Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 62

Welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Bees. I have taken to putting my hair up in a little ponytail to keep it out of my eyes, so for anybody who wants to ridicule me, now is the live stream to ridicule me because I've done it and it feels really, really good. I like to have it out the way, but we are here today to talk about bees. I have already filmed today 32 videos, and you might get the impression from my voice that it's going a little bit— it's kind of, it's squeaking, and it's gone very, very low indeed. But I filmed a huge amount of videos already today, so we are going to just limit the Let's Talk Bees for 1 hour going forward. I can't do the long ones any longer, especially not when I'm doing them on the same day where I am filming that many videos. So I'm trying to squeeze in as much content as I possibly can, but that means I've just got to reduce the Let's Talk Bees down to a single hour every other week. I know it's not the— it's not what people want to hear, and I do like to try and get through as many comments as possible, and I will go faster than I normally go. So kind of without further ado, let's just jump straight in and answer as many questions as I possibly can. Also, I do owe my customers a couple of spare queens, but I'm not going to do that today. Had a few complaints about playing battleships last time. I think people who weren't interested in winning the queens found it slightly tedious, so I'll come up with another way of giving away those free queens. But let's jump straight into it. So Donna Morrison, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, thank you so much for the queen which arrived this evening. She is rather vocal. Is that normal? She's been piping continuously since she arrived. She's in a cool, dark dining room. So it's absolutely fine. Queens pipe all the time. People would say it's only virgins that pipe, but believe me, it's not. I get hundreds of queens delivered each week and I hear all of them piping. Not all of them do pipe, but when you've got lots of them together, they certainly do go for it. We do recommend though, as soon as the queen arrives, we recommend like taking it out to the apiary instantly and putting it into the beehive and getting it in straight away. We don't recommend keeping them at all. So I would, I I would get get her out as soon as you possibly can and get her into the beehive where they'll keep her at the right temperature and give her everything that she needs. Margaret says evening from Spain. Hello to you too, Margaret. PJ Morgan says evening from Ealing, West London. Hello. Donna Morrison, channel member, says P.S. I've never heard a queen pipe before. It's a lovely sound. It is. It's kind of like a cricket sound, isn't it? Like I can't even go high enough. John Begri says hit the like button whilst you wait. That was a good shout, John. Um, Graham says good evening. Good evening to you, Graham. Hi Lawrence, the 2 Black Mountain honey nucs I bought 4 weeks ago are insane. They have both filled a 12-frame brood box, drawn out and filled a super with honey, and a fully drawn out second super. Very, very nice. But I, I'm amazed at how fast they're growing this year as well. Taking me a little bit by surprise, but the weather is just perfect. But it is that risk that the season is so good, but it's just condensing down like that, and we're gonna have, gonna have some battles towards the back end of the season. I do think even if we get some rain now, it's going to be a very compressed season. New Black Mountain Honey Queen received today, introduction tomorrow morning. Hope it all goes well, Graham. I fully expect the second super to be full by next weekend. Loving it. It is crazy, like at the moment at least, at least one super a week is going on most colonies, often kind of a couple going on. Uh, Hi Lawrence, I know you use underfloor entrances, but how do you advise removing the entrance block in the summer? So my underfloor entrances, I don't have an entrance block in there, I just have Nothing. So the whole way through the year, the whole way through the season, the entrance block is effectively just open. And then whenever I want to close it down, I use— well, I don't close it down every winter, but if I want to close the bees in, I use a foam bung insert and I soak it in water, chuck it in the entrance, and it seals all the gaps, seals the bees in. It's such a good way for transporting bees. But so I don't actually have an entrance block in mine. They just the whole way through the season. They, uh, they have it fully open. Uh, John was also taking care of Donna, making sure her queen arrived safely. Channel member, says, hi Lawrence, 2 new F1 queens arrived today and immediately done 2 splits in the apiary as per your video. Fingers crossed, keep up the excellent service. Thank you very much, Tony. Says, hi Lawrence, while waiting for my first nuc to arrive, I made a swarm trap with an old— sorry, with an old 2 frames of comb, 3 frames of foundation. I caught a swarm last Friday. What are the next steps? Thanks, Max. So great, great to hear that you caught a swarm trap. Very good. Or caught a swarm in a trap. You need to, like, without putting a down on it, the risk with swarms is you're catching someone else's disease. So best practice is to, if you can, take that colony of bees and put it into a full-size beehive, brand new beehive or freshly scorched beehive, brand new frames, brand new foundation. Leave the bees for 3 days, so don't do anything for 3 days. Definitely do not feed them. And let the bees use all the stores that are in their stomach to produce wax, to draw out the wax, and to try and purge them of any disease. You then want to take them off to a quarantine apiary, if you've got a quarantine apiary, and keep the bees kind of away from all of your other bees. Let them run a couple of rounds of brood, so 3 weeks is about one round of brood, so 3 to 6 weeks you want to let them run for 2 full rounds of brood if you can, and then do a full disease inspection. If there's no signs of any disease after 2 weeks, then you can safely reintegrate them back into your apiaries. But, you know, that's, that's like the textbook answer to make sure that you're not doing anything wrong or bringing any disease into the apiary when you shouldn't be doing it. Do a lot of people follow that? Probably not. And they just, they'll just put them into the colony, put them into the apiary, and just be done with it and carry on. Hi all, and he says, what is your availability of queens? So for the first time this season, you can order still for next week. So we've got queens available for dispatch on the 22nd of May, so this Thursday. And, and he says also hit the like button. Cheers, Steve. Do bees move eggs? 2 possible queenless splits, don't have 2 spare frames of eggs to take, so cut out small sections of comb with 50-ish eggs, removed frame from splits and cable tied comb with eggs. Um, I'm guessing there's more to come from Margaret somewhere. I'm just going down. Here we go. Oh no, we missed that bit. Where's the rest of it? Where's the rest of it? Uh, oh, here we go. So cable tied with comb into the gaps between frames, peeked 2 days later, eggs all gone from the section of the cut comb, eaten or moved. So this is one of the ones that divides beekeepers, and no one really knows what they do. I'm pretty sure they're moving eggs around. They might have cannibalized them in that instance there, but you find sometimes where you have like a play cup and there is no possible way that a queen can get in there, like 0% chance, maybe in like a super or something. And you know that queen excluder is sound, you know the queen's not getting up and down, and then all of a sudden there's an egg upstairs in the 3rd super up and they create a swarm cell or supersedure cell or whatever it is. And you kind of think there's nothing, there's going to be nothing in there, and you open it up and you're like, oh my God, there actually was something in there. And you just think, well, how did that— how did the egg get up there? There's only— there's 2 explanations. One is a defective queen excluder, and if that was the case, there'd be eggs everywhere. She wouldn't just lay one single egg in a play cup. And the other option, or the other kind of way of explaining it, is that the bees are moving the eggs around. So I have seen that, but I don't know if it's confirmed evidence that bees do move eggs, but I suspect they probably do. Uh, right, who's next? What's your thoughts with the Elgon queens that you sell? Uh, so I was really impressed when I went out to Malta and took a look at the Elgon lines that they got out there. And they had like 6 or 7 different Elgon lines. And also doing some work with a German— a Swedish guy actually, but he is coming over from Germany strangely enough— to do some artificial insemination with the queens that we have here. And he has got access to the original sperm that was brought back from Mount Elgon all those years ago. So I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. So we're going to get some Elgon lines in, get some access to the breeder queens, create some virgins, and then kind of go back to that original line, which would be really, really interesting. Uh, and I'm gonna— gonna see more of that happening at Black Mountain Honey over the next few years. But in terms of my thoughts of the Elgon line, I've been very happy with what I've seen from the Elgon line, but I don't necessarily treat those Elgon bees the way that potentially my customers do. So if they're buying them for their VSH, their Varroa-sensitive hygiene tendencies, they might not be treating them and they might be tracking the amount of treatment that they need or tracking the amount of varroa that's in the colonies, whereas I'll just use them for production colonies and be happy with the temperament, been happy with the honey production, been happy with the colony's kind of overall health. But then I treat them at the end of the season, so I can't give you a, a good update on how effective or how efficient they are removing