and I know you, and I know how you can talk, and I know how enthusiastic you are, and I've seen you writing your notes and stuff, so you'll be brilliant. So don't worry about what anyone thinks, that's my advice. Have fun with it and know that, uh, like, it's only the brave people who make the videos and put themselves out there, and you are a very brave young boy, so good luck, Tom. I hope everything's going well. You have mentioned about doing Denver Split somewhere in mid-May. My question is, do you take some brood for splits from those colonies earlier on, as my brood boxes had 8 to 10 frames of brood in the beginning of April, uh, and they were already creating swarm cells. So it's, it's a really good point, and no, I wouldn't be taking brood from them. What I would say is that I, I give advice based upon like my line in the UK, and we're very, very northern, so I'm saying this year I'm doing my Denborough splits on, on the 7th of May. I'm trying to give people like a little bit of warning for that, so that's kind of this upcoming week. But really, that is going to be suitable for anybody, kind of North Wales, Manchester, Liverpool, Hull. It's like Ricky Gervais, isn't it? Ah, The Office again. Bracknell. Too many Gervais impressions going on here. But if you're anywhere else in the UK, you kind of have to extrapolate a little bit either way. So if you're further north, you might say, okay, maybe it's 15th of May for me this year. If you're further south, I appreciate the advice isn't that good for you, but The Demaray split is great because it comes with a universal trigger and it does work on most brood boxes. The National one is 2 super trigger. Obviously the Langstroth is like in between 1 and 2, but all that means is that when you are— when you're saying that they're on 8 to 10 frames of brood in the beginning of April, if they're on 8 to 10 frames of brood and they've got 2 supers full of bees, that's the trigger. You can just do the Demaray then. And then that's nice, it's not a date, it's not a time, you've not got to kind of look at it on a calendar, you just say, well, the bees are ready. because there's a brood box full, they're expanding, they're on 2 supers full of bees. If your bees are like that, you can just go ahead and do a, um, a demo split. Morning Lawrence, I'm now officially a beekeeper, confident thanks to 14 Day Beekeeper. Oh, I love that, that is, that is what it is all about, because even doing these videos that I've been doing this week and trying to share that information, and just, I'm trying to get into beginner beekeepers' minds to see the problems that they have that I know they're going to have before they see them, and going through 14-Day Beekeeper, I know that the content in there is setting people up very, very well. One of my favorite comments that I get on the advertising of the videos is, bees don't read the books, so what's the point? And I say, well, bees don't read the books, so all the more reason to understand the bees as best as you possibly can. And I know with the techniques and the understanding that 14-Day Beekeeper will give people, people, it sets them up for success way better than any book can ever set them up. And okay, the bees don't always read the books, but on the whole they do. And on the whole, if you manage the bees before the bees manage themselves— so if you go in and do a preemptive demaray split and split the bees before they've swarmed, making them think that they've swarmed but all keeping it under one roof— that's a very, very smart thing to do. It's very reliable and it works 99 times out of 100. So although the bees don't read the books and that 1 out of 100 might just go off and swarm anyway, when you start playing the averages, you're much better off going in with the knowledge and doing stuff before the bees go and do it themselves. And yeah, I'm very much looking forward to reading some of the success stories because I've already seen people sending me brilliant pictures showing me what they've done with the knowledge that they've got from 14-Day Beekeeper. So I'm very happy, Niamh, thank you for that. Morning, Laurence, my 4 queens arrived yesterday in tip-top condition. Thank you, thank you to you too, Keith. I hope they, I hope they're all going well. Um, I think I've missed one. John, John's put me on there. Yeah, so Keith, I hope you're going well. I hope the introductions are all good. I think John's saying that I've missed someone, so sorry if I've missed you, Ricky, long-term watcher. Dave and Ella says, we have done 2 weekly inspections but not seen the queen since the original move from nuc to the brood box, seeing brood in all stages, so should we not worry or spend more time looking for her? Really simple. If you've got a new nuc and you're seeing eggs, no problem whatsoever. Even if you're just seeing young larvae, should be okay. But as long as you're seeing eggs, you know the queen is there. Don't worry about looking for her. There's no, there's no need to look for her. Uh, it's nice, it's nice to see. I said this to Zane, you don't need to, you don't need to look for her. Just see the eggs and then it's good. I like to, I like to see her. I like to see them too, but don't, don't fret over it. And there's nothing worse than going through