Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 36

Good evening and welcome to episode 36 of Let's Talk Bees. So we'll jump straight into it today. I've got my standard Pucca teas, chamomile fennel mix or whatever it is. Let's see if I can get kind of halfway through it this time. I'm going to start off with a sip because I never get anywhere near to the bottom of my cup of tea. I'm not gonna lie, I watched Griff's stream the other day, um, And I'm not competitive at all. Okay, strike that. I'm massively competitive, and I was a bit gutted that you got more viewers than me. So share the stream, get your friends involved. I do appreciate people coming and watching it. My competitive side says, you know, you had Richard Noel on there as well, so maybe he got a few more. But we have struck a dirty deal to say that we're not going to do a live stream on the same weekend again, because I do think that's a little bit fair— unfair even on everybody who's watching. You don't, you don't want to do that 2 days in a row. So Griff's stream is next week, and he's got a, a good special guest next week. It's not quite Richard Knoll, but he's got this, this random guy called Lawrence Edwards on. So it is me and Griff next week. So you will hear from me again next week. Um, if the weather, uh, anywhere in the UK is like it is in North Wales at the moment, it's absolutely hammering it down. The wind has stopped, but there's probably been like 3 inches of rain in the last hour. It is very, very wet indeed. So live Q&A, I'm just going to jump straight into it and answer as many questions as I can possibly answer in about an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours. We'll see how we go. I'm glad Arsenal won as well, for any other football fans out there. That always puts me in a much better mood than if they lost. So JK, first comment saying my live is at the same time as Cayman's, not good. So you got me worried there, but I looked and I did see his one come up, so I'm pretty sure that his is at 7 PM Eastern time, which is like one o'clock in the morning. So probably times quite nicely. I'll finish this one at maybe ten, can have a little bit of a break, and then go and watch Cayman stream. But good to see Cayman in action. Not seen or heard from Cayman in a while. Okay, first question of the night then. So from Ira or Ira Cromling, she says, "I have new hives but no bees yet. Should I put more wax on the frames? Nothing built out." So you can catch swarms. in kind of like naked beehives. I'm not going to tell you the best way to catch them though because I got in trouble from the NBU by giving out that advice previously and I have retracted all of that advice and do not give that advice anymore because it is very bad practice. So I won't even tell you what it is, but I guess some people could guess. However, you can catch them in kind of empty beehives. The important thing is the volume of the beehive. They reckon, I can't remember who it was who did the studies, but they say 40 litres is optimum, which is about a brood box and a super roughly for a national sizing. And then you want to have put wax, you basically want to make it smell like a beehive, so clean, pure, fresh, new beeswax. And then what they say is if you drop a little bit of lemongrass oil, kind of dab it in a little baggie and put that on some cotton wool and then seal it inside the hive, that's supposed to mimic queen pheromone to get the scout bees interested. And then you want to face it south or southeast and you want to place it up off the ground. going to be your best way of trying to get some bees to go in there. I would say though, it's probably easier just putting some posts out on Facebook to say, I'll come and collect swarms for free, and then you'll be annoyed come the end of the year how many people call you with swarm collection requests, and then you'll be able to fill as many beehives as you would like. Next question from Marcus Bug. He says, evening all, I noticed in a recent post that you mentioned putting supers on mid-April. Is this to reduce swarming or to start the production of honey? Being a newbie, I presumed it would be mid-May. So I again, I get in trouble from giving very rigid calendar-based advice to people in terms of supers, because if you're down on the south coast, it's going to be very different from if you're up in Scotland. And I've been following Murray McGregor on Twitter and his escapades with the weather at the moment, and apparently where he is in Scotland, it's not got above seven degrees really on any of the days yet, and the bees are working through all their stores and they're brooding a bit, but they're. they're struggling because there's just nothing coming in. There's no pollen coming in, there's no nectar coming in. And he just posted this evening, he said it's not supers that we're going to be getting on, it's feeders. We need to go back around and make sure that there's sufficient feed to keep the bees alive so that if it ever gets to the point where they're going to be bringing in some nectar later on in the year, they're alive and able to actually go and do it. But then you kind of compare that to people on the South Coast where the bees are completely bubbling over the top. I've seen swarms, I've seen 3 or 4 things that have been posted now with big prime swarms sitting in trees, and that is clearly down to the fact that the bees do not have enough space, so they're crammed in and they're swarming. And then I'm not going to say that it's like a linear line from the south coast up to Scotland, but you could be anywhere in between. And I'm really not a massive fan of putting supers on too early. I like to compress my bees down and keep them compressed as long as possible and kind of sit on my hands And I'll do the occasional inspection to see how they're getting on, but I like the ability to feed my bees early on in the year. And if you put the supers on, you immediately lose the facility to feed them in an easy way. And what's happened to me previously is I've gone around, thought I'm being really organized here, going out, putting all my supers on, and then we get weather like we've got at the moment. The bees can't fly, they're starving, they need feeding, and I had to go and take all the supers off. And it's really awkward taking supers off. So When would you realistically put your supers on? I would say if you've got lots and lots of stores in your brood box, maybe like 3 or 4 frames of stores, and your bees are bubbling, boiling out over the top, then you're not going to be that far away from doing it at the moment. Maybe a week away, a couple of weeks away, something like that. Your comment there saying it would be mid-May, mid-May for me would be like really, really too far the other way. They would definitely swarm. My colonies would have definitely swarmed by mid-May. I would say on an average year— and again, it's average year, kind of like average position in the country— I would say middle of April is about right for going out and putting your supers on. But you just have to look at the weather and see what it's doing. And if it's been sunny from the middle of March, then you need to get them on earlier. And if it's raining like it is here at the moment, it's going to be a little bit later. If you want to be On the side of caution, I would say you're better off leaving the supers a little bit, and you might lose swarms. So you could, you could leave the supers off but do the occasional inspection to make sure that they're not creating any swarm cells and continue to feed them. And I would say that's probably the safest bet for the next week, maybe 10 days. So Steve has put on there, is anyone adding supers yet? So it'd be interesting to see in the comments if, if people are adding supers. anyone has, or if anyone has lost swarms. I'm not adding supers yet at the moment, but I have got a few nucs that are just way in advance of where they should be, and I've got extension boxes on them. But I am feeding them heavily as well, and they're taking to it well. As long as, as long as you've got a few days where the bees can get out and they can get pollen, and they've got pollen on the frames, then they can do a lot in the beehive at this point in the year with you feeding them, feeding them one-to-one. If they've got pollen, they'll just create tons and tons of brood. If your bees— like up in Scotland, if you— if your bees can't get out and there's no pollen in the hive, it doesn't matter how much you feed them, they're not going to grow because there's no protein for the bees to rear the brood, to expand. Uh, so it's always, as always, a bit of a balancing act. I love that Lee Leatherbarrow, channel member, has come straight in by saying to people, hit the like button. Yes, I definitely agree. If you enjoy the streams, please do hit the like button. Next question from Brookley. Not sure if that's your real name, but he says, "Good evening, Lawrence. Just a quick question: Did you pre-treat the nucs you sent out recently with Apivar? Very pleased with the new colony, and we will rehab them, rehome them next week. All fed and doing well from Charles." I'm guessing Charles Dingwall. I do. I do recognize people's names when they come on. I'm guessing this is Charles Dingwall. Hi, Charles. So yes, all of our colonies treated with Apivar. And we treat with the Apivar very early on in the season, so kind of towards the earlier part of the summer. So it goes in about kind of like early August, middle of August. They get 8 weeks on the Apivar, and then they get treated with, uh, Apibioxal in like— it's changing, to be honest, when we're doing it. Used to do that middle of December, Christmas time. We like to do that now back end of November. So they are fully treated. I'm Glad to hear that they're doing well and you're going to rehome them. You're very pleased with it, but they will not need treating again till maybe middle of August, back end of August. Depends when you take your honey off. Peter, another channel member, says, "Hi all! Bit surprised to find capped drone brood in one of my colonies yesterday. Capped worker cells and larvae, so not drone laying queen. Bit early, perhaps a lack of space in hive. Any ideas, Tar?" So I've been going through a number of my hives this week, Peter, like. pretty much taking them all apart and having a look, seeing what's going on. And to my surprise, they're looking really, really good. I've not actually lost a single colony yet. I've had a couple of drone-laying queens that I've fixed, but I've not, I've not had any that are dead, which is really good. But I've got some of the breeder queens— I've got about 7 or 8 different breeder queens now— and I've been going through their colonies and they are firing, absolutely firing, the ones that I've been feeding up nicely. And there's tons of drone brood in them. So it will depend just completely on the bees and the position that they're in and the amount of stores that they've got. But I would say like it's not, it's not a million miles away from finding really good kind of capped frames of drone cells. The drones take considerably longer to emerge. I always forget, you know, I'm not, I'm not a charts man, but I think it's like 21 days, 22 days for a drone to emerge versus like nowhere near that much for like a queen. I think 16, isn't it? And then a worker one is 18, 19, I forget the numbers. I'm shocking with that. If I ever need to know that number, I'll just go and look at the chart. I'm not one for remembering facts, but I know that drones take considerably longer. So if you're going in and you're seeing like the first patch of drone brood or the first frame of drone brood and you're thinking, well, we can fast forward at least 3 weeks here, 3 and a bit weeks, so you're talking back end of April, it's probably not a million miles away. I would always expect them mid-May, I would say, is pretty much average for seeing sexually mature drones. You've got to think they've got to go out. They're not going to be sexually mature as soon as they emerge. So it is, it is a little bit early, but not completely crazy. So Chunky's been excited waiting for this all week. Good to hear. Right, let's get through to some questions. We're going to go serious on the questions today. We're going to try and answer every single question. Liam G says, hi Lawrence, I'm currently running double brood on 3 hives. When do you think I can expect my hives to want to swarm? So it's difficult to answer that one because there's so many different variables in there. I would say it mainly depends on the amount of stores that you're going to have within those colonies, because if you've got— you could have a double brood configuration with, say, 22 frames and 20 of them are full to the brim with stores, and you've just got bees on like 2 frames or brood on 2 frames. Like, if you're in that situation there, then the bees are just going to swarm straight away. They're going to think we've not got anywhere near enough space in here. But if they're pretty average, or maybe you've got like 2 or 3 frames of stores on each box and it's full of brood, what I always like to tell people to remember is like fast forward ahead. So for every single full capped frame of worker brood that you've got, 3 weeks later, that one single frame of capped worker brood is 3 frames of bees. So if you're sitting there and you've got a double brood configuration and you've got 12 frames of capped brood, which is Like you could have a lot more at this stage of the year, but say you've got 12 frames of capped brood, fast forward 3 weeks and that's 36 frames of bees plus all of the bees that are already in the hive. So you've got, I don't know, 12 frames of bees in the hive, it's 48 frames of bees in like a 22-frame hive. So for me, that's kind of like they're going to swarm because of that. And that's what I always like to do is to try and think ahead. So, and that's what— that's going to answer your question there. So when do you think, when can you expect your hives to swarm? if you, if you start counting up the amount of frames of brood that you've got, use the 3 times rule, work out how many bees you've got in there, and make sure that you've always given the bees sufficient space, then you try and keep ahead of them a little bit. But they can swarm. They could swarm in March, they could swarm in April, they could swarm in May. It's just a bit of probabilities, I guess. Hey Lawrence, have you ever considered making a top bar hive out of a few old scaffold boards? I think you should. Best wishes. So I have, I have thought about that. I think, I think someone messaged me saying that they were going to make me One. I do like the idea of of playing around with top bar hives. I think I think I will. I think I will do one this season. It's a good shout amongst other videos that I've got lined up