Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with John White - Episode 24

So hello everyone, this looks like it's so well planned. We started exactly at half past 8 and me and John have been here being fully prepared. Now John will say I just came online about 10 seconds ago. I've been in my garden, I've been running around trying to sort out Royal Mail. Nightmares with Royal Mail this week, about 35 packages stuck in Chester. Um, I've just eaten my dinner, I've just made a tea, I've just had a shower. But we have got Jon White on board, so I will leave it to Jon to introduce himself, who he is, what he does, what he's a specialist in, and then we're going to have a fantastic bee chat. So welcome, Jon.

Yeah, thank you, Laurence, thank you. Yeah, so definitely Laurence cut it fine, but I was sitting here waiting patiently for all of you guys. But listen, I've kept bees for 12 years now, and 11 of those I've used small cell, small cell bees because I had such a nightmare early on with varroa. So, um, it was— I went looking for a silver bullet and I ended up with small cell, not knowing anything about it, desperate to try something that tackled the varroa, which was— I had a chronic case of that early on. And then about 6 years ago, I think I nearly gave up beekeeping because of the whole swarm issue, and this year has just been extraordinary. for swarms. And so I took up checkerboarding 5 years ago because I had a queen that swarmed 8 times, clipped queen 8 times in that year, and it just nearly broke me. And since then, 5 years including this year, no swarms. So that has been just such a revelation. So I'm, as far as the bees Brilliant, you know, I've got one very, very angry hive, we all have one of those now and again, that I'm dealing with, but in terms of varroa, swarms, I'm really happy to say that has not been an issue with my beekeeping at the moment, so things can always change, but for now we're in a good place.

Excellent, so I know John, I think it was, it's John Owen, I get confused by all the Johns, it was John Owen that introduced me to you and we had a chat, didn't we? And you convinced me to give the checkerboarding a go. You very kindly sent me up some small cell bees. So yeah, I've chatted to John on and off for probably maybe 12 to 18 months now.

Yeah.

And we're going to talk this evening about checkerboarding. We're going to talk about small cell, and we're going to talk about all other stuff beekeeping as well.

Sure.

So it's interesting, the checkerboarding. Do you want to just tell people what checkerboarding is? Because I think checkerboarding, normally people just think it's just a manipulation in the brood box where you're just putting foundation in between the brood. When we say checkerboarding, do you want to explain what you're system is, or the system that you use is.

Absolutely. So, I mean, I'm not clever enough to invent anything, so I just— I went again with the swarm management issue. I went looking and found this guy, Walter Wright. He passed away in 2016, a Tennessee beekeeper over in the States, and he documented this concept of checkerboarding. And it's a term that's used a lot, especially by a number of American beekeepers, and And it means different things to different people, and lots of people say, well, I do checkerboard my bees. But if we think about how Walter Wright defined his technique and what I use, what I mean by checkerboarding, it has absolutely nothing to do with the brood. I think Walter Wright had a deeply profound understanding of honeybee behaviour, especially when it came to swarming. I think he was completely out there on a limb and He, with his profound understanding of beekeeping and swarm management, he realized that the way to stop bees swarming, it's nothing to do with separating queen, flyers, brood, it's nothing to do with space and allowance of space. Sure, that helps, but eventually, you know, they'll swarm if you give them double, triple brood. He realized it was all about alternating the stores with empty frames or frames with foundation or drawn frames and doing this at least 9 weeks before swarm, the peak swarm season. So that means different things to different people in different places, but essentially you're not going into the brood, you're manipulating the stores well in advance of swarming. You do that, give them enough space, your bees will not swarm.

So a couple of questions. So, so first off, I tried that on one colony once and it worked and they didn't swarm. and then I would not have been organized enough to try it this year. But like, it worked, and it worked really well. So 2 questions. First one, the first one is, why do you think it works? But the second one is kind of give us your stats. So how many years, how many colonies, how many swarms have you lost?

Yeah, so the last 5 years I've done it, which— so I started in 2018, did it on 2 colonies. One swarmed immediately, oh well, 7 weeks later, and the other one didn't, and thereafter nothing. So between then and now, I've had up to, up to 12 colonies, probably not less than 6 or 9 every year. So let's call it 10. 50 colonies over those 5 years, none of them have swarmed. None of them have swarmed. I do know people who say— my, my neighbor, my next-door neighbor on the allotment, Mark, he said it doesn't work. My bees swarmed, all 4 colonies that he checkerboarded swarmed. Then Sure enough, sure enough, you know, when I went and looked at his colonies, it was crystal clear to me he put a queen excluder in too early. The bees are banging their head on the ceiling, these massive colonies that came out of the winter, and they just all took off. And you know, it's very difficult to do forensics on somebody else's hive unless they're right close, physically close to you. But the 2 other people I know, it's not worked either. They haven't left space enough at the top, or they've constrained the brood in some way. So I think, you know, based on that and based on stuff that I've heard from other people, including in the States, you know, if you follow the principles faithfully, it will work.

Because it's not just about space though, is it? Because you see a lot of bee farmers, they'll sometimes— it varies across the world, but some will build up the brood in the spring and then they just stick 5 supers on. And just say, right, you know, let's just stick 5 groupers on. And it's not just a case of give them enough space and they don't swarm. Like, it, it seems like there's something else going on, doesn't there, with the checkerboarding that's stopping it in addition?

Yeah, that's right.

And I think the essence of it was Walter Wright honed in on the fact that it wasn't just about— exactly as you, to your point, Lawrence, it wasn't just about space. So he started off with the premise that, oh, let's, let's try space. So you give them a double groove and they still swarm. To reduce swarming, but they still swarm. Then he gave them a triple brood. Again, it reduced the swarming a little bit, but they carried on swarming. Once he identified that basically the parent colony, the colony that's left behind, they won't commit suicide. There's always exceptions, there are always exceptions, but in the vast majority of cases, the parent colony will not leave unless they have a solid block of stores at the top of the colony, whether that's in a tree or in a hive.

Right.

So if at the top of that box you've got a block of stores there, they, the bees, are good to go. So what we do by doing the checkerboarding is we break up that block of stores, same block of stores split across 2 shallows, and then in the bee's mind— this is me trying to be clever and imagining what the bees are thinking— in their mind, they haven't got that core ingredient left behind, a block of stores, In order for them to swarm. So by fracturing that block, checkerboarding it, and then always having an allowance of space— so by having the space, even though they're filling up, yes, they're filling up 1, 2, 6 supers, but at the top they always want this block of stores at the top. They haven't got that. And so he figured out by constantly leaving the space, having fractured the stores, not giving them what they wanted, and stopping giving them what they want thereafter, They won't swarm.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm def— I definitely need to just do it on a whole apiary and have a go with it again. So the thing that I was thinking as I was doing it as well was, and it's interesting what you say in terms of breaking it up and not having that solid super of honey at the top is their trigger, but I was thinking more if you imagine like the stack of a beehive being like a timer and the higher you go further you are throughout the season. Like, when you, when you get into those 2 supers, that's kind of like around May, early June time, which is your swarming time. So by giving them lots of foundation to work in there, you're kind of stopping them swarming. You're giving them something to keep them busy at that time. But then I kind of got back to, well, if you just put 4 boxes of foundation on, it doesn't stop them swarming. So I'm just, I'm, I'm still just really intrigued as to why it's so effective. But the other challenge that I'll put back in there, and this links into what I'm going to say about the small cell bees, is that it's clearly very effective for you. Do you think it might be to do with your bees? Do you reckon you've just got really non-swarmy bees and that's why it's effective as well?