consistently trying to find her and then pulling her out and squishing her. Oh, not good. Right, there are a lot of questions, I think, so I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go quickfire. Last 10 minutes, quickfire. I am so confused too regarding my unmarked queen and 2 queen cells. I gave them loads of space. They were on 2 brood and 3 supers. Okay, so 2 brood and 3 supers, that's potentially a big colony. Are you sure it was just 2 queen cells and that they hadn't taken a lot of them down? Because it might be that if you have like a delayed inspection and threw up 30 swarm cells and you go back in, you found an unmarked queen, so there's a virgin running around, which indicates that the swarm cells are quite old. This is probably what's happened. I'd say they swarmed. What I would do, I'd knock down the cells and assume that there's a virgin in that colony and leave them to it. Knocking down the cells will stop any further casts, but to be honest, it sounds like they might have cast out already. Uh, right, let's go. I've got a few in here. Aha, look who it is, Stuart! I was thinking about Stuart the other day, who is just a crazy macro photographer. And somebody— I posted a picture of your drone, Stuart, and somebody said it's AI. I said, no, trust me, it's not, it's not. I know it does look a bit like AI because it's cool and a bit unusual with the eyes, and they wouldn't believe me. So I reckon you're getting that quite a lot now because your amazing macro images are so easily replicated with AI, but they're not the same. They are so cool. I'm very much looking forward to you coming back up, Stuart, you're always welcome. Right, here we go, let's go to the next one. Hot wax dip, don't worry, I've set it up outside, not close to anything, I have fire extinguishers, the gas bottle is as far away as possible, worst case scenario I burn down the fence panel. Okay, I'm not laughing, definitely get a picture, definitely get some videos, I'll be very, very interested to see how you go. Hi from Lofoten, Arctic, have you tried Italian bees? So hello to you too. Um, I always loved that we had our little conversation, uh, up in Mondiori, and it was so casual, the conversation as well, and now we just get to chat online, it's brilliant. Uh, have I tried Italian bees? So yes, Apis mellifera ligustica are Italian bees, and they're, they're very, very good at one thing. They're good at other things as well across the world, but in the UK they are the best for brood production, but they will starve themselves to death quite easily in the UK because the weather's so up and down. You need— I think Italian bees are suited well It's like most kind of across the, across the US, I think most people's bees— well, there's a lot of Italian bees in the US, but somewhere where— and I know I don't want to generalize and say the US is a type of climate, but maybe further south in the US. But you know, you know, the states where it's nice, it's predictable, you've got good, good flows and good amount of sunshine and it's nice and warm, then Italian bees are very, very well suited for that because they will just keep the brood going throughout the whole time. There's lots of bees, but they'll get the forage as well, so they'll get the honey production to go with it and the buffer in case the bad weather comes. In the UK, the weather's not quite good enough for that, so Italian bees are great if you're going to feed them and use the brood to make up splits, but they're maybe not so great if you're going to try and use them for honey production. Be interested to see how they get on in the Arctic because a lot of the places where they do well are places like in Canada, where they have— in some places in Canada where they have very, very— like where Ian lives— very restricted forage season, really, really short forage season, like it's not that long, it's a couple of months, and the crops that they get, like the yields they get, are huge, huge, huge yields. And that's as a result of building kind of bees up, um, could be Buckfast, could be Italian, but bees that you're able to build up to really huge, strong foraging colonies to hit these, these mega, mega nectar tsunami flows over a short period, which would be similar, similar to you, I guess, up in the Arctic Circle. It can't be— you're probably still What, you're still under like a foot of snow or something? It must, must be a little bit warmer now up there. Thanks, Laurence, I did get the frames from Abello. Great idea with the DN1 frames. I hope you have a great weekend. I hope you too do. You do too, Ricky. Uh, right, where we go next? I live remotely in the Highlands, I don't have a mentor, so I will heavily rely on 14 Day Beekeeper. This is, this is a really good point as well, and this is part of the reason that I wanted to develop not only 14 Day Beekeeper but that, that HiveQ community. Local associations are brilliant, and I recommend everybody to go and join your local beekeeping association and try and get hands-on with bees, be part of that community, but getting hands-on real experience early on in your beekeeping career is a really, really good idea. But it's not for everyone, like for Niamh, she lives miles away from anyone, and sometimes, sometimes you've got the wrong type of