for this year. Ian UK says, "Hi, I checked both of my hives that were knocked over two weeks ago. As you suspected, both queens okay. Good to hear. I definitely recommend ratchet straps. Without them, my hives would have died out for sure." So I I couldn't agree with you more. Ratchet straps, proper ratchet straps. And I'm I've never liked span set straps, but all of the bee farmers seem to really. Like them, and I think it's probably me, I can't use them properly. But I, I just like the simplicity of like a cheap ratchet strap. But what I like to do is really ratchet them down super, super hard, but then make sure that I'm ratcheting them to like the pallet or ratcheting them to this, to like the frame or the stand that they're on. Because like, you look at the weather outside today, it's like 50, 60 mile an hour winds here. If I didn't have them ratcheted down and I'd kind of been going in poking around and they weren't— well, they're not propolised together anymore because I've been opening them up, then the roofs would have gone like they'd be just blown all over the place. So I'm always really confident that my, my hives aren't going anywhere because I know they're both ratcheted up together and ratcheted to the stands. I would recommend it, definitely, definitely something that you should do. And you can see there from Ian that it saved both of his queens there. I love it. Gareth says, Gareth says the ultra-competitive world of beekeeping YouTubers, you and Griff are like Sly Stallone and Arnold. Very good. I hope, I hope I'm Arnold. Stallone's got a bit of a melty face, I think, for me. Uh, John Hayes says, evening Lawrence, when should I switch to 1:1 syrup? Now feels right. So if you're talking about a switch from fondant to 1:1 syrup, you can definitely go for that now. A bit like my bees have been taking syrup down for a good 4 weeks now. Yeah, and I think kind of for next year you can, you can start feeding syrup really, really early on. You don't need to feed them lots, and I wouldn't go and fill any of the feeders up. And I think it's a good time of the year to use something like Hive Alive to get some thymol into the bees, and it stops them, stops the syrup going mouldy at any point as well. But as long as you get like 1 or 2 days over 12 degrees, the bees will just go up and they'll clear the feeder out, stick it down in the frames, and then they'll just use it as they need it. It's much less work for the bees as well. So I only really use fondant when it's like cold, like emergency feed in the middle of winter. I like to switch over to syrup early on. And it's just worth noting as well, you can feed any syrup in the spring. I know that the standard advice is 1:1 syrup in the spring to simulate a flow and to stimulate the queen, but 2:1 will, will do exactly the same thing. That doesn't apply in the winter though. So in the winter, you definitely do not want to feed One to one syrup. It causes lots of issues if you feed one to one, and it gives the bees too much work to do at a time where they just want to be storing nice thick syrup. But for anybody, I think on on here, then you could be feeding syrup now. Prees Prees Hack. I think that's how you say it. He says the Discord is looking good in it. Yeah, so I agree. It's looking good. I I have to say I'm I'm a complete dinosaur when it comes to tech, and it's annoying because. know, I wasn't always a dinosaur, but Discords were not my thing. But I looked into them and someone messaged me about 3 weeks— 3 years ago saying, you should set up a Discord server. And I said, oh yeah, but do we need a Discord server? Because I kind of got a Facebook group that does pretty much the same. And he properly like just— he's like, you're such an old man, it's completely different. And I did think at that time, I'm not sure. I'm not sure the No Nonsense Beekeeping community is ready for a Discord server. And for anybody who, who doesn't know what I'm talking about, I'm sure there's plenty of people out there is a Discord server. It is a place to chill. It is a place to hang out. It is a place to share information in a really fun, interactive, and kind of media-rich way. So you can, you can talk to people, you can chat to people, you can live stream, you can watch live streams together, you can video call them, you can upload videos, you can upload pictures, you can talk and break off into little separate groups. It's really, really good. But like I said, I'm a dinosaur, so I don't know how to set these things up. But I've done my best and I've set it up. And someone got in contact with me, uh, 3 or 4 days ago and they said, they said, well done for setting up the Discord server, like it's good, and that we think that beekeeping needs a Discord server. But they said your Discord server is absolutely rubbish, really, really rubbish. Um, I've been, I've been a member of thousands of Discord servers and I've managed hundreds of them, and I'd love to, I'd love to manage yours and make it good and make it work. And I was just thinking Oh yeah, that is that is what we're talking about. So he's he's employed now. Not sure not sure we agreed a salary, but he's definitely doing it and fixing it and making the Discord server good. So I'm really excited about that because I do think that is going to be the future of beekeeping, and I love dipping in and seeing what people are talking about on there. And I just love I love the the fact that you can see that there's people online, so you can go in and get advice. And I'd love to get it to a point where you've got like resident experts. So you know if someone's particularly good at I don't know making cut comb honey. can be like the resident expert for a certain area and they can give you the advice. I just think it is one for the future. And if you have not already subscribed, definitely get on there and add yourself onto the Discord server because it is cool. Thanks for the 2 queens, Lawrence. Arrived perfect and look good. Excited about the other 3 for Thursday. Yep, you're all booked in. Glad the queens have arrived. Should probably have mentioned that really, shouldn't I, that we started selling queens and that they sent out. So we had the first 400 arrived this week and they're gone. Um, I'm just looking at my calendar. I have to have a proper calendar here now because the dates just get a little bit too much at this time of the year. But the next queens coming on Wednesday, and they're basically sold out. I've got— Richard wants 100 of them, and I've said— we said I can take 70, I can take 100. So we're kind of in that 70 to 100 stage at the moment. So if you're thinking of buying queens for next week, I'd be quick. I would suggest that they were probably going to sell out Like tomorrow, day after, maybe have a sip of tea. And then we've got the next, next batch of queens coming in. So queens coming in every week now, 400 queens every week. And we've got the nucs going out as well. So every single person who has ordered a nuc now from Black Mountain Honey has been given a date for collection or delivery. And I've also gone ahead and put out another batch of nucs for delivery back end of June. And I just, I can't believe I put them up this morning. I think we've already sold like 12 or something like that in a day, so they're not going to last very long at all. So if you do want another nuc, there are a few nucs available for the back end of June. Can I ask a question please? Of course you can, good sir. He says, when a queen is clipped and she drops to the floor, do you find her and then place her back in a nuc with a couple of frames? What happens if she can't be found or dies? So really good question, because you, you would think that the queens, you know, they've got clipped wings— I didn't know they've got clipped wings— they go out and try and fly and they just fall into the floor. I've never ever found a queen or, or lost a clipped queen because she's gone out of the hive and fallen on the floor. She does, she does one, one of two things. So more, more likely what happens is the colony tries to swarm with the original clipped queen, and if you've got a mesh floor, so like an underfloor entrance or, or like an open mesh floor, she's underneath it clustered up with a big swarm. So there's a big swarm underneath the mesh floor, and inside it somewhere is that clipped queen because she couldn't fly off. I would say that's slightly rarer though than what I find because I do a 7-day rotation, so I inspect every single colony every 7 days. So what I always find is if you're going out and looking to your colonies and you see like capped swarm cells, you generally don't find the queen there because the second they cap the swarm cells over, they take off with the new queen if she's not clipped. However, if you've got a clipped queen in there, what I find— and this is what I find on a 7-day rotation— is I'll just go in I'll find capped swarm cells, probably like a day capped, and the queen's just still there. And then what happens in that instance is the queen just decides to not fly off because she clearly realizes that she can't. So you might think, well, just what happens in that situation? So what does happen in that situation there is that the colony still swarms, but they swarm with the first emerging virgin. I love, I love saying emerging virgins, it's good, isn't it? But the first emerging virgin will take the prime swarm with it and then leaves the, the kind of rest of the queen cells in there and the clipped queen to fight it out. Generally the clipped queen that wins that battle because she just goes around killing all the virgins as they come out. So you can't just clip your queen and leave it and think that they're not going to swarm. They still do swarm one way or another. You still lose half of the bees. Um, but I've never ever once had a clipped queen like that I've lost, or that's just kind of like fallen. front of the hive and wasn't there. And for anybody who hasn't clipped their queens, clip your queens. Brilliant. Everybody should clip their queens. And I realized that I give that advice out to a lot of people, and then I get a lot of calls saying, can you clip the queen in my nuc? Or can you clip the queen for the queen that I'm buying? And unfortunately, I can't. I can't do any of that. And the reason being is that if we— we don't like to clip queens in advance because Most people don't want their queens clipped, but we find if we clip the queens like just before we send them in a nuc, for example, for some reason the bees don't like it. And we've had it a couple of times that we've done it and the queens have been killed in the nucs. So we don't clip the queens in advance. And then similarly, I'd never introduce a clipped queen into a colony because the colony just doesn't like it and they think there's something wrong with the queen. They're like, no, no, she's defective. gonna supersede her straight away. So we always recommend introducing an unclipped queen, and then once 3 or 4 weeks later, you can go ahead and you can clip her, and it is a very easy process. Says, I love your streams and look forward to them. I learn so much from them and actually prefer them to Griff's so far, so don't put yourself down. I don't know, I like Griff's one. He's got a good accent, hasn't he? He's going off on a slightly different angle, which I think is good, and I'm very excited to be be his guest next week and to talk about everything to do with bees. Marcus at Walker Bee Honey says Ormskirk and Croston Beekeepers Association has their beekeeping course today, 45 attended, and we recommended they all subscribe to your site. Excellent, that's very kind, I really appreciate that. Some of the beekeeping associations don't like me, so I appreciate it when people at beekeeping associations do give the recommendations out. For anybody thinking why why don't they like me? I'm not suggesting that anybody should like me, but, uh, it's because I keep Buckfast bees, and not all beekeeping associations are massive fans of people who do not keep dark black native bees. A shame. Hi Lawrence, could you run over how I could start grafting from my best hive and what I would need to get to do this? Uh, so yeah, we It's surprisingly asked a lot, this question, which is, I've got like a few hives in my back garden, I want to do some queen rearing. I— the, the method that I use is the 10 over 10 method from Michael Palmer, and admittedly it's not, it's not really suited for backyard beekeeping. It's quite resource heavy at the beginning, and you can break it back down again. But I think the, the video that I did with Richard and the method that Richard uses perfect, absolutely perfect for getting some queens. And, uh, it's Richard's method. I'm not an expert on it, so I'm not going to try and describe it to you. But if you go onto the website, onto the YouTube channel, and have a look at how to rear queens, it's the one with like the pink text on the thumbnail. I think it's got pink text on the thumbnail. Definitely got pink text in it somewhere. Um, but in terms of what you actually need to get going with grafting, like, you really do not need much. You need a grafting frame which you can buy from Abello. My, my Abello top, you see that? Again, my Abello top on today, completely coincidentally. They sell grafting frames. Basically any beekeeping sales shop is going to sell this. You want a grafting frame and then you want some sort of cup to go into it. And what I'm— I really, really like the JZ Beezy cups. They're so much better than the Nikko ones. I hate the Nikko kit. I know a lot of people use the Nikko kit. I do not like the Nikko kit whatsoever. It's too fiddly to put together. Whereas the JZBZ cups are just like single molded cups that just slide into a frame bar. So if you, if you speak to Abello, they will put you right on this. You want one individual grafting frame, and then you want some JZBZ cups, and then you want a grafting tool. And it's a weird— grafting tools are kind of like, I don't know, like maybe like a, a particular pen that someone would like. The most expensive one isn't generally the best one at all. I like the Chinese grafting tool. which is like the cheapest one that you can possibly get. And I just, I find it so much easier, so much more flexible. But that's basically it in terms of what you need. You need a grafting frame, you need a grafting tool, and you need some JZBZ cups. And that's literally everything you need to get started raising your own queens. And then, you know, you'll need some other nucs, you'll need some other boxes, you need some other frames and stuff like that, but nothing that you won't have already. But watch that video from Richard because that gives you a really good technique that you can use on a single colony using a queen right method. So you're not taking any resources to go in and do it, you're just splitting the bees in a certain way and putting a board in, in a certain orientation to mean that you've got lots of nurse bees where you want them. Hi Lawrence, could I ask what you do with the extra frames when condensing from double brood to single for winter? Do you try and leave all the brood? So I don't necessarily always condense from double brood to single brood for winter. I just leave it. Leave it as it is. It gives you the issue of what you do with all the extra frames, especially if there's brood in there. There's no way I'd ever take any brood out of a colony because I think, well, what am I going to do with it? And I don't want to take it out of one colony and put it into another colony because then you're just introducing an unnecessary disease risk. And I think for me, this comes back to the question that I got challenged on a lot last few weeks in terms of double brooding in the spring. if you're on a single brood and you want to go to a double brood, about putting the box underneath. And I think a few people have tried it, a few people have been really happy with it and shown that it's a good method. It is a good method, I've used it a lot. But generally for me, I'll just leave them on double brood. I don't see any problem with just leaving them on double brood. I wouldn't even switch them around. You leave the additional frames in there, you leave the additional brood in there, and what you'll find is that the bees, they'll start at the bottom And they'll go into winter, like late summer, with brood at the bottom, food at the top, and they finish the year just in the top box, and the bottom box is just empty. So all of the brood has emerged and they just travel up to the top. So then what you can do is you can just take the box out if you want to revert to a single brood for, for like the summer, which a lot of people do because you'll get more honey, but it is a little bit more tricky in terms of swarm management. Or what you could do in that scenario there is just switch the boxes around. So then you take the box of bees and put that at the bottom, then you put the other box on the top, obviously once it's a bit warmer and the bees can cope with that, and then they'll start to expand. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that, I wouldn't change it round. If you are going to do that, like what you're going to do with the frames, you're just, you're going to have to store the frames somewhere. I would say whatever you do, make sure you don't take any brood out. You can't store brood frames with actual brood in it, it will just go really manky really quickly. Even if you just take out completely empty brood frames, they are the perfect magnet for wax moth. That is what wax moth eats, and that is what they will destroy. So you're going to need to keep them somewhere where you get a good frost, or you're going to need to keep them completely sealed up from absolutely everything. But then if you do that and you've got like nice frames of stores, then you can just make splits with them in the spring. So there is a benefit to doing it, but it's not something that we do. Thoughts on using cells from a demerara to create splits? So for me, definitely not, for 2 reasons. So one, the splits that are made at the top of a Demaray emergency cell, because they're made because the queen pheromone is not reaching up to the top box. I never like requeening from an emergency cell because I don't think they make the best queens. Maybe a subjective opinion, but that's just me. And then the other way around of doing it is I see a lot of people saying, right, I'm going to do a Demaray because I've got swarm cells in my colony. Way too late for a demeray. A demeray needs to be done preemptively or proactively. You can't do like a reactive demeray; doesn't work. It just it fails every single time. You need to do an artificial swarm or make some sort of split if you get swarm cells. On on the topic of demeray, I would say the demeray is the number one thing that I get questioned about now, which is like when can I when can I do a demeray? Or what, what do I do with the top box of honey that's, uh, in Apivar-tainted frames? Um, so I talk a lot about demerays, and it's— it might be like— it might have turned into like quite a fashionable topic, a demeray, or like something that you just think that you should do because other people are doing it. And maybe people think they're doing it at the wrong time of the year. So I've seen so many people saying, right, I'm going to do a demeray this weekend, like now, and, and it's just way, way too early to do a Demaray. So for me, a Demaray split for me is for one, one reason only, which is I want to stop my bees swarming as best as I can, and I don't want to increase my colony numbers. So it's the combination of those 2 things. Demaray gives you both of those things. It means that you don't need to split your colonies, and you've got a way to try and stop them swarming. But in order to do that, like, the first Demaray of the year is the most important Demaray of the year. and it's all in the timing. So if you're doing it in April, you're not really timing it for like prime swarm season for us. And again, I don't like giving out calendar dates and saying this, this is— we do it middle of May-ish, you know, we'll look at the weather and take that into account, but we do it the middle of May. But then the other prerequisite that I'll throw in there, which is a good prerequisite and a good way to understand like when you should be doing it, is that your brood box needs to be full to the brim with bees, absolutely full to the brim with bees, and you need to have 2 supers on the colony, and both of those supers— 2 supers at a minimum— need to be absolutely full to the brim with bees. That is the bare minimum for a demarée. If you've got anything less than that, don't do it yet, it's too early. So if you've got a brood box full and one super full of bees and you're thinking, I want to put another super on, just put the other super on. You need those 3 things as a prerequisite: one brood box, one super, and another super, all full of bees, and then you can go ahead and do it. Well, I'm going to catch my breath. I'm going to drink a bit of tea. 124, we're getting up there. We need to get to 200 tonight because I'm a bit gutted that Griff on his first live stream got to 200. But you know, not competitive, right? About an 8th of the way through the tea. Harry says some people's bees are struggling and goes to show how different it is. Down in Devon, I have 2 colonies that have been split twice each and still have 8 frames of brood. So perfect example of my point there. Down in Devon, it's going to be very different from people up in Scotland who the bees have probably not broken cluster yet in Scotland. It is very much dependent on the genetics of bees as well though, so people who have got like local or native or near-native bees don't produce anywhere near as much brood early on in the season, and I hear people who like their native bees kind of say, well, you know, that's a big benefit, like they respond more to the seasons, And I think, yeah, but you know, they might do, they might survive a little bit longer, but I'm pretty sure my buckfast would survive if I didn't take any honey from them, like you've not taken any honey from your bees. So if I left the 200 pounds of honey that was on, I reckon they would get through without me feeding them. I only need to feed them because I've taken all their honey, but they tend to omit that slight piece of information. Sorry, I shouldn't, I shouldn't be so cynical. Right, says, I caught 3 swarms last year in May in my back garden in a plastic bucket, 10-gallon, with lemongrass oil and melted beeswax in Inside. Oh, that's excellent. That's good. So it does work. It's not just—it's not just a beekeeping myth. I catching swarms was so easy the other way, but it really isn't good practice. So I'm not even going to say what it is. Michael Martin says, "Hi, it's Michael from Scotland. We spoke through the week. Thanks for the advice." That's no problem. It's—it's—it's quite amazing the amount of calls and texts and emails and stuff that I get at the moment. Up until last year, I didn't really advertise my phone number so much on the website, but it is on the website now, and people are using it for advice, which is exactly what I told them to do, which was, you know, text me, call me, email me, WhatsApp me. WhatsApp's my favorite out of all those communication channels, I have to say, because it kind of gives you that visual as well. So if people are saying, oh, I don't like the look of this, or my colony is going to swarm, what do you think? when they're talking through it, it's quite difficult. You need to visualize it. So I do, I do like WhatsApp as a communication channel. Right, John Hayes says, uh, 2SO, not sure what that means. Queen arrives on the 17th, when should I make the split with the double brood? Same apiary. Should we let queen cells form, remove them, put caged in for 7 days before release, or caged queen in same-day split? Interesting you say that. I do it both ways, but I would say best practice is definitely time the queen to arrive on day 8. Yeah, day 8. So you kill your queen, original queen, work out what day 8 is and get your queen to arrive on day 8. And then what you can do is you take your queen down to the apiary, open up the colony. You can have loads of emergency queen cells there. They're all going to be capped. Shake every single frame, really important there. Shake every single frame, kill all of the emergency queen cells, put your queen in, leave it for 24 hours, and then come back and pop the tabs. And then really be patient at this point. point, don't go back in for another week. Just leave it, leave it for a week. What I like to add into that as well that's not on the advice at the moment is that if you've got a feeder on, a feeder at that point really does help with the introduction. It helps keep the queen kind of like in prime condition because it means that the nurse bees can feed and then they can produce kind of sufficient royal jelly to feed that queen up nicely. Helps with introduction. Next question. South Saxia, is it? She says, I did High Wield BKO Swarm course today. Thanks to them for that. Would love to hear your thoughts on nuc splitting preventions. So I'm glad you enjoyed the course. That's good. So nuc splitting prevention. I'm not sure I 100% understand the question there. Can you? If you, I will jump back down to the bottom in a second. If you just kind of like reclarify what that means. I'm not. I'm not entirely sure nuc splitting preventions what that means. Sorry about that. David McDowell says, had to requeen one of my hives. Old queen bees got rid of her in Feb. Colony is so strong, no eggs or brood for about a month. Don't want to shake them out, it's too strong. What's the best introduction of a queen? Uh, it's interesting that I had a colony, I think I did it last year, where I went in, popped open the— popped open the roof, and you could see just so many bees like boiling over the top. Probably first week of April this was, and I was like, oh Yeah, looking good, is exactly what I want to see. And I got like 3 frames in, I was like, there's no brood, there's no brood, literally not a single cell of brood anywhere. And there was no queen, there was just nothing in it. And it was really weird. And, and I think what happens in that scenario is, is you've got a perfectly good queen in there, like, at the time, and she gets out of the spring, or kind of like into the spring, and she says, right, I'm gonna go now, I'm gonna give it my best. And she lays like 10 brilliant frames of brood, and then she's just like, oh, and dead. And she probably dies like just as the brood is capped over, and, and then that's it. And then the bees have got no chance of creating any cells out of her. I reckon that's probably what's happened there. So the introduction of a queen for that one is, is really easy, which is there's no queen, there's no virgins, there's no brood, they're hopelessly queenless. I just put the queen in straight away. And in that situation, I wouldn't even wait 24 hours. I would just put the cage in, pop the tab straight away, and just let them eat through. And, and that's what I did with that colony, and they were, they were fine. Says she's put some supers on some in South Yorkshire. It's interesting. Like I said, there's no, there's no judging here. I do think it's very much location dependent and kind of weather dependent, and depends how much stores you've got in your brood box as well. But we're not a million— I'm not a million miles away from going and putting mine on as well. But I do wish it would stop raining, doing my head in. Uh, Lee has shared the link to the beginners WhatsApp group. Excellent. So hello, any beginners that Lee has shared the link to, welcome to Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards. Been waiting to do that for ages. Says he's already got drones in the brood boxes. That's good to hear, should be a healthy colony as long as there's lots of nice capped worker brood with it as well. drones, I think, is the sign of a very healthy and vibrant colony. Put my supers on today just in case I'm away working for just over a week. So I think that's a good tip as well and good bit of advice. If you know you're going to be going away and you think that your bees have not got anywhere near enough space, but you're confident that they've got enough stores with the temperature as it is at the moment, you can go ahead and you can put your supers on. There's nothing stopping you putting the supers on in terms of temperature. Like where I am or anything further south. Scotland is different. Scotland, it's not even got to like double-digit temperatures, so you could do a fair bit of damage by putting supers on a colony like that, um, so early on in the year. Hollow Oak Stores put their supers on yesterday. I've been speaking— I've been speaking to Nikki from Hollow Oak Stores. Hi Nikki! Today, and, and I spoke to Nikki and she said— she said, I think it was after the stream a couple of weeks ago, you said you were going to send me some nice soaps arms. And you did, and they were beautiful and very gratefully received. And then we were chatting, we were chatting, and I said, these, these are amazing, you need to send me some videos of you making the soap. And I've just downloaded all your videos, and that's absolutely amazing. So we're going to do some how to make soap with Nikki from Hollow Oak Stores, and she's given us discount code as well. So I think it is— you can correct me if I'm wrong, Nikki— but it is BMH10. I think I'll put it in the comments there. Um, and if you go on to— if you go into Hollow Oak Stores, you get 10% off all of her amazing soaps and lips and— not lips, lip