No, because I think for me, you know, I've got a small sample of, say, 50 colonies over 5 years. Some of them are the same colony, obviously, You know, excuse me, I see the evidence in other people that have used, you know, that have used, adopted this methodology in all kinds of different size hives, everything from Dadants to Nationals. And for me, the acid test was that first year we did it, I had this black hive, what I call a black hive, and this queen swarmed 8 times the year before. And I thought, if this works on her, I might start to believe this. So the fact that she was a prolifically swarmy colony, okay, we're talking about a sample of one here, but that worked. She didn't swarm, and thereafter none of the others did. So, and I've bought, you know, I unashamedly have bought in Carniolan bees, Buckfast bees, and the rest of mine have all been native bees, local native bees. So I've don't think it's the genetics. I don't think— I'd love to think it is, but it isn't my excellent bee husbandry, absolutely not. I just think, you know, there's something in this.

Yeah, well, as I said, I'm definitely going to give it another go, and every time I get around to doing it, like this year, I think, right, I'm going to start my checkerboard, and I realize I've done it way too late. So tell people again, like, what is the timeline for doing these things? Because it's a bit crazy, the timeline, isn't it?

Yeah, it is, it is, because What clearly happens with some bees is they make up their mind. I think they make up their mind in the autumn that they're going to go the next, the following year. And so Walter Wright's basic principle was when your peak swarm season is, which for us is typically, what, middle of May, end of May, beginning of June, you count 9 weeks back from that. And so when the first year we did it, 2018, we did it 20th February, it's a blindingly warm couple of weeks. We had really freak weather conditions. That didn't work because they swarmed 7, 8 weeks later. So now what we do is we do it pre-Christmas. We do it, you know, we, we take that block of stores and we fracture them, checkerboard it pre-Christmas, job done, leave it alone. And then as long as you— they come out of the traps really fast in January and February, and so by doing it then you haven't got into the really cold— for us, what's normally the really cold month of January—

you've done it way before, you can just sit back. As long as you load up your boxes, you're good to go. You end up with a byproduct.

The 2 byproducts for me are, which is not why we did it, you end up with huge colonies, and you all know this better than I do, Laurence, more bees usually means more honey if that's what you're interested in. And, and you don't have to go in, you don't have to go in and do all that checking for swarm cells. So first year we did it, we were just paranoid. We thought the skies are going to darken if these colonies swarm. So we were going in forensically every week and frame by frame and just looking, and we saw the evidence of what he suggested. We saw it for our own eyes. We saw supersedure. So they swap one for one. We didn't see any swarm cells, so I have good faith in this methodology.

So you just got me right onto my next point, which was an excellent point raised by Peter, which is, so do they produce supersedure cells, and if so, kind of how often, and how old are the queens in the colonies?

Yeah, I think that because of the tremendous rate at which they're laying, and I did some maths once and worked it out, and we all here know about these sort of inherited figures of, you know, they can lay 1,000 a day, 2,000 a day. And I remember working it out, so I, I tracked the brood throughout the season, all the frames with brood on, and I worked out that at their peak they were laying at something like 4,000 a day, which is colossal, and they just can't sustain that. So the queens will literally burn out, and any time from, you know, late March, April, right down to September, they will supersede one for one. And because they haven't got that key ingredient for swarming, i.e., the block of honey, because I'm constantly putting supers on the top, they won't swarm. So you just get this trade-off one to one, which for a beekeeper is, you know, manna from heaven.

And do you find that's like every year they're superseding every year, or some of them that will kind of wait?

Some of them will last, some of them will last 2 years. I've not had any that last Beyond that, I think just because of the incredible rate at which they're laying, I think they just literally burn out, Lawrence. And so, you know, after a couple of years, they will— when they've just, you know, like they do, they decide when it's time to move madam on. And, um, and so 2 years, 1 year, and, and for me, you know, I know I don't need to clip my queens. I know they're not going anywhere, so I tend not to. I could sort of relax about that.

I love it. You're so, so confident with it, and it does seem like the easiest thing in the world, doesn't it? You, you do this manipulation in before Christmas, and then you don't need to inspect your bees during the swarm season, and you get loads of honey. It's like the best thing about a silver bullet.

It is. Yeah, well, you know, so far so good.

Yeah, so the supercedure cells that they produce, what do you think? You hear a lot of stuff about supercedure cells, and I don't like the teaching about they only— if they create a cell on the face, regardless of the number, it's a supercedure. Do you buy into that?

In my experience, so looking at what I've seen with the checkerboarded colonies, you know, they tend to be— where can they— you know, they could be anywhere on a frame. They can be in the middle of the frame. I've had them at the bottom of the frame. The first year we went looking, I saw 2 supersedure cells in a colony, and because it was right between 2 boxes, you know, we buggered up one and thankfully left the other one was was okay. So I think they can appear anywhere on a frame, personally.

I'm 100% with you. I don't buy into it where they are. For me, if there's one cell, it's supersedure. If there's 2 cells, I treat it as supersedure. 3 or more, and I treat it as swarming. Yeah, there's probably a grey area in between, but I don't— I saw something on Facebook the other day with someone saying there were like 7 cells on this frame, and he was saying, oh, because they're on the face of the frame, it's definitely supersede you. So it's gonna just supersede. I just thought your bees are ending up in someone's chimney, guaranteed. Yeah, yeah, I didn't want to say anything. So just a couple of people late to the stream here, give us a real, like, simple what is checkerboarding, the exact process in terms of what you need to do when you come to your hives. Actually, let's pull it back to the previous year. So at the end of this year, how will you get your colonies ready for checkerboarding?

So as we go, as we're going into the autumn, so I'm already conscious in my head that, you know, I need, I need a frame of stores. What I do know is that all these ginormous colonies are all going to shrink down to yours, mine, everybody else's size colony, a single, effectively, you know, a single British standard deep brood. But on the way there, so when we get into the autumn, so if I'm not leaving on enough honey, I've got to be conscious that I've got to have a box of stores and a box of frames, and that could be foundation. So I've done it with just using foundation. I prefer not to, and go into that in a bit. But, um, a box of stores, and that box of stores, as we're moving into the autumn and starting to— if we're thinking about feeding, then I would always make sure I've fed. So I'll put the queen excluder on. I very rarely use queen excluders, but I'll put the queen excluder on. I don't want her upstairs. And I'll feed a super so that there is a box of stores and that's ready, ready to go just before Christmas. I've got another box of frames, and then when we get to a mildish day in December, what we'll do is take the—

So wait, let me just jump in there. Do you feed a super? So you've got a box, you've got a super full of some store, like some sugar syrup?

Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter whether it's honey or sugar syrup, it's stores. It's that block, it's that same block of stores that we're trying— we're going to fracture. So already we've given them that block and we fractured it in December. So then we're going to just before December, just before Christmas, sometime when we've got a mildish day, we would go in and take that box off, cover the hive, do the alternating of the frames: food, drawn empty comb, food, drawn empty comb in those 2 boxes. Put it back on and that's it, job done.

