Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees with Laurence Edwards - Episode 25

Hello, it has been a very long time since I last did a stream, and it's been a very long time since I last cut my hair as well. I think it's probably about the same amount of time, which is like 6 months. So I've gone back officially to the '80s with like a full-on perm. So excuse, excuse the shocking haircut. I don't know what's going on with that. But also apologies for not doing more live streams. I, I just don't know what happened. It 2023. I, I committed to doing one a week, and then I kept it up for 6 weeks, 7 weeks, and then 2023 hit and it just all fell apart. So I, I do apologize. I am sorry, but it is back. I'm not going to commit to doing it weekly, but I will commit to doing it as much as I possibly can. Uh, so I will just— I'm just going to answer the questions in the live chat, and I'll intersperse that with just telling you What's happened in 2023 and what I've got planned for 2024. But let's just jump straight into it. So I love this stream live where you could put the comments up like that. So KTM Machinery says, "Good evening, Lawrence. Hope it's not been too wet for you today." Kevin from Sunny Devon. So no, not liking rubbing it in, Kevin. I have to say, I'm only joking. It's been soaking wet, absolutely drenched in North Wales. We had a major issue, like, um, the, the previous storm— not Storm Ciara, the one before that, was it Barbert— where the water started just running off the field like a full-on river. I did post a little snippet on the YouTube channel, but if that drain had, uh, had blocked, the, the whole house would have flooded. And a few houses in the village did flood. So, uh, it's been very wet. I, I hate the wet weather. I have to say, and I also hate the short days. Like, I'm not one for short days, and I think that's probably why I don't end up doing so many streams, is because I like to be outside doing stuff, getting stuff done. Um, and then in the winter when it's like pitch black outside, there's nothing I can do. Uh, so obviously I will do some live streams where, uh, where I possibly can. So Castle, Castle Hives, hello. Um, for anybody who doesn't know, I, I am going to the Honeybee Expo in America in January. So I'm very excited to see anybody who's going to be out there, over there. Very exciting. Hi Joe, I've missed all of your questions. And how has the year been? That's a good one to get us started, isn't it really? How has the year been? So it's been a really good year, best year on record in terms of like our business, in terms of YouTube, in terms of turnover. Rubbish year in terms of honey. Oh, like the absolute worst. Spring was all right, and I think predominantly most people that I talked to say spring was either okay or the best spring ever. And then it just all went really downhill, didn't it? And just rained and rained and rained a little bit more. And I heard of lots of colonies that died and lots of colonies that starved out and lots of people feeding in July. Um, it was a pretty rubbish of the year. But overall, really good, so no complaints whatsoever. A few bee farmers saying they kind of wished there was going to be a really bad year to reset the bulk honey price, and we've had the bad year and it didn't seem to reset the honey price and just sent it plummeting. So I know of a lot of people who've got lots of honey and can't sell it, and you hear people talking about like £2 a pound bulk price of honey. So it's not looking good for the bulk honey market at the moment, but overall, yeah, the year has been very good. Ah, so Jim. Hi Jim, how's it going? Have you had any storm damage to your apiary? So no, I, I used to have apiaries in like really silly locations, kind of like under forests and in woodland and by rivers, and you think they're good at the beginning and you think, well, nothing's going to happen to them. it would be really unlucky if something happens to them. So I moved them all. So I went out and just moved them all to somewhere much more sensible, which is like in the middle of a field, kind of no trees near them. And then the worst, the worst thing that can happen in that situation there is that I can't get to them. And as long as they're well fed, it doesn't really matter. Like, I went to some today that are in the middle of a field, kind of in the middle of like 6 fields in a row. I just had to walk over to them and I thought, well, they're pretty safe there because nobody's getting in and getting those bees because they're just in the middle of a completely waterlogged field. So no, no storm damage to any apiaries luckily, and I can't see there being any damage, but everything is strapped down though. And I got caught out a little bit early on in the year when the wind came kind of middle of September and it was like 40-50 mile an hour winds and I lost a few lids. And a few boxes that were stacked up, but just kind of like scattered around the apiary. And then I took that as an early warning to go and strap down to the pallets at that point, as opposed to just strapping them up. But no, no damage. Uh, Carl Lockyer, guys, this is crazy, isn't it? This is how long I've not had one of these videos. Yeah, Carl Lockyer, that was good fun. Um, I did loads of videos with Carl. There's a few, there's a few more up on the member section. Um, but I don't think there's a huge amount more to come from Carl, unfortunately, because they were, they were quite good videos, weren't they? They were good fun. Um, but they— yeah, there's probably like 2 or 3 left to go, but I've not got any more in the bank. I've got a good few videos in the bank actually, in terms of like that aren't on the members section. I've probably got like another 10 or 15 that I have filmed that I've not got around to editing yet. I've kind of come up with I don't know, like I used to be able to fire out, like over a weekend I'd edit like 13 or 14 videos. And I know I look back and the editing maybe wasn't quite as, as good, but I've become really inefficient at editing videos. I've been doing one at the moment, it's taking me like 6 days and it's rubbish. It's not like a very good video, but I get like writer's block and I keep on like watching it over again and then trying to change things. And I'm just— it's too dark outside and I've, uh, I've got better things to do. I've got kind of like not enough time and too many things to do, so I tinker and get nothing done and then get really annoyed. Um, but they will go up. Uh, I do this— I do a similar thing every year, which is I'll record lots of videos kind of like July, August, September, and then I've not really recorded any videos since then. But I will just— I'll drip feed them out over the course of the year because when I— when I put loads of videos out at this time of the year, no one really watches them. And I kind of think, well, I put loads of effort into those videos and they get like 1,000 views. So I just think I'll just drip feed them through and then save the good ones until March and April when people start watching beekeeping content again. But there's, there's a few more coming up. There are some good ones from Carl, right? I'm gonna have a look through then and see, uh, see if there's any questions we've got on here then. Um, It's shocking, my hair, isn't it? I don't even want to touch it because it is just like so '80s. It— when I wet it, it comes down like to here now. Um, but I don't wanna— I don't wanna cut it because it kind of indicates like how long— I don't know, I'm gonna get it cut, I think. The amount of people that say horrible things about my perm. Um, but yeah, Andy's saying, great looking hair. Met Richard Knoll last week at the National Honey Show, who then introduced me to my palmer. So many experts to listen to, and you are also on here. So yeah, maybe, maybe not include me in the list of experts, but Mike's cool, isn't he? Mike's a good guy. I've never met him face to face, but I have chatted to him online. See, very, very well respected. He's got good hair as well, isn't he, Mike? Nice little ponytail. So Rob, yes, I will be back at the beekeeping show. I've been speaking to the, the owners and organizers of it like the other day, a few days ago now. Um, I will be back there again. I will also be live streaming from there a little bit more. So I'm going to do another live stream the day before, and then I'm getting involved in doing some stuff in the day, and I'll live stream that as well. So I'm gonna have to work out how not to kind of get my phone not to die, but it should be okay. So I will be back at the beekeeping show, um, and I will be doing something cool, and I will definitely live stream it as well. So I'll just put up a few people there. Hello, James from Michigan. So Joe said he forgot to mention he managed to get a warming cabinet from Abello and can say it's amazing. Made all your all-seed rape soft set now and people love it. So it is one of the best, one of the best buys, isn't it? I like a shameless plug, isn't it, for Abello? I got my Abello fleece on today, um, but their, their honey warming box is, is absolutely amazing. I think I've got 4 of them now. I've got 2 of the big tall ones and 2 of the smaller ones, and they're just the most handy thing in the world and so easy to use. You just turn them on, set the temperature, and you know that they're going to be like reliable and stay at the same temperature and not cook your honey. They are really good. Oh, I like this kind of question, Paul. So what are my business goals for 2024 in beekeeping? So we are doing— I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give it, uh, I'll give most of it away because you have logged into my stream. So we're rebranding the company. I say we, I am rebranding the company. Complete new rebrand. Uh, we're having a brand new website built, which has cost ridiculous amounts of money, but I feel it needs it because the current website was just built by me, and I think it looks, it looks like it was built by me, so it looks a bit tired. So So we're getting some professionals in to do that. Um, we're going to sell a lot of nucs. I honestly can't believe how many nucs we sold already. I won't, I won't give you a number because I'm not one to kind of go on about it, but I genuinely can't believe how many have been sold so far. Um, hopefully sell a similar amount of queens. We sold 10,000 queens last year, which was just unbelievable. Uh, we started off in the first year, I think we sold 300 And last year it was 10,000. So, uh, it's not really scalable, our business. It's not the kind of thing that you could build it up to a point and, and then like sell it or do anything different with it. And I don't think we're going to sell many more queens than that. Um, the nuc side, want to, want to grow the nuc side a little bit more, want to double down on the queens, like the home, the UK mated queens this year, uh, and do more from different lines because we're kind of focused on just a couple of the breeder queens that we've got. Got breeders now from— I'm not telling people who this breeder is, but it's in Germany— and got some exceptional lines, some new breeder queens that are in. So I want to do more breeding from different lines and then do some testing on those, and then definitely do more beekeeping videos. Uh, I kind