balms. There you go, soaps and lip balms and, and all different cool things. But I'm really, really looking forward to, uh, doing those videos. It'd be really cool. Well, I just rolled all the way down to the bottom and I realized that there is a huge amount of comments and questions, so I better get— better get going, right? Steve's Honeybee says, inspected today Wrong footwear had trainers. Wrong foot. Okay. Wrong footwear had trainers on. Got dozens of stings to the ankles. Lessons learned. Wear wellies all the time. Painful. Isn't they? Is really bad when they get you on the ankles. Yeah, definitely. Harry's put me right on the the timings. That's shocking. I got that well wrong. Twenty one days for worker and twenty seven for drone. Is that right? Double double check that. That seems that seems like a bit. I'm not going to question it. I don't know the answer. I'm guessing you've Googled it. JK says 26 days ripe. Okay, I need to, I need to swap up. Well, that's, that's dead. I know that's definitely not right. Arctic Beekeeping. Oh, I think he has corrected himself under there. There we go. That's more, that's more what I thought. Okay, 24 days. So it goes to show, when people say to me, why would you do like, um, a master beekeeper examination? Well, why don't you do it? And there's the reason, because I definitely fail it. They ask you questions like that and I'd just be like, I don't know, I just, if I need to know that, I'll go look on Google. And apparently you're not allowed to look on Google while you do the exam. Right, here we go. Right, says, sorry, bees are ahead and on oilseed. I'm a bit gutted we've not got anywhere near as much oilseed rape around us this year. I'm a massive fan of oilseed rape, if for nothing else other than making small splits and letting the bees just gather copious amounts of pollen. Um, I like the honey as well. Inspection done today in Hampshire and swarm cells aplenty. Don't be seduced by bad weather and keep an eye on them. I think that is also very, very good advice. Like, you see, you see some people very like smug saying, yeah, well, you know, it's not beekeeping season yet, it's not shorts and t-shirt weather, won't be looking in my colonies. And you just think, you probably should look inside some of them because They could be starving. I guess they're hefting, but they could be swarming as well due to lack of space. It's warm, and the bees will respond to the length of the day and the temperature kind of more than the weather, and if they want to swarm, they'll just find a little 2-hour slot and they'll go out and swarm. So it's getting to the point where I think we start to need to do regular inspections. Apparently that's a a show that I should know, but I don't. So says, I think double brood are great because you can either split if you want more or demerit if you want big colonies. Yeah, I'm a massive, massive fan of double brood. Really like it. Says, looking to split around the beginning of May from a strong colony. Would it be wise to give the parent colony a blast of apibioxal to reduce the phoretic mite load before taking the split? I wouldn't bother. I honestly wouldn't bother because at this point of the year, that if you treat— if you treated last year, the mite load's not going to be that high anyway. And okay, you're going to be getting rid of the phoretic mites or reducing the phoretic mite load, but that's, I think, only like 10 or 20% of the mites. So if you— even if you took out 50% of them, I don't think it's going to have a massive impact. Saying that, it's not going to do any damage, so you could go ahead and do it, but I wouldn't bother. Evening, Laurence. What got you into beekeeping in the first place? So I had swarm land in the garden, beekeeper took it away, and then this swarm landed in the garden the same time the next week. And I thought, definitely having these. And then it completely changed my life. I went from 1 colony to 4 colonies to like 30 in like 18 months, and then went from 30 to 150 in 2 years, and then realized that I didn't have a clue what I was doing, and then like condensed it down a little bit. Um, but yeah, I enjoy it. I do like beekeeping. It's great. I love— what I love more than anything is like the first couple of times going into bees and like the smell of propolis and like the smell of bees when it kind of gets into your veil. I love it. Right, Steve's Honeybee says, I've seen 2 swarms advertised on local Facebook pages this week. So yeah, it's getting out there. Swarm wars. Swarm Wars is definitely back. Uh, says Club A pre-open today, 9 hives, no losses, supers on most of them. Excellent, well, that's good, someone knows what they're doing. Uh, Hi Michael, he says good afternoon, not worrying about swarms in New Hampshire, USA, got a foot of snow 2 days ago. Wow, proper snow. He's a fan of Discord, he says Discord is great, I've made a new bee friend. Excellent, good to hear. Chunky says, hi Lawrence, I'm receiving my nuc from you soon. What would be your strategy for this nuc? Should I split it to give me a fail-safe for the winter, or keep them as one colony and go for the honey? Without a doubt, I would say split it. But I, I had, I had a message from someone saying, can I send them 3 queens with their nuc, um, so they could like basically when the day that the nuc arrives, they want to split it into 4 colonies? And I was like, whoa, we definitely can't do that. So I would just take one nuc out. That's the best way to do it. And get your 6-frame nuc, put it into a colony, build it up, get it onto like completely filling the brood box— not completely, get it, get it to 80% filling the brood box— then start putting your supers on. And every time you get to the top box is 80% full, you put another super on. And then once you get to like 2 or 3 supers, maybe like back end of June, early July, Just take a split out, take a 3 or 4 frame split out, put it in the nuc, and it's not going to dent your honey crop that much at all, taking such a small split out at that time of the year, because all of the other brood's just going to emerge and you're going to have tons of bees anyway. And then you've got backup, you've got a failsafe going into winter. Always advise people 2, 2 is the best, kind of like 2 is the minimum, 3 if you possibly can, but don't put all your eggs in one colony getting through the year. And if you're going to put all your eggs In the kind of one colony getting through the year basket, definitely treat them for varroa and definitely treat them early. Don't be putting apivar strips in in October; get them in nice and early. Bada bing bada boom! Like that channel member says, channel member for eight months. Congratulations on the eight month anniversary, by the way. Says no idea what this does, but hey, just back from the bees. We got them from my father-in-law, dairy farmer, old material. Nice, but hard to work with. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how you've done that. You've got like a fancy, fancy different color coming up. That's pretty cool. Good, good to hear you got some bees though. Herd and Hive says, "Hope you enjoyed your goat's milk soap. Have you tried them all?" So no, I've not. So Herd and Hive, I should give them a shout out as well in terms of soaps because they came along and got my longhives that were smashed up, which was did me a massive favor. So I hope you're well underway. uh, fixing them, and they're not as bad as you thought they might be, or as bad as they possibly were. But I did— I love the goat's milk soap. So no, I've not worked my way through all of them, but I've— we've just been using one that is very nearly finished now. So I've been using the, the mint and poppy seed goat's milk soap. I literally wash my hands— you see how clean my hands are? I wash my hands with it like 5 minutes before this stream, and I love how like moisturizing it is. It's very— it's very moisturizing soap. So I did, I did enjoy that. So I've not tried them all yet, I'm just working through them one by one, but thank you, that was a great gift. Managing emergency cells in a lower— sorry, in an overwintered hive at the moment. There are 2 fully capped over, 1 half. Suggestions please, Lawrence. So if they're— are they definitely emergency cells? He killed the queen. Uh, it's frustrating to kill the queen at this time of the year, but if that was in my colony really, really straightforward what to do there, which is just wait until they're all capped over and just take them all down, shake all the bees off, take them all down, and add in a mated queen. And that might sound like I'm, I'm plugging our mated queens— they're good, blackmountainhoney.co.uk— but get anyone's mated queens. Don't, don't try and let the virgins emerge and get mated at this time of the year because you've got zero chance of getting a queen mated in the current weather anywhere in the UK. There's not going to be a sufficient amount of mature drones So I wouldn't, I wouldn't try it. Definitely kill them and requeen. Lynette says, Club Apri opened today, my first time inspecting bees and I loved it. 9 out of 9 hives survived winter, 5 people inspecting and learning, and no stings at all. We have happy ladies so far. Excellent, that's good to hear. Uh, Bada Bing Bada Boom says, on the Discord server invite in the description is invalid, expired mostly. Okay, well let me, let me just quickly do a New invite while we're talking here. Oh, it's gonna—I'm gonna do something crazy now. Break something while I'm on it. Where's that there? Right, here we go. Right, invite, invite, invite. All right, everything's changed. Everything's changed. Well, I'm not going to do that now. The guy—the guy who's fixing it has made it look loads better. To be fair, that's the first time I've looked at it. I will—I'll send—I'll send one out and I'll make sure that it's not expired. They shouldn't have been expired. I thought I clicked the button to say that they should never expire. Right, Kevin James says, hi Lawrence, help! My hive swarmed 2 weeks ago and then we had 10 days of really bad weather. Then it cast 4 swarms within 24 hours. I found 21 queens. Can I combine smaller swarms? I'm overwhelmed. So wow, that— I, I'm not surprised you are overwhelmed. That is a seriously bad news story there. So let's just read that again. Your hive swarmed 2 weeks ago, so that's kind of like back end of March. Uh, 10 days of really bad weather, forecast swarms, and you found 21 queens. Can I combine smaller swarms? I'm overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed talking about it. So yes, you can combine smaller swarms. Just chuck them in, chuck them all in together. Don't worry about chucking in multiple virgins, they will just kill each other and you'll just get left with one. Um, if it was me, I would even consider just combining them all back into a single box. I don't think they'll— I don't think they'll try and cast out and swarm again because they're not going to have any brood to be able to do it. And I don't think that— I don't think the virgins that are in there are going to get settled enough to take any bees away with them. Might happen, but you're definitely not going to get 4 swarms. I would just chuck everything you've got back into one hive and, and just close them up for a little bit. Close them up for 24 hours, make sure that they're well ventilated, give them a feed, give them something to do, and then let the virgins kill each other. Um, I'm not sure what you're going to do next. Again, I wouldn't, I wouldn't let the virgins go out and try and attempt to mate in this weather because I just think, I just don't think you're going to get them mated. But trying to introduce a queen into that is going to be very, very difficult because you need to ensure that all of the queens are dead, and it'll be quite difficult to do. But I'm really interested to hear how that goes. Uh, it is overwhelming and it can be quite difficult, but, um, it does get— it does get a bit easier. And I think knowing what you know now, maybe you'll give them a bit more space next year if you're somewhere— you're probably quite far south, um, if they swarmed that early, I would reckon. Be careful of the scammers of the Discord channel, get them all the time. Good shout. Frolics Bee says, hi Lawrence, I need to get a queen off you soon. I have one hive that has no eggs and can't see a queen. I gave them a frame, but I think I'll need to get a queen for them. So again, giving, giving a colony a frame of eggs at this point in the year doesn't really do anything other than tell you whether there's a queen in there or not. So it's worthwhile for you to understand whether there's a queen in there. If they draw out emergency cells, there isn't a queen, and if they don't, then there is a queen. But it's just too early. It's too early to do any form of walkaway split, any sort of queen mating in the UK at the moment. You just, you literally do not have a chance. Like, even on the days where it's warm, you'll get like, it's too much wind. You need like really nice, still, calm days for good queen mating, and I don't think we've got them at the moment, certainly not where we are. When doing a split in the same apiary, should I move the queen to the new hive or leave her in her original location? So, uh, I didn't read that properly. I'm gonna read it again. When doing a split in the same apiary, should I move the queen to the new hive or leave her in the original location. So you can do it, you can do it either way. My preference is always to move the queen to the new split so they have the original location without the queen, because my idea is that more bees will go back there because they know how to get there. But if you take the split away and you put the queen in there, the queen will keep quite a lot of those bees there as long as you've got a decent amount of brood in with it as well. But it does work. It does work either way. You can do it either way, but my preference is move the queen. First emerging virgin. I know we need a K-pop song of that. I know it is. It is kind of cool words, isn't it? Thank you, June. I need. I genuinely needed that comment to come up. I do. I have. What do I have? I have a pucker organic relax tea, which I need, and it's pretty cold. It's nice. Peter Peace, black bees forever. Black forever. I love it. It's like it's like tribal warfare out there. It genuinely is. The best is it is funny though. The people who like black bees. I saw this happened in I think it was Ireland somewhere, and and someone started importing Carniolan queens, like really good quality Carniolan queens, and the black bee brigade were like, oh wow! Have you seen this guy's queens? They are absolutely amazing. The Best we've ever seen, and they were just Carniolans. No one no one told them that they weren't AMM, but they passed the test because they were black, which