Yeah, so, so you're effectively— if anyone's not understood that, imagine you've got a brood box, queen excluder, and a super full of stores. Take off the super full of stores and you put an empty super on, and then in that empty super you put a frame of foundation, a frame of stores, a frame of foundation, a frame of stores, and then you put another empty super on, and then you put a frame of foundation, frame of stores. That's it, isn't it? So it's 2 supers that go on, both fractured.

Exactly, and it can be a frame of foundation, the frames of foundation can be frames of foundation or drawn comb, doesn't matter as long as they haven't got anything in it. And the other key point, very important, is please don't use the queen excluder. The queen excluder's gone now because when they come out of December, January, February, they're tearing through those boxes and it's all brood, brood, brood, so it's an unconstrained brood that you want really, you want them to have free rein.

So do you get any brood being laid in your supers at any point?

What I tend to do, what we tend to do, is you get a huge brood explosion, and that can go up, say, if we talk about British Standard deep boxes, you can have 2 of those, maybe a little bit more, 2 of those in a, say, a super, and that'll be just brood. And the only time I'll ever use an excluder is once I'm convinced that The brood's finished, and I can see the brood's finished because all that's coming in now is nectar, nectar, nectar. Once I see a box full of nectar, and I've always, always got an empty 1 or 2 supers above, above the bees, and when I say the bees, either the brood or the incoming nectar, so I know that the brood's finished, we're into nectar production.

I'll sometimes then put a queen excluder on and put my Spoke honey supers on, so I just have those are only with left honey to come.

Oh yeah, it's it's crazy the way they do it. So so when I did mine, it was it was strange, and I wonder if you found this as well. Like there was brood everywhere. There literally because because I went and inspected them. So I don't know, do you, you just leave them because you know they're not going to swarm? But I went in there kind of pretty much weekly to see what they were doing.

Yeah.

I was pulling up like the third super, third, sorry, like third super, like the top third super, and there was brood and then honey and then brood and then honey and then honey and then brood. And it was just like, it was just a mess in terms of what's going on. Monster colony, lots of honey in there, but the brood was all over the place and the honey was all over the So do you find that, and then what, they sort it all out at the end?

Just kind of, yeah, what I find happens, Laurence, is they come out of the winter fast because they've got all this space and they've got all this food. And definitely I would say there's immediate chimneying, so they go straight up the middle. And then once they've kind of reached a height that they think, you know, this is it, we're good to go now, then I've found That, that chimneying which goes straight up first brood box, second brood box, maybe into the next shallow, and then once they start bringing in nectar, the brood population I find just expands. So you do end up, we do end up with 2 boxes, more, sometimes more than 2 boxes, pretty much rammed with brood and pollen, and the honey tends to be, you know, classically sometimes a little bit on the edge, but mainly above.

Yeah, and this is, this is what I found when I did it, is that it was a little— it was quite erratic, very erratic at the beginning. It did settle down and kind of normalized, but it was strange in that it normalized itself ready for the checkerboarding again the next year. And there's a question in here that's very interesting because this, this kind of happened to mine. So a question from James saying, do you find the larger colonies are better at managing varroa and chalk brood, especially for darker queens? So that's— yeah, go on, if you answer that.

I probably can't really comment on that because I've been doing small cell for so long. Everything of mine is small cell, and I don't have the varroa problem, so I can't— you know, I'd probably have to ask other people who checkerboard. Um, so, but to be honest, looking at James' question, I'd be surprised if there's any correlation between Checkerboarding, big colonies, and varroa management internally within the colony. You know, I think varroa is a kind of separate issue that the bees either manage by themselves or we have to intervene in some way, and I think I intervene by encouraging them to be small, but I wouldn't say there's any correlation between—

doesn't seem to be any obvious correlation between big colonies and varroa management.

Okay, so the colony that I had, and this is completely anecdotal, and I'm probably not putting it down to checkerboarding, but it got the worst, it got probably the worst case of chalkbrood I ever saw. And it didn't start off the year with really bad chalkbrood.

Yeah.

I like that, that's not saying that it caused it, it did get terrible chalkbrood though. Right, I'm gonna, there's one more question here from Peter, and then we're going to talk about small cell bees. So question from Peter saying, is it just the top super that needs to have gaps I.e., could you have 3 full supers above the brood? So I think I know the answer, but if you want to answer it.

Yeah, so if we go back to the way we described it a little while ago, Laurence, we, we go into the winter with this, go into Christmas with a brood, and we've checkerboarded a couple of boxes. Excuse me. And then in January, February, the bees are expanding and the brood's expanding and expanding, and then at some point, at some point, they're going to start Drying out cells and then bringing in nectar, the brood stopped expanding, and then we're into honey, honey, honey.

So at that point, you know, all the time I see nectar coming in or I see the brood nest expanding.

When I go, when I do my inspection, I start at the top and I go down to one of two things, brood or nectar, and it doesn't really matter which, but I just make sure that, let's say, that shallow box has got nectar in it, I would be anxious. So if I see the top box has got nectar in it, I will immediately put another one, probably 2, on. And likewise if I saw brood in there. So the fact that you've got a full super, even capped super, underneath your, your uppermost box where they're bringing in nectar doesn't matter. You know, they— if you go back to the beginning, if they haven't got that basic block at the top, early on, as long as you sustain that at the top, that emptiness, you're good.

Cool. There's one last question from Claire on checkerboarding. So what do you do for winter treatments? I know you said you're on small cell, so you just not do any treatments for any of these colonies now because they're all on small cell?

Yeah, well, I'll sort of hypothesize. So if I was treating, if I was— I mean, first of all, there's so many different treatments that, you know, you can do all year round. If you were devout about, you know, a lot of us kind of get into a nice rhythm where we do what we do and it works for us and our bees. So let's say you did an oxalic acid treatment between Christmas and New Year, which a lot of people do, and that's worked for you and you really don't want to break with that tradition. All I would say is do it, absolutely do it. Park your checkerboarding, you know, do that A week or 3 after. I wouldn't do it later than January. I think January is a cold month anywhere in this country, especially in a bad year, to be opening up a hive. But as a last resort, do your oxalic acid when you think there's minimal brood, and then do your checkerboarding thereafter. So if you do it the way I described, whisk off the box, do everything offline, and then cover your hive so it's not getting too cold. And then put your checkerboarded, your alternating frames and brood of drawn frames and frames of food, pile them back on, then you've got minimal, hopefully minimal heat loss, but you can still do your oxalic acid, your OA treatment.

Okay, cool. So checkerboard, we'll probably come back to checkerboarding in a bit if anyone's got any more questions. The other thing that we're going to talk about then is small cell bees. So John very kindly sent me up a colony. It was great, I loved it. It was in a nice cedar box and all the frames were numbered, and it was— it's doing really well. Well, was doing really well, so I think it was doing a little bit too well. So before we get into how I broke your colony, do you want to tell us why? Go on, what's small cell foundation? Why does it work? Why do you do it? And how much success do you have with it?