the varroa, um, from those cells. But from, from what I've seen and from what people have told me, they're very, very good at it. Lawrence, I'm still deciding between Anel poly Langstroth or the Abello poly 11th frame deep roof. Your opinion, please. Oh, that's, that's a big decision. That's not just a straightforward, um, comparison between 2 hives. That is like poly versus national. And yeah, no, not wood versus poly, but poly versus national, and then kind of like one brand versus another. So it's like plastic versus poly as well, isn't it? So they're 2 very different beehives. I do have both of them. And I think you need to park the decision between like Anel and Poly or Abello and any of that first and decide what frames you want your bees on, and then put up a comparison between 2 of the same frame type. That's what I would do. So work out whether you want to be on Langstroth or you want to be on National, and then say, right, if I'm Langstroth, right, I'm going to go with Anel Poly Langstroth or the Abello Poly Langstroth. That's probably a better comparison for me to do because then it's definitely Langstroth for you, and we can do a similar one for National as well, maybe. But I would say, like, you, you know, I do the social media for Abello, so I do have a lot of their kit, and I have tried a lot of their kit, and I really do like their kit. And it's, it, it's, it's hard to explain it because plastic doesn't dent or dint in the same way that the poly does, but it's almost like it feels like a safer bet. But then, like, the bees that I've got, a colony of bees in the NL Polly Langstroth nuc, and they overwintered, and they overwintered really, really well, like 10 out of 10. And they definitely like the beehive, and I think they— well, I know that they liked the insulation of it because you see this with colonies when they go through the winter and then they come out of the spring. You can see what the colony is like, and it's as a direct result of the material of the beehive, kind of what that colony looks like in the spring. And the wooden ones do catch up, but the ones that are in insulated beehives like Polly beehives, they're just so far ahead. And this one here, when I went in and had a look, I was thinking, Nice. This is a very, very good beehive. So it's one of those, it comes down to price. Probably work out which one you can get cheaper for that week and just go for that one. There we go. I sat on the fence. The Arctic Beekeeper says, hello from the Arctic. Want to start a YouTube channel as well, both for sharing my harsh climate with other beekeepers but also for documentation. Do you have any tips, mics, cameras, gimbals, and such? Oh, I like questions about just doing YouTube stuff. So my number one tip is Forget about all that equipment. Just start filming a video tomorrow or today with your phone and just film it and get it done because the first video is always terrible. As as I found out the other day when I I showed I was showing Helen one of my latest videos and I was like, oh, they're looking quite good, aren't they? New videos with the editors and doing stuff. And then I said, and she said, oh, she says you're good, you're good on you're good on camera, come across well on camera. And I said, oh, thanks very much. That's very kind of you. you. I was like, I bet I didn't always come across well on camera though. So I thought I went through the early, uh, the early YouTube videos. So if you just go on the YouTube channel and watch the first like 3 or 4 videos that are on there, it's absolutely hilarious. Like, I really should take the videos down because they're, they're so bad, um, in, in terms of the delivery, in terms of the cameras, in terms of the audio, in terms of every single thing about them. But it is quite a nice— it is quite a nice thing to look back on and think, well, I It was really, really bad back then and I could have just given up. Could have given up many, many times in between, but I didn't. I just carried on and it's going quite well now. So I'm glad that I did it. But that is my advice to you. Just go out and do it. Your smartphone, any smartphone that you've got is gonna be good. The first upgrade you wanna put on a smartphone is some audio. So get yourself like a lapel mic, either a Rode or the DJI lapel mics and kind of like transmitter and receivers are really, really good. That's what I use now. That's the biggest upgrade that you could get. Definitely going to be upgrading that before you look at gimbals and things. I've got a gimbal, I never use it, and it's a good gimbal as well, but it's just, it's just that extra bit of hassle for smooth footage is not, it's not worth it. So I don't use that anymore, but I'm looking forward to seeing it. Graham Thomas said, would you put empty supers under those already or on or at the top? How about checkerboarding them? Bees are filling them so fast. So at the moment, I don't think it makes a massive difference, just stick them on. Checkerboarding is definitely a good idea in this, in this climate with what's going on. It just gives the bees a little bit more work to do. It makes them go a little bit harder, but it also slows them down at the same time. If you're keeping all the bees together, they'll just grow out nice and rapidly, nice and steadily like that. But if you're checkerboarding and making them think, oh, what's going on, it just seems to— it doesn't necessarily slow them down, but it fills out the box more efficiently and allows you to manage that space a bit better. I'm checkerboarding left, right, and center at the moment, in the brood box, up in the supers, everywhere. Uh, Harry says, any free queens going? Looking forward to mine coming tomorrow. They are on the way, but no, I've got to work out another way to get up to speed with the 2, uh, free queens that I owe everyone. How's the weather up north? I'm getting to the point where I'm running out of supers. I might have to do 2 harvests this year. I have 40 supers. So it's like perfect. It's just been perfect, perfect, perfect weather. I absolutely love the sunshine. It is the best thing ever. Uh, but As Harry said there, some of the bramble is already out. The early flowering bramble is already out. It is crazy. Hi, have you ever tried putting a Carpathian queen into a hive with black bees? Do they accept her better than a Buckfast queen? Our black bees killed the Buckfast queen that we bought. Sorry to hear that your Buckfast queen died. Um, so no, it pretty much rejects all sorts of queens, AMM. It just doesn't like anything other than AMM. And it's weird because all of the other subspecies are nowhere near as fussy. But using a Carpathian over a Buckfast bee isn't going to make a difference. What my recommendation is for people who are doing that is to make off a small split, gonna be much more readily accepted in a small split, and then get her accepted as normal, but then go back in every 3 or 4 days and take down the supersedure cells. And as soon as you get Buckfast bees from that queen in that colony, it will make it loads and loads easier. Uh, and they will stop trying to supersede her. Someone had a really nice idea how to speed that up as well, which was when you put the new queen in, like once she's out on the frame and she's like starting to lay, you take a frame of emerging Buckfast brood from elsewhere and place that into the beehive. And I thought that's actually a really nice idea because it doesn't interfere with the, the process of requeening because, um, you're never getting them back to the point where they're not hopelessly queenless. And then once the queen is out and laying, you can add captured emerging brood if you want to anyway. So it does, it fixes the problem theoretically. I've not tested it, I've not tried it, but it is, it's good theory, so I'm going to give it a go. Uh, DSDS says, could you do a video on collecting pollen and how to process it for sale small scale? So I can definitely do a video on collecting pollen, and I'll have a go on the processing one because we don't, we don't process any pollen at all. We collect a bit of pollen and I eat some kind of out of the pollen trap, and I use some for like queen rearing and stuff like that, but I don't, I I've never done the processing, and a lot of the processing equipment for pollen is very, very expensive. But if you take a look at how much pollen you can get out of a single colony in a season, if you like manage a colony for pollen and then work out how much you can actually like sell it for, you look at this equipment and you think, you know what? That could that could turn like a reasonable profit. There's quite a high demand for nice clean pollen at the moment for some reason. Margaret says, interesting to hear the weather in the UK. It's been raining for a few weeks and 12 to 17 degrees C. Flowers are about to explode. float in the next couple of weeks could be a monster nectar float. How weird is that? This is what— we're in some strange parallel universe where in Spain it's raining every day and chilly, um, and the, like, the UK is probably hotter than Cyprus. I'm going to go out and say it is absolutely brilliant. Says Frolly Bee's hot. I had someone else's queen move in. I know it's not mine because it has a queen logo on it. I've seen Tim's random queen that's gone in there. Right, next up, Bart says, hi Lawrence, do you ever get questions about bees foraging poison plants, or do you test the honey for it? So around here there's so few plants like that, there's just kind of hardly any, so it wouldn't ever be an issue. You'd never get it in the concentrations that would cause issues, so you never, never have any testing for it either. But is there like a particular plant that you're, that you're worried about? Not sure. After losing a swarm in April and just catching Carnie Bee before her colony swarmed, it's off to check for splits. I put queen cells in tomorrow and see how full supers are. Good luck to you, John. Evening, Laurence. Introducing a Black Mountain honey queen, but after 4 days they haven't eaten through the fondant. Is it okay to leave, or should I wet the queen and open? So just— I get this question