I found quite amusing. Bada bing bada boom! I'm going to start. I'm going to change your name to BBB. Saves a bit of time. So BBB says, "If all goes well, we get about 12 annual hives new to almost new and a 20 frame extractor new radial end of April early May." Englishman in the Netherlands sounds good. I love hearing about people's beekeeping. Plans. Good fun. JK Photography says, first, first off, I really do enjoy your Twitter feed— not Twitter, sorry, your TikTok feed. It's great. Your videos are really cool. I like them. He says, hi Lawrence, hope you're good. Question, do you think there is a risk of the UK importing the new tropomyelitis as it is in Europe? So, so yeah, definitely is a risk of it. It's— I never, I never know like what the risk really would be with tropomyelitis because For people who don't know, it's just like another mite, lives on the bee. It's absolutely minuscule. Like, there is no way you'd ever be able to know that it's in your, like, colony without, without kind of knowing that it's there and looking for it. They are so, so small. And like, I understand the treatment is Apivar, it's the same treatment that you use for varroa. So I kind of think, well, unless it was going to bring over some sort of different virus that wasn't already transmitted by Varroa. Not really sure what the actual impact would be, and that, but that might be me being a bit naive. Um, so I'm guessing there probably is other dangers of it coming over, but I do think it would be— I think it'd be a difficult one in terms of how you would really get it over here. It's not like it can fly over, it's like a tiny little mite. And, you know, it's been, it's been around in Europe for years, for decades, and it's, and it's not come over. So I don't, I don't see it being a huge issue, and I would say there's, there's kind of other things higher up on the NBU or Defra's list of invasive species that they're probably more worried about. Asian hornets, for one. Am I saying that right? He says, I'm sciencing it at the moment, certainly easier to access access original frames for inspections. Okay, definitely over my head, that one. Worried about one of my hives. The other 3 are mad with activity, but one was hard— has hardly any. But there were 6 frames of bees when I had a look. I'll look again next warm day, but anything I need to check? So could just— could be perfectly fine. Could just be like a smaller colony working its way up. I always think like when you, when you go into a colony and there's like 10 10 colonies of bees, they're going to an apiary and like 9 of them are working frantically and then one of them's not and you open it up and it's like half the size of the rest, I always think the same thing, which is it's gonna— the queen's gonna fail. Drone laying queen generally is that. And, and that's— it is fixable at this point in the year. I would get in there sooner rather than later and I'd have a good, good look through all the frames and hopefully it is just a slower to get going queen that might need a little bit of syrup to get her going. But I reckon you might find some spotty brood in there, and then if it is that, just kill the queen, add in a new queen, and they will take off. Hi Lawrence, hope you and your family are good. We are. Just watched the Arsenal win. Yes, go Arsenal! I know you're a Gooner too. Have you ever used diatomaceous earth— I think that's how you say it— on your bees instead of chemicals like Apivar? So, so no, I've not used that. I have used that on my chickens. for— it works for red mite, doesn't it? You cover them in that. Um, but I've not seen— I, I've read the stuff about using that for varroa, but it's probably— I think it's pretty similar to the whole icing sugar thing, which is really work and does quite a lot of damage to the actual open brood anyway. So I wouldn't want to be using it and like sprinkling it on my open brood because it doesn't kill a lot of the larvae and the eggs and stuff. Uh, and the thing is, it's like, for me, Apivar works really, really well. If you don't want to use Apivar because it's a chemical, like a synthetic chemical, then I would just go with oxalic acid, either sublimated or as a drizzle, because that is as organic as you're ever going to get, and it has proven to be very, very effective. So if I was going down the non-chemical route, I would go with oxalic acid. Says, just saw a super frame, we left it on Because it still had honey on for winter, full with drone brood. No idea on that one. We need drones, but a full frame. This is the reason I don't like brood and a half. But but good. We do need drones, but a full frame. I think a full frame is fine, and and they'll backfill that with honey at some point, I guess, as well. BBB again says my girlfriend is going to take a beekeeping source. I guess he's saying course. She got an email yesterday that if you use beta blockers, you cannot follow the. Oh course, you can't follow the course. I got beta blockers. Odd one or hmm. Hey, I'm not. I'm not sure. I've never never heard that one before. Alex says, ever done a Pagden artificial swarm? So yep, I've done plenty of artificial swarms, but I'm not. I'm not a fan of artificial swarms. I'm not gonna lie, and for a couple of reasons. One, I don't like waiting until the colony. is going to swarm because it's very reactive, and it means that you can't like manage a whole apiary site because you have to wait until they swarm. So you're going around doing inspections, you're like, right, that one's swarming, these 3 aren't, that one isn't. It's a bit piecemeal for me and I don't like it. But then the other one is that I just don't like making continual splits. You can't just keep on splitting. You get to a point where you hit your limit and you realize that you're probably like 50% over where you should be, and then It becomes a method that you just can't use anymore because you want to get your numbers down. So for me, the demeray is is so much better than the artificial swarm because it's it's not reactive and it means you don't have to split your bees so much. Demby Honey, is this going to be controversial? He says, "I always get the feeling that some of these BBKA people don't really like YouTubers. They need to come out from the past and look forward to the future. I have learned copious amounts of knowledge from." you. So thank you very much. I, I understand the reason why the BBKA is not keen. I think because they're not keen on like imported queens. That's, that's the one for the BBKA, which is a shame because I don't— is that, is that the voice of the general beekeeping consensus across the UK, or is that just like a few people in the BBKA? I'm, I'm not sure, but they're not Not too keen. And look at the weather, like the weather's shocking. You wouldn't have queens, UK-mated queens, until the middle of June, and then, you know, for pollination you've got no chance. Like, these things are done for a reason, but I think they see it as they're just done because people want to make money out of it, and it's not. It's the supply. The supply is there— sorry, the demand is there for a reason, which is people want to make early season splits for various reasons, to get more bees, to get more honey, to pollinate their crops, and imported queens is a way of kind of fixing that. So yeah, I don't want to make enemies with anyone. I'm open to doing anything, but it's, uh, yeah, it's a bit of a sad situation. Uh, Demby Honey's doing, doing pretty well for creeping with the hat. I do— I, I've got 2 hats that I need to give out. Uh, I have to— I'll have to have a look, see who's doing the best. I'll tell you what, I will do one thing. I, I did a A competition the other day for people to comment on that video. Let me look what it's on now. It's going really, really good. I've got a video on Instagram. I'm just going on it now to see how many it's got. I've become totally addicted to this video, watching it. It's now got 695,000 views in about 6 days. So thank you to everyone that commented on it. I'm pretty sure that helped. I really, really want it to get to a million. If it gets to a million, I can retire a happy man. Uh, because I've never had a video get a million views. Uh, Craig M says, how is a grafted cell different to an emergency cell? So a grafted cell is, is kind of like different. Like, grafting a cell just means taking a larva and putting it into like a grafting cup. Simple as that. You could take that and put it into a colony and try and get them to create that into a swarm cell. Using various different impulses. So you can use supersedure impulse, you can use the swarming impulse, and the emergency impulse is just like a really delayed and quite sad version of that. And arguably that they're very, very similar, and the only difference really is that it's the size of the cup that they're in, and it's the time that the kind of age of the larva when they start turning it into a queen. So in— when you're grafting, you're using the correct size cup, which is effectively in a colony, a swarm, a swarm cell, or a swarm cup, or a play cup. That is a different size cell to a worker cell. So supersedure cells, swarm cells, are made in like swarm cups, which is the same size cup as a grafting cup. And then emergency cells are made in worker cells. When you're grafting, you're trying to get the youngest larva that you can possibly get. So you want the egg to have hatched into a tiny little larva day 4, and then you're getting that tiny little larva out and you're putting it in like at day 4, this tiny little larva. And then you're giving it copious amount of nurse bees, copious amounts of pollen, copious amounts of feed, and using one of those impulses, either supersedure or swarming, to try and create— try and get those nurse bees to turn that larva into a queen by feeding it lots of royal jelly. The emergency impulse, they'll just— they choose whatever larva that they want to choose, and they generally choose like an older larva for some reason. It's never the nice fresh young ones that they go for. So the queen cell, that larva's not actually had the right correct amount of time— or it's not even the correct amount of time, it still works, but you're not giving it like the absolute very best start by giving it like that real copious amounts of royal jelly at the beginning. So you end up with, in my opinion, like an inferior queen. But that's not to say that everyone's going to find them inferior, uh, but they, but they are, they are different. And I guess like grafted cell is slightly wrong terminology for me there as well, um, but it's maybe a little bit of semantics in there, I guess. Mem says, hi Lawrence, bought a Buckfast queen from you last year, took 2 splits from it, did an inspection today and all 3 hives are monster hives. Nice one, cheers, Memz. Good to hear. Says picking up some hives from the spring convention, made up, made up some national boxes to put my 14x12s to draw. Do you think I should order queens for the end of May to make splits? Suppose all weather permitting. So it'd be good, I think, make some splits, but I think kind of towards the end of May. You don't need to think that far ahead if you're worrying about availability. I would just have a look at the colonies towards the middle of May. See how you're getting on and then order them in advance of that. Pink It's Honey says, good evening, love the live chat. Still haven't managed to get into my hives, but hopefully tomorrow depending on how they are, I might add supers. Interesting. You have to report back in a couple of weeks. How are they? I bet some of them needed supers. I bet some of them didn't. I bet some of them swarmed, and I bet some of them are still clustered. That's probably the spread that I get. Recent research has shown that eggs laid into queen cells are longer and heavier than normal. Eggs. Interesting. All right, yeah, it's crazy. And I always think like, how, how does the queen even know to lay like a fertile— not even know how to live, but how does she lay like a fertile egg or in like an infertile egg if she's laying drone? I find like the mechanism behind that crazy. But then you're saying there that the fact that she's— when she's laying into the queen cells, they're longer and heavier than normal eggs. So I find that amazing. Love to see that research. That sounds really interesting. Jez says, evening, got a Buckfast F2 from a cell last year and they're getting nastier every time we open up. Her mother is still going strong. Ordered a new queen from you today to squish and replace. Correct. So I guess, yeah, it is correct, uh, they can, they can go nasty at F2, but it is not really the— I want to say it's not the Buckfast fault, it's, it's just a random mix of drones that you've got in the area. You see people in America, America is a good place to look into the way that you get the regression through the Buckfast line because they're just like middle of nowhere and they put like 10 F1 Buckfasts there and then the F2s are just like exactly the same as the F1s and then the F3s are just the same. You can just go down generations because there's not really any wild bees in the area because it's like maybe desert or something. So it's not— it's right, let's turn— let's turn Discord off. Discord popping up there. Um, so it's not necessarily the buckfast that's causing the aggression there, it's the mix between the two that's giving you, uh, random aggressiveness. Uh, Gerald says— I just got— I'm gonna call you Gerald. I think I'm just gonna change that name to Gerald, which is a little bit, a little bit easier. So Gerald says, is there anywhere in the UK you can get drone comb foundation or plastic national frames from? Um, so you definitely get drone comb foundation, like wax, but I've not seen any plastic. So wait, there's two— I'm not sure if there's two questions there. So plastic national frames, yes, get Frames and Feeders. They do fully molded plastic national frames. And then drone comb foundation, if you want like wax drone comb foundation, most places will do that. Thorns definitely do that. I've got loads of that. I've not seen anybody doing plastic drone comb, never seen that. Hi, you just made a comment that putting supers on too early can cause damage. Can you explain that? So if you're in a place where it's pretty cold still and you put supers on too early and the bees are just like, what are you doing? Why are you putting the supers on up there? We're not ready for that. All of the warmth that they're creating in their brood nest is just lost up Upwards. So that means that they have to like use loads more stores to try and keep that increased volume of the, the whole box warm. So I, I used the analogy last week, it's like the, the warmest place in the house is like the roof and upstairs, um, and if you just kind of keep on putting additional space up above but you're still