Yeah, so I, I, it started for me with my first bought colony from a very good commercial beekeeper, and they were all, they were just magical in every respect. They were fantastic producers of honey, lovely temperament, really prolific, except the varroa. And no matter what I did, I couldn't get the varroa. The daily drop went from 50 to 10, and after a year of pouring every chemical known to man and a few others as well I just couldn't break the Varroa cycle. And so I went looking for this silver bullet, and I looked in America— excuse me— and there were those guys over there, the Lasbiers, and I think more, more recently people like Mike Bush, who were sort of leading the front on small cell beekeeping. Didn't know what it was, but I thought I'll give it a go. And so I tried it, and I was just amazed that, you know, for the first colony I tried it on Having these small cell bees, which is the foundation, the cells are literally 10% smaller, 4.9mm compared to our standard foundation 5.4mm, and it seems to work.

For me, it's worked, it's worked.

I haven't had to treat bees in 12 years, and I think I've lost, in that time, I've genuinely lost one colony to varroa where going into the winter I thought this is unusual that there's a high varroa load, And they died eventually. They presented nasema or dysentery, but I think that was secondary. I think it was the Vrera that did them in. But the small cell, for me and for others, seems to work. And I think the reason why— how does it work? Why does it work? I don't think— I think that's recently been cracked by a very good Norwegian researcher, Odi Oti, who wrote a couple of papers a couple of years ago and she compared small cell with regular-sized bees, and she said, you know, it's quite evident that their reproductive cycle is less. They do this thing called recapping that people like Professor Steve Martens, Salford University, speak about, whereby the bees— this varroa-sensitive hygienic particular behavior that they have where they can sniff out the varroa they'll punch a hole in the cells. It seems to upset the equilibrium within the cell, temperature and humidity, and that seems to throw the Varroa. Sometimes they'll hoik out the grubs. Most of the time, just punching that hole seems to make the difference. And it seems to be that smaller bees, for some strange reason, do it more so than the regular-sized bees. Not all the regular—

not—

it's not the exclusive domain of the small cell, because there are big bees that do it. I think all those bees that you hear about, we hear about a lot in North Wales, They all seem to have adopted this recapping behavior, but it seems to be with the small cell bees and using that foundation that it works. And they— this something, whatever, they've all got the same set of genes, but this gene, particular gene that says let's go find the Varroa, seems to kick in more so with the small bees.

So that has kind of made me think a lot about what I was going to say next. So let me tell you the story of your colony so far, and I'm completely giving away a video that went live on the channel membership section today, so no one's got to watch it now. But if you do want to become a channel member, you can, you know where to go. So John gave me these bees, I think, when was it, June, July, something like that? It was like, it was around this time last year maybe. And I did nothing with them, and they produced a couple of supers of honey, like what you would expect. They came up on a national brood. They lived in an apiary that I got treat— I did all my treatments around them, used Apivar, and didn't treat these. So I was thinking that there's going to be a high varroa load in that apiary. but I'm not treating them and they're not off to one side. They're kind of like in the row as well, which is pretty much the worst place for them to go in terms of drift. They got through the winter fine, really healthy, nothing wrong with them. No, no kind of— no massive visible amounts of varroa on them, but I don't really go checking and I've not done a drop test on them. But no deformed wing virus, they look like healthy bees. They got through winter very well, no problems whatsoever. And they built up really strong in the spring, really nice. And then they tried to swarm. So my view is always, if a colony is trying to swarm, that's a healthy colony. You don't get ill colonies building up nice and strong like that. I didn't put enough space on them. That was the reason that they swarmed. I didn't put the supers on early enough. Yeah, definitely operator error, my fault. So I took the queen out and I put the queen somewhere else. and I left them a single open swarm cell and I left them to requeen. I went back 4 weeks later and it was shocking. The weather was really bad at this point, so they hadn't requeened properly. There was a runt virgin running around, so I killed the virgin. But at that point, I didn't have any queens to add in. I would have just normally added in a new queen at that point. So it's really interesting what happens next with this. So what I did, I added a frame of eggs from another colony. And as I added them in, I thought, they're not small cell eggs, like the foundation is a different size. I thought, you know what, I've got what I've got, let's go with this. So I added the frame in, and do you know what they did? I went back maybe 10 days later just to check that they'd drawn out the cells, and they had. They'd created a nice few emergency cells, but there was tons of bald brood.

Oh my God.

absolutely tons of bald brood on this frame, and there was no bald brood in the colony, no bald brood in any of those. So I was thinking at this point, right, I'm not 100% sold on small cells being the elixir for varroa treatments, or not doing varroa treatments. And I was thinking, you know what, it's probably more that Jon's got a really nice batch of bees that have got good hygienic traits and they're just clearing out the varroa. But then what you said a minute ago, which was that it's maybe the small bees that are more prone to having that, um, that hygienic behavior and that capping, there's definitely something in that. Because the way that they responded to that frame of eggs was that they didn't cap things over properly, and there was evidence of holes in the brood as well. And not in terms of varroa infestation, in terms of the bees being hygienic, and bald brood is a known indicator for like VSH, for Varroa-sensitive hygienic behavior.

Yeah.

So I broke your colony. Sorry I broke it, but it taught me, it taught me quite a lot about your bees. I'm sure I can get it back on track. I'll just take that frame out so they're not—

Yeah.

But what do you think about that in terms of like your bees having that behavior? Do you think it is— what I was going to get at is, do you think it is just your bees that are very hygienic? Are you in an isolated area? Or are you slap bang in the middle of those other beekeepers?

Yeah, I don't think so, Lawrence, because, because I've sold loads of colonies, you know, to other people. I've got lots of mates who do the small cell thing, um, you know, I've had colonies come in and queens.

I think down to the size, small cell size, regardless of provenance of queens or the genetics, you know, it will—

it seems to work. And I And there's a few other really interesting characteristics I've noticed about the small cell bees, and that is they genuinely seem to be a little bit more defensive. Not so much towards people, having started off this show by saying I've got a really angry hive, but towards other bees and other insects, they seem to be able to hold their own. And since, well, I've done small cell for 11 out of 12 years, the first year I, like everyone else, saw a little bit of wax moth. I don't ever see any wax moths in my colonies. I don't really see anything that's, you know, untoward. I do, I get a little bit of everything. I see a tiny little bit of ball brood, chalk brood. I see a little bit of deformed wing, you know, but I never worry, you know, I don't overreact. If I, when I say I see a little bit, if I see, you know, a handful of deformed wing or chalk brood I don't tend to worry, and I do think, I do agree with you, and I think that thinking is changing about when, you know, when you do see things like ball brood, that's actually a really good indicator that your bees are picking up on something and doing something that's positive rather than negative. Because previously, I think that's been pretty frowned upon and thought, wow, these are not very good bees if they're not even capping the cells. But I think it's a good indicator.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think the other one with with bald brood is if you see it in like a dead straight line, it's almost certainly a wax moth digging under the— underneath, isn't it? But this was just kind of dotted around. So I won't plug the channel membership again, you'll see the video coming out. Um, it is a very— it is a very interesting video, and I wasn't expecting them to do that. So I'm intrigued to see how, how they recover. And I kind of wanna— I need to track down where I put the queen because that's going to be more interesting for me as well. What I'm tempted to do is take the queen that you've given me, is still in one of my colonies because I just needed it. So she, she's marked, she was marked yellow. So what I'm tempted to do is not treat that colony and then see if your queen works on a 5.4 millimeter size cell as well.