of lost my way a little bit this year with YouTube in terms of trying to do different things and, and I hear it when people say, you know, you don't like the clickbait titles and you don't want stuff that's shocking. Um, but trying to— you've got to try and ride the wave a little bit with YouTube, and unless it's a little bit clickbait, people don't really watch it. Um, and then for it to be more mainstream, it needs to be less beekeeping-y. And then I, I understand and appreciate that's not what people want anymore, so I'm going to go back to basics, I think, with the beekeeping and try and do more like specific beekeeping tutorials and maybe a series. Um, one other thing I forgot to mention as well, when I'm doing the rebrand, I'm trying my best at the moment to work out a slogan, a 3-word slogan for the company, and it needs to encompass kind of queens, nucs, and a bit of honey, because honey's like 10% of the business. It's really difficult. But it needs to be three words. So if you have any ideas and you want to share them, you can either email me or you can put them in the comments as well. That would be good. I'm really struggling. I got my mum helping me with this, and she's probably watching, and she's she's quite good. I was going to say I was going to say you're rubbish there, Mum. You know she is good. Um, but I'm really struggling with that, struggling to come up with a good three-word slogan for Black Mountain Honey. But I am very excited about the rebrand and new website, but they will come in January, February. I think I'll do the launch for all of that. So the launch for that will all be in place definitely by the Beekeeping Show. So I'll have like a new hat and a new t-shirt, and you'll be able to see it all there. It's pretty cool. Um, interesting you say that one. I'm, I'm winning that at the moment, Jim, um, by a long shot, but, uh, April, I think I'm going to do that one. Oh, I'm not taking that as a compliment, a young Clarkson. I can't stand Jeremy Clarkson, but okay. Right, here we go. When is the beekeeping show? So it is back end of February. I don't know the exact date, uh, but it is in Telford. If you Google the beekeeping show, it will come up with, with tickets. I think you can buy tickets now. Uh, nope, unfortunately not continuing with— well, I am continuing with Hot Fire Honey, but I'm not continuing with any of the kind of ancillary stuff around it. So the barbecue sauce is gone, um, along with all of the mustards and the scorpion and the pepper and stuff like that, because we just weren't selling enough of it. So that is all gone. I've got some, I've got some out-of-date barbecue sauce if you want it, Jim. It's perfectly good to eat, but I can't sell it. So if you want some, I'll send, I'll send you off a box. Right, here we go, back to the beekeeping questions. Right, so Edward says, do you know what paint Abello uses for painting the inside of the poly feeder, and what paint would you recommend for painting the inside of a poly feeder? Um, I don't know if this is déjà vu. I swear I've answered this question before for you, Ed, numerous times, but I'm more than happy to answer it again. It's fine. So Abello sell their own— it's like a, it's like a masonry paint they do sell it online on their website, all the different colors. And that's all they use on the inside is like a, an exterior-grade masonry paint. And that's all I would recommend using is just an exterior-grade masonry paint. Um, I think like Santex, I think, do one. Um, but any, anything exterior-grade for masonry is good. You can use an exterior-grade gloss as well, that works quite well. But just make sure that you paint it before you put any syrup in it, because if you put syrup in it and then the mold starts to grow and then you try and paint over it, the mold still comes through. It's a nightmare. Oh, that's a good question, Andy. So, so for someone new to queen rearing, do you recommend grafting or non-grafting methods? So the one, the one that I use is, is Michael Palmer's 10 over 10 method, which is a grafting method. But I would just say try them all. Like, and, and this is definitely what I'm going to do next year. Like, I'm not an expert on any of these methods, but I, I try a couple of— like, I know how to do a few of them, um, and then the one that I always use, I'm relatively good at and get a good few strikes. But I'm definitely going to do more methods. Um, the one that I showed you that Richard uses, that's a good method. Um, that is a grafting method as well, but that's a much simpler method in terms of raising like a few queens. If you, if want like, I don't know, 5 or 6 queens, that's a really good method that doesn't require a starter finisher. It's kind of done all under one roof. But I'm gonna do some more, some more queen rearing videos that maybe some are grafting, some are non-grafting. We'll do like some cell punching. There's tons of different good methods that you can use. I would say for, um, if you're brand new to it, like, you can just get going with swarm cells. And there is the argument, are you rearing swarmier bees? And yeah, you probably are, but you're not going to notice it until you get a few generations down the line. So that's always a good way to start. And you can let a colony kind of go on and on and on and just let the virgins emerge and put them in cages. So you kind of like, you get the rough timings together, got your frame that's got loads of swarm cells on it, And then you're either like caging them in the actual frame, or you're taking them out and putting them in an incubator and then kind of letting the virgins emerge and then trying to introduce virgins. I would say that's probably a little bit more difficult than, than grafting, to be honest. I think grafting is easier than trying to introduce virgins. But just, just have a play around with it and try lots of different methods. And as I said, I will do lots of different methods for this next year. Um, ranging from kind of like more commercial methods to what's easy if you've just got literally one beehive in your garden. Uh, so that should be good fun. Secret Stoffen Queens? No. So I do have a Stoffen Queen, but it's not Secret Stoffen Queens. It is, it is a level, a couple of levels above Stoffen Queens, I have to say. Um, but I'm— I will not, I will not give this one away. I gave, gave the other ones away, and, uh, it's not happening this time. So You will just have to see what the F1 queens are like. Uh, Flower Street Farm Bee says hello from Colorado. Hello. And Wildways Farm says hi from Devon. If that's Harry— Harry down there, I think. How you doing, Harry? Uh, right, East Sussex Peter. It's Peter. I should read the last bit, shouldn't I, first? Hi, Peter. Right, the underfloor entrances seem to have solved wasp issues. We'll try to make a few more over winter. Any issues with Asian hornets in Wales? Now again, this just goes to show, doesn't it, how long I've not done a live stream for? Because the last time I did a live stream, like there was just no talk of the Asian hornet invasion, and it seems pretty bad news now, doesn't it? Like I'm genuinely worried for what we're going to see next year. It's quite clear to me that there was a nest or multiple nests missed last year. So in 2022, regardless of what anybody says, I don't believe that all of those Asian hornets queens were blowing over just all of a sudden. My view is it was quite clear there's loads of overwintered Asian hornet queens this year, and then I think there's no doubt that there's going to be nests missed already this year, and the fact that they've seen kind of queens coming out of the nests And some of them being fertile as well. So I do think the Asian hornet's here to stay. I am really, really worried about it. Like, it has the potential to completely devastate our business, but the beekeeping industry as a whole. And it's hard to predict what happens next. Like, it could get really, really bad, but as with all these things, there's going to be winners and losers. Out of it, but I'm trying to work out who the winners and who the losers are going to be at the moment. So the one the one slight glimmer of hope that we have in North Wales is that we're probably like the furthest point away. Like obviously Anglesey's a bit further away, but the furthest point away from the invasion in any direction. So you've got like Hull and Yorkshire and then Kent and then the south coast, and it is just going to creep through the country and it's going to. it will go at a similar rate to the rate in which it went in France, which is about 80 kilometers a year, but could get quicker than that if you get one queen that hitches a ride from London up to North Wales and then you get a nest in North Wales, then it can spread a lot quicker than that. But I've not had any sightings or anything kind of like that in any of my apiaries yet. What I have noticed though is that there's loads of European hornets around. Like, I don't know if anybody else has noticed that, and maybe it's just because, like, we're looking a bit more, but I had my European hornet's nest in my apiary in, like, I won't say where it is, in one of my apiaries, and then there was a European hornet's nest in Richard's apiary, and then I went out the other day and saw loads of them just on the ivy. So it seems to have been a very good year for hornets over here. But I do, I do hope they manage to get it under control. Um, there's a lot of doom and gloom going around with Asian hornets, and I, I am worried, and I don't, I don't know what the answer is. Like, you see all this stuff about trapping and when to trap, when not to trap, and the collateral damage. And then I, I follow a very respected person on a beekeeping forum who, who knows what he's talking about, and what his view is, is that trapping queens in the spring is the worst possible thing you can do. I won't go into the detail why, but he seems to think it's, it's not a good thing to do. And what he is suggesting to do— I've been really tempted to do a video on it and say you can't do this because it is illegal, but it's proven to work. Um, and I just don't know why this method hasn't been used as a one-off and got a special license to use it to eradicate the nests when they were known to be kind of like in the, in the faces of the Kent cliffs. So it's, um, it's kind of irrelevant now because the problem's here and the problem's definitely going to be here to stay. So sorry, yeah, that was a bit, that was a bit grim. Uh, right, Andy Bryson says, hi Lawrence, you mentioned in a previous video where you got your ratchet straps and I can't find it now. Could you tell us again? Thanks, Andy. So I can. It's a website called Handy Straps, and unfortunately they've gone out of business, or they don't sell the straps anymore. Because when I used to buy those straps, they were about 70 or 80p each, and then you just can't get them anymore. And I tried to contact the manufacturer and tried to contact the website and said, are you getting them? Can you get them back? And they just never got back to me. Um, some— someone can have a look now. I won't do it while I'm online, but I'm pretty sure either Either the website's not there anymore, they don't sell that specific cheap, like, um, endless strap. But the ones that I use now, I just buy them on eBay. You can get