a lot about the queen is not eating out of the cage quick enough, and I always say to people— and I know you didn't say this, Thomas, but just for the sake of capturing everyone— that the queen and the attendants in the cage will take weeks to eat out of the cage. Absolutely ages. It's the colony, it's the setup of the colony, and they eat inwards through the fondant. That is how the queen is released. So if it's 4 days and the queen is not still being released, probably not that many bees in there. But it doesn't— they can stay in there for weeks. I wouldn't kind of risk doing anything yet. I'd leave it at least a week, and then if they're still struggling to get through, you can get like a little pin and just make a hole in the fondant that's smaller than the size of a bee, um, but then they'll just tunnel through that within like maybe 10-20 minutes and release the queen. So that's the, that's the better way of kind of like forcing an introduction rather than dunking her in water. Uh, well, there we go. Thanks. No problem, Max. You can hear my voice going again. Hi Lawrence, well, busy few weeks we've had. We've officially run out of supers. Luckily our brand new Tektron UK 24-frame extractor arrives next week. Very exciting. I bet you can't wait for that to come, Paul. Pedro Neto says, hello, just did my first inspection ever. I bet that's brilliant. I got— going back to when I kind of first kept bees and you do like inspections and you sit back and like all that goes through your mind, and I was thinking that this week, the amount of nucs that we've kind of sent out and like nucs that have gone out this week. Like when you get your first nuc, you, you go to bed thinking about your bees, don't you? And you're thinking, have they got enough space? Have I done stuff right? Have I squished the queen? Like, are they facing the right direction, or should I face them like a little bit that way? Or like, you, you're thinking, you're constantly thinking. And I thought, I don't really do that anymore. Like, I, I worry about the business now as opposed to worrying about the bees. I like think about the business or letting customers down, or, you know, all that good stuff that comes with it, right? Whoop whoop, and I'm here, Lawrence. Hope everyone is well. All good here, Matt. With this crazy hot weather here in Somerset, for sure everything, even summer flowers, especially blackberries, are in bloom now. Don't you worry that the summer will be harsh for the bees? I really do. It's all roses now, but the further south you are, the more of a problem this will become for you. I remember back in— when was it that we had a mega drought in Wales? It was a serious drought. I want to say 2018, but I think there was maybe one in '21 as well. But it was a huge drought in the whole of the UK, and I remember they did this big satellite image saying it's not rained for 4 months or whatever it was. And it hadn't rained. It hadn't rained here. It was bone dry here. But when they did the satellite image, you could just see that Wales was still completely green, and the whole of the rest of the UK and well Scotland was quite green as well. But all of England was just brown, and like no water had been there at all. But Wales seems to retain its greenness quite well because I don't know. I don't know why it is. It must just be like the topography. It must be the fact that there's like a lot of trees still here. So from the satellite, you're picking up on all the trees that are still there. But even the fields remain pretty green up here, so I'm confident. And it's great for us in Wales— no rain means lots and lots of honey in Wales, and you'll just get an extended season still. But the further south you are and the more kind of further you are into England, the shorter the season is going to become. And I see people— you look at like Chris Manton on Twitter, he's predicting it to be done by June the 17th. He said that's it, the season is done by June the 17th, where normally like June the 17th you're only a week or so, maybe 2 weeks past the June gap. You've got the whole of the summer harvest ahead of you, and he's predicting 2 weeks after that it's done. And if it is done, then the bees will be in trouble, like big, big-time trouble. And I'm predicting a huge amount of starvations later on this year because you think new beekeepers starting and building up their colonies in this climate, uh, excuse the pun as well, but it's so easy. You just leave it to them, they just do it. What's that? You split them, take them into 2, and they just, you Yeah, they requeen every time with no failures because it's just perfect weather. But then if you, if you kind of like fast forward that, if you're doing that early on in the year and thinking, well, this is easy, just leave the bees to it, and then all of a sudden you take the honey off and then all of a sudden the flow stops, I think there's going to be a lot of, a lot of bees starving. So I will be giving people advice to hopefully, hopefully negate that. Hi Lawrence, when is the latest you can do a walkaway split down south? So all of the advice really for stuff like this is thrown out this year because it's just so warm. So a walkaway split would get mated pretty much every time at the moment, I would say. High chance you're gonna be well up in like the 90% rate for getting queens mated. And when would I say to normally do it? I'd say I don't like walkaway splits. I prefer to raise queens using a different impulse, but you could definitely do it up here all the way through until kind of like mid-July, back end of July, something like that. Possibly later, but I don't think I'd push it any later than that. But then this year, I, I just think that's even pushing that. So I would say you've only got a few weeks really left of it, and that's, that's down south. I don't know, I, I'm not sure what we're going to see later on this year because up until now it's been Perfect conditions, but I'm I'm aware that it is just condensing it down unless we get the regular rainfall to prolong those plants. Then oh don't know what's going to happen. I don't I don't want to be like scaremongering or doom mongering or making out that it's not like a good thing. Like this spring so far is brilliant, and people would have got like double their annual harvest just from their spring harvest. So there's no need to get any more honey. It's the the thing that I'm worried about more is the gap between. the end of the flow and kind of like the bees going into winter. I just keep a lot of feed on hand, I would say, is probably going to be the way to do it later on this year. Right, I better speed up because I've officially got 37 minutes left. Right, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, queen arrived today safe and well, now introduced. Very much looking forward to seeing her on the next inspection. Many thanks. P.S., don't forget to sip your tea. You're the first man to say that, um, or woman I might add. It might not be a man. But thank you, I enjoyed that tea. Robert Tilton, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, your bees are doing fantastic. Thank you very much, Robert. Stevie Boy says, hi Lawrence, what would cause a queen to randomly lay 2 or 3 eggs in the bottom of the cells? Colony is healthy and several frames of brood in all stages. So, uh, my, my mouth and my nose is, uh, getting itchy because of too much talking. But what generally happens with queens is at the beginning, as soon as they start laying eggs after being mated, you'll get like a few eggs going down into each cell. And then they get into the hang of it, and then they like kind of work out how to just lay a single egg, and then they get into that rhythm of single eggs. I've never really seen a colony or a queen start to randomly lay like on scale 2 or 3 eggs. You might get the odd— you might get the odd cell where there's a couple in, and you might get the odd cell where there's 2 or 3 in, but I've never seen— I've never seen it kind of like on a whole frame where there's— where there's multiple eggs in the cells. So unless you're seeing that, I probably wouldn't worry about it. And just, yeah, that queen maybe not got the, the control that she needs just to get a single egg out each time. Thomas, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, I'm going to purchase my first extractor. I'm thinking of going for the Lyson 24 radial extractor. Can you explain the difference? What's the difference between radial and tangential? Which is better? So unless you are extracting heather honey, I would just go with the radial one. Loads easier, a lot cheaper as well. So this is the difference here. So Imagine that's your extractor. In a radial extractor, this is how the frames are going to be set up in the drum. So excuse my poor drawing, but you kind of get the idea here. So they're going to be set up like that, and they are perpendicular to the side of the drum. So then the, like, the frames are spun and all the honey comes out. So that is radial. And then the only difference to tangential is the frames are placed like this. And again, excuse the poor drawing, but they run parallel to the barrel of the drum. And then again, it's spun like that, but what you have to do is it only spins one side at a time, so it would just spin out the honey like that. But you have to flip the frames over. It only does one side at a time, so tangential is much, much slower for the for the beekeeper or for the person using the machine. So there's not like— they say also tangential is slightly easier on the comb, but it's negligible. I don't think it makes a massive amount of difference. Radial is a million times easier. Stick to radial if you're getting an extractor, unless you have heather honey that you need to extract. But also don't just think, all right, I might have heather honey. You need to needle it first as well, and the needler costs about £8,000. So Like, you need to invest in the Needler before you need a Tangential Heather Honey Extractor. So like 99 times out of 100, the answer is going to be go for the Radial. Uh, we did that one there. Where did we get to? Today I received your