Yeah, almost certainly. I could tell you now, Laurence, almost certainly. I would say the odds are against that working. It's all to do with the cell size. If the cell size is small Regardless of the queen, it doesn't matter whether you swap queens in or swap them out of an existing colony on small cell, you know, they will cut it. It's all about the bees, it's all about the workers, it's all about the size of those bees. And if they're small, there's a very good chance— I wouldn't say 100%, but that's what I'm thinking— that this will work.

I, I like to break things in the name of science though. So, you know, we gotta have a go, haven't we? We'll have a go. I'll find the queen and we'll give it a go, and if we disprove it, then great, we've learned something. And I know, yeah, we say it before, like, the data sample of one isn't really—

Right.

But it's interesting. Phoebe is back because she's bored. I'm not sure Phoebe's into beekeeping chat, but hi, Phoebe. Right, so, so yeah, so small cell. So where can people get small cell?

Yeah, in this country, it's the exclusive domain of Thorne. So they produce small cell foundation on all frame sizes, wired, unwired.

So you can get it from national unwired shallows right up to, say, Dayton frames, ginormous frames. And I know people who do it on small cell, people do it on shallows, and so right across the board. Previously, I had to get it from Bee Equipment, which were man-made before. They used to come across from America. A couple of companies in Sweden, Europe, Sweden, Germany produced it, but you can pick it up from Mallorca, and you know, they're great in producing All those different sizes, any frame type, wired or unwired.

You have to give your microphone a little bit of a hit. I think it's like bumping in and out a bit.

Yeah, sorry.

Oh, there we go. That's better. So what are the disadvantages? Like, why doesn't everyone just use small cell? Like, what's the disadvantages? And I've heard a lot about small cell. When I speak to people about small cell, they said it doesn't work. Tried it, tested it, it doesn't work. But I never— I don't like listening to people. I always like trying stuff for myself because there's so many beekeeping myths. And, you know, if you went on what everyone said, wouldn't be using Buckfast queens, would I?

Absolutely.

Yeah, I wouldn't be treating, wouldn't be doing varroa strips or small cell or checkerboarding or swarm control. So I like to try things out and see what works. But why shouldn't we use small cells?

Yeah, it's a kind of a bit— for me, it's a little bit of a no-brainer. I mean, I can quickly become very evangelical about this, you know, and sound very righteous, but And for me, it's a no-brainer because what's the downside? The downside is you put in small cell foundation instead of regular size, and if you're transitioning your bees, that takes a bit of time, usually a season or 2 if you do it gently using a daily comb change. But the downside is you're putting in a different type of foundation, if that's a downside. Worst case is you treat anyway. So I had a stand at the National Honey Show about 4 or 5 years ago where I was talking about small cell, and I spoke to dozens, probably 100 or 200 people. And, and they were all really interested, really interested in going down the chemical-free route, wanted to talk about it. And then when I asked them, you know, do you think you'll have a go? And I would say 9 out of 10 people gave me the same answer. And they said, you know, John, I'm all right as I am. And I think with beekeeping generally, I think actually, Laurence, it's quite a complicated art for a lot of people. And once they get into a system, it's really hard to get out of that trench, you know, and do something different. I think you're a sort of slightly unusual character in the sense that you'll try lots and lots of different things and what I consider to be fairly progressive. But for most of us, It's enough just to keep those plates spinning and just keep going in that furrow that we've all dug for ourselves. I think it's really hard to get out of that.

Yeah, I'm in the very lucky position that I don't rely on my bees for my living, and it— like, I've got a YouTube channel, so I get the views. And when people love, love it when things go wrong, love me, love watching me get stung in the face and stuff. So the videos where stuff goes wrong tend to do better than the ones where It's just me doing some beekeeping. But so what I thought with the small cell, immediately started doing the maths, do you get more bees?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So you get 10% more bees, they're smaller, but I would say in terms of honey production, no difference. In terms of temperament, I would say no difference, no better, no worse. So they've got that, I think, I think in my mind they've got that reduced stress in that they haven't got to deal with the varroa.

But I wouldn't say it makes them better, or in production it's just the same. So I can't see an obvious disadvantage. They don't, they don't go through the queen, thank God, not yet anyway. So I can't see a downside, obvious downside. They're smaller, their noses are a bit smaller. I mean, when people in my village say, oh, your bees are all—

I can glance at them and say they're not my bees, and they think I've got some kind of magic guru ability to identify bees. It's had nothing to do with that. I can just see that they're obviously much smaller, you know, 10% smaller. When you look at them side by side, you can spot the difference at a glance. So I can't see an obvious difference. Fewer, smaller bees, more of them, same honey. Same sort of temperament.

So would you, if people wanted to give this a go, would you, what would you suggest with Bailey comb exchange or a shook swarm?

I think personally, I mean, it's my own hang-up, I just can't, you know, I can't abide the whole kind of shook swarm thing. I know it has a place, I always thought it had a place where we were talking about disease management in the bad old days of having to deal with light cases of VFB. I always thought that was the place of a shook swarm. I think a lot of people now just see it as a fast-track way to change your comb. You might well be losing a load of brood. Personally, I don't like it, but that is a way. Absolutely, that's a very aggressive way of doing it. I prefer to use a daily comb change, and if you do it, if you put a box of small cell above your existing box of regular-sized foundation, what you find happen is the bees will go halfway, so halfway between 4.9 And 5.4, so roughly the cells will end up something like 5.1. So yes, you've given them this 4.9 foundation, they'll say thank you very much, here's the sheet of wax, I'm going to build 5.1, because these are big bees on their way to being small. And generally I've found if you can get them to 5.1 or less, so measure 10 cells and divide by 10, and then you get the cell width. If they're 5.1 or less, you pretty much nailed it in terms of varroa management and treatment-free. If it's slightly above, then you've got to go and, you know, another leg and do another Bailey comb change. So I think doing it gently over a couple of seasons is better. If you do it very aggressively, you can use, for example, a shook swarm, or you can insert small cell frames right in the middle of your brood in a strong colony and push out the other frames. So you're really forcing the pace, so you can do it within 3 brood cycles, a couple of months. And what I find happens there is sometimes you get this huge spike in varroa for about a third of them, and I've done it on about 40 colonies, made them smaller. And yeah, for about a third of them, you get a huge spike and you have to treat once more, and then everything settles down. A lot of people say, so what, that's not a big deal if we can do a single treatment, but I just think it's quite hard on the bees in terms of trying to be a little bit more empathetic. But Bailey comb change, my preferred method over 2 seasons. One season will probably get you most of the way there, if not more aggressive methods, but you might need to treat once again.

So there's just a question about what kind of— what is a Bailey comb? Do you want to explain just what a Bailey comb exchange is?

Yeah, so essentially what you're doing with a Bailey comb change is you're putting your new frames with new foundation above your existing box, and you're encouraging your bees to migrate up. And there's lots of different ways of doing this, you know, my preferred way is I usually drag a comb up, an existing comb, not— if we're talking small cell, this will be a big cell comb, Just to encourage the bees into that upper box. As soon as you see the queen, the bees have drawn out and the queen laying in those, in any of those frames upstairs, then you'd insert a queen excluder, get rid of, and feed the bees along the way, and get rid of everything below that isn't brood. So you just let the brood hatch out, any stores, honey, pollen frames, get rid of. The entrance that now relocates to the middle box— sorry, the upper box. And by shedding those surplus frames, all the energy and all the stores are going into the box that you want. So you just go in each week, that's the way I do it, and I lose the frames that are non-brewed just so that I'm not losing bees and the bees are not focusing where I don't want them to be. They're actually migrating up onto these new combs. And you're getting a nice set of drawn combs, hopefully with a smaller cell size.