them still on eBay pretty cheap. So you just, if you look for like 5 meters, the one that I like to go for, the 4-meter ones are a little bit short if your bees are doing well, but a 5-meter endless strap, and you can get them in like batches of 10, and I think they're like £15, £16 on eBay. So it works out still £1.50 each. And, and they've been really good, the ones that I've got. Like, it's the quality of the mechanism but also the quality of the band. Some of them just degrade really quickly from UV, but these ones that I've got have been all right. Um, so, so Steve's spoken a little bit about the current Asian hornet situation in the UK. There's going to be more, there's going to be more content from me coming out on the Asian hornet. Like, I offered to go down to Jersey and, and get involved and, and do what I do, what I could. Um, but we couldn't do it in the end. It was all a little bit short notice and people had obviously other priorities, which are— which I do understand. Just didn't want me down there filming and getting in the way. Um, but there will be more on that situation and I will do my best to kind of do more videos on it. Um, so Wildways Farm saying, do you think the warm autumn we've had this year will influence the number of queens pumped out of the nests? So yeah, sadly, yeah. Um, I think it's just been like absolutely ideal conditions for them, really. Whether they like the cold or the damp, I don't know. And I've always kind of thought, well, you know what, it's pretty cold in North Wales, um, so it will impact their overwintering. And then you speak to this guy who knows everything, he's like, no, that's what they want. They want it a nice like cold snap and they just go and hibernate. He said it's the worst years for them is when it's, it's quite mild and they, uh, they come out early and then can't find a food source. So I just think we're, we are in it for the long term now. Uh, Chris Matthews says, given that we've had just had the joint warmest September on record, do you think the broodless oxalic acid treatment will be later this year? So it's always difficult to know when to do this. Like, I, I did a batch, um, about 2 weeks ago now just because I was filming the video. It's not when I normally would do it. And for the vid— for the video, I, I just— I didn't put it on the video, but while I was there, I pulled out a couple of frames, and on some of the 6-frame nucs, there's 4 frames of brood still, like jam-packed, full to the brim. So they definitely hadn't stopped rearing any brood yet. And I think if it stays relatively mild, you can just get colonies going through the whole winter with a bit of brood. So you've got to do it when you— when you like, best possible place to do it for you. I still go for like back end of November, early December, like so a 2-week period around there tends to be okay. But I definitely don't go in like checking the bees and trying to actually like confirm that they are broodless because we use Apivar anyway. Oh, Peter, can Asian hornets mate with European hornets? I'd love to be able to answer that. I'm pretty confident that they can't, but I don't think they're the best of mates. But that would be crazy, wouldn't it, if they started mating with like our native hornet? Let's hope they don't do that. Just put some homemade sugar bricks on but then saw lots of sugar under the hives. Is this normal? Have you had luck with these or just use fondant as failsafe? So yeah, I never use, I never use just like normal sugar or homemade sugar bricks because I just don't think it's very accessible for the bees. I know it's cheaper and the price of sugar's just gone through the roof, but fondant is a lot easier for them. But seeing it out underneath the hives, if you've got open mesh floors, it could just fall through. If, um, if you've not got open mesh floors and they're just chucking it out, that could be slightly concerning. Problem with any sort of homemade sugar bricks or homemade fondant is that if you don't do it right, like, you properly poison your bees because the, the level of HMF can just be huge. Uh, so that's always a good, a good reason just to buy whatever's going. Um, I know the Bakar fondant used to be so cheap It used to be, what, £7.50, £8 for a 12.5 kilogram slab, and now that's like £15, £16 if you, if you can even get it for that cheap now. It's just like everything's getting more expensive, isn't it, for beekeeping? Right, Robert says, in your last soft set video you mentioned just grinding it down with the Abello creamer. Do you just leave the temp off? The lowest temp goes on -30°C. So yeah, definitely, when I'm doing my soft set, I I melt the honey down in the buckets. So all seed rape, I melt it completely down in the buckets until it's liquid, and then I pour it into my, like, my creamer, and then I leave it until it's just starting to set without the churner on. So you'll see it go, it becomes— it's still like honey, but it becomes like a little bit cloudy, and then I turn it on. And I always go on the lowest spin setting, so 25% spin setting, and I don't put the temperature back on at all the whole way through. And then I leave it in there fully soft set, and you can leave it in there indefinitely. It's like a bucket. And then when I come to put it into the jars, I heat it back up again to like 38, 39 degrees C until it's liquid, and then straight into the jars. And it works very well. I'm just looking for some questions that aren't about Asian hornets. We can talk more about Asian hornets. Um, but it is, it is very worrying. All right, so Daryl says, any more videos of the Beekeeping Show in Telford? Will you be with Abello this year again? So I probably will do something with Abello. Um, not 100% sure what yet. What I've— what I said to the guys at the Beekeeping Show and to Damien is that let's do some more like stuff. Let's not just selling, not just talking, like let's just do some showing. awesome, like, breaking stuff. So I would like to do more of that. And I think maybe kind of limited in terms of what we can do, um, for, like, health and safety. But what I would like to do is— I said to Damien, he needs to try and, like, extract some honey. He's got, like, his, uh, all-singing, all-dancing honey extraction machine there, like the uncapper. And let's just, let's just extract some honey. But appreciate that he doesn't want to mess up everything. And I don't really want to have to bring all of my stuff there and then clean it again. So we might just take like a very specific portion of it and, and do something. I don't know, maybe like some honey jarring or something, because the honey jarring machines are pretty cool. So I might do something like that with the Bellow. And then I, I'm hosting like a practical session, so I'll be like the compère for a practical session doing some stuff that we're yet to agree on what it is. But it might be like some hive assembly or some candle making or something that will pass the health and safety criteria. So there will, there will be videos for that show coming up. I will do my live stream before going around talking to the different manufacturers that are there as well, and then we'll do some stuff on the day. I do have one— there is still one video on the channel that I've not released yet that is like, it's me, me at the beekeeping show going around to all of the different things all of the different vendors, and I will release that at some point, kind of probably around Christmas. That's quite a cool video. Oh, I always do this, make my tea and then forget to drink it. I've got a peppermint tea today. Um, right, so Edward says, hi, what do you think is better, using a Mini Mating Nuc from Bellow or just using a nuc for queen rearing? Uh, so it does depend what you're kind of doing. If you're, if you're just in your back garden, I wouldn't bother with mini mating nucs because they're, they're just, they can be a bit fiddly, but then you're just not really aligned to all of your other frame sizes as well. So like a, a nuc would just be my, the easiest way of doing it really. Um, But if you're going up to like, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 queens, then it is probably a good investment to go down that system there. The only difference really is the amount of like resources you need to stock them. So if you, if you think about it, if you've got like 2 beehives and you want to make 2 queens, then you've not really got much resources to do that. So you might be thinking, I'll go for the little mini ones and then I can make maybe 20 queens. but then you don't really need 20 queens to do it. The, the mini mating nucs, it's all about resources, um, and the amount of bees that you have to put in to get out a viable queen. And if you think if someone's on a commercial level and they're doing 5,000 queens, then they're not going to want to have 3 or 6 frame full-size nucs because it's a huge amount of resources. Um, so I would just go with standard nuc. Uh, Joe says, how do you store the sections or Ross rounds until you need them? So there is only one way to store them really, and that is in a freezer. You have to shrink wrap them and put them in a freezer, and then when they thaw out, they're just liquid again. Otherwise, it just— they just granulate and they're, they're a bit useless. Oh, Peter's doing my work for me. Thanks, Peter. Only 7 likes. Um, hit that like button. Very good. Cheers, Peter. Uh, Paul says, would like to start using oxalic acid vaporizer with only 10 hives. Don't want to spend a fortune just now. Any ideas for a good value vaporizer? So I'll sell you my Sublimox if you want a cheap one. My Sublimox is for sale. You will need a, an inverter, either an inverter or a generator to go with it, but it's, it's not that it's not the best, it's just it's got a cable. It's a little bit like temperamental. I'm doing the best, best sales effort there, aren't I? But it is for sale, and the reason it's for sale is the Instant Vap is just by far and away the best thing for oxalic acid vaporizing. It is not cheap, but it is just so much easier to use, and it's so easy to use, it's so easy to clean, it just kind of works, and it's really small and neat and packs away well. Like I've got, I've got some gas vaps as well. I can send people a couple of gas vaps if you want. Um, I'll do you a good deal on those, but I wouldn't recommend them because they kind of work for like 2 or 3 hives and then they just start, they just seem to start going a bit weird and not really working very well. And it really annoys me because I think, well, they, they should work, but they don't. So I don't want to recommend something that doesn't work. Like you almost want to go with like a wand-style one. If you, if you want the cheapest one that, that definitely works, go with an oxalic acid wand vaporizer and just build something to go underneath your beehive because they work and they're really effective, but they're slow and they're fiddly. Um, but the gas vat is just— I, I can't recommend them anymore. I kind of retract any previous recommendation for them as well. Because I've had nothing but aggro trying to use them. And the Sublimox works, but it does need the inverter. So my recommendation would be the OneStar one if you want it as cheap as possible, or just spend the money straight up and go with the