bees, sometimes you've got the wrong type of hive, sometimes it's not all just tea and cake, and it can be a little bit, I don't know, a little bit angry. I'll go ahead and say it. So 14-Day Beekeeper, and particularly HiveQ— and wait until you see the upgrade for HiveQ, it is going to be super cool— gives people like that a place to learn, um, and not only just sit there and consume the content and learn, but to engage and to share with other beekeepers. Because it's that sharing, it's that— it's, it's Niamh understanding kind of what to do with her bees and then trying to replicate that and put that into practice in the field, and then maybe coming across problems saying, oh, I didn't, I didn't expect for them to do this. What's this? Can anybody help me? And then taking a picture, putting it onto HiveQ, and people will see already HiveQ is a very, very active community. People are willing to help. There's a lot of people there who've been channel members here for, for years and years, and they've, they've kind of taken on all of that knowledge. They know exactly what they're doing, and they're happy to help and happy to assist. And then as that builds and as that grows, we've got some AI agents that will be going in there and and helping people like get the very best out of their bees. So it's not a case of join 14-Day Beekeeper, here's the course, see you later. It's a case of come and, come and join our community, which is going to be there indefinitely, um, and, and help you get the best out of your bees, and maybe you can help other people get the best out of their bees as well. So yeah, thanks for the nice feedback, and I'm glad, I'm glad it's useful for you. So in my case, do you reckon I should try Demerara with 8 to 10 frames of brood earlier in the season, even though there was only one super Bees. So the trigger, I would say, is the 2 supers. So you— the 8 to 10 frames of brood is good, and you have to ride that wave a little bit to say, please don't swarm, please don't swarm. One super of bees is not quite enough to connect them, so even one and a half supers, you probably get away with it. You want distance between the top and the bottom brood box, but you want them connected up, and that's why the 2-super trigger is so, so important. But yes, it's not based on the date, it's not based on the time. not necessarily based on the amount of brood that you've got. 2 supers is a good, good trigger. Oh, Stuart, Stuart gets the pain. It's AI. Yeah, it's all right, we'll, we'll make sure that we get a nice video of you doing it so no one can complain. I have an 11 out of 4 Black Mountain honey and quite a few dead or dying bees around the base. Some have pollen sacs. Colony seems strong and seeing queen, should I be worried? Um, so A few. So dead bees is entirely normal. It sounds really grim, doesn't it? But the churn rate, the mortality rate of a colony is huge, like hundreds of bees die each day, and if you're on concrete, you've got a beehive on concrete and it's colder weather, you're going to see a lot more bees dying down there. Generally shouldn't see them with pollen, although you will occasionally see like one or two with pollen. If you're seeing lots of bees coming back with pollen and they don't look well and they're dying around the entrance, I'd be thinking poisoning, time of year for it unfortunately, where the bees have gone and foraged onto some insecticide or even, I don't know, some chemicals that have gone on some flowers. Generally going to be insecticide if they're dying in that way, but there's some herbicides that can do equal damage, thinking about like glyphosate. It shouldn't kill bees in that way, but we don't want chemicals going into the beehives like that. But then the other one is CBPV, so Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus, will show like that as well. And that's just like a virus that the bees can, can pick up. There's not a huge amount you can do with CBPV. Some people said about taking the floors out and letting the bees drop down, but I think they've disproven that one now. And, and the best thing that you can do is, is give space to relieve the bees of any congestion. So if they're on single brood, go double brood. If you've got one supers, go up to 3 and just give them that space in between them to try and reduce the transmission from bee to bee and then hope that they can get through it. And a lot of the time they can get through it, but you just got to give them the chance. Thank you for the pollen trap video, it's perfectly timed. I was trying to work out something, looking everywhere for what I need to do for the abello entrances. It's cool, isn't it? I have to say, he gave me that abello trap, sent it to me about 2 years ago, and you saw it on the video, like it came slightly wrong with that bit on, and I said, just, is that, is that bit of wood supposed to go in there? And he said, yeah, a bit of wood's supposed to go in there. I said, okay, well, I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to take this apart and put that in, but then I just, I bodged it in the end, so I stuck a bit of bamboo in there and it works, it works very, very well, doesn't it? It's my, it's my new favorite thing to do, yeah, so I go up, I go up there, I'm moving that floor around so it's