Good explanation, thanks. I used to always look at people who like shook swarm, I see it like shook swarm your bees every year in the spring, and I just thought, oh my God, what are you doing? You have no idea. And it's one of those things that some people like, you've got strong views on checkerboard and you've got strong views on small cell bees and and people will follow that, but you've got really good basis for those arguments, whereas some people with shook swarming, it's just the done thing, so we shook swarm every year. So I used to be really against it and thinking that's just, that is nonsense, it's not no-nonsense, but I'm slightly warming to the idea, not every year but at regular intervals, especially if there's any disease risk there. But if you're seeing chalkbrood, if you're seeing sacbrood, Definitely, if you've had any instances of EFB, like either in your colonies or close to your colonies, it can be quite a good, like, cleansing and just getting into clean boxes, do a nice shook swarm. And I shook swarmed a whole apiary 10, 12 days ago with the MBU, like a planned shook swarm. And I've done— I've filmed it, but I've not got around to editing it yet. It's going to be a nightmare to put together. But oh, they'll properly bounce back, like just within 10 days every single frame is drawn out. 8 frames out of the 10 have got, I've got capped brood in it now. They bounce back like that and I'm just on perfectly brand new frames. And I'm hoping, like, the reason I've done it is that if there's any asymptomatic EFB sitting there, it should eradicate it. But I'm hoping it fixes the chalk brood. I'm hoping it fixes any sac brood.

Yeah.

there as well. So I'm not— I'm still, you know, I try things out, but having seen how well they've bounced back, I'm not kind of dead against it. And then I think if you're doing something like this where you want to move from one cell size to the other with the aim to reduce your dependence on chemicals for varroa, by doing a shook swarm, you give yourself the opportunity to have kind of like no capped brood. So you could do some oxalic acid vaporizing in that point and get the varroa load down really low to start them off and give them the best chance. So I thought, I don't, I don't see it as necessarily like a hugely aggressive thing to do, and if it's a strong colony, they should bounce back quite quickly. But do you think—

Yeah, I think you're right, you know, Laurence. A lot of people, you know, a lot of the names in beekeeping, you know, seem to be encouraging— not encouraging people, but are adopting that method of beekeeping I just find it, you know, I went to a talk at the spring convention last year, and I won't say who gave the talk, but, you know, it was all about being a bit empathetic, understanding the bees, and it was all very, very nice talk by a very well-known beekeeper and author. And then at the end of the talk, the person concerned just said, oh, and, you know, I'm thinking of shook swarming, and I just thought, I don't get that, you know, I just couldn't quite You know, I mean, I'm too biased against it, I suppose, to have a sort of completely impartial view. And I hear what you've said and what other people have said, but it just seems very harsh. And I'm not sure about the commercial benefits of it because I get your point about disease, but you're going to lose, what, 3 weeks? You're going to lose a whole brood cycle, aren't you? And they've still got to draw the comb. So are they actually going to— do you feel that they will make that up?

So for me, it's weighing up the potential impact of a major EFB outbreak. Yeah, that's the only reason. If you take the EFB elements out of it, I wouldn't be doing it to solve a small chalkbrood or sacbrood problem. I would just say, you know what, just get rid of that colony and then it goes away. It's to save 50 or 60 colonies going down with EFB.

Yeah, if I was in that situation, I wouldn't— I'd be doing exactly the same. I'd be thinking, I don't like this, but this is absolutely the thing that could make the— be the game changer and positive for them. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so that's the only reason. So this, I love this question from Peter, and I was thinking this before. So he says, so is it the enhanced hygienic characteristics of the smaller bees, or is there less room for the mites in the smaller cells that has an effect on the load? See, I thought it was the latter. That's what I always thought, that they can't, because They don't take quite as long to go through the cycle, do they? Is that right?

That's right. So the opportunity time, which Peter hasn't alluded to, but the opportunity time for breeding with the small cell bees, a bit like the Africanized bees, the Asian and African bees, um, a day less. So the capped period is a day less. So, so the opportunity time when the varroa's breeding is a day less, and I think that was a popular rationale for trying to explain it, and I kind of bought into that before the research came out by Odi. I thought, well, that's logic, I can see the sense in that, a day less, less Varroa, what isn't there to believe about that? And prior to that, I think there has been this thought, you know, these cells are a little bit smaller, the Varroa are the same size, maybe they can't move around as much. I actually, you know, when you look at Varroa on a bee, They're bloody tough little critters, and I think they can manage to worm their way around the cell, big or small. So I don't think it's the cell size. I just think that this particular behavioral aspect seems to kick in, as I said earlier, much more so— not exclusively, but much more so— with the smaller bees. So I do think, Peter, it's down to the, the, the, the, the genetics kicking in more With the smaller bees, it's—

we're never going to know, are we? This is the thing with bees, is you can't kind of just ask them and say, how do you— why do you do that? It's just—

yeah, yeah, yeah. And I do think some of the research that's been done by Odie, and, you know, she's written 2 or 3 papers on it, and people like, um, uh, um, I forget the researcher guy up at Salford University Martin, Steve Martin, you know, he's spoken a lot and written a small booklet on recapping. So there is this, this known behavioral characteristic, this recapping, and you, you or I could detect that, see that for ourselves. But you— I think you need to be a sort of a mini surgeon. You need to use something very sharp enough like a scalpel, pare off the cappings, and you can't see it on the surface, the visible surface to you or I, because the trafficking of bees means that everything gets a little bit changed color, blended, dirtier, but underneath the capping, so if you flip the cappings, you can actually see these little filled-in circles where they've actually done the recapping, but that takes a lot of time and effort and application, but so that we do know what the characteristic is, and we know it happens with the small bees, but it's quite hard for the lay beekeeper, I would suggest, to, you know, to actually detect that and analyze that in their own colonies.

This question here combines small cell and checkerboarding, so do you use small cell in your supers?

For simplicity, I would say it's just easier to buy one size if you're keeping all your bees— not many people do, but, you know, a number of people do— on a single frame size. Then there's a, there's a, you know, with anything in beekeeping, anything that you can do to rationalize, simplify helps. Personally, personally, the thing I really like to use in my honey supers is our big manly frames with drone foundation, and not small cell drone foundation, but regular bee drone foundation, because I think that stuff spins out, you know, you get more honey per frame with 10 Mandels in a box than 11 Hoffmanns or anything else. And those big cells, you know, there's less surface tension, I think spins out easier. So in principle, I think I would say if I was teaching small cell, I'd say just, just have it all, keep it simple, have the same frame cell size throughout. In practice, I would probably, my personal preference is When I— when we get up into the honey, when they— that's when I load on my man lids with drone cell.

See, it's the interplay between these, these 2 systems of small bees, small cell bees, and checkerboarding that interests me most. So you— so all of your supers, you don't use a queen excluder?

No.

You have a single brood, and then in your supers, they're drone foundation, but the queen just grew up there while just knocking out loads of drones?