Instant Vap because it is really, really good. All right, here we go. Thank you very much, Pink It's Honey. It was, it was good. I really enjoyed it. Beekeeping Show. It was great to meet so many people down there. I had a proper cold the next day, and I remember I got up the next morning because I was playing golf, and I got a picture of it. I was so tired, absolutely shattered. I was like talking like this, like, oh man. But it was good fun. We're in the process of getting our honey room signed off. How long does it usually take after registering? Any tips on areas to focus on? So it didn't take that long at all. They basically told us on the day, yeah, it's fine. They didn't tell you what you were going to get, but it was clear that there wasn't any issues. Any tips on areas to focus on is your, your HACCP plan, however you say it, the HACCP plan. That's what they want to see. You almost like painting them a picture or telling them a story of every single step in the process and how you're avoiding any contamination of your honey product. And just go overboard with your processes. Have a process for absolutely everything, have records for absolutely everything, make sure everything's got like a signing box, make sure everything's properly— make sure your people are properly trained and you have like training records for everyone. I just found online was pretty good for that. Like, you do, you have to do your Level 2 in food manufacturing Safety, which is, which is quite simple. And I think that the content in that course just gives you everything you need in order to, to do it. And also what I found as well is that the people, they, they don't just turn up. It's not like they just turn up out of the blue and say, right, we're here to do it. Like, you know when they're coming and you know who the inspector is going to be, and you can speak to the inspector before, before they come, and they're pretty good. could just ask them questions and you can show them stuff and you can say like, this is, this is kind of what we're working on, can you suggest any improvements before you come? And they're generally like, they're generally quite good. Like what they want is compliant food hygiene, so they're willing to help you get compliant food hygiene. They're not there to like catch you out, so I'm sure you've got it all covered. Joe likes the gas vat. Andy likes the gas vat as well. So it's interesting. Like I said, I don't, I don't hate the gas vat, and the gas vat works on a smaller scale, but it definitely doesn't work like consistently on a bigger scale. If you're trying to do like a run of 20 hives, I find you just get to a point where it just stops firing out oxalic acid, and I look at it and I think, okay, it's like, why is it not working anymore? And I'll put like a gram in nothing happens, and then it comes out somewhere else, and it's just, it's just a little bit frustrating. But good to hear it's working for other people. New to beekeeping, one of the few things I was confident doing was making 2:1 syrup. Now you have scared me saying I could poison my precious bees. Advice please. So making syrup's like really easy, and you can definitely make 2:1 syrup without killing your bees. The way that I always— like, the advice that I'd always give is as soon as you put the sugar in, don't apply any more heat. And as long as you, as long as you follow that advice, you'll never poison them. It's when you see people like boiling water and then they're putting the sugar in and it's like mixing it and it's not dissolving, so there's got the heat and they're just like ramping up the heat and then they're like kind of boiling it down to get it to like a syrupy consistency, and you just think, what are you doing? You don't need to— just don't do that. You can make 2:1 syrup with cold water if you like spin it and agitate it enough. It does take a long time to do it, but there's no need to do that. What I do is I just boil the water, turn the water off, and then add it to the— and then add the sugar to the water and stir it and keep on stirring, keep on stirring, and then it will eventually dissolve and you'll have it like a completely dissolved solution, and then it's fine and you will not poison your bees. So Wildways Farm, I think, is with me. Always found that the gas ferts kind of fall apart and doesn't project the gas far enough into the hive, and the treatment doesn't seem to kill many mites. So yeah, not— I don't, I don't do kind of any testing of the drop rates, um, but you're spot on. It doesn't project far enough, and with the gas ferts, it's only got a small spout anyway. And then if you put the extension spout on it condenses in the extension spout because it's not designed to kind of go through a long length of copper like that. So you're doing it with this little spout, and then if it doesn't project through, you're stuck a little bit. Whereas you'll see, I did the video that I am editing at the moment that's just taken me a nightmare because half of it was out of focus, is for the Instant Vap. And you'll see from the Instant Vap one, the difference between the two is just incredible. Like, it projects it like it fires it out. You could almost do it like 2 or 3 inches outside the entrance to the hive. It's that kind of vicious, the, uh, the amount that it projects it, and it just makes it so much easier. Uh, so Daryl says, what do you use when vaporizing to not melt the poly hives? Some on abello floors and some on wooden underfloor mesh floors. So you, you can use extension tubes, but nobody recommends them. because it does, it starts condensing down in the extension tube. So for me, I kind of just say, you know what, I'm going to maybe melt a couple of my polyhives. But I just try and put the nozzle in the entrance and leave like maybe a centimeter because the bees are not going to come rushing out when you're blowing in oxalic acid sublimate. And that's just the way that I do it. And occasionally you kind of like lean in a little bit and you melt a little bit of Poly, but I'm not, I'm not overly fussed about that. I'd prefer the treatment to be effective than to kind of try and protect the poly and then for it to not be effective, if you get what I'm saying. Another one for the Instant Vap there, so there we go. Um, be interesting to know what, what other people use. I've got a hello from Miami, Florida. What's, what's the weather like in Miami, Florida now? guessing it's like daytime out there as well. It's, um, it's about 9 degrees Celsius here. It's pretty cold. Oh, did that one, didn't I? Um, last time I was stung in the face— I've not been stung for a while, you know. My bees are pretty chilled now. Still do get stung, but nowhere near kind of like the same level as before. Um, when was the last time I got stung in the face? Oh no, let me Well, I got stung in the face loads when I was doing Joe from Staunton Park Bees. Um, his— yeah, his bees, they absolutely battered me. And then when I was doing the video with Liam, I got stung in the face a couple of times. Uh, so I do— it's other people's bees tend to sting me in the face now, I think. But I know how much people do enjoy watching me get stung in the face, so I might have to bring that back. So Liam says, hi Lawrence, I've just finished my first year and ended the season with 3 hives. I've got the bug for it and was wondering what you thought is the ideal number of hives, right, so you don't get overwhelmed. So regardless of what number I tell you now, Liam, you're going to end up with kind of like 20 or probably 50 before you realize that it's too much work. That is what— that's just what happens with beekeeping because The easiest thing in beekeeping is splitting beehives, and it's one of those weird situations where it's, it's easy, but then it makes your life easier. So it's kind of, it's self-perpetuating. You're doing something that's easy, which is splitting the beehive, and then you've not got to manage your big strong colonies of bees because you split them. So the, the real, it's like proper eye-opening, is when you get to the point where you say, right, That is more than enough colonies now. So say you get to 10 colonies and you say, right, that's enough, the garden's full. That's when the real difficult but fun and challenging part of beekeeping begins, which is, right, got 10 colonies coming out of winter and you want to go into winter with 10 strong colonies and you want to get a honey crop. That's when you've got to do some real proper beekeeping, and it is difficult because you can't split them. And they just want to swarm. So what people tend to go off in, like, a couple of directions there. One, which is just, they just leave the bees to it, and I don't like that approach because it's a bit diseasy, but also there's no skill in that. That's just kind of, yeah, I'll leave the bees, leave the bees to it, and what you ultimately end up with there is 10 rubbish colonies at the end of the year, maybe 5 or 6 of them that will turn drone layer by the following year. and pretty much no honey. Or the other way of doing it is that you end up starting making splits and either giving the splits away or selling the splits, and that's where I would be, much better way of doing it. Or you just say, I'm gonna do my best to make sure these bees don't swarm, you know, one-trick pony. Demeray is good for that, it's not a silver bullet and it doesn't trick all of the colonies into thinking that they're swarming, but it definitely reduces the number of colonies that swarm. But then the other one is just— and I think more people should do this one, it's a good one— which is, say you've got 10 colonies going coming out of winter, is build them up so they're nice and strong, and then first week of May, maybe last week of April, take the queen, make a split, really small split, let the big colony requeen itself. And if the big colony requeens itself, great, just leave them to it and keep your splits. And then at the end of the year, choose which are the best queens and just combine everything back down together. And then if the colonies don't, um, don't produce their own queen successfully, then you've got your original mated queen that you can just introduce back. So kind of like a no, a no-risk bet, and that works well. That's what I would do if we weren't selling nucs. I'll just kind of make preemptive splits and then just combine everything back together again at the end of the year. But if you want— if you wanted an ideal number, just where it like, it remains fun, keep it single figures, definitely single figures. I recently found out that Formic Pro works so well on half a treatment dose, which means that the bees aren't overwhelmed with the vapor. So yeah, a lot of people use kind of like a smaller dose of the Formic Pro, or the Max as it used to be called. The thing that I don't like about that is it, like, it can damage— it seems to damage older queens. So if you've got old queens, they do not like formic acid. But the one thing that Max had going for it was that it was registered to use with the supers on, and now that it's not and that you've got to take all the supers off means that you can only really use it at like at certain points in the year. And I just think if you're only going to use it like August, you might as well just use Apivar because it's kind of