kind of like on a different, different hive, different day, and it's just filling up with pollen and I go up there and I open it up and I just get some like pollen that's nice and fresh and I just eat it like with a spoon or with my hands, but I'm eating quite a lot of it. I've become a little bit addicted to it, I'd say. It's really nice, yeah, get yourself a pollen trap. Oh, smash the like button and sip your coffee. Thank you very much, Jason. Got a minute left, says, new to beekeeping, first nuc arrived 2 weeks ago, our hive consists of brood box and 2 supers, we have a spare brood box and a spare super, would you say I'm under-equipped? So spare brood box, brilliant, most people don't have a spare brood box, it really, really helps. You've got a brood box and 2 supers and you've got a spare super, All I would say is one more super, one more super and a single harvest at the end of the year, or a smaller spring and summer harvest, and you should be fine. That, that's what we say in 14-Day Beekeeper for everyone as a minimum. So the setup is 2 brood boxes, 4 supers. That's— and that's a really, really good configuration that will, will cover most people throughout most kind of scenarios in the year. The Arctic Beekeeper says 3 degrees today, but the spring is slow here. I imagine Buckfast is the breed that has the best breeds, breeding from Italians, frugality from the Black, and wintering from the Carniolan. Um, so yeah, so the Buckfast doesn't have any Carniolan lines in it, it's just a mix of like AMM and Italian, but it, it does it. It definitely the, the best of all of those and gives you, gives you what you need, I think, to, to succeed in beekeeping. Like, it's, it's very, very demoralizing buying, buying nucs of bees, and I'll be careful what I say, you know, I'm not one for smearing other people's work, Although plenty of people try to do that to me, but there's no fun in buying a nuc, 6-frame nuc, building it up, and then getting to the point thinking, right, I'm going to put super on now, and then going in and they've swarmed, and you think, what's good? Like, why are you doing that? You shouldn't be swarming yet. And if someone's selling you a nuc that's doing that, then they've not bred those bees correctly. They're selecting for the wrong thing, and there's a lot of this going on. People are selecting based on color. They're looking at the bees, they're making measurements, they're looking at the color, looking at wing morphology, and saying these bees are 90% pure AMM, so I select them. Don't look at the chalk brood, seriously, don't worry about all that chalk brood, don't worry about the aggression, don't worry about the fact that they're struggling, don't worry about the fact that they swarm when they get to 8 frames of brood, they are 90% pure. And that is a lot of, a lot of people do breed like that in the UK, and it's, it's a bit it's a bit sad because it's not really giving people what they want. They're selling people a dream, which is this— the bees that are able to kind of survive and fend for themselves and produce lots of honey and stuff, but they don't. They can't do any of these things that you're telling people that they can do. They just go off and swarm. I've been triggered. It was the Arctic Beekeeper that triggered me, and I got— I basically got an hour in without being triggered, so there we go. I will stop being triggered. I'm going to do my very best to get to the end Until someone knocks on my door. Our Little Welsh Homestead, nice name, says, hi Lawrence, I love the new format of your videos, so take no notice of the negativity. Currently working my way through 14 Day Beekeeper and feel confident for our bees arriving soon. That's very nice, thank you very much. I do, I've managed. I'm— you ask my wife, she says you are the most sensitive person in the world. I really am, like, I take offense quite easily, but I, I've got used to social media and I've got used to the abuse, and it's— there's not really anything that anyone can say on social media that affects me in any way anymore because I've kind of, A, heard it all before, but B, I see the ratio and I know that if you're going to sell 100 things to 100 people, you're going to get complaints. It's just the way of life. You're not going to be able to keep everyone happy all the time. So all I can do is just try and keep the people who support me and the people who are positive and the people who want to kind of be part of the community I focus on them now and I don't give the trolls any time whatsoever. Callum says wax dip. I love that you've pre like got a prefix in there to let me know what it is. That's very helpful. That is going to catch on. Callum says wax dip. If you want to see it, I'll probably make a YouTube video about it once it is all set up. Absolutely do that. Make take some pictures as well. Send me a couple of clips. I will do like a posty whatever and then link to your YouTube channel so people can see it. Awesome. Stats Ig Happiness says do you use any precision beekeeping devices to reduce frequent Frequency of hive checks. Any thought on such technology? I love technology. Yeah, I'm very much one of these people. Like, it's kind of—it's not my background. I've done like Lean Six Sigma and stuff, but I've been in those