Yeah, first, the first year we did it, sure enough, you know, they, they just treated this big stack that I had like a flipping tree, and they just went straight up, loaded up. She loaded up, you know, 3— she crossed 2 or 3 solid capped honey barriers, laid 1 frame, 1 frame, 2 frames with drone brood, came back down and just carried on, you know. And I thought, oh, you can't believe that.

So there are might be doing that. I think you don't really need that.

We're into nectar production full, you know, full flow is on. So that's when I started putting a queen excluder when I knew we're into full-on nectar production, and that's when I put a queen excluder just to stop that eventuality. So you have to be a little bit savvy to sort of. Figure that one, work that one through.

Um, so my dog's going wild downstairs if anyone can hear that. Uh, so there's a couple of questions coming in about, about where to buy it. So Damien's saying, just want to say thanks, John, always been super helpful in Windsor. We'll look into it. Did you work for Thorns?

Yeah, I'm very lucky that I, I have a, um, um, part-time job in their Windsor shop. I do Monday to Wednesday, and that has been such a blessing in so many ways. I want to because, you know, I get to talk to so many people about bees. You know, I can bore myself senseless talking bees all day. That's all I do. And, um, you know, and there are some amazing beekeepers who come into the shop, you know, other commercial guys like yourself. And, you know, I found I've learned so much from all the beekeepers and had a chance to talk bees. And, you know, I could never get away with talking bees like that at home. Not in a month of Sundays, you know. So, um, yeah, that's been a great opportunity, and Thorns have been really supportive. You know, when I started talking about small cell, they were hugely, you know, hugely in favor of getting behind it, getting some rollers in from Germany to generate the small cell. You know, they're very good about supporting work I've done with the checkerboarding. You know, going to the National Honey Show later this year to talk checkerboarding, and, you know, Thorns have been really helpful. in helping to facilitate that. So yeah, it's been a real blessing in lots of ways. Cool.

So there's a question there, just where can you buy it? But obviously you can buy it from Thorns. What else is going on at Thorns? Go on, give us the inside scoop. New products? What's going on? I bet you're completely knackered.

Well, at the moment, I think what's absolutely blown us all away is that I think for the last 3 years, every year seems to be even busier, and it's just colossal. So this year, you know, the volume of sales has been really impressive, and customers are coming in, and the demand, you know, the sort of spring and summer has all happened very quickly with the long cold winter. So it's really full-on. But I think the thing I really like about Thorn is generally they're very progressive. You know, you or me, Laurence, can just come up with an innovation and say, look, what do you think of this? You know, and a lot of the things that are in the shop are innovations by individuals, hobbyists who've come up with a really good idea, and they'll give it a go, you know. And then if it's, if it's, if it's a biddable product, they'll get behind it, manufacture it, and sell it. So things like, um, the Wasp Out, for example, you know, just a really good innovation, probably one of the foremost sellers in terms of wasp management, you know, that's an innovation by an individual beekeeper. So I think they're a really progressive company, very supportive.

Yeah, I'd never really thought about it like that, but you're right. You go onto their website and I speak to Rebecca about stuff very occasionally, but she does— she gives you— they have products on there, don't they? Like new products. And yeah, yeah, okay, then it might not be cheap, the new products, but there's always something new Like a revolutionary kind of coming along.

Yeah, I think they're very good at innovating and listening to customers, you know, they're really— and they haven't paid me to say this, by the way— but they, yeah, like the same way that you try new things, you know, things that are completely foreign or alien to you, you know, they would innovate new products. And I think they're very forward-looking and progressive in that respect.

Yeah, yeah. What was the what was the smoker that I had called the the Apisolis? They stopped that. They they stopped that. Talking of that, I just I I got a a DPD notification the other day saying that I had another Anel. I have to get it right. Anel delivery coming in from Greece, and I thought I've not ordered anything from Greece. And then I had an email from their export manager, and he said, "Oh, we're sending we're sending you some bits," and they are sending. It's like a, it's like a hybrid smoker, a hybrid vaporization smoker. So I have no idea what it is, but he said like it's, it's kind of electric, but you can use it as a normal smoker, but you can also use it as like vaporization with the smell of wood. I have no idea, but it's—

Yeah, and I think the good thing about working there is that, you know, say like the, the Apisol smoker where you're effectively electrically generating this huge puff of of smoke without having to go through all the torture most of us do with a traditional smoker. You know, because, because of working in a, in a B environment, a B shop, you get to meet and speak to the 1 or 3 people who've actually bought these things and used them, and they actually get to get the sort of lowdown, the spec on what, what it's actually like. And I think, well, they're very expensive, but the, the 2 or 3 people I've spoken to You really do rate them, you know. One guy's bought it, bought it for the apiary that he's a part of, the association he's also a part of privately. And I think, you know, okay, they are expensive, but they do seem to be a good innovation. Yeah, so yeah, you get some good exposure, Laurence.

Yeah, so what's, what's new? What, what have they had recently at the moment that's— that people won't have heard of? Or, or what's selling well that you might not expect to sell well? Not—

I think, I think there's a sort of slow-growing popularity with those underfloor entrances for what, essentially, for wasp management. You know, they act as a mouse guard come wasp deterrent. So they're expensive, but they are, I think they are really, really good. And I know you've done your own video on how to do one of those, make one of those, convert your existing floor into one of those. But I think, you know, they're not massive sellers, but because they are quite expensive, but I think they're a fantastic innovation and they've been around a long time. It's just that they haven't sort of got that groundswell behind them yet.

Yeah, I love my underfloor entrances. I've got probably, I've got way more underfloor entrances than I need, but like they're not all on the right hives and I've got loads of Suyenti floors still. And whenever I come to do something with the colony and they're on a Suyenti floor, I'm like cursing. And it's the moving the colonies that's a big one for me with the underfloor entrances. It's so quick because you just get a foam bung and just stick it in and it's done.

Yeah.

Bee-proof invention ever. Whereas on the Suyentis, you have to tape them, and no matter how well you tape them, the tape fails, and then the bees get out, and then they're all in the back of the truck. So I'm just trying to phase them all out.

Yeah, and I think they're really good for wasps, you know, they, if you get in there early and you've got those floors on, I think they seem to be a really good deterrent. For mice, you know, doubles up as a mouse guard, and, you know, and I, when I spoke to the first really enlightened beekeeper that I spoke to who used them before I even knew what they were, and he said, I said to him, you know, what do you do if you've got a nuc, you know, you've got a 4, 5, 6 frame nuc, You're going to put it on a full-width underfloor entrance? And he said, yeah, it just doesn't seem to be a restraint. Effectively, it looks like a vertical full-width entrance. He said the pros of it in terms of wasps and mice outweigh it, not having to go in and muck around with the entrance. So that's a really, really good innovation.

Yeah, it's strange because I don't even think about mouse guards, like, and I never have. Because the Scirenti one's got a similar size 8mm gap that only the bees can get through, but that'd be a pain to have to put mouse guards on and take them off every year, wouldn't it? But there's a few questions that have come up, so I will— let me go to some of these questions. So, are smaller bees less hardy in the winter due to smaller mass? Any kind of observations on wintering them?