queen. However, as I was checking and knocking down all the queens so I was ready for introduction, a new queen popped out and flew around. I'm not sure if she went in the hive or not, so I continued to introduce the cage. Do I do the right thing? Oh no, unfortunately not, you didn't. So hopefully you didn't open the cage. The queen that flew out will 100% kill the queen that's in the cage. There is no, like, question, they will kill her. Um, so I would take her out and just go and make up a split and use the queen elsewhere. Otherwise she'll, she'll be dead within a couple of days. Lawrence, what's the difference between your premium Buckfast and your normal Buckfast queens? So we've been working with kind of a few breeders over the last few years to develop our own Buckfast line. The normal one, so the normal Buckfast queen is what has been available through Melitta Bees for a few years now. It's their Continental Dark Star line, very good line, but it's one that they're keeping going over there, whereas the premium one is the lines that we've been working on over here in the UK, and we've managed to kind of share those genetics now. So it's a completely separate different line of German Buckfast queens. Really, really good, uh, and I'm very, very excited to see them come over. When is it? Is week 26, so 23rd of June, I think the first batch is coming in. Or maybe it's the week before that, the 19th of June. Um, but I am very, very excited for that one. Chunky says, hi Lawrence, thanks for the queen I received today. I have a full super of overwintered honey, not Apivar tainted. Can I extract it or shall I nadir it to freshen it up? I would definitely nadir it. Um, to freshen it up, kind of mix it in with everything else that is there, and then extract it. Definitely, that sounds like a good plan. Talking about queens getting into supers, mine did this last week. Reckon she fell in during an inspection. Could workers have killed her pulling her through the queen excluder? Um, I, I wouldn't think— I wouldn't think they'd pull her through the queen excluder. They don't really like do that much to the queen, like telling her— not so much telling her what to do, but, uh, but like forcing her. So no, I don't think it would be that. More More possibly that she just like needed to really lay some eggs and she couldn't, or maybe she tried to squeeze through the queen excluder herself. That's more more than likely what's happened, and she just got stuck and she couldn't get back through. Never nice though. Lynette says, "My bees were massive in April when I first inspected them after winter." Anel Hives. There we go. They looked very good. Daniel says, "Hi Lawrence, I'm thinking of getting bees, but I'm not sure how viable it is if I live in London. Any recommendations?" So I'd join your local beekeeping association and go and have a play around with the bees that they've got first. That's always a good first thing to go and do. And then possibly, if you're thinking about doing it, speak to a few people and see if you can find yourself an out apiary. Like, I lived in London for 20 years, 21 years, and there's like— thinking back to where I lived, there were loads of places that I could have kept bees kind of like tucked out the way, like on disused bits of land or just like rubbishy bits of land that people own. And I'm sure if I went out and made some inquiries, I could have found some some pretty good places to keep bees. Mark Chambers says, "I did not I did not official swarm on it." Oh wait, we're reading all of this here. Oh sorry. So following on from Mark's talking about the queen there, so he says, "I did not official swarm on it as there were queen cells. Was that the right thing to do?" Um, I guess if the queen had died, what I would have probably done is just taken down all of the queen cells and just left one, and then there's no queen and just one queen cell. they should, should requeen. Uh, Your early YouTubes I've seen are just fine. You said um a lot, but they were all very informative and I've learned loads from them. Well, that is very kind. Thank you, Tim. I did say um a lot, and you know, I got better at not saying— I still say um now, everyone does, but I got better at not saying it because I had to edit it out thousands of times a day. So it was just easier to not say it anymore rather than have to edit it out that much. I also got— I also got taught a really good technique with um, which is you still say it in your head Um, and then you just carry on talking, but you just don't say it out loud. So the gap, the gap that um gives you is actually really, really good, but then you just don't say it. And I was like, oh, that's really nice. So you just have a little mind break, and you think that you've got to talk the whole time and never have a gap and just talk like that, and there's no gaps, and no— and that's not how you talk. That's— no, nobody talks like that. So there we go, little, little lesson on um there, right? You did a review on the Abello Full Frame Queen Introduction Cage. Have you used it? And technique, blah Please. So I've used— he's got a queen excluder cage and they've got a queen cage where the queen can't actually get out, where no bees can get in and no bees can get out. I've used both of them and you use both of them for different purposes, but there's no real kind of like technique. It depends on what you're trying to do with it is what I would say. Like, what are you— what are you trying to do? I don't like the way that it's called a queen introduction cage. It's not— I don't use that cage for queen introduction, and I think it overcomplicates the introduction process of like hopelessly queenless The little postal cages that we send are perfect for introducing queens into colonies. That is the only way that I would recommend that. Ben the Beekeeper says, hi Lawrence, I was away today and took care of— and took— and a friend took care of my hive. They left multiple queen cells in, 2 hatched, and I removed 5 today. They swarmed. I have an extra 2 virgin queens. What do I do with them? Oh, that's a really horrible question because I, I have no use for emerged virgins. Emerged virgins are very, very difficult to do anything with at all. So I would— I don't know, I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to suggest doing with them, but I wouldn't personally be using them because they're just so difficult to do anything with. So I could give you— I could give you something to do with them, and the likelihood is they'll just kill the virgins, and then you'll just have to combine everything back up together again. I like to introduce queen cells as— sorry, I like to use virgins as queen cells a day or so before they're about to emerge, put them in the colony, queen protector on, queen cell protector, so they can't take them down, can't kill them. virgin has to emerge, and I find it gets such better acceptance doing it that way around. Channel member says, put 2 queens into 2 hives today that have become super aggressive, being hopelessly queenless. How long does it take them to regain their chill? A very good question there. So it's not— unfortunately, it's not instantaneous at all, far from it. But what I would— you've got a few different things going on there. So if a colony is hopelessly queenless, they generally become a bit angry. So putting a new queen in will calm them down from that perspective. So they've got a queen, so they're a bit happier now they've got a queen. But if you've got a lot of bees in there that are the old queen's daughters and they're horrible and feisty and super aggressive, then just having a queen there isn't gonna change their temper or their behavior. So you need to wait for those bees to die. Now, worker bees at this point in the year are going to be working super, super hard, so they're probably only going to live for 4 to 6, but maybe really like the lower end of that, probably around 4 weeks. And then as that queen expands and builds up that colony back up, you'll get new nice calm buckfast bees coming out. and you'll start to see that. So it won't be instantaneous, but you'll probably see a very small improvement upon adding the queen in there. And then I would say at least 4 weeks away before you're going to see any sort of improvement, because you're not even going to start to see the new Buckfast bees the first round for 3 weeks before you even see them. So yeah, 3 or 4 weeks before you see like a jump up again, but then I would say judge it really next year. Next spring is when you're going to see and really notice the difference. Uh, right, where are we here? Oh, there's a lot of questions. I thought I was getting close to the bottom. I'm absolutely nowhere near, right? Okay, that's not good. All right, geez, right, let's go quicker. Right, Lynette says, brood and a half, I think I might have had swarms by 1st of April if they're on single brood. I think a lot of people are in that boat. Chris says, are you getting any more Carpathian queens? It'll be next year, unfortunately, until the Carpathian queens are in. My hives face south, but one side is to a forest, so they end in the shade towards the late afternoon. Once the shade, the bees tend to go out less even though it is still hot and sunny. Is this normal? Absolutely normal. And that is why people say to put them in full sun for the— as much of the day as possible. It's no major issue though, but they will just work less if they're not in the sun. Thanks for the prior question. We have a hive we think there is a laying worker. How would you deal with this? We tried searching for a queen with a brood box and queen excluder. There is definitely window queen. My solution for a laying worker is as follows. Now I just take the beehive away completely, shake all of the bees up into the air, and just let them go into the neighboring beehives. That is the only solution really that I use for laying workers now, and it works quite well. Learned loads from you, Lawrence. Thanks, my pleasure, Sam. Got the queen my mother got as a gift and she is laying well. Thank you. My mum said you were very nice and helpful. Thank you, that's very nice. I do, I