living down below and all the heat just can go up because there's no, there's no like walls or like ceilings anywhere in the house. Then you're just making it way more colder for the bees. So I don't think it makes a massive difference too much this time of the year unless you're very north. But I see some people like asking about putting supers on in middle of Feb, back end of Feb. But you can you'll kill a colony if it gets too cold because there's just too much heat that's lost up to them. But that's the reason why. Right, I'm doing pretty well. I'm getting I'm getting closer to the bottom here. Right, so bees honey Alan B says planning on grafting this year normally in May, but. I would like to do it again towards the end of the season to do late splits. When would you say is a cutoff for late grafts? So I really don't like doing late season, um, queen rearing. I've just never had— like, I've not had good enough success to make it worthwhile doing it. So I really don't like doing it. I like condensing it all to like a couple of months, start the middle of May and finish like the middle of July. And then once we get through Middle of July, we'll do our last run, and then that's that's pretty much us done. But we'll do like big batches, and it will condense it down to like a lot of queens in that point. But I don't like doing a I don't like doing a like a late one, especially like not a really late one. So for me, it would be like mid July at the absolute latest. Definitely wouldn't be doing anything into August. It's just too late in my opinion. Oh, I'm gonna have a sip of tea. Go on, I'll have a sip of tea. Right, Brian Green says, hi Lawrence, I just found several capped queen cells. The queen is still present and laying. I've squashed all the cells and demerated them. Swarming or supercedure? Have I done the right thing? So, oh, I'm worried you, you brought the demerated word into that. I— so, so, sorry, sorry Brian, this is going to sound like really negative. I, I think you probably have done the wrong thing there. So for me, the demerated should never be used reactively like that. So if you found swarm cells, you need to do like a Bagdon or any form of artificial swarm, which is like a split, one method of a split. The, the Demaray there is not, it's not really doing anything. Like, you squashed all of the queen cells, the queen's still present. Swarming or supersedure? So definitely not supersedure because you found several capped cells, so they were trying to swarm. You've squashed all the cells, you've demerited them. So, so I'll tell you what I think they'll do. I think they'll try and swarm again, and I think they'll swarm before they cap the next round of swarm cells. That's my prediction for what, what would happen there. And I think there's potentially damage that's going to be done there by, by moving the brood so far away from where it naturally should be. And I don't think there's enough bees in the colony at that time of the year to both be down with the queen, which is kind of like where they want to be, and also be up with all of the brood upstairs. It's like, what's in the middle? If you put just like 2 empty supers in the middle and really split them like that— it— if you want my like kind of blunt advice, what I would do is I would take it all back apart, condense them all back down. You've got 2 brood boxes on because you've done a demaree. Just, just put them all back into 2 brood boxes, take the supers away, merge everything back together. Um, take the queen out and just make a split, make it look like a 3-frame split with the nuc. Just keep that off to one side so you know you've got the queen, you know you've got a nuc, and then see what they do. And if they start creating more cells, then keep on taking them down. That means that there's no, there's no queens that emerge, there's nothing in there. And then I would add a mated queen in there, or if you don't want to buy a mated queen fair enough, then you can merge it back with the nuc. That's kind of— it sounds a bit like over the top, but that's probably what I would do. It's, uh, I think, I think what you've done, I think they'll swarm. I think they'll go again and you'll lose half the bees. But doing it the other way, you might be able to preserve some of them. Do you prefer open mesh floors or solid floors? I'm on open mesh at the moment, thinking of trying solid. So personally, I don't think there's a huge amount of difference in either, but I am seeing a lot of people moving back over to solid floors. Richard is a really big fan of solid floors. He has a lot of solid floors, and he's cycling out all of his open mesh ones and moving them all over to solid, and he thinks that they do better on solid floors. I'm not convinced, and I'm not convinced kind of like one way or another. I think they're both pretty decent. Um, I have open mesh floors. I've always had open mesh floors, and I don't have a huge amount of experience with the solid ones, but I do trust what Richard says, and he's had both, and he seems to think they overwinter better in the solid floors. What— the only thing I don't like with the solid floors is like the risk of overheating when you're transporting them, or the risk of them overheating. I wouldn't say they'd overheat, just they're out, you know, on the hive stands. But definitely with any sort of moving, I really do like having at least the bottom as an open mesh floor, preferably the top and the bottom. Nothing worse than kind of roasting your own bees in the back of the truck. So I'll stick with that. I think I prefer open mesh. Is it right most swarms leave between 10 AM and 2 PM? So I— yeah, I guess so. Maybe, maybe a little bit later than that. They'll go for like the warmest part of the day, definitely. Hi, I'm not a beekeeper yet, but I was always fascinated by the topic and a fan of all sorts of bees. For now, I'll just listen to your stream while drawing bumblebees. Thanks for this live stream, love it. Thanks very much, I hope you enjoy it. Definitely get some bees at some point, they're good fun. Added my F1 mated Buckfast yesterday to see how good they are in person. While I was in the hive, I seen workers with green pollen on rear legs. I wonder what the green is from. So again, this is probably like the question that comes up in like a master beekeeper examination. I'm shocking for pollen identification, I'm not gonna lie. I don't know, I genuinely don't. I bet you someone on the stream will know, someone will put it in the comments for you. I do not know what color or what plant green pollen comes from. BBB says Discord server, top left pull-down menu, second line is invite people. Okay, yeah. So I, I just couldn't— I couldn't do 2 things at once and trying to talk. He had changed it. I'll, um, I will get another link up for that. And there we go. June says green pollen is from apple trees. Interesting. I've seen the green, it's kind of like a— it's like a gray one, isn't it? I always think it's like more of a gray from apple trees, but yeah, I guess it is. It could be green. I was thinking like neon green for that one. Interesting, Lawrence, about ordering queens for the nuc. When we sold queens years ago, we would often have people order a hive and a queen and ask if the 10 or 10— sorry, the 10 or 12 attendants will be enough to start. We get that all the time. I've had it like a number of times. People ring up and say, right, so I've ordered the hive and I've ordered the queen and they don't really seem to be doing anything. I think they've just flown off. What have I done wrong? And I just think, oh, poor queen. So we do— like, it is somewhere in the T&Cs to say, you know, you do need more than a queen to start a colony, but Maybe I should, maybe I should double-check with people before I send the queens out. Uh, Hi Lawrence, can you start nucs last week in August for overwintered nucs? So I used to do loads of late season splits to make overwintered nucs, and I kind of thought, you know, just take like a 2-frame split last week of August and like build them up. And I'll tell you what, my, my percentage success rate since I started making them earlier has gone up so much. since I started doing them considerably earlier. For me, like middle of June, just as soon as you get past the actual, like, the, the June gap wherever you are, I would say that's like the latest that you really want to be making any splits. And it's, it's a false economy making small splits like that late on because they either just get robbed out or they get blitzed by the wasps, and you end up— you might make 10 and get 4 through. Whereas if you do them early on in the year, it's like it's kind of using a bit more resource at that time of the year, but you'll get 10 through and they won't get killed by wasps. So I like making my nucs much, like, much earlier than that, like middle of June I would say is the latest. So it's not a WhatsApp group, it's just, it's just my WhatsApp. If you go on, if you go on blackmountainhoney.co.uk and then there's like a chat button at the bottom, and then there's, there's a link to my business WhatsApp in there, you can WhatsApp me there. It's just me. Hey Lawrence, I didn't mention, but I'm in northern Spain with my 4 swarms and 21 queens. Right, that makes, that makes sense. I killed all but one queen in each swarm, hopefully all but one. I cannot get a mated queen until mid-May. That's, that's strange that you cannot get a mated queen until mid-May. I would have thought in Spain you could, you could definitely do that. Um, but, but maybe they'll make— my advice was very much UK-based there. Maybe The virgins can get out and mate in Spain depending on kind of how far south you are. David McDowell says debate today on Ian Stepler using antibiotics to treat EFB. Can't hear, which is great in my opinion. Thoughts would only mask the problem, not cure the problem. Yeah, I'm not a massive fan of antibiotics for treating EFB. From what I've heard, obviously I've never I've never used it. It is illegal to use it in the UK. Uh, but from what I hear, it does just mask the problem, doesn't, doesn't solve it. And it kind of links into another one. I think you're, you're following Chris Manton on Twitter, which is probably where you've got this from. The, uh, the queens, the vaccinated queens that are vaccinated to survive against AFB— and I, when I was in America, I was chatting to the guys who, who created the vaccine or worked for the company that created the vaccine And I said, well, it sounds brilliant, doesn't it? Like, you vaccinate a queen and then all of her daughters are not susceptible to AFB. Brilliant. And I said, but how does it work in terms of like transmission though? So if you've got a colony that's got AFB and you've got one of your vaccinated queens in there, so if you tested it, it would test positive for AFB, but they're completely immune to any of the impact of it. How does that work in terms of like transmission? And he said, well, it would, it would transmit the virus kind of the same way. And I thought, whoa, that is properly dodgy. So basically, basically what they're selling is a queen and a colony that's completely immune to the effects of AFB but spreads it around to all of the other colonies that aren't immune to the effects of AFB. So you effectively got like a monopoly on the market and everyone has to get those queens then. Because you've got all of these super healthy colonies that are spreading around this virus. And I know they're probably not— like, transmission from bees is probably going to be minimal, but they'll definitely throw out swarms. They'll throw out like healthy big colonies because they're not subjected to the, the, the disease, the AFB disease, but they've still got the spores, so they're just going to be multiplying. I think a little bit, a little bit worried about that, unless I've misunderstood what he said, but he did That did sound like what he said. Jamie Miller says, hey Lawrence, just built a new honey house. It's 4 meters by 3 meters. Uh, environmental health are going to inspect it to sign it off at the end of the month. Is there any— is there anything you would do differently before you got yours signed off? Um, no, not really, because it got signed off and got 5 stars, which was good. But what I would definitely do is speak to them in advance of them coming. Say to them, like, because they'll say to you, are we coming middle of April. And if you, if you like ring them up at that point, so is there any chance we can just have like 30 minutes on the phone and I can just like talk you through like my systems and what I'm proposing to show you? Maybe you can like give me some advice in advance of you coming. And they'll just, they'll come, sorry, they'll give you the advice, they'll give you any bits of information that you potentially missed out. Um, so that, that would be, that would be my advice. Um, it's the HACCP is the big one that they'll be on, which is your hazard prevention. How are you stopping anything dangerous getting into the jars of honey is the big one, and they'll want you to be able to talk confidently about that process. And that process covers, you know, what you're doing when you're inspecting your bees all the way through to how that honey gets in the jar and how you're stopping any sort of hazards or any sort of anything going wrong really with that process. So it's quite, it's like all-encompassing. It's a big, long, big document. Is it important when using oxalic acid instant wrap to block up all the holes, gaps? What is the best way of using open mesh floors to prevent all leaks? So I don't close them up. It is best to close them all up, but we go in at the top. So we kind of like top sublimate. So I've made an eek. So all I do is I take the roof off, put the eek on. The eek's got a hole in it. And then I sublimate from the top, so then the sublimate just has to naturally fall down to get to the bottom to get out. So once it starts getting out the bottom, it's coated the bees already. But ideally you would close up, you would put the ventilation trays in or the inspection trays in to close up, stop that sublimate going out. It does make it more effective. Hi Lawrence, nuc arrived all okay and installed in the new hive, looking good. Thanks for the great service. Thanks very much, Luke. It's kind. Good to hear. Need any advice, give me a shout. H says, I keep getting confused on the labeling situation for the honey to be able to sell it to local shops and also the hygiene standards inspectors and how that all works. So if you've got any specific questions about it, give me a shout. I did do a video on the honey labeling regulations and tried to kind of break that down in terms of what you needed as the absolute minimum. On your labels, but if you've got any specific questions, put them on stream. Peter says regarding beta blockers, there is a