scenarios in the corporate world where it's like, come on, guys, we've got this new good example. Yeah, they were doing this footway footway design. That's how they used to do it. Just get a bit of paper out, print off these big CAD drawings, and go and go and mark up the footway design, and then take it. And CAD it all up and then present it to the client. And then the client would say, no, we don't really like that, we want it done a different way. I'm going into way too much detail on footway design. I developed a system on a tablet, yeah, that just overlaid— this was years ago, Martin, before all of the nice GIS systems— that just overlaid the design in a really crude fashion that we could then take to the client and show them it on the tablet and get them to approve it before going and CADding it up. Saved all of the CAD. It was a huge, huge saving. So I showed it to the directors and they were like, Absolutely, yes, that is that is the way forward. Client loved it because not only was it better for them, added tons of value, but it saved them a lot of money at the same time. Try try getting the operatives to do it. Fifty-year-old guys, they're like, "No, Birmingham can't do the Birmingham accent." I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I just I'll lose loads of customers. But they would not they were not willing to take it on. They were just like, "No, not doing that because we've done it for thirty years, lad, and we know the way to do it, and we're not using your stupid." tablets, like not doing it at all. And I really don't like that attitude. So eventually the directors went down there and told them to do it, and they did it, and it was a massive success, and it saved nearly a million pounds in kind of hours over the lifecycle of the project. So it was good, obviously went on my CV. I've very much come from that place, which is technology can help. There's a new way of doing things. Don't just rely on doing something because that's the way we've always done it, like actively go and challenge it. and see if you can do different ways of doing things. So bringing it back to beekeeping, I've done that on many occasions. I'm always up for trying new things that would help the beekeeper, um, and I have to say I've not really found anything that, that works like autonomously. The one, the one that I showed earlier on, like this one here, this is about as good as it gets. So this is my HiveWatch dashboard here, and it gives you, gives you weather, like you can see, not very warm today, but low wind. Um, but I love this dashboard. This is very, very helpful. So this is like a weekly breakdown on all of your sensors. So I've got scale there, so you can see I'm like gone up like nearly a kilo, gone up half a kilo, but then gone down 0.7. So it gives you that breakdown, and then you can always just dive in and kind of look at it on a, on a curve basis or a graph basis like that. But you've got lots of different things in here. But this isn't really doing anything, this is just informing me, and it's kind of like the next step. So I spoke to somebody else about this, my— where I'd like to go with HiveQ is to get multiple people with systems like this in different places all over the country feeding data into a central point to give localized warnings on what beekeepers should be doing. So it's a great question, like PK said before, is it the 7th of May that I should be doing it, is the— is it the 8th of of— oh, sorry, is it the 8 to 10 frames of brood, or is it the super that's the trigger? I want to start using data like this, building it into a network to be able to give to HiveQ members to say, this is what you should be doing in your very localized area. And then the more people that get involved in that, the better the data will be. And that data is also potentially very valuable for other sources as well. So anybody out there, tech whizzes who are up for that, we can, we can definitely do stuff. I've got a number of IT people working for me at the moment, but there's definitely space for that one there. I'm looking, I'm looking at the HiveWatch thinking it could be very, very cool. Uh, so there we go, I'm up for that. Most long-winded answer ever, that one. I love your content. Unfortunately, I'm not so— I'm not so keen on the local bee club. Sorry, I'm not so keen, um, just not my people. Your 14-day beekeeper is excellent for people like myself. Um, it's, it's an interesting— yeah, so, so thank you very much, I appreciate the kind words. It's an interesting take, this one, yeah, because we get a lot of hate. I said about it before with the trolls and the color of bees and stuff like that, and people anti-imports, and we get, we get kind of everything thrown at us, yeah. You can see organizations and people like that, like, really trying to make an example of us and saying, no, we're, we're doing it the right way with the black native British chalky bee. I shouldn't, I shouldn't make fun, but you know, you know what I mean. Um, And a lot of people get caught up in that propaganda. They say, oh no, that's the right way of doing it, it's the local, it's the black bee, that's what we need to do, we need to save the bee. And then they get— first thing they do is they say, where can I buy them? And they say they're not for