do like it when, when people call me up and we have a good old chat, but she was very kind as well, Stephen. You tell her that. Very friendly. I bought 2 Black Mountain Honey Queens, ETA tomorrow. I'm requeening a hive that has 8 supers on it— 8 supers— and making a split, a small split from another. What is the fewest number of brood frames you would take for a split? So at this point in the year, you can push it as much as you want. You can go a single frame of brood, a single frame of stores, and a shake of bees, and that is a perfectly viable split at this point in the year. And you could do 10 frames of brood as well if you want to make a split, big split like that, or or anywhere in between. Damn, I missed the first 20 minutes watching last month's by mistake, but here now. Oh no, what a nightmare. Sorry about that, Nigel. Hi Lawrence, how do we encourage the bees up into the supers? We have the bees on double brood and they haven't gone near the super. So you don't need to do anything to lure the bees up to the supers. They will get up there when they need to get up there. Double brood is going to slow that down, really does slow that down, but believe me, it's what you want to do, especially if you're a first-time beekeeper, because it's just getting you through this difficult swarming period of the year and the bees are building up, you're probably going to be able to keep some of that honey that's in the brood box if you put a queen excluder in between, which I recommend to people, channel members as well like you. Um, not that far away now if you want to take a good honey harvest in the spring. All I'd recommend doing is taking the queen, putting her down in the brood box below, queen excluder in between the 2 brood boxes. Do that about 3, maybe 4 weeks before you're planning to harvest your spring crop. and then all of the honey— and then all of the brood, sorry, in that top brood box would emerge and the bees will just backfill it with honey. It becomes a super, and if you've got a way of extracting it, that is a very, very good way of getting or maximizing your honey crop for the season. But in terms of when will they go up into the super, they'll go up kind of when they need to go up there, and having it on isn't causing any issues to the bees, so they will get there eventually. What are your thoughts on the rolling demuree? Is she taking all the capped brood from the bottom box brood box and swapping with back-filled frames in the top box. Is this a good option to help prevent the need for the second demerara? So a rolling demerara, if you've got the time— if you had one, if I had one colony in my back garden, I'd just be rolling the demerara literally every single day. It is brilliant. And like, like Sophie said there, all it is is the movement back and forth of the brood frames and the honey-filled frames above. You can just do it, you could do it once a week, you could do it once a day, you could do it once every 3 days. You're just constantly moving it and removing any future cells that are being made if you're taking brood from— let me get this the right way around— if you're taking brood from the bottom and putting it up to the top, if you're doing it that way around, you just need to be on top. Every time you put a new one in, you're taking down the emergency cells on the one before. You're consistently giving the bees, the queen downstairs, additional space in which to lay. It's serving a purpose. You're taking down a frame of stores, you're putting it in the bottom box. You don't want the stores in the bottom box, so the bees are moving it up to the top box. And they replace in that frame a frame of eggs. Once all of that frame is capped over— once all— sorry, once that frame of eggs is all capped over, you can just take that frame back out, put it up to the top again, and then replace it again. So you just like roll it the whole way through. I would say if you're doing a rolling one, it's easier to do it— just do it once a week and move the frame around, move the frames around that way. I am getting to the point where I can't even talk anymore, uh, but that is— it's a very good system, and I, I will be doing a video on that one. I'll probably do that one the following year. I've got I do. I've got to do the video just on the standard demerara this year before going and doing the rolling one. Put a brood box and already drawn and filled. The drought was in 2022, bone dry in Devon. We had some rain a week ago, so all good here. I think the water table must be higher in Wales. Water table's definitely higher in Wales as well, uh, but yes. All right, Patrick Laslett's Organic Allotment says happy beekeeping from a cold Norwich. I had a few people message and say that it's been like cold last couple of days or raining down south. It's been stunning the last two days up here. Absolutely beautiful. Nigel Tim says, "I recently did my first demerit and all was going well. Inspected twice, all okay. Went in this week and they all swarmed out the top. Bottom brood check and no queen, but one good charged anymore. I'm guessing it's gonna be oh yeah. So how should I? How long should I leave it before checking again? They also have five supers on too, so much honey, but not too much capped." Oh, sorry to hear it didn't work. It it. It sounds like— not sure. Sometimes, you know, bees don't read the books, do they, when it comes to demerets? I generally find they don't swarm within like 2 or 3 weeks from a demeret, but after that third week, like, it's just back to— it's back to normal in the beehive. Everything's kind of back to where it should be, and the bees have probably run out of space again. So you can do what Sophie said before, kind of like roll that demeret to continually give the queen space to lay, or you could just re-demeret. You could do a second demeret just to same, exactly the same thing over and over again. Oh right, here we go. Matt Page says, I know it's way off, but I'm very much looking forward to my couple of premium queens coming. Thank you. My pleasure, Matt. They won't be much longer now. Grant says, good evening. This afternoon I did a split with one of your beautiful Obsidian Star Queens. Could you tell us more about them and your experience with them? So the Obsidian Star Queen came about from a previous cross that they were using out in in Malta, Melitta bees. They were crossing a Caucasian bee with a Carniolan bee, and I was just amazed at how dark this bee was. And the question that I get asked all the time is, do you sell black bees? Do you sell like dark bees? We want black bees. So we get the question all the time, which is people wanting like local— sorry, local Welsh Blacks or native bees. And I won't sell people those bees just because I've not got access to good enough stock to be able to say anything nice about them. So if people say, are they good bees? And I say, well, not really, no, terrible. But that's not to say that all local stock is terrible, that's just to say the one that I have access to isn't particularly good, so I don't sell them. But I like the idea of a dark queen, and I knew that they had this cross that exists, and I've used them, and I was very happy with them, and happy with the temperament, and happy with the ability of the bees. So I've kind of got a couple in hives and building them up now, and I will do some more videos on them, but I've been very pleased with them. So far, Harry says, "I also think the wasps and hornets will be terrible this year. The mild winter and warm weather bees stopped brood earlier as well, being worn out." So I think yeah, hit the nail on the head with the pests as well. They're going to come a difficult point for the bees. But luckily, the only good thing yet with this, with the wasps and hornets coming in, although feeding bees does bring in more wasps and hornets, if you get the entrances right and you make sure that the the wasps and hornets can't get in the beginning. If you're feeding them, then it doesn't really— they don't really need to come outside the beehive, which means they're going to be much less predation by those wasps, but in particular the hornets, especially Asian hornets who like hawk in front of the beehives. If the bees are just happy to stay inside the beehive and just you feed them like syrup or whatever and feed them water and give them pollen and give them everything they need, they don't really actually need to ever leave the beehive. Uh, Helen P says, when would you consider spring to finish and summer to begin? So you have spring and summer honey, or this year is it all summer honey due to the weather? So normally up here in the UK, we have a June gap. So we have like a small period in the middle of the spring and the summer harvest that kind of denotes the difference between the two. And all of the spring crop, like the oilseed rape and the hawthorn, is generally, you know, that's all your spring crop there. There's other things in there as well. You're going to have sycamore, you're going to have horse chestnut, all of your blossom honey that comes out early on in the year. And then Later on, you're going to have like the main crops, like your lime trees and your borage and your bramble and your clover. So there's, there's generally just like things fall into 2 categories, either the spring, which is the early ones, or the summer, which is the later ones. There generally is that little gap in the middle, but everything that's flowering up until now is still spring flowers. Some of the summer flowers are starting to flower now. You can see bramble coming into flower, or been flowering for a couple of weeks probably in some places. So depending on where you draw the line, you're going to get a different mix of honey. But if you draw a line now, safe to say that would be very much a spring crop regardless of the weather. The weather doesn't really make a massive difference other than you just get more or less. It doesn't change what type of honey is kind of like extracted or produced by the bees. How long should I leave it before checking it again? Oh yeah, we did that one, sorry. Right, Graham Astor says, in one of your conversations you