similar price and, and just as effective, if not more effective. It definitely doesn't kill your queens. So I'm not— yeah, I'm not a fan of, not a fan of Formic Pro. But you're right, if you, if you cut it down, it doesn't kill as many bees. Definitely, you will love it, Joe. They were very aggressive, yeah, and you know what, it's weird, it's kind of, it was like a throwback because you do get, you become a little bit complacent when your bees are pretty chilled and you can kind of walk around and they're not too fussed and then you think you can do it on other people's hives and then you realize that you can't. I got battered that day. So no, we don't tend to stock any Carniolan bees. I like to just kind of keep things as simple as I possibly can, and I tried going down the route of getting all different genetics in and trying all the different ones out, but I know there's some very good breeders out there that do use Carniolans, but we do use the Buckfast ones. Oh, my light in the background! I got it from Etsy. It's cool, isn't it? I'm getting a new one because we're getting our new logo, which is already designed, which I'm very pleased with. I'm going to get a new one of those. It was from a Ukrainian guy in Etsy. I'm going to probably sell that one if you want to buy that one. This is like I'm flogging everything today, isn't it? If you want it, everything's for sale. to buy anything. Got a nice cup here. Send me your offers. Right, amazing. I've gone— I've come to the end of the questions then, so I'm only going to really do like an hour, uh, and I'm on 47 minutes. So if you've got any more questions, feel free to drop them in the comments below. If not, I'll talk maybe more about like our nucs or talk about our queens. Oh, I drink my tea a little bit more. Uh, I'm very excited about the website, so I've been having like regular communication with the website designer. I've been trying to contact as many people as well for like case studies and video reviews. So you might, you might have had an email from me asking if you want to be involved in queen studies, queen studies case studies, or queen reviews or nuc reviews. So we're full, we're full of queen reviews now. I've got tons of queen reviews, but if anybody, if anybody bought a nuc from from me and they want to do like a video review, that could be good. Uh, I've got a couple of them, but I'm trying to get like a little, a little banner across the website for different people who have had a good experience with our nucs. Uh, so could be interested in that. Probably going to go live like January or February in time for the new queen season. Takes, takes a surprisingly like large amount of time much for them. Like, this is, this is brilliant. This is, this is a genuine Edwards wig. Um, I'd probably sell it for £20 though because it does need to go, and then that would fund maybe the haircut to, to get rid of it. Oh, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go to bed crying tonight about that one. Um, any suggestions on theft prevention for hives in remote areas? So, so this is something that I think is just going to get worse and worse with With the price of everything going up, oh wait, we're gonna we're gonna jump in here. Jasper's definitely not for sale. Can you see him in here? No, he's over there. Stop for sale. But yeah, jumping back to that one, any suggestions on theft prevention for hives in remote areas? It's a really difficult one, and this is one that I do think is going to get worse and worse. But I think in in terms of prevention. Like there's there's no like gizmos or gadgets I would recommend to say, oh this is gonna this is gonna help. Like you see people saying about like was it like Apple AirTags or Bluetooth things that you put inside them and and like the thieves they're they're way in like on top of all stuff like that. All they're going to do is just like shake the bees off and sell the bees and chuck all the equipment away anyway. But what what I would suggest though is. Like putting them out of the way, making sure that they're not visible on Google Earth, making sure that they're not visible from a road. Like, if you can see something like that— I see some near where I live here, especially like on heather moorland— and you just think, well, like, how easy would that be? Like, I'm on the road, I can see them, I can see the gate for where you've gone in that's not locked. Like, I could just pull up and just take them. They'd be gone in literally 2 minutes. So I do think some people don't help themselves when it comes to hive thefts, and I'm honestly surprised there's not more of it, or there's at least it's not reported that much. Like the one in Llangollen got a huge amount of media coverage all over the UK, so I don't think it happens that much, which is good because it's— it would have to be an inside job. I think it's definitely a beekeeper that's stealing beehives. Um, trail cams. Not really that good. Like, I've got trail cams up at a couple of sites, and if someone went there and nicked the nucs or the bees, like, I don't think the footage would be that good. It's not that good in the nighttime to give you like a picture of someone's like face or anything like that. So I would just— my advice would be just keep them well out of the way, and even like when you're near to them, kind of like conceal them as best as you possibly can. So instead of spending the money on, say, like a trail cam, spend the money on some sort of wind protection camouflage so that they're really difficult to see. Painting them is a good one as well, so they're not like a garish colour. Like, I know the Abello ones, they're quite— say garish, but they're quite colourful and you can see them from quite a way away. So I would suggest getting them unpainted and then do classic, you know, a bit of camouflage with the spray paint. Because it— you'd be amazed how much of a difference that makes when they're, when they're tucked away against like a green background. You can't really see them. Um, what else would I say? That's probably it. Um, but just don't, don't put them in a stupid area where they're kind of asking for it. That's right, I know some people would be jealous, wouldn't they? It's like a proper '80s wig. Um, brave the shave, free haircut on a good cause. What though? They took my— I don't think they'd want my hair. It's not, it's not nearly long enough for that. Can't like plait it or anything. Um, but I'd happily do that. I've shaved my hair once and I'd shave it again, although I was a bit worried last time that it wasn't going to grow back, and I think that's why I'm like— it's like emotional damage. but I shaved it once and it didn't kind of grow back properly, and then it's come back now. It's got curls again, so it's staying there. Uh, so Glyn, back to honey question. So Glyn says, how was your heather crop of honey this year? Had around £70 from 2 hives. So that, that's a good crop. So I— you'll see that this is on the member section at some point. I forget, like, we're, we're months behind on YouTube videos at the at the moment. But the heather crop, well, I was long overdue shook swarming, and I wanted to get every single apiary this year shook swarmed because I had some like frames that were like 7 or 8 years old, and like whole hives with brood frames that were 7 or 8 years old. Never had any disease in them, but I just wanted— it was starting to kind of mean that they weren't that productive, and I just wanted to give them a real nice fresh start. So I Um, I shook swarmed the whole apiary in probably like the first week of June, and I remember doing it thinking the weather's perfect, what a perfect time to do shook swarms. And there's a few shorts going out, it's just like beautiful sunny day, 27 degrees, shook swarming all these colonies, didn't have to feed them because there was great flows on. And I was thinking this is going to be great because they are gonna, they're gonna build up to a point where they're strong enough to get a good crop from the heather just in time for the heather crop. And then as soon as that thought came into my mind, it started raining, and then it just rained for 7 weeks, like non-stop for 7 weeks. And the combination of that weather where we are just completely obliterated any chance of a heather crop. So I kind of decided to just call it, call it a day, and I called it a day probably middle to back end of July. and said, I'm just— I'm not even going to bother going for a heather crop. I'm going to feed them now, and I'm going to get the Apivar strips in nice and early, which I did. And they look really healthy, they look really good, but I didn't get or even try and get any heather from it at all. And I know a couple of people that are close by who would have been foraging on the same crop, and they just said, we didn't, didn't get a sniff and get a drop of heather honey. So I was quite happy I made that decision, but I was a bit gutted because I bought a new heather press, like a hydro press, like a 90-liter one sitting there in the honey extraction room, and it's just— it's never been used. And I was a bit gutted, but that'll be— that'll be next year's video. I'm going to stick them on the— they're called frames and feeders frames, the big 14 by 12 ones— and I'm going to scrape it all back in. So I'm pretty confident that that process will work. I've, I've had quite a bit of experience with those frames this year, the Frames and Feeders ones, and it is, it's a slight love-hate relationship. I do— once you get them drawn out, they're brilliant. Um, I've not had to clean any of them yet, so I don't know if they warp, but once you get them drawn out, they are really, really good. But getting them drawn out is bloody difficult. Like, it really, really is difficult. And the rate in which they draw them out is so incredibly slow compared to wax foundation. So it's a little bit frustrating, and it will be frustrating when I start to scrape them all back down to press the heather honey out of them. But I do think it will be a good process. And as I said before, the reason that I'm doing that is so I don't have to go through that secondary process of filtering the heather honey, which is just a nightmare. Luckily, the previous year I got so much heather honey. It was ridiculous. It was like 40, 50 pounds from some of the hives. I think the average was like, yeah, 30 pounds, 33 pounds or something. I had 30 colonies up there, so I've got loads of heather honey, more than enough to get me through until next year. Oh right, so KTM Machinery, can you do an up-to-date YouTube of your honey extraction process? So definitely. So I've always struggled with honey extraction videos because You, you've seen my room, small room, and there was so much equipment in there that trying to do the video was just impossible. And then I had the problem as well that every time I tried to do like a little slow-mo thing, the, uh, the lights flicker. So you've got LED lights in there that flicker, and I just, I've never, never worked out how to get rid of the flicker. And I know that it's like the frame rate of what I'm filming versus the flicker rate of the LEDs. And then I stumbled upon it, funnily enough, at the beekeeping show last year, which is— it's like the difference between— I think it's like NTSC and PAL. I think it's— it's definitely