sale. And they say, what do you mean they're not for sale? I wanna— I would like to buy a nuc, please. And they say, you know, we're sold out. And they never come back into stock because you can't produce anywhere near enough of them to supply the demand. But then when people do get them, they kind of tend to give up beekeeping after a couple of years because they're generally quite angry and get stung a lot, which is what happened to me, nearly killed me twice with very angry, aggressive local black bees. And then the strange thing about it is, is that they end up kind of in Hive Q or 14-Day Beekeeper and with some Buckfast bees, and they say like, this is— oh, this is what I thought beekeeping was going to be like in the first place. Like, I'm really glad to be here, I'm really glad to have your bees. I wish I hadn't started off with the angry black ones. So for all of the anti-propaganda that goes for Black Mountain Honey, I think ultimately it just, it ends up with people getting the Buckfast bees in the end, which in my view are just far superior. And that's the reason that we sell out all of our nucs like months in advance. That's the reason that we sell out of our queens like well over a week in advance, is because people buy our products, people buy our nucs, people buy our queens, and they have good experience with them. and they do what they say, which is they're nice, calm, big, strong, prolific colonies. They're not chalky, they're lower swarm propensity, you can make lots of splits, you're going to get lots of honey, you can get the kids involved. Like, these are all things that I tell people, and these are all things that people have confirmed via their reviews, whereas the, the darker bees might not give you such benefits, I would say. So that— Neil's done well for triggering. I need to stop at 8. That's it, I've gone to freestyle mode and it's just auto-triggered on those things. do apologize. I'll come back to very calm, diplomatic Laurence now. Morning Laurence, been out helping my friend who is my bee mentor, got my hives and equipment arriving today and can't wait, bees following soon, loving the videos and info you provide. Thank you very much Peter, good luck, that's, that's a very, very exciting day. I hope the weather serves you well. Would you take the pollen from the pollen catcher every day to dry it? You can leave it in there, it's quite well ventilated, you wouldn't want to leave it in there for kind of like multiple days because it will go a little bit moldy. But you do, you need to, you need to filter it and clean it and dry it. But I'm just, I'm using it at the moment, which is just I put it in for a couple of hours, put it in for a day, and then just, it's, I eat it. I come back home, there's not that much because it's quite cold at the moment. But as soon as, as soon as the good weather comes and it's on proper-sized colonies, yeah, it's, it's maximum of 24 hours on each colony, and then I take it off and go and dry it. But make sure that there's no, you don't leave it on, you can't just leave traps on indefinitely, you will kill your colony. Blue Lights Bee says, morning Lawrence, my other account Ongar Honey has started a frame building speed challenge. Would you be up for doing a challenge video? You can use either the hammer or a nail gun. Yes, definitely up for that. I'm gonna shoot myself in the finger probably. Richard Mallion, thank you very much, super sticker, much appreciated, sir. Ashley says, hi Lawrence, I received my first nuc off you last week. I put them in the new hive. I have seen the queen, capped worker brood, and capped drone brood. I have not, however, seen any eggs or larvae on on any frame. Is there any reason why the queen would stop laying? Should I just be patient? Am I— I'm also seeing 4 play cuts with nothing inside them also. Okay, so you might not be able to see the eggs, that's the first thing. If you can see the eggs and there's no eggs there, that's perfectly normal as well. The fact that the queen is there is very, very important, so if you've seen the queen, the eggs will follow. Transit can really put them off. It's shaking them around, the queen's like, I want What's going on? This is just ridiculous. I'm not doing anything. If I had to bet, I would say there might be some eggs knocking around there anyway. If the weather's anything like it is up here, get them into their hive and get them fed. Make sure they're taking down the feed. That access to the feed will trigger a queen that's not laying to lay. Monitor it. If there's any problems, we will fix it for you. But I would say that is perfectly normal. I wouldn't expect there to be any issues. I think you'll start to see eggs brood over the next few days. few days or weeks. So what are we going to do together this year? Well, I, I think we need to do something even more fantastic than we did last year that is based around you taking lots of incredible macro photos. I've got a new— I've got a new Sony lens as well, um, so I've got the Sony 2:1 macro as well. And like, if I buy the Laowa 28— 24mm 2:1 as well, which, which Zane wants me to get, we'll have some really cool lenses for you to come and try out. So I was thinking something like that, maybe do a pizza, it'd be good fun. What should I do if I add another