mentioned the last invert feed of the autumn should have Thymol in to reduce fermentation. Is there a brand you recommend? So, uh, yeah, so that's correct. I use Hive Alive in the last couple of ones, which is, uh, thymolated. So you're thymolating the syrup, but there's also like extracts of seaweed and all other good stuff in there as well. The bees really do like Hive Alive for some reason. I don't know why it is. There's something in there that the bees want to get at. I think it's like the salts that are in there, but they love Hive Alive and it stops it fermenting. And if you mix it with invert as well, you've got something that's effectively bombproof and it's not going to ferment, and it can live inside the comb without it being sealed over, so it's much less work for the bees as well. Alex Miles, part 1, says, good evening, Black Mountain. Honey nuc arrived yesterday and the bees are bringing back lots of pollen, and we'll move them into their WBC hive tomorrow. We're so excited. Part 2, once they are over 90% of the brood box, could we add another brood box rather than a super in the hope we could do a split later in the summer? So yes, so my rule is generally 80%. But what I'm saying to people this year is just go with 70%. So if you've got a box that's got 11 frames in, when they're on 7 frames, get the second brood box on. It's not going to set them back if the weather remains as it is at the moment, and it just means that they won't catch you out. So they'll build out into that box as they need to. Um, just a bit of damage limitation from trying to— or prevention even from losing some swarms early on in the season. Hi Lawrence, has anyone else had problems with the green plastic queen excluders with the bees not being able to get through the slots? I've not had that problem. I've heard a number of people reporting that there is definitely a dodgy batch of queen excluders knocking around, but I've not had any issues. Could it pose any issues if I do a demerare close to the May-June gap? Worried they might not have enough nectar to draw the bottom box. So proximity to the June gap could definitely affect a demerare. I like to do one demerare before the June gap and then to time the end of the demerare, so like the 3-week process, to roughly coincide with when I think that June gap is going to be. That gives me a chance to rectify everything, change things around, add additional boxes on, feed if I need to, and then go again following the June gap. I don't like to do the demo day to coincide with it because I'm kind of either wanting to get honey off or get boxes on or feed or do something different. So I like to kind of split it out a bit like that. Says main honey flow just starting, strong hive, single brood management, pull nectar frames up is backfilling. Um, backfilling is gonna— is a nightmare at the moment for everyone, for any— anybody producing honey, everyone, uh, producing nucs. There is a lot of nectar in all of the frames. But I think, I think we're all in the same boat. You just got to try and manage it as best you can. Is it worth forgoing a potential super of honey for a brood box of foundation and getting this drawn out? Weather looking great next week. So, no, so I never recommend that to people. You hear people say, you know, drawn comb is worth its weight in gold. It's true, drawn comb, especially in the supers, is worth its weight in gold. But I wouldn't forgo a honey full of, like, a super full of honey to get some uh, drone— to get some frames of brood drawn out. I can't talk, I'm literally— I'm done. Where are we? We're 46. We've got 14 minutes left. But I wouldn't do that, no. I'd just get the— I'd get the honey super drawn out and then fill that with honey, and then you kind of get like 2 things. And it's the honey super frames, the drawn comb, that's much more valuable. The brood ones only last for 3 years before you should be recycling them, where the honey supers, if there's no infection there, will literally last indefinitely. So much more valuable. I think we did that one. Good evening, Lawrence. Last week's queens were all accepted and this week's queens arrived safe and sound and in their nucs. Thanks for the great service once again. Here in Norfolk, the flow has stopped dead. Oh, I'm glad the queens are doing well, and that, that doesn't surprise me. So where are we now? 15th, 16th of May, flow stopped dead. So that's like 2, 3 weeks ahead of schedule of where the normal June gap would be. I, I'm expecting the flows to stop dead around here if we do get a June gap. Norfolk Honey says, yes, here in Norfolk it's winter again. Crazy, isn't it, how it's come in like that? It's so warm, like properly, properly warm up here. Jason Lomas says, can you explain the best way to go about removing the top brood box after a demurrer? Have a sip of tea. Thank you very much. So if you time it right with the top box of a demurrer, all of the brood will emerge and the bees will just start backfilling it. If you're happy just to kind of take out all of those frames and just shake out any nectar, you can do that, and you can just take the box off immediately and not put it anywhere. If you've got a box and it's like full of stores, full of nectar, but they've not capped it over, you just want to take that box, take that top box, place it underneath the original brood box, so at the very bottom of the beehive, and the bees should just move that honey up through the brood box and up into the supers. If they don't do that, you need to start checkerboarding those open frames and bruising the wax cappings if it is capped over. and then placing that in between frames of brood, and then they definitely will move it up. That's what I would do. I'm getting some breeder queens from Lutz in August. Advice please on maintaining them to prolong their life and egg laying as much as possible. Oh, so it's a challenge. That is a very, very good thing to be doing. You want to maintain the length of the, the life of your queen by limiting the amount of eggs that she lays. Now, I thought the best way to do this was just to take out frames of brood. So just take out frames of brood, shake off all the bees, donate the brood elsewhere, and then that kind of keeps the number of colonies— keeps the number of bees in the colony as low as possible. But these breeder queens are just on the next level. They just pump out eggs like it doesn't stop. Just go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. So when I'll be taking out these frames of capped brood, putting in frames of foundation, colony just draws them out instantly, fills it all up with eggs. And I'm thinking I'm probably doing the opposite of what I want to actually happen though. I want the queen to not lay as many eggs. I want to reduce the amount of eggs. I'm taking out the brood. And then I'm just forcing her to lay 3 full frames of eggs every time that I do that. I was like, that's a really silly thing to do. So taking out frames of brood doesn't, doesn't actually give you what you want. What you need to do— this is the best way of doing it— what you need to do is take out enough frames of bees and brood. So if you've got like a 6-frame nuc, take out 6— sorry, if you've got a 6-frame nuc, take out 4 frames of bees and brood and leave the queen just on her own. with a frame of brood and a frame of stores and don't even give them the additional foundation, just kind of leave them as they are. And then when they just start kind of like creating the wild comb next to it because they've got a void, you just take off that little bit of wild comb and you put in a single frame of foundation for them to go on. And then as they build slowly onto that, you can get to a point where it's— you know what's so bad? And I'll tell you why I keep on doing this in a minute. But you get to a point where the colony is so small you can just keep on taking out that one frame of brood once it's fully capped over and shrinking it back down again. And you keep it so small that the queen doesn't lay any eggs. You then, when you're getting it ready for winter, you build it back up again, um, and get it nice and strong by adding lots of brood in to make sure that it's up to a sufficient strength for winter. That is what I do with mine. What I've just realized that I was doing there was the timing that I do for when I'm filming on camera. I'll kind of stop like that and then I'll carry on talking to make sure that all the cuts go together. and I'm doing that live and not even really realizing it because I'm so incredibly knackered, right? Hi Lawrence, the overwintered queen and new colony I had a few early April now filled a brood box, stuck a super on, uh, which Monday had 6 frames of uncapped honey. I stuck another super on because we were worried about swarming. Since then the weather has gone almost Arctic, no queen cells, only a few plague cups a week or two back. Sounds about perfect. That's exactly what I would have done, and I definitely wouldn't take that second super off, just leave it on. Ian says, hi Lawrence, I set up a nuc 4 weeks ago and they're doing very well. Good to hear that, Ian. Justin says, split my new Caucasian package, are they less likely to swarm this year due to lower population? Thank you from Fairbanks. Um, yeah, I would say lower population if you're kind of in the main swarm period at the moment and you've just taken whatever this full-size colony is and split it out into 2. Those 2 separate halves are going to be much, much less likely to swarm this year for sure. Rosie says, good evening Lawrence, another fantastic nuc received from you yesterday. It is now happy and settled into new hive. Thank you, Rosie. Glad to hear it's all gone so well. Good evening, Julian. Hope you're well. Andrew Simpson says, hi Lawrence, I just want to thank you for supporting me on my journey. Up to 14 hives now and all down to your advice. That's amazing, Andrew. I recognize your name from kind of like a few years back buying nucs and queens and stuff. 