No, I think, you know, if you— I think the success of wintering is really down to us, the beekeepers. So we've just had I think what amounts to a really hard winter with big, big losses across a lot of hobbyists. Not so much the commercial guys, what I'm picking up in Thorns in Windsor, but amongst hobbyists, I think that's down to how we look after our bees, you know. So yes, they have got— they're smaller, but you know, I think it's much more to do with what we do. And I think especially with regard dampness, you know, humidity in the colony. I just think there's lots of things that we can do. The obvious things are, you know, making sure they're in good health, not too much varroa, and making sure they've got enough food. But I think how— not so much the insulation, I think that's a bit of a myth that, you know, wrapping them up in whatever is going to save them through the winter. But I think just kind of keeping on top of the humidity and dampness is a Big, big plus.

Okay, that's interesting. Another question in terms of sizing. So 4.7 or 4.9?

Yeah, I don't think it makes any difference. So those scooter— scooter, I can never say the word properly— but the 4.7, yeah, you know, I think that the danger with going down that route is, you know, it's harder, it's harder to find that foundation. You can find the 4.9 It's a standard. If Thors are producing it, for me that's effectively a standard issue. If you did 4.7, it would work, and you had the foundation, I think it would work just as well. I wouldn't say it suggests it's any better or any worse. I think it would work.

Yeah.

So we'll jump back to checkerboarding then. So the first thing that struck me with the checkerboarding was messing around with bees at Christmas just seems bonkers. Like, you do it time where you'd like— for me, it's like the best time of year, especially like post-Christmas, once the Christmas rush for gift sets is out of the way. But like January, February, March, you get a bit of time off, but yeah, so you don't have to think about bees. You literally— they're done. I don't look at my bees kind of past middle of September, really. I feed them, I do the varroa treatments, which I know you don't like, and then I leave them. But how do you think it applies in other places then? So the question here is about doing it in Canada. where it gets like proper, proper cold. Like, is it going to be worth going in and doing it, or is it just not practical to go into colonies when it's that cold?

Yeah, I think, you know, the reason I say I suggest we do it here 9 weeks before the peak swarm season, but in practice do it before Christmas, is because we're avoiding the really cold months of January and February here. If I was in Canada, up near the Arctic Circle somewhere, Canada's a massive place, country, with a huge sort of temperature ranges, and depending on where you are, you know, there's some place in Canada where to get the bees through the winter they've got to put them in a warehouse, you know, stacked above each other, mothballed, you know, you're probably not going to be doing checkerboarding there and adding more space. But generally, with— I think generally, you know, we think that bees can survive really cold conditions, they can survive under 6 feet of snow in Finland for 6 months of the year. You know, in some places, I think, you know, and I've in my checkerboarding talks more latterly, I've always put a slide that shows bees in Washington State or New York, northwest New Jersey, just northwest of New York, where they go down to minus twenty in the winter. You know, and they've just got regular hives, no protection, nothing on above or around them, covered in snow, and it's going down to minus twenty. So Given here in the UK, those are exceptional temperatures. I think, you know, most of the time you can get away with it. I don't think that's going to be a significant factor unless you're in really extreme temperatures.

Cool.

Well, I'm not going to keep you here all night, John, but what's next for me? Because you've given me checkerboarding, you've given me a small cell bees colony. What's next? What's the next fad? I know I don't— I won't call it a fad, but go on, what's the next fad?

Yeah, I, I, you know, Lawrence, it's going to be a bit of a surprise, but I probably think I might take a timeout. I just, uh, yeah, I just think, you know, I've, I've, I've been really, really lucky, Lawrence, in the amazing people I've met in beekeeping. And the, you know, these things, they're never— like I said at the beginning, it wasn't some false modesty, you know, checkerboarding a small cell. I've just taken someone else's idea And, and made it, made it work in my own environment over here. And I've been really, really happy with that. But now I think, yeah, I might just sort of throttle back a bit and just, um, just sort of go into sort of sleepyville and just take it easy and not do anything too innovative.

These are famous last words. You will hear 2024, John White's got a new thing out.

I'll tell you first, Lawrence, if I do.

We'll test it and we'll trial it, but I'm going to run some more colonies on small cell just to see how they go because one, it seemed to work for that one single year. One year is not enough, like you need to do this over kind of like 5 or 6 years across many apiaries, I'd say, to test it out properly. But also I feel a bit guilty that the colony swarmed, so I didn't really get to even get it through to its second year.

Yeah.

So I'm going to get that one back on track. and I'll expand that, but I'm definitely going to do more on the checkerboarding because, yeah, although it didn't— it doesn't work quite well for me kind of commercially because of the timings and the fact that I do need to do treatments and we use— we tend to use like Amitraz, so then you're infecting the supers and it wouldn't really work. I want to develop a system where it could work.

Yeah.

And for people who just keep bees in their back garden and aren't that fussed About, well, who don't want to go in regularly to do the kind of weekly inspections. That's the main benefit, I think, for commercial beekeepers, is that it's swarm season from middle of April to kind of now time. Yeah, it's carnage and you just can't keep up.

Yeah, I agree, Laurence. And I think that, you know, we— it's a shameless plug— we have a Facebook site, Low Intervention Beekeeping, and the whole essence of Certainly the checkerboarding, and indeed the small cell, is you're not having to go in, you're not having to do all those weekly or fortnightly inspections. By not treating with the small cell, you know, it really, for those of us that use traditional methods like Apiguard, it kind of opens up the autumn. You know, you can be more flexible about when you take your honey, when you begin your feeding regime. You know, we haven't got that traditional, you know, feed and treat or treat and feed. The treatment isn't an issue, so And, you know, I sell— I'm able to sell my honey for a bit of a premium because I label it as chemical-free as far as the beekeeper's concerned. So it has a bit of a sort of unique selling point there. So I think there are some benefits, you know, if it works for you on both of those, that the hassle-free factor is a real plus.

Good stuff. Right, Peter said my light's flashing. That means that I've got to tell John to go, but really interesting fact. Thank you both. Yeah, I really enjoyed that, John. Do you know what? One of the— I love talking to beekeepers. I love talking to people who are so passionate, but I just love talking to anyone because I get to drink my tea. I never get to the end.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I appreciate that, mate.

No, I, I'm going to turn this light off, do my outro. I, I genuinely enjoyed it, and I do— I love, I love the fact that people try new things, and that's what I'm always trying to get across with my videos, is that Don't just listen to what people say. Like, don't listen to what I say, don't listen to what John's saying, take it as, oh, small cell foundation works because John says it does, or, or Lawrence says it does. Just try it, see if it works for you. Try stuff and see what works for you, and then tell other people about it. Because there's too many bad myths and bad teachings that go around in beekeeping. It is difficult to distinguish what's good and what's bad and what's, what's fake and what's genuine experience. So I just, I respect you very much in that you try different things and you've got your goal of making things easy and not being reliant on chemicals and everything to work for you.

Thank you, Laurence, yeah, and thank you for being, you know, the person you are and your innovative and creative mind. I think that's such an unusual and big thing in beekeeping, especially once you've got past the introductory years. If you've got the bandwidth, I completely support what you've just said, you know, try Try and keep your mind open if you can, and to possibilities.

Yeah.

Good stuff. I think that's a really nice place to end it there, so we'll call it a day. Thanks for coming on, John. You're not having— you're not having any time off. We're going to get you back on when your next fad's here. But, um, thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Lawrence.

Nice one. We'll finish it there. Cheers, John.

Yeah, you take care.