brood box on top and my spring crop is now on? Should I take the extra brood box off and put a super with drawn-out comb on? So this is, this is the challenge that a lot of people have at this time of the year, trying to manage spacing the supers and the spacing the brood box, and the bees don't see it like that. The queen excluder is effectively an arbitrary line that we draw that makes— that means nothing to the bees other than the queen can't get through it. So you can draw that line wherever you want, and you, you can draw it and make it a single brood, you can have a double brood, you can put more supers on. But putting more brood boxes on at this point in the year, I would say, is never really a good idea. If you're going to put a brood box on at this time of the year, do a Demaray, because it's— you are primed perfectly for it. Don't just double brood, because all you'll end up doing is you don't get that much swarm suppression, but you end up with loads of issues when it comes to losing all of your honey down there. So Manage the supers as they need it, they'll just kind of tell you when they need additional boxes. This time of the year, if you— if they need boxes, I add on 2 boxes, and then if you're going to double brood, I would go with the Demaray, as long as they've not created swarm cells already. Thank you for your time this morning, what projects can we look forward to from the next few months? Oh, that's good, I can tell you some of the videos, let me read them out. Right, so we've done whatever— oh, let's do it like this: What Every Beekeeper Needs to Know in May, How to Tempt Your Bees Up into the Super, Why you might need to keep feeding small splits. How small can you make up a nuc in April or May? What to do after your first inspection. 3-week guide. What is the June gap? How to protect your bees and honey. What are orientation flights? How to protect your hives from wasp attacks. Did underbrooding help my bees in spring? How to set up an Asian legged yellow hornet bait station. When to add supers to my beehive. So I'm not joking, every single one of those videos is there, is on, um, and they'll just be released over the next few days. So they filmed either last week or the week before, and I've never ever been in that situation before. I can bring you that many videos that are that relevant to the season. And okay, like the videos there, when to add my super to the beehive, might be relevant to you, it might be relevant to somebody else who's already got 3 supers on, but we're still sending nucs out. So the nucs that are going out like last week, week before, that'd be very, very relevant to someone. But I will try my best to keep, keep a little bit ahead. Ashley says, hi Lawrence, I received my first nuc off you last week. I put them in the new hive. Okay, we did that one. Um, okay, there we go, jump off. Here we go. Uh, Julia says, hi Lawrence, a few years ago you did a series on wild comb in jars where the bees build comb in jars and then you can fill the jars with honey. Would you try this again? Yes, I'm definitely going to try it again, and the problem that I did first time around just didn't work and I had to I had to curtail the series for one reason or another, probably took too much on. Um, but I've got— I, I know how to get it to work again now. So I need bigger jars, more wax, and the foundation in there. Definitely going to do it. It's the only problem with it is that to get them to go up there and work, you need to trigger like swarm-like conditions. But it's, it's quite good for me to do that. I don't mind triggering swarm-like conditions because if the bees swarm and I'm up there and they swarm, I get a cool— I get a cool video of them swarming. It'd be a very boring channel if I, um, if I played, if I played it all by the rules. Uh, Ben says, when, sorry, when do you remove oilseed rape so it does not sit in the supers? Do I remove it when 3/4 capped? Do I remove the super when the majority is 3/4 capped or remove individual frames? So you'll see the flowers start to go over, you'll see the triggers. You're not that far from me yet, so the oilseed rape, you're going to get to a point within the next, generally they say back end of May, but depending on where you are in the, uh, in the UK, but also depending on what the weather's doing Like this drop in temperature, to me, it— if I had bees on the oilseed rape now and they had 3 or 4 supers on, and it's— I've had 2 weeks of 21, 22 degrees, and then I see next week is going to 10 degrees and it's staying like that for 2 weeks to take me through until the 16th or 17th of May, I'm thinking maybe I'll just take it off now. Maybe I take off what is there now, because as long as it's not shaking out, it's good to harvest. And looking at the weather, they're probably going to go backwards over the next couple of weeks. So if you take it off, make sure you feed them. But yeah, the capped rule doesn't really apply to all seed rape honey. You just got to get in there, shake it out, and just know as well, when you're taking those averages, it's not just a case of, you know, you haven't got to take every single frame out, but you're just, you're making a judgment based on what the frame in the center is doing, what the frame on the edge is doing, and if there's