14 hives now, that is quite some journey. Congratulations on that. Sandra Bun says, hi, this is our first spring. We started out in August and they've done a great job. We put a second deep and super on a couple of weeks ago. Last weekend we checked we couldn't see the queen. Lots of capped brood, a small handful of drones, and a few queen cells. Does this mean we somehow lost the queen? Unfortunately, that sounds very much like they have swarmed. I would take down all of the swarm cells bar one and just let them requeen naturally. And if the weather's anything like it is up here, you should be all good. How can you tell the difference between a virgin and a mated queen? So a virgin is much, much shorter, much flightier, much quicker to walk around the combs. Where a mated queen, much slower, much more lethargic, much bigger. You really do notice the difference in size when a queen is mated. That abdomen just kind of extends out like that. Um, but the big one for me is like they're kind of just like quite set. They're happy just to wander around the comb. They're not like running off it. They're not flying off into the distance. Virgins are very, very flighty. Hi Lawrence. Oh, we did that one. Okay, where are we going next? Uh, Nick James is the first one to comment. He says, loving the man bun, mate. Checked, uh, on one of my hives, added a frame of eggs. 7 days later, no queen cells. However, couldn't find a queen, but I think she's there, but not much brood or eggs. I would say almost certainly, if they didn't create queen cells, you put in a frame of eggs, there will be a queen in there somewhere. Uh, Moonshine Manuka says, hello Lawrence, running at least 50 hives, just preparing for extracting. I'm trying to find an economical way to deal with the cappings, just been letting it sit and drain. What would you recommend? Oh, depending on how expensive it is where you are, search for a hydropress because they're really not that expensive. You can just get a 20-liter version for just pressing cappings, and you can press loads of cappings in a hydropress. It is incredibly efficient. It leaves you with like solid wax at the end of it and gets all of the honey out. And you'll probably get them for like, well, $500, $600, something like that, for a really good machine. You probably get a smaller version for cheaper as well. Have a super on, however the bees are not moving into it from the brood box, causing overcrowding and And suggestions. They will move up to it eventually. They definitely will. Double check the queen excluder is letting bees through is always a good one to check though. And then I would I would just say they will get up to it soon. There's always there's always about two or three weeks where you put a super on and they do nothing, and then before you know it you'll be putting the second super on. Toishka says, "Hey from Maryland." Sorry if I said your name wrong, but hello to you too. Ian says, I had a poorly performing queen with super seizure cells removed here, and after 10-day intros, uh, introduced a virgin. She doesn't seem to have taken, no brood of any kind. Can I safely add in a mated queen? Oh, depends. I'd be doing a test frame first knowing that I added a mated— sorry, added a virgin in previously. She's probably still wandering around, the virgin, so I would test that first. Matt Titmus says, I run all my hives on Nationals, but I have one hive on Langstroth. I was going to order a new NL Langstroth hive to transfer them to, but the the price has gone up and it's a pain having one single hive on a different format. Do you suggest shook swarm and cut and band the frames? The frames have been in for a year, so I'd rather just shook swarm if it will work. So shook swarm, absolutely fine, probably the easiest way of doing it. The only thing with the shook swarm is it really does set the colony right back. Um, you could cut— I've done, I've done both of those already this year. So I did a shook swarm and it sets the colony right back, and I've cut frames up and bungeed them in And it's messy, but once you get through it, once you get through the messiness, you end up with a nice big strong colony. If there's any reason, other reason that you might want to do a shook swarm as well, that could lead you towards doing a shook swarm. Um, it's definitely the easiest way of doing it, but it does, like I say, sets them right back. Uh, Rich Pearson says bees are new. Ah, we've got that one already. Matt Page says, yes, I'm North Norfolk and the weather is cold and windy. I just, all I think of is Partridge, North Norfolk Radio. Louis Baldwin says, hi Lawrence, got a second brood full of honey, just don't want, uh, don't want to spin the brood frames? Can I put it below the brood box with an excluder on top and empty super above? Cheers. So yes, you can do exactly that. It's called nadiring. Make sure all of the frames are not capped over. If any of them are capped, you want to bruise it with a hive tool. And if that doesn't work, you can start checkerboarding in between brood frames and they will definitely move it. Oh my God, Lexi is here! And he is my Royal Mail collection driver who came this week and did an absolutely amazing job. So massive shout out to you, Lexi. How's it going? John says, Lawrence, do you still want, uh, do I still want to try one of the local black bees from Stylian? As I saw he's got queens mated recently. Oh, I will have a look at that after this. Thank you very much. Uh, Matt Page says, 148 people watching, popular boy. Thank you very much. Jackie McCutcheon says, hi all, got my pretty new queen settled into a colony today. Thanks again, Lawrence. My pleasure. David Bisco, channel member, says, hi Lawrence, I did an inspection the other week on my 2 colonies. I had one queen marked and one queen unmarked. If people are wondering about the markings on our queens, we are trying to work on it, but there is there is an issue. I think they're saying that there's there's too much of a flow going on, like a honey flow, and it's causing issues with the bees just stripping the paint off the back of the queens. So we are we are working on on a fix. John Sylvester says greetings to you and your family, Lawrence. What's the difference between the F1 Buckfast and the UK F1 Buckfast? So the F1 Buckfast is the standard continental dogs. Continental Dark Star line from Melitta bees that we import, and then the UK F1 Buckfast is our own pure Buckfast that we brought in over the past few years that we used to graft and raise them back here in the UK. Uh, the following on from David's one, he says, during the inspection I couldn't find the marked queen, inspected the colony next door and she was in there happily laying. What do you think happened? Oh, I think— don't know. No idea. Million and one things could have happened there. You could have had a colony that superseded but didn't need to supersede, so you just got 2 decent queens in the colony. And then maybe the colony next door swarmed, didn't have a queen, and then the first colony kicked out one of the superseded queens and she just wandered into one next door. That could have happened. There are, like I say, a million and one explanations for that. Channel member says, hi Lawrence, I really enjoyed your series from Elite Bees. One question, What is the timeline for queens getting from them to you and from them to, from them to me? So we're very, very good in that. It is— they send them out, they come out. It's basically about 48 hours, maybe 72 hours, between 48 and 72 hours from Malta to the customer. Very, very quick turnaround. Uh, John says smash up the likes and subscribe. Thank you very much, John. Hi Lawrence, I'm in trouble. I have 2 nucs and a hive and they're being robbed. I've closed up the hives and covered them. 4 days later they were still buzzing around the hives. Help please. In that instance there, the simplest thing to do is just take your colonies and go and place them miles away somewhere else. Give them a fresh start. It really does kind of like break it, break that process, and they just don't know what to do. And you take the covers off and everything will be gone, and within a few weeks you can just bring them back again. Hi Lawrence, are you taking up tennis? Now I could be taking up tennis though with the white top, couldn't I? Uh, he also says, got my queen today from you. I was happy to see her. I still have my Black Mountain honey hives from last year. Nucs, do you leave any supers on during the June gap or remove and harvest and feed until the next flow starts? So there's lots of different ways of managing that June gap, but I think what you've said there is a very, very good way of doing it, especially if you know you want to split your hive. Say you want to split your hive into 2, use the June gap to your advantage. What I like to do, say you're on a single brood configuration, I take off all of the honey supers, every single one, But as I take them off, I put on a brand new brood box, I put on my polyasphalte feeder, and if the bees need it, I'll give them a couple of litres of 1:1 sugar syrup at that point. Over the next 2 weeks or so, as the flows come back on, I'm still feeding the bees, building them up, and then as the flow comes back, I can stop feeding and just split that colony into 2 with the 2 brood boxes and put the supers on, and away you go. You're going to have minimal contamination from any sugar syrup because the bees are going to have used most of that energy to just draw out all of that wax Foundation. Uh, My neighbor saw a hornet today. I haven't seen one yet. Should I put a trap out yet? Uh, should I put a trap out? I don't want to attract more. So you won't attract more by putting out the traps. Um, you should get the traps out, I would say. Thank you. I've already done a shook swarm split on them. I just want to move them away from the Langstroth to a national. It's a good shout, I would say. Uh, I'm looking to start my first ever hive. Can this be done any time of the year, or is there a time you'd recommend? It can be done kind of still now for the next maybe a few weeks, but possibly in that six weeks, and you still get a crop for 2025. If not, generally starts around April each year. Ian, channel member, says new nuc about four weeks ago. It's doing really well, but today three queen cells. There's