PAL. I don't know if it's NTSC, but it's whether it's like a 25 frames per second, uh, versus 30 frames per second. So I get like way too technical now, but I've— I have solved the problem of the flickery lights in the extraction room. So I've sold tons of my equipment, so I've got it down to like a nice size now as well, so I can get the, um, camera and stuff in there and it's not going to have the flicker. So I'm going to do, I'm going to do loads of honey extraction videos next year because I've not done any of those for ages and they are good fun. So I'll definitely do some of those. But what I, what I really, really want to do next year, and believe it or not, it's quite difficult to get people to volunteer for stuff like this I just want to film other people more. I want to go and film you, someone, anyone honey extracting, and I'll come there and we'll be in the video. But it's so much easier for me to be kind of like behind the camera and filming, and there to be somebody else there, be it a beekeeper or a bee farmer. Like, like the videos I did with Carl, like the videos I've done with Richard. I think it, it makes for a much better video. at the end, but not many people are keen to be on camera. So if you are up for being on camera and you want me to come down, and this is like the final caveat, though, is you're not that far away. I don't mind traveling a little bit, but I can't travel to Essex or Cornwall or something like that, you know, it's 6 hours away. So you just need to be relatively local. So, Aaron, I'm looking at you here, get in contact, we'll do you next year. This is a good point, angry bees and you won't want to steal them. You'd be surprised though, they're probably still just like— you've got like an underfloor entrance or you know what you're doing with a bit of tape, you can quickly tape them up in the winter before the bees are even out. But you're right though, ain't you, people will probably be less likely to steal angry bees. Hardest thing in beekeeping? Um, not getting carried away. That's just like the hardest thing in my life, I think, not getting carried away with stuff. Um, but yeah, not getting carried away is probably the, uh, the hardest thing. Do you know what the most annoying thing in beekeeping is? Is when you realize that when you Bought the domain for your website blackmountainhoney.co.uk, and you thought I'm not going to need the .com because why am I going to need the .com? And then you go back to buy it and it's like fifteen hundred quid, and I bought that yesterday. I was like oh bloody hell! And somebody's bought who's bought this blackmountainhoney.uk? I thought well I might as well snap that up as well considering I'm getting .com. Somebody's already bought it. I just think well I'm not. I don't mind paying £1,500 for blackmountainhoney.com because that's quite a good domain ending. But who's bought .uk? Weird, man. But then he got me, then he got me searching for other people's websites, UK-based websites that haven't got the .com version. Oh, it's like nobody's got them, so I've been hoovering them up. I haven't really, I did think about it. But yeah, hardest thing in beekeeping, yeah, is not getting carried away. Not buying the extraction machinery for like a commercial operation when you've got 10 hives, not counting up all of your beehives and saying, right, well, I've got 5 supers on each and a super can be £30 of honey, so that's £150, that's 300 jars per colony, but 10 colonies, that's 3,000 jars. And then work and like, and then you get to the end of the year and you're like, well, I should, I should have made £30 grand here. in honey cells, but I've seemed to have lost £500. Like, it's very easy to get carried away with beekeeping. And then the second hardest thing is managing swarms. There we go, 2 hardest things. Says, what's the most amount of honey you've got from one hive? So surprisingly not that much. Like, we've definitely topped £100, but I've never like gone and like weighed individuals' one, but you can tell from supers. You know, if you've got like 5 full supers, like full full, you know you've got £100. But that's probably about it, um, because we don't— it's not, it's not the same up in North Wales compared to kind of down south where you have arable crops and you see people next to like borage, and then the borage gets taken, and then there's beans, and then before the borage and the beans there's the oilseed rape. And we're not any of that, we've just got sheep. So we don't get a huge amount of honey up here. We get decent amounts, but not the same as our friends down south. Right, Matt says, hi Lawrence, can you run through the double brood configuration when it comes down to tracking down the queen, and do you leave the double brood through winter? So finding queens on double brood is a nightmare. It really is quite difficult. So what I always do whenever I'm doing double brood I take the roof off, pretend there's no supers. I take the roof off, turn the roof upside down, and I take the— I take my queen excluder and I place that inside the inverted roof. And then I take my brood box, top brood box, and I take it off and I put it on the queen excluder. So then what you've got is an inverted roof, queen excluder at the bottom with a brood box on. So if the queen's in that side, she can't get out. And then you're just back to it. The other one's just a standard single brood box, and then I just inspect them separately. And that's the only way I've found to do it really, because if you start, if you start kind of like inspecting the top box and you go through the top box and you're like, queen's not there, and then you take the top box off and then you're looking at the bottom box, she could still be in the other one. So that's the only way I've really found to do that. And it doesn't make it easier, but it means that you know that she's not running between the 2 boxes. And it is quite apparent after maybe like 3 or 4 minutes, you get a roar, and one of the boxes roars and the other one doesn't roar, and it's always the one that doesn't roar where the queen is. So they roar because you've taken the queen away. So that's a good way of identifying where she is. And then in terms of leaving double brood configuration for winter, I Always leave double brood configuration for winter, always, because there's no benefit to kind of like taking them off. The only thing that I would ever do with the double brood configuration is split it into 2 hives, and I definitely don't do that kind of just as they're going into winter. So all I end up doing is I just leave them on double brood, and then you, you'll see it. It's interesting if you leave it on double brood, if you go back in like January, February, and if you crack the boxes in the middle you'll just like, you'll see that there's bees still in between the clusters, maybe like halfway up. And then go back in in like March, and generally the bottom box is empty. March, April, and they're just all in the top box. You can just take the bottom box away then if you want to get it back down to a single brood box. Why do you use Apivar instead of just using your vaporizer to treat for mites? So it comes down to time. Because if you're not using Apivar, then you've got to either get them once when they're completely broodless, or it's just like going back again and again and again and again. Also, I'm a bit scared of like vaporizing with oxalic acid. I think it's one of those things that I can almost, you know, for like one day a year going around proper PPE, Brand new gas mask, brand new filters every single time, making sure like I'm clean-shaven and that I'm not breathing any of it in. But I'd really worry about doing that kind of like repeatedly. And you see sometimes you have to do it like 5, 6, 7 times if you're going to start tracking the mites. And I was just, you know, worried that it's, um, like damaging. So I just tried to like limit the amount that I do. And then also like Apivar is, is so effective. And works really well. So I just, I want people to have like the healthiest bees possible, but you, you would get similarly healthy bees by doing repeated vaporizing. But yeah, it comes down to a time constraint, but then also concerns over health. James is building and putting on quilt boxes today. What's everyone else been doing bee-wise? I'm not doing anything bee-related now. At the moment, it's great. So I'm just gonna have some tea first now. So what extraction equipment are you now using since you sold a lot of it? So I only sold the stuff that I didn't need, and it goes back to that question: the hardest part of beekeeping—not getting carried away. Like I bought so much stuff that I didn't need, and I'm a bit gutted. Well, I'm not a bit gutted that I bought all of it because it's probably doubled in value. Like from since when I bought it, but I didn't need so much of that stuff. And and I kind of keep on buying stuff without really thinking about what I'm going to use it for, or or trying to improve a process that doesn't really need improving, or trying to think that well, if I have 300 hives, then this is going to be easier before I've got 300 hives. So I sold what I sell. I sold my sump. Because there just wasn't enough space in there to have the sump running. I sold my capping spinner because it didn't work very well using it for what I wanted it to use it for. Worked great for spinning cappings, which is what it's designed for, but it didn't work very well for getting the kind of like fine bits out of heather honey, and then it put loads of air into it. So I sold that. I sold a lot of stuff that was like the wrong size. So I bought— I had a 100-liter tank and then a 100-liter creamer, and then I bought a 200-liter tank and a 200-liter creamer. And then I'd connect everything up, and then we'd get to a point when we're like jarring something up that one of the tanks would run out because it was only half the size. So then I just— I was like aligning everything to the right size. So everything's now just 200 liters. Um, my pump's still for sale. Not sold my pump yet, um, so if you want to buy the pump, all offers accepted. But it's a good pump, nice and pump. But then I just kept kind of the basics. So what have I got left? I've got, I've got a 200-liter tank, premium tank, like the conical bottom. Love that tank with the built-in sieve, so it's like doing 2 jobs in one— sieving and settling tank— and then a bottling tank as well. I've got my extractor. I've got a new extractor that's never been used. I've got a 30-frame premium Lysan extractor with a heated bottom, which is, is pretty special. I've not actually had frames in it yet, but you can tell it's really special. Uh, it's a big upgrade on the one that I had previously, which was a good extractor, but this one is really good. And the biggest thing that I like about this new one— this is 2 things I love about it, and I will obviously do a video when I get some frames into it. First one, and this seems like the smallest thing in the world, is that on the other one you have like 2 like half moons of Perspex on, um, on most extractors. And then on my old one you can only open one half because the motor and stuff was sitting on the top. And now on the new one the motor's on the bottom and you can open both halves. And that seems like the tiniest