one frame where it's a little bit of nectar coming out but most of it's okay, and then you've got another frame that's fully capped over, once you uncap all of that and blend it all up, The moisture content will even out a little bit. The Arctic Beekeeper says, after I started using the Broodminder sensors, I have much more peace to my mind. The temperatures alone tells a lot. I really like the temperature bit. It's— let me just add it on here, see if I can get back into my brood temperature one. So the brood temperature is great for so many things in terms of understanding what your bees are doing, and it's not, it's not quite as straightforward as just the interpretation that I'll give you here. But you can see like the temperature dip down. So this was— you have to like ignore some of the lines, but look, so from October the 22nd, like we clearly got brood going up here, it's in the 30s, and then it drops right off. So from 21st of November all the way through to the 28th of Feb is kind of like hovering around 18 to 16 degrees, which I would say, okay, there's no brood in there, but it's not It's not as simple as that because the temperature is just in a central position in the hive. If the bees just move over to one side and rear the brood over there, my temperature is just in the open space in the hive and it's not going to be picking that up correctly. But look at that expansive growth there. What that shows to me is regardless of where my sensor is, the box is filling up now. The box is getting nice and warm. I really, really like the temperature sensor and you can see how consistent it gets once that that colony builds up. So if you look at it over a month or even 10 days like that, it is just well and truly chock-a-block full of brood now. Jean says, hello Lawrence, what does your day look like in your apiary today? Oh well, the weekend today, so I am doing my very best to spend as much time with my family as possible. That is what I'm doing and not getting bogged down by emails. I have done about an hour's worth of emails already and then I'm gonna have a little tidy up. One of the things that we worked out Yesterday or day before when I was filming with Zane is we now have in the apiary we've got two or three lovely spots from say midday through to about five o'clock. We've got good spots to film now. The sun does really awkward things in the morning. We're struggling a little bit, so I need to go and build a new a new site up in the forest apiary. That's what I'm going to do in the middle of the day when I get kicked out of the house. Jean says hello, Lawrence from California. Hello to you, Jean. I answered your question first. Richard Mallion says so far have had trouble requeening dark bees with a buck. Fast. They tend to let her start laying and then supersede her. They are very annoying when they do that. So they do, and the way that I've said for people to fix that one is to go in. So normally the advice is pop the tabs, wait 7 days. With requeening dark bees, I say— let me remove this, sorry— I say go in every 3 days, every 3 or 4 days, and it gives you a chance to take down the cells before they cap them because they seem to kill the old the, the Buckfast queen off before they capped the cells. Someone did give me a good tip though, which was if you've got another colony, um, just take out a frame of Buckfast brood. So put the queen in, release her, get her so she's walking around on the frame, go and find a frame of Buckfast brood, capped Buckfast brood from somewhere else, shake the bees off and add that in. Get a queen, put her on that frame, and if you wanted, you could even put her in like a big cage at that point. And then that's really good protective way of doing it, and it means that the Buckfast population is going to increase much, much quicker. I should add that and do a video on that. I'd like to remind myself. Darren says, morning Lawrence, I finally got to one of these. Looking forward to installing our Langstroth nuc into our Langstroth hive tomorrow. Oh, excellent. I'm really enjoying seeing what you're doing with your stuff, Darren, and thank you for taking the national one and getting it in. It's a cool, cool series. I'm enjoying it. Jean says, Lawrence, could you explain what you do with a honey-bound hive? So a honey-bound hive In the brood box, we spoke about this one earlier, it is a case of cycling those frames out, taking out any capped stores, making up splits if you can do that, but if not and you're confident that all of those, all of the stores is in fact honey, it's a case of you need to somehow boost the brood nest to get it bigger and bigger and bigger and then intersperse that brood nest with brood stores and space above and the bees will move it all up. Okay. I'm really sorry, I think we're done. I think I can hear someone pulling up, so I did an extra 20 minutes. There we go. I hope you all have a brilliant, brilliant weekend. I'll be back in 2 weeks' time. I'm not doing the advertising for 14-Day Beekeeper, but if you've got to the end of this stream and you want to learn more about bees, I would click onto it now because the lifetime access does end in 2 weeks and it's one not to be missed. I hope you all have a good weekend. I hope the sun shines, and I'll see you all in a couple