like loads of space and only in the hive for four weeks. Any ideas? So I'll be doing a video specifically on this today. Bees do seem to come up against some sort of foundation, some types of foundation, and they just don't accept it or they see it as a war. They think they're restricted and they swarm when they've got space. Checkerboarding is the way forward here, and it might be enough to save your colony. Now, if you take down the queen cells and do some checkerboarding, likelihood is they're probably just going to create more. But if you're seeing the colony is not expanding in the way that you would like it to expand, you can checkerboard both in the brood box and in the super by placing frames of foundation in between frames of brood. And it, and it just seems to really stop the bees swarming and keep them busy, and they're just always drawing out foundation. And I find Bees that are drawing out foundation are happy bees. They don't get too angry. They don't swarm anywhere near as much. Uh, Nikki says, evening, queen arrived today, thank you. Any reason for the different style cage? So we had to get some more queens from a different supplier, a supplier that we use very, very often, just to make up for the huge demand. So we are, we are using both types of cage at the moment. Um, I like those cages though, where people say they don't like the blue ones. You'll like the, the JZ Beezy cages, they're called. They're impregnated with Queen pheromone, apparently very good for queen acceptance as well. But there's going to be no queens getting stuck in any of those cages because the tube is very, very, very, very thick. What you will note on it though, I put it on the back of the package. There's a bit of plastic tape over the top. The bees can't eat through that plastic tape, so that is effectively your tab. So once you're happy, you take the tab off and the bees will eat through the fondant. Lottie Hansford said, "Hi Lawrence, just wanted to jump on here and say how useful your content and lives are. I've learned so much from you over the years, and it's really built." my confidence to problem solve on the spot and help build my knowledge up. Thank you very much, Lottie. I like comments like that. I'm glad all the content has been so useful for you. G'day from New Zealand, just wondering if I was to purchase queens from you, do you know what the cost of freight would be? Unfortunately, we can't send queens anywhere outside of the UK, and definitely not all the way down to New Zealand, which is a shame. But yeah, I'm really sorry about that. Can you start beekeeping any season? I figured late winter, early spring is the the best. So I would say if you're going to pick a time, spring is the best time. Get your colonies maybe March, April, May, and then you get a full season of beekeeping in. Greetings from Romania, bad weather here, we must put syrup on and wait for good weather. It's just like it's flipped around. Surely Romania should be nice sunny warm weather, no? And the UK should be the one that's drizzly. Which ones would you recommend, the F1 or the UK, or does it matter? They are very, very similar. In terms of quality, those two. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't fret too much on it. Tipulo Stud says, "What is the difference between the nukes you sell Welsh versus UK?" So again, very little difference. Some of them are raised in Wales; some of them are raised in England. But we call the England ones raised in the UK. We call the Welsh ones raised in Wales. That is the only difference. They're very, very similar. Louis says, "Got amazing high five supers full, but found super seizure cell. Why would they betray her, and what should I?" they do. So when these colonies are expanding really, really rapidly, it does expose any defects or deficiencies in those queens. If they can't go as quick as the colony wants, they might say, you know what, you're just not up to this, up to the job. And the weather's so good at the moment, we've got like a real easy guaranteed supersedure cell here, gonna go out, gonna get mated, gonna come back perfect. So it's the bees hedging their bets, um, and I don't mind that. I, I'm all, I'm all kind of up for a straightforward middle of the season supersedure. If I find a single supersedure cell in a colony, I'll just leave them to it and see what happens in a few weeks' time. And if that supersedure fails, I can just kill both queens and add in a new one. I don't worry too much about supersedure cells. Do you have lost family bees last winter? Do you have any conclusion for this? I'm guessing you lost some bees over winter. That's not good. I don't like losing bees over winter, but it is always going to happen to everyone. What's your advice to go from double brood back to single brood after I've done a couple of splits with the premiums? Um, so I wouldn't— I'd only go back to single brood kind of at the end of the season. I would say it's much easier to do it at the end of the season. And do it at the end of the season is you just leave the bees on double brood going into winter, and then you probably remove the bottom brood box around like January, February, March time when there's nothing in it, all the bees have moved up to the top box. That is the easiest time to go from double brood to single through. Right, we've nearly reached the bottom, that's brilliant. Thank you for replying, unfortunately I have nowhere else to take my hives, am I doomed? Um, maybe move them somewhere else in the garden then, like ignore the 3-foot or 3-mile rule and just get them 20 meters away in the garden and that should give them a fighting chance. Question, would you recommend sugar bricks for winter as I'm concerned they may not have enough sugar syrup stores? Um, I like to feed my bees as much syrup as I possibly can going into winter and avoid sugar bricks or fondant wherever I possibly can, and I only really use that as an emergency. Hello from Virginia. Hello to you, Dan. Hello from Colorado. Hello to you too. Hit the like button and subscribe. Definitely, thanks, David. How often should you be checking a strong colony with the current weather to stop swarming? 7 days religiously. If you want to go down to 5 days, you'd be more effective, but 7 days is kind of where you need to be as a minimum. We've got 2 swarms this year into what, into a 10-frame, one in the nuc And the one in the nuc, we went in 14 days later and they drew the comb out great, but it wasn't attached to the frame and lost a whole half a frame. Very disappointing. Any help would help. You need to make sure that the foundation that you put in there is properly embedded in the frames with the wires going through it, because that will support the foundation as the bees start to build it up. Spoke yesterday evening for some advice. Can't thank you enough. Your bees are so chilled and brilliant. Love the man bun. Thank you very much, Ian. A trio of compliments there, much appreciated. Dorian Brown says hello from CT, US. Hello to you too. Dale Smith says, are we going to get an early dearth? What do you think? Almost certainly at the back end of the season. Uh, Matt Page says thank you, bud, you're awesome. Thank you, Matt. Louis Baldwin says queen's laying well, would you not just remove the supersedure? I, I'll take, I'll take it on the, the word of the bees that that queen needs to be superseded, so I just, I just let it go. And if the bees have got it wrong, they'll just accept it as well and keep the mated queen, so I just leave them leave them up to that one. Can you inspect hives too much? Definitely. I wouldn't inspect them any more really than every single week unless there was a genuine reason for me to be able to go in there. I had chalk brood, I killed a queen, I shake bees into the new hive, 24 hours later added a new queen, 8 days later there is no queen and no eggs. What should I do? I just started, it's the only hive that I have. Um, I would say that almost certainly that there's a virgin in there and the virgin has killed her, so you need to go in, find that virgin, kill the virgin before before you add in a new queen. Thanks, Lawrence. Great colorful bee suit, buddy. Could you possibly do us a quick sketch of the different placements, the different types of cells? I have no clue what type of cell I'm looking at. So I won't do a sketch because the sketch doesn't really tell you anything, and it is a myth about where they're placed. You have— if you're going into a colony and you find multiple cells, it's swarming. If you go into a colony and you find one cell, it's supersedure. And if you kill the queen, the next time you go back in, you're going to see these cells that have got a 90-degree kink in I've got a separate. There is a video knocking around, I think, on that one: swarm cells versus supercedure cells versus emergency cells. John will hook you up with that video, I'm sure. And that is the answer to that one there. What's the difference between a supercedure cell and a swarm cell? In terms of the cell, in terms of looking at it, absolutely nothing. They are identical. The difference is the impulse that the queens are trying to, that the colony is trying to use to replace that queen or to reproduce. Danny B says, "Evening guys. Only just dropped on. Clip my first queen today, and she proper played dead, rolled on her back so funny. Then she was." off. They always do it, don't they? Properly faint. Harvey said, did I miss the queen giveaway? No, we're taking it away from the live stream because people complained. Uh, Amco said, what is a virgin or whatever killed my queen? So before it's a mated queen, it is a virgin queen, and that is what you need to get killed, right? John says, sure, you're past 60 minutes, take a break. We are at the end. Thank you so much, everyone. It is every other week now, Let's Talk Bees, half 7, 7:30 PM BST. We're only going to do it for an hour though because I've just got a million and one things that I need to do, and I just need to prioritize things a little bit better going forward. But thank you for all the massive support. Hopefully the live content is useful, and I will see you all in a couple of weeks.