perceived increased risk of anaphylactic reaction to insect bites or similar, similar to ACE inhibitors. So ACE inhibitors, a group of diuretics. Okay, interesting. Richard R. Bryner Jr. says watching, got ten swarm traps out starting over from scratch. Oh, lovely. I hope, I hope it goes well. You catch lots of swarms. Thanks, Peter, we'll contact my local GP. Okay, there we go. Uh, got your, got your BB Wear Ultra Suit. Thanks for the discount. No problem. Uh, UK Honey Marketing Board says nice hair. Thanks very much, growing it out down past my nose now. Look at that. Oh, I've messed it up now. There we go. Uh, Luke says did have a question. Uh, have the hive on a stand and open mesh underfloor entrance as per your video. Noticed a small-medium cluster of bees on the mesh on the underside. Is this a problem? So it's not a problem, it's just a few bees that can't work out how to get in. If you want to, you could just kind of pick them up, pop them on like the internal landing board of the underfloor entrance, but they'll work it out as soon as they start. As soon as they go out and fly, they'll work it out in the end. Our local BBKA doesn't seem to be a fan of YouTube or anything Modern, unfortunately. We however recommend Black Mountain Honey channel to any new members we talk to. Thank you very much, Nikki. Mem says he's put all his supers on his hives today in South London. Very nice. Mem lives where I used to live, very close to it. Uh, BBB says cannot believe I don't know Gerald. So it's Gerald now. I don't— I genuinely don't know Gerald. Gerald Arrivia. I do— I do not know that. I know fishing, I know golf, I know bees, I know Arsenal, I know most sports. If that's kind of like— I don't know, is it like— I want to say World of Warcraft. Is it World of Warcraft? And has that made me seem like a complete person who doesn't know about stuff? It probably has, but I won't take it back because I don't know what it means. Denby Honey says, today I added wet supers. Would they act like a feed as well as extra room? So yeah, they love wet supers. They'll be all over them within seconds. There's not a huge amount of honey on them, but they'll clean them up and they'll fix them while they clean them as well. I do like wet supers. What are the best tricks for bees to draw out frames apart from feeding? When you do feed for them to draw out comb, is it 1:1 or 2:1? So definitely, if you're drawing them out for— so if you're feeding to get them to draw out, just use 1:1. 1:1 is fine. And one-to-one will work really, really well. Two-to-one will work as well, but you can feed them for longer using one-to-one. And it's that process of feeding as opposed to like the overall calorific value that is giving you that kind of drawing out process. So definitely use one-to-one. And if you're buying it in jerry cans, just water it down, add like a third of water into it. I would say checkerboarding though definitely helps at that point. They will start, they'll go up They'll go into the middle and you'll find they'll take that first frame. There you go, a bit of focus blur for you though. They'll take the first frame and they will work out from the middle. And the easiest way to do it is once they've, once they've completely drawn out the frames is you just take them out, put them to the end. So every time, so say they've gone in and the middle frame they've completely drawn out, take that frame up, lift it all the way over to the side, and just replace the central frames with like foundation. But don't do it in a don't take all the good ones out. You only ever want to put one frame of foundation in between 2 frames that are already being drawn out, so you're kind of like, like a constant checkerboard. That really speeds things up, that gets them going great. So I'd give that a go. I would say as well, the other one is don't think that you can put like 3 supers on at once and that's going to be any quicker. It's counterintuitive, really counterintuitive. In order for the bees to draw out frames, you need lots of young bees. So kind of boosting the brood in those colonies is good as well. You can give them like a hive alive feed would help, but I appreciate you're not going to want to do that when you've got supers anywhere near them. But early on in the season, giving them something like that to boost the health of the colony and the number of nurse bees would be a good thing. But I would say just using one super at a time and focusing on getting one box drawn out at a time is the real— is really important. If you put 3 boxes on, you just— they're not going to do it anywhere near as quickly as doing 1 box, then 2 boxes, and 3 boxes. And then the next tip I would say is that, say you put your first super on, you've got a brood box full of bees, you put your first super on and you do that checkerboard and they've drawn out that first box, undersuper the next one because it's the heat coming out that brood box that really helps them draw out the wax. So don't just put the next boxes on top, put underneath, so lifting up the most drawn-out box to the very top, and they'll still continue to work on that, but then put the new foundation as close as you can to the brood box. I would say they're my tips. All right, it's gonna have to be another tea, I think, another sip. I'm doing quite well, I'm about halfway through my tea now. Right, Gary Wheeler says, hi Laurence, my bee population is just exploding with new bees. I'm filling the air doing orientation flights. Should I up the sugar water I'm feeding now or cut back the amount they're having? So it is, it's a real balancing act at this point of the year. Like, you don't need to feed your bees unless they need feeding. So if they're hefting really nice and heavy at this point in the year, I doubt I'd just stop feeding completely. Definitely wouldn't feed them because you'll have issues with like syrup going into your, up into your supers later on. I'm hoping you've not got supers on at the moment. But you, if you've got a good amount of stores in the frames, I would just stop feeding. And you kind of want to almost want to run them dry before you put the supers on. And that, that's the balancing act that you really need to get right. So it sounds to me that if the bee numbers are booming and you've got loads of them in the air and they're hefty, nice and heavy, I just stop completely. I thought that checkerboarding required very early prep in December and loads of additional space. Doesn't this create a problem for the bees and keeping the space warm. How did you find it? So yeah, if when you— if you look at checkerboarding as like you look at the pamphlet, you're just like, that's ridiculous, not doing that. That sounds just like everything that you should do wrong for beekeeping. But it, it did work. It didn't kill my bees. So yeah, so maybe you could argue that putting the supers on that early didn't, didn't cause an issue to the one time that I did it. Uh, whether the colony would have been better off without me doing that, I don't know. I should have done like a side-by-side, I guess. Difficult to do a side-by-side with F1 queens, but yeah, it did work. This is the thing with that checkerboard, and I did— I had a sample size of one, so it was a bit difficult to compare, but it did work and they didn't swarm. Um, but they did have a lot of chalk brood, and that could— whether they're connected or not, I don't know. But like, you don't tend to get a lot of chalkbrood when you have like really dense colonies because they, they'll clear it out. You don't see much of it. But if you have like these sparse colonies, which checkerboarding does create, then, then maybe you get worse chalkbrood. But they didn't swarm and they didn't die. I'm definitely going to give it a go, but every time I think to give it a go, I've like left it too late. Um, so maybe this year I will, I'll do another one. David says, always use solid floors where I am. Too expensive for what they are. Retailers are taking the proverbial with pricing. Noticed National Seconds hives have gone up in price on Thorpe's website. So yeah, everything's gone up in price, isn't it? It's crazy. It's getting out of control, I think, the pricing. And it's strange because generally inflation is slowing, and I know that doesn't mean that Prices are coming down; they're just going up slower. But it doesn't seem to be affecting beekeeping yet. Prices just going up like crazy at the moment. I got very itchy nose. I don't know whenever I do a stream, I get mega itchy nose. UK Marketing Honeyboard said apple is orange and white. Like I said, I'd fail the pollen course definitely. I've never I've never really needed to know the. So the only one that I'll get right every single time is dandelion because that is the most noticeable one coming in. So we're saying Berberis or Laristus— I can't even say that, I can't even say the names— are green. Interesting. Liam G says, how the hell can I stop my bills infiltrating my suit? They always seem to get in and zap me in the face regardless of how much I check my suit. It is annoying, isn't it? It's, you know, generally the way that I find that they get in for me is— and, and I always realize it too late— is it's like through the legs. So I, I wear my wellies underneath. So I bring them right down and I zip them right down, and if I zip them right down to the bottom, they're fine. But if I don't zip them at the bottom, I find they go in up and they get me that way. So I would check, check your ankles and make sure that they're like really tight around the ankles. Have you reviewed the Keeper's Hive yet? So no, but I have built it and I have it in my back garden. I was going to go out on Friday afternoon and do it, and I just, I can't get to the apiary to get it there because it's just too wet and I'll get stuck. But it's, it's, it's there ready to go, and I've got a nuc to go into it. So I'm thinking I'm going to change it up because what I would have done previously is I would have reviewed it prior to putting bees in it. But I think what I'll do is I'll just get it there, get some bees in it, and then do the review with the bees in it. Chunky says, thanks for answering my question earlier. Did anyone win the hat on the last live stream, the one where you asked people to show you how to start a beekeeping video. So no, I've got that one to give away. I've got my black hat here, that's like special edition, isn't it, that one? And then I've got the one from the Instagram, so it was episode 33 was the one that I need to do. So I do have it on my board here, I've not forgot, it's on there somewhere. Previous winners. Um, sorry about that, let's hit the mic. But no, I've not done that. It's good, I've got it on the board. I will do it, I will pick someone. Um, to win a hat. Uh, Jacob says, good evening, Lawrence, what are your thoughts on the Anil hives? So I, I've had a look at the Anil hives, I got sent one and they looked good. I'm not, I've not, I've not used them intensively, so I can't give— I think that mic's a little bit closer now. Um, I can't give a detailed review of them just yet, but I will, I will get some bees into them this year and see, see how they go. Uh, Brockley says, Charles D again, a point your followers might like to know is that next Thursday evening on David Burns Q&A is Just Alex. Oh, very nice, that's good. I should get Just Alex on here really, shouldn't I? David Burns has beat me to it. I could have, I could have done that. I didn't really think about that. That's annoying. And I just advertised David Burns chat as well, so there we go. Uh, UK Marketing Honeyboard says, get ChatGPT to write you a procedures manual. will tell you exactly what kit you have and what taps, sinks, vents, etc. GPT will write the lot for you and then you just edit. I love ChatGPT. Good, isn't it? I use it for way too many things. I, I ask it to do it. It's, you know, the best thing I've asked it to do for me yet is when we, when we sell the Queens, you've got to type in all of the different variants for all the different days, and it's just like the most mind— I can't even say it— is the most boring thing in the world to do. You have to say Monday the 14th of February Monday 2024, Tuesday the 15th of February 2024, and it just takes forever. And there were no like pre-populated lists. So now what I just tell it to do is like, write, write me out all the days of the week in this exact format, in a CSV format, so it's like we've got commas in the right place. And it just does it like that. I just paste them in. The best thing ever. Saves me hours. I love ChatGPT. In terms of making a split after day 8, normally take down all the queen cells and introduce a mated queen. Is there any reason why at least one queen cell can't be used in another split? What's the chances of success? Uh, so you can. Again, it's just, it's the emergency impulse for me. I feel they make inferior queens, simple as that. But they— you will get virgins emerging and you can use them to make queens, mated queens. Uh, David says, have you ever had use for a frame feeder or do you think they're a gimmick? It's weird, this one. Yeah, so I've gone full, like a full— done a full 180. I want to say 360, it's not, it's a full 180. So I have this conversation with Richard, and I used to hate the Payne's nucs. Like, the Payne's nucs got integrated frame feeder. I used to hate them so much, and I used to say top feeders, top feeders all the way, so much better. And having used— we use so many Payne's boxes now, and I still got a few Mazemore, I've still got a few BS Honeybees And I absolutely love the Payne's boxes now more than like with the frame feeder in the side because I just find that the bees kind of take to them a little bit better. I don't know, and they don't need— I think the biggest one for me is that they don't need to be completely level to be able to get a huge amount of syrup into them. But in terms of like an individual frame feeder for a hive, I would never use that because I do like the polyashworth feeders for the top for that other benefit that you get, which is the additional insulation that's in it. Um, so yeah, I'm not a massive fan of frame feeders in terms of individual ones. Oh, apparently Gerald is from The Witcher. There we go. So not World of Warcraft. No, I just— yeah, I'll stop talking about stuff now because I make myself sound not very cool. Uh, Marcus has sent me a WhatsApp pic of some pollen color source identification because my knowledge is substandard. Which I would definitely agree with. So thanks for that, Marcus. Uh, Graham says, could you do an updated series of videos on checkerboarding? So yes, I can, but the earliest will have to be next year because you're supposed to do the manipulation in January, so I'm like 3 months too late. Oh, there was people saying hello to each other. Uh, Charles says, uh, oh, we've done that one. Yep, Just Alex. So advertising that again, Just Alex is having a chat with David Burns. It's good that we we have different time time zones. Otherwise, I'd have about ten people watching my streams, I think. Right, let's jump through. I'm doing quite well. I'm near. I'm nearly at the bottom. If I get to the bottom, we're done. Here we go. Say hi to Aiden, channel member. How's it going, Aiden? Right, we are we are nearly at the bottom. So Adam says hello. Greetings from Poland. I've been in the UK last week, Wiltshire area, and rapeseed is all. Already blooming. It's at least four weeks ahead than Poland at the moment. It was nice to see it. Good stuff. Oh, Caldespar says, "What's the best way to get them to draw new foundation with supers?" So I think I answered that earlier, asking answering Harry's one. Hopefully you heard all of that. Hollow Oak stores just another vote for just Alex as a guest. I bet I better ask him really before Griff gets in there. Griff Griff gets all the celebs, doesn't he? I am doing I am doing a video with Alex. 20— we've got there 24th of Feb— no, 20— 29th of April. 