little detail in the world, but for my Honey room, it makes a massive difference. It really does make a huge difference because I want to go kind of from left to right and get my frames, uncap them in the uncapping machine. They move along like that. I take them off, I put them in one side of the honey extraction— the honey extractor. I extract them, and then for me, I stack all of the supers on the other side. So what I was having to do is take them out on the wrong side and walk them around. And like, it sounds like, okay, it's like 3 seconds longer, but it's 3 seconds like loads and loads of times over and over again. So that's one of the things that I really like about the new one. And then the second thing that is a, is a deal breaker, the second one, the heated bottom. I've not bought the heated bottom because I think you need any sort of heating really in an extractor, although it will help keep it like a bit more fluid, the honey inside, but not much. But it— because it's at the bottom, it's like water jacketed at the bottom. So it means that it's really, really heavy because you've got the water on it, but it's really heavy at the bottom as well. So the center of gravity of the whole extractor is really low down, whereas on some of them you see them— so this one's really wide and really heavy with a low center of gravity, where some of them are really narrow and really tall with a really high center of gravity, and that means they wobble more. So this one, like, I've had it I've turned it on 100% speed. It just doesn't move at all, and I know once I get frames in, there'll be a little bit more wobble. You can tell it's not going to jump around the room like the other one did a bit. So I'm excited, and then that's it really. I've got like so I've got my uncapping machine, which I'm really jealous of the new one that's got like the chain drive bit. But anyway, I'm not buying a new one. Got my uncapping machine. I've got my capping screw press. I've got my settling tank. I've got my mellow flow. And I've got my extractor. That's it, and it's good. So Peter's got the smallest dedicated honey extraction room in the UK. God, how big is it? It's probably, it's probably bigger than mine. Um, mine's pretty small. Do you reckon you could get me in to come and film if you're not that far away? Uh, Liam says double or single brood. My local club advocates of double, but I'm not sure. I don't think it makes a massive amount of difference. Like, just let the bees decide. I would say with that, with my bees, with the Buckfast you get from us, I would definitely go double on like a national, on a standard national box. But if you're on like jumbo Langstroth or something like that, or 14 by 12, then I definitely wouldn't go double. So it is dependent on the equipment and also dependent on the bees. I would just try, try, try them out. Double does give you tons of flexibility, uh, and single is a little bit more tricky in terms of management. It's very true, like the amount of rubbish that I've got. I've been going through some of my old stuff and I just think, what, what all this stuff for? Like bonkers amounts of things and just like duplicates of things, and you buy them, don't use them, and then you buy the next version even though you've not used the first version. It is really difficult, isn't it? And I'm doing the same now at the moment with like cameras and lenses and drones. And although I do, I do get good use out of some of those things, but I, I'm very bad for buying stuff. Uh, he's just had 2 hives taken down by wasps this year, even using the underfloor entrances. They are brutal. So they are, they really are. It's worth pointing out at that point as well, like the underfloor entrances, they do help the bees, but wasps, they won't solve a problem if there's like a really bad wasp problem going on. They do just give the bees a little bit more of a fighting chance before there's a wasp problem. So if you're trying to put them on when the wasps get going, they do nothing, but What I also do on the underfloor entrances as well, if you do find that there is like wasp trouble coming on, if you just build like— you can either, you can use foam bungs, is good. Foam bungs is a really quick way to do it. Or you can just cut out some bits of wood to go in, and then you can knock them down to get them into like a single bee space as well. But the wasps have been really bad this year, and we seem to Say every year we just need a really sharp, good, long couple of weeks frost to knock out some of those queens, to try and take the pressure off a bit. Oh, that's good. So on a better note, the Lagustica queen you got from me after you showed them on your video is absolutely killing it. Hopefully she gets through winter okay, and can't wait to see how she performs. Well, that's very good news. All I would say with the Lagustica is do just keep an eye on the on the food. Because they'll almost certainly rear brood all the way through the winter, and they'll almost certainly like exponentially use their food before you think they might. So you might go in like middle of Feb and heft them and they're like super heavy, and then go back like early March, middle of March, and they'll be really light. So keep an eye on them towards the back end because they will use a ridiculous amount of food. But then What the Lagustica are perfect for is they are just like the brood, the perfect brood factory. Great for making splits and great for building up a number of bees, so if you do get a good flow, you get like insane honey crops. But then the bad thing is that they just, they just turn a lot of the food into brood. But I really like them. Richie really likes them as well. But be good to hear how you get on. Be great. I love it. I love borage honey, my favorite. Um, not much, John. New, new wig that's not for sale. Um, flash sale of basically everything else. People bidding for Jasper. Um, so it— that video was actually, was actually my, me, uh My coffee this morning from a bellow. It was nice. It was good coffee. I I enjoyed it. I love a coffee. Dude, I did. I did wonder. I said to Damien, "Is this is this why you're selling coffee now?" He said, "Yeah." But what I'm going to do next time from Damien though is I'm going to say that I don't want the ground stuff. I like the beans. I like to grind my own. But it was nice. It was good coffee. Uh, uh, it's a very quick tick. Forefoot by e-foot. That's— that is pretty small. Um, what is e-foot? But forefoot, like, regardless of what e-foot is, forefoot's pretty small. They're doing very well, Lycan, in America, aren't they? I know I see a few people out there now. Um, using Lysan equipment. Which, which Lysan 30-frame extractor did you get? Do you get for the— get the red one? Because that's the one that I had previously, which was— which is really good. But I don't see my— I don't see much of the premium stuff out there. Every time anybody kind of in the US has a Lysan one, it's always the red one. I don't know, you can prove me wrong. Right, Peter, that is definitely the smallest honey room ever, 4 foot by 4 foot. That is, that is tiny. So Daryl says, can't wait to see the review of the 30-frame premium. Have your eye on it because the same takes the same amount of deeps as shallows. Yeah, so that's it. When you get to like the bigger ones, anything over 800mm on the extractors from Lyson, it will take as many deeps as, as the shallows, and it is a massive benefit doing that. I do, I like to keep all of my colonies on deeps. But I was— I found last year when I was— no, year before when I was extracting, I do— I like the simplicity of having everything on a single size, but I'd much prefer extracting shallows. They just seem to do better in the extractor, and they seem to balance a little bit better in the extractor as well. You don't get anywhere near as many blowouts as when I'm using, uh, the, the kind of like the deeps in there. And I've completely given up on ever trying to extract anything 14 by 12. It just didn't work. I just, I blow out more than I successfully extract on the big ones. Uh, Wildways Farm says, how many queens do you sell each year? So we sold, we sold 10,000 queens last year, which was just insane. We— I've got the list, I've got the list above me here, which is like the checklist for the queens coming in each week. And it was just every week was like 400 or 500 queens, and we kind of thought the demand would drop off at some point, and it never did all the way through the year. And luckily the breeder, um, let me keep you. I didn't order 10,000 queens, I'll tell you that. I think I ordered about 3,500, and then he was just saying, what are you doing? You've only ordered 3,500, but you kind of it's May and you've already had 3,500. So he was pretty flexible with us to increase them. But this year he said, you've got to give me a better estimate. So I'm— what I always err on the side of caution. I don't— I'd hate to ever be in a position where like I've got queens that I can't sell. So I'll always under-order. I'd prefer to not be able to fulfill as many orders and always sell the queens than not be able to sell them. Uh, you can fit 2 people in and work, but definitely not 3. Wow, in— that's— that is the tiniest honey room in the world. I want to see a picture of this, Peter. You have to send me a picture. So Steve says, I've been watching videos of melting cappings with heat gun before extracting. What are your thoughts? So I don't know if I ever did the video on that, but it doesn't work. Like, it just doesn't work at all. You, you get the heat gun and you go over the top of it and it kind of looks like it's working. So if you were to do it, like, you just look at it, it looks like it's working. But then before you get all of the frames back in, like, the wax seems to just like re-solidify and then it doesn't extract out properly. And so some comes out but some doesn't come out, and then all that happens is the extraction is just wobbling all over the place because it's kind of saying, well, you've not really uncapped all of the frames properly. So then all we end up doing is going back over it with a knife. So then you just give up and just say, not for me, that one, back to the knife. So Peter says, we are now only using one type of frame, National Hoffman shallow frames, 3 boxes to a double brood. Ever thought of changing to one frame type? So we did this, this is what we do on most of our colonies. We just use National Deeps. So like National Deep in the brood box, and then everything above the queen excluder is a National Deep as well. And I've done it a couple of times on colonies where it's just all 14 by 12 as well. Don't do that, it is backbreaking, and then you can't extract it. But it works, it works fine. And it— you do get like— it's way cheaper doing that in terms of like buying the boxes, but more than that buying the frames. Like, buying the frames is kind of like the same price for DN4s versus SN4s, and you're getting like 50%— more than that, 50-60% more surface area. It definitely works out cheaper. Um, but as I said, I do like extracting the shallow ones. It just seems they seem to extract a little bit better than the bigger ones. Come on, come on, get down there. So in Peter's 4-foot by 4-foot honey, honey room, you've got an oven, heater, sink, floor drain, and 3-frame