24th of Feb, where we got that from? 29th of April, we're doing a video with him. Uh, Aiden says, if Lawrence is in your living room, hit the like button. That's a good shout, appreciate a like. Like if you're watching the stream and you enjoy it. Uh, Cub Rider says, when my wife first saw me in my white suit covered in honey improperly, she thought— she thought he's a keeper. Very good, it's like a bee joke. Uh, Mem is— Mem is interested in the hats. Yeah, do you know what, like, these hats have caused just no amount of grief. Absolute full grief. And people, I'm not paying £30 for a hat. And it's like, well, that's kind of how much they cost me. I like just sending them out to people and not making a penny on them, but like justifying their expense to people and I'm not making any money, so I'm not doing it anymore. So if you get a hat, you've got a limited edition hat. Definitely not doing that again. Cup Rider says, a couple of years ago I broke my neck carrying 14 by 12 brood boxes. I haven't looked back since. Boom! Very good. These are quite good jokes. Jacob says, one of my brood boxes has quite a lot of stores. Is it likely to be fondant that they've stored, and if so, will they take it up into the supers? So it could be fondant that they stored. They do store fondant, and they will store fondant kind of like as liquid as well. So they'll go out like take— get water, break down the fondant, and then store it. They do crazy things with fondant. And yeah, if you've got lots of stores, uh, and you put your supers on, they can move stuff up. They won't move capped stores, but anything that's open is liable to be moved up. So you want to kind of like run down the stores as best as you possibly can before putting your supers on. Would you do a split this early in the year as my hive is very full? New to beekeeping this year and amazing work you do, keep it up, we love it. Thanks, Joel. It does depend where you are, but I've got colonies you could definitely split at this point in the year, no problem. Just, I would say, you know, you've got to keep an eye on them and make sure that there is a sufficient amount of brood and you're a couple of stages into the brood, you're not just doing it on like the first round of brood of the year, because you could get to a point where, I don't know, it gets a little bit colder and you've made these splits, and because you've made the splits there's not enough warmth in either of the splits to keep that brood warm, and they start dwindling, and then you've got a lot of old bees, and they generally start going backwards. So you don't want to, don't want to be too aggressive making early splits. And if you are going to make splits, don't take multiple splits out of a single colony. Definitely don't want to be doing that this early in the year. Uh, evening, Stephen, he's enjoying the show. Uh, Cayman Reynolds does have his live tonight as well. Everyone's, everyone's doing live streams now, aren't they? I think If, if my numbers ever start going down, I'll just start doing them less often. Might have to go to once a month. Um, can't, can't be competing with all the other beekeepers. Uh, David wants Stuart Spinks on. We did have Stuart on before. Stuart came on once. I don't think, I don't think he'd be up for doing another one. Um, Jacob says, yeah, it's capped stores, so it should be fine. Capped stores is fine. You can put your supers on. Uh, I want to say Blue. Blue says, hi Lawrence, I bought some queens from you. What's your best method to adding them to a queenless colony as I've now squashed the old angry queen? So once you've squished the queen, wait 8 days. After 8 days, shake off every single frame. You'll have emergency queen cells. Take down all the emergency queen cells, introduce your queen, pop the tab after 24 hours, and then leave them for a week. Then that should work well. If you scan the packet that they come on, there's a QR code on there as well that that shows you that in a bit more detail. Joel says he's in Lincolnshire and got brood on 8 frames and 4 in the super. Brood and a half, I suspect. That's good. I have quite a few capped brood frames. Should I remove them and keep them for winter or extract them? So I'm guessing you're saying stores there. Yeah, if you've got space to remove them and you can keep them somewhere safe, you can actually freeze them. Freezing them is probably the best place to put them. keeps them like intact, really nice and intact, and then you can just use them. I wouldn't extract them if you've been feeding because they're probably just like sugar syrup, but keep them. Great for making splits. That's what I do with all my excess capped frames, kind of get through to the beginning of spring or like, you know, a few weeks on from now, and I'll just take out anything capped and just make up a split. And then easy way to do it. Hi Lawrence, do you ever use starter strips? So no, but I did go through a phase of trying to you know, not pay for foundation and wiring up frames and using starter strips. And it was just carnage. It was too, too much trouble. And I just found doing it, doing it late on in the year, you could probably get away with it when they're, they're over laying drone. But I just found do it in the spring, they just laid tons and tons and tons of drone brood. So I didn't like it. Just bought the BB Wear Ultra Suit, complete game changer. Fully agree with that. Is going to watch Match of the Day and witness my beloved Villa throw away a victory against Brentford. Great livecast as always. Let's just hope Villa don't win next weekend. I hear Douglas Luiz is out, which is good. Said, I've seen some people in the BBKR advising not to do spring trapping for Asian hornets, but I have anyway. Only a couple of queens so far. I've seen that as well. There's a guy on the beekeeping forum— I'm pretty sure it's a guy, his name's Carol— on the beekeeping forum I don't know whether it's a man or a woman, but I think it's a man. And he is like this— he knows everything there is to know about wasps and hornets, and he is a strong advocate of not spring trapping. He says spring trapping for Asian hornets does way more damage than not trapping them. And his argument is, unless you're using like a highly selective trap, you're going to start trapping like the queens— sorry, like the, the wasp queens as well— that could potentially grow into a big colony that can provide the food for the Asian hornets, the actual colonies as they grow. So inadvertently what you're doing is you're creating a bigger problem for honeybees because you're taking away loads of the, uh, the prey that the Asian hornet would otherwise prey on. I think, I think that's the basis behind it. Again, like, I'm not, I'm not an expert, but it does, it does make sense. But It's difficult, isn't it? Because it's really a— it's a binary decision. Do you trap or do you not trap? Which is right? And got 2 different people telling you 2 different things who are supposedly experts. Um, I just don't think we should be in this situation where there's going to be overwintered queens in the UK. I think we, uh, dropped the ball last year. BBB says, want to buy one also for my girlfriend, but she's so cheap she wants to stick to some cheap Amazon one. It's already tearing up. Yeah, can't be dealing with cheap bee suits. How long roughly will it take for splits to fill a nuc box? And then once added to a brood, how long roughly to fill that? Would it take a whole season or will they need to add supers all in the same year? So it is, it's a bit like depends how many frames of brood you put in there. So if you, if you took a, a colony now with 2 frames of brood, 1 frame of stores, like, and a good shake of bees you can use that, you can use that 3-week rule really to say that it'll probably fill it in about 3 weeks, call it 4 weeks, and that nuc, that nuc box will be full. And then the same, once you take that and you put that into a hive, you're probably looking like another 3 or 4 weeks before it's going to fill it, roughly, depending on how much brood you're starting out with and also depending on the genetics of the queens that you've got. If you're using kind of like AMM native or near-native mongrels they're not going to grow anywhere near as quick as like a Buckfast queen would. But definitely, like, they will grow quick. I always use Rob Tallis as the example here, who sometimes comes on here. Sold him an overwintered nuc in middle of April, and then come the end of the year, it was on double brood with 7 supers full of honey on. So that's the kind of scale that you can get in a single year. Robert says, will you be doing the how many splits from one colony again? But you could get 60 to 80. I really want to do that one again. Definitely, definitely not doing that one this year because my wife is giving birth in 6 weeks and, you know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it last time around, but I'm definitely, definitely going to do that one again because that was a cool video. And we got to— I got to 20, didn't I? And it wasn't even June, so I think it would— I think I would have got to 80. I'm going to do that one again, but not this year, next year. Says reason he asked that is because he doesn't have enough supers to put on his 7 hives and worried he won't be able to buy them and build them in time due to moving house. Um, so you can always, you can always combine colonies back, especially towards the end of the season once the swarming impulse is gone. Just combine as many as you want to stick them all under the same supers. Says had a bumblebee queen enter the hive the other day. She got out alive though. Wonder what she was looking for. just like somewhere warm to set up a nice little nest. Good timely reminder from Lee, don't forget to hit the like button. Appreciate it if you hit the like button. I saw Griff was getting a few likes and was a bit jealous, so you know, you can maybe give me a like as well. Aiden's— I was only joking there if you didn't notice, but do hit the like button. Aiden says, I'm going to try cut comb. What foundation do you use in the Ross rounds? So it is called Lace thin— I think it's called like thin foundation. It's like specifically designed for cut comb. You speak to Thorns, just say you want like thin foundation, they'll know what it is. And it is just like wafer-thin foundation. It's nice. Ordered a couple of Buckfast Queens. Good stuff, Stephen. Says, looking at joining the Bee Farmers. Are you a member and do you think it's worth it? At roughly 40 now, looking at building to 60-80 this year to overwinter. So yeah, I am a member. I've been a member for about three years now, I think. Yeah, four years. Definitely worth it. Definitely worth it for the insurance alone. I would say that's the big benefit you get from it. Jar prices are pretty good as well, but they're not quite as good as they used to be. Used to be really, really worthwhile being part of the BFA for the jar passes. I can't even talk. The jar prices. There we go. Right. I'm literally oh. get David Wainwright on, that would be good. I did, I did speak to David Wainwright at the, uh, the beekeeping show and said that I'll go down to his facility and do, do some videos with him, and he seemed up for it. So maybe, maybe I'll give him a shout. Moved my nuc into the hive last week, inspected today, still 4 frames that they have not drawn. The other frames very full of brood and stores. Should I keep the syrup on? So yes, definitely keep the syrup on. If, if they've got— if you've got frames of foundation in there, just keep feeding them, and they will. It's funnier when you get like nucs and you think they're just not growing, they're not growing, they're not growing, and then bang, and they've filled the box. And it is, it's like a timing thing with the cycles of the brood. They can only create so much brood because of the bees that are in there, but then as that brood emerges, it kind of like is exponential, the amount of more brood that they can create. And then there's that second round of brood, when that emerges, they just fill the box instantly. It's great. Robert says congratulations. Thank you very much, Robert. Have you ever tried adding a queen cell to a queen white colony as a super seizure for queen replacement? So wait, let me read that again. Have I ever tried adding a queen cell to a queen white colony? Oh, so basically like a forced super seizure. Yeah, you can do that. Um, I'm not, I'm not sure, I'm not sure the reason why I would ever do that though. It's like I could just take the queen out. and just put the supersedure cell in. But I know some people like, like the idea of a supersedure cell, but no, it's not, it's not something that I would really ever do because we just add them, do them elsewhere. I just add them in as mated queens. I don't like, I don't like leaving a whole hive like open to a queen failure, so I don't like adding like a big cell to like a big colony of bees because then if something goes wrong, it's the whole colony that gets wiped out. Uh, right, so there's 143 people currently watching the stream. So we didn't, we didn't get to the lofty heights of Griff last week at 200, but I'll be interested to see what he gets next week. But actually, next week's probably unfair because he's got me on as well. So he's going for the, the double, double bubble, isn't he? Get 2 people on, get more viewers. Um, but I've come to the bottom, so that's it, we're done. Hour and 50 minutes. I have answered, answered all of your questions. Um, So there we go, another episode, episode 36, Let's Talk Bees. I'll work out who the hat winners are, um, I'll see you all next week on Griff's live stream, and I hope it's not too rainy where you are, but have a good weekend. See you all later.