Vivo tangential converted to a 6-frame radial. Very nice. Powered by a 1945 sewing machine motor. So I remember I, I had a similar one to that. Wasn't a Vivo one, but it was basically like the same design. Kind of from China, wherever they come from, and I converted it with a drill. So my Makita drill, and it worked so well. And then I broke it because I think I broke the bearings on it from just you. You got a drill in it, so you do it like a little bit quicker, a little bit quicker, and then and then it broke. But I got a good couple of years out of it, and then I lent it to someone who who doesn't like me anymore, and then they never gave it back. But I was a bit gutted about that. Uh, so no, no, I was— it was a bit— it's a bit far. All of the other ones apart from the beekeeping show are just so far away. Like, is it Sandown Park? Like 5 hours, 5 and a half hours each way. So no, I wasn't there, but I heard Richard gave a really good talk, um, carved himself an excellent niche, can't he, as an Asian hornet expert. But no. I wasn't there. Oh, that's cool. Propolis soap. See, I'd like to, I'd like to do more stuff like this. So you're making a propolis soap today. What's a popular propolis product by you? So most people use their propolis to like make a tincture and then just kind of like put it on their tongue, ward off colds. Uh, I, I've used it for like a balm. You can use it, it's not for lips and stuff, which is good. I, uh, I swapped a couple of queens— was it last year? I think it was last year— for some, like, some cleaned liquid propolis from someone, and it was a really good propolis. And they— I thought I was getting, like, raw propolis. I shouldn't say the word raw, should I? Raw propolis, uh, but it wasn't. It was pre-cleaned propolis that came in, like, a bucket. This is like a liquid, so incredibly potent, but I— it was a good deal and, uh, I've not done anything with it. So I've got tons of propolis to use. And you know, you know what it's like if you're making propolis soap, you don't put a huge amount of propolis in, do you? And the same with the balms that I was making, the only— it only calls for like a few milliliters of propolis for a big batch. Um, so I've got tons of it. So any good ideas? It's a good question. What's a popular propolis product by us. I don't know, I'd like to, I'd like to use some more of my beehive byproducts to make some stuff. Be good. So Joe says, are you implementing anything to combat Asian hornets next year? Traps, guard apiaries seems to do a good one. So at the moment, no. I've got some stuff on standby, but All I will be doing next year is what they're urging everyone to do, which is just monitor. And I'll probably put up some bait stations, but I'm not going to do any trapping because I don't like trapping stuff. And you look at all of these traps at the moment and the kind of bycatch is pretty huge. And I think, well, in North Wales, when there's clearly no Asian hornets around at the moment, I'm not gonna I'm not going to start trapping, but I will put bait stations up for it, and I'll put bait stations up at home and obviously monitor and report anything that I do find, which is what they've advised people to do. But I will be watching kind of with a keen eye people on the south coast and what happens to them and trying to learn before it becomes an issue for us up here. Uh, John's saying, guessing with all those queen sales, you'll either have a big drop-off as folk rear their own from them, or just need as, uh, just as much or more if they buy in queens to do splits from them. I kind of thought that last year when we'd sold like 3,000, and it's gone— it's, it's been a huge jump. So, um, when we did, when we did the reviews and heard people's comments back about them It's clear like they're very good queens and people would prefer to pay kind of £40 for a queen and get £150 of honey and have nice calm gentle bees than have like aggressive stingy bees and not that much honey. So I do understand why they're so popular, but I will always err on the side of caution, I think, when it comes to the numbers and make sure that we're not over-ordering. The thing with the rearing your own, it just completely depends on where you are. So if you're somewhere nice and isolated and you've got 10 F1 Buckfast there, then the F2s will be lovely and you can rear your own. If you're in an area where there's tons of other beekeepers and tons of other wild colonies and you start rearing your own, you soon dilute what's good about the bees, so then you need to get some more. Best tips to get a small colony through the winter, is there much you can do? It's a difficult one because they'll be small for a reason, so the only thing you really can do is give them, give them everything that they need, which is a nice warm place to live, nice dry place to live, all the food that they, they need, which isn't going to be much if they're a small colony. And the most important one is a good mated queen, which is too late for now. But the small colonies, it's either because they've been made too small, so we made the splits too late and they were too small, or they've been battered by wasps, or the queen's not mated properly. So if there's a perfectly mated queen in a really small colony, then you can get them through. Just really insulate them down like really well, make sure they're nice and warm, make sure they're dry, and just cross your fingers that it doesn't get too cold. Um, and then, you know, if it's not— if it's not a well-mated queen, there's nothing you can really do. Um, but you, you can see that now. Like, I, I— when I went around to take some of my Apivar strips out, there was a colony, bloody artificially inseminated queen that had swarmed. So someone got a good swarm, left behind a virgin queen that's clearly not mated, so I just shook them out and put the frames of stores in a box where there was a frame of foundation to kind of use the resources. I was gutted, I believe that burned a little bit, that one, but yeah, keep them nice and warm, keep them dry, and cross your fingers. Best part of beekeeping? I do, I have to say, like, my For me, best part of like my beekeeping slash beekeeping business is YouTube. I like doing videos. I really enjoyed going and doing videos of other people as well. That's like the most enjoyable thing. And I like stitching the videos together and seeing, kind of seeing the end product. And obviously having like a fan base is, is very nice. And then apart from that, I would say like the best thing is the variety. There's not like one thing that I'm like, I really like that. And some bee farmers like that. They're just— some bee farmers like just to be on their own all day, and they love the peacefulness and the fact that they've not got to talk to anyone and they can just be on their own all day. And I really struggle with that, like being a lone bee farmer. Very lonely job, very hard, hard job, and definitely not for me. And then, like, I would say, like, queen rearing, I love queen rearing, but doing it on you see, like in America, and they're like, oh, we've reared 30,000 queens this year. I'd be like, that would be really difficult as well because it's so repetitive and monotonous and you're just doing the same thing over and over again. And then like honey extraction, like I think the first 10 frames of honey extraction every year, I'm like, this is brilliant, love honey extraction. And then I hate it. I hate honey extraction so much. So everything— I love everything about beekeeping, but only in small doses. And I love the variety. I love like doing all the different bits. KTM says, "What's your best advice to get a 14 by 12 brood box back to a national deep?" Really easy, that one. So if I should have done the live streams a couple of months ago to implement it for this year, but all I would have done is kind of come like maybe July, August, put a brood box on top. National Deep brood box on top and then just overwinter it like that. So National Deep brood box on top, 14x12 underneath, come back in like March, April the next year and they'll basically all be in the National Deep up top where it's nice and warm and cozy. And then you can just take the 14x12 away, works really well. Yeah, I don't think it's gonna be 30K queens, but I think it's probably going to be similar to where it is again, which is, um, which is really good. So thank you, thank you for everyone who supports us with our queens. And thanks to JK Photography, that's very kind, £5 tip, appreciate it. Cheers, mate. Um, so a different vibe is— it is slightly different vibe. I just I just find it so much more enjoyable engaging with other beekeepers. And I've always like said this on the channel, like, I'm, I'm not the expert when it comes to beekeeping. I'm just like inexperienced beekeeper with a camera. But I think you learn so much more like going and seeing like other people's bees and learning what other people do. Like, I, I learned tons going and seeing Carl, seeing like all the different stuff that Carl does. I learned absolutely loads going and seeing like Richard, beekeeper of 35 years, who's, who's done and tried and broken everything and then settled on something that works for him. And like, these people know so much more about beekeeping than I kind of probably ever will, definitely ever will. So I just kind of want to go and engage with other people. But then I like the idea of going and seeing people who have kept bees for like a year And almost like doing the videos, like focusing on people's mistakes and errors and what's gone wrong. And like, you look at the videos at the boat are a good example with Liam, who hadn't kept bees for very long. And like, you saw like the state of some of the frames and the spacing, and you just think it looks quite bad. It's really easy fix. And he wouldn't have known that unless I'd gone down and kind of showed him it. So I'm going to definitely try and do A bit more of like a diverse range of videos, I think. Um, next live stream, I, I honestly don't know. I'd like to say like this time next week, but it's probably not going to be. I think a more realistic schedule would be like once a month, so I'll try and do that once a month, which means I might get one done before Christmas. I'll definitely do one before Christmas. Um, I might do it at a different time as well. It's, uh, this, this time's, this time is generally quite good for me actually. Swarming was hard work this year, thinking about doing a pre-Demaray split. What's the best way to get the bees to remove the honey from the original frames treated for varroa? So it's— I, I don't think I've done the video showing this, but I've definitely covered this on live streams before. But it, it's really easy to get them to do it. So you just take the box at the top So if they've capped everything over at the top, you just take the box, shake all the bees off, bruise all of the frames, and then put that box at the bottom of the colony. And then make sure that there's space directly above where the queen excluder is. And all the bees do is they just say, no, no, no, we're not having capped stores below our brood nest. So they just move it all up, and then it's fine because it's out of the frames that are tainted with the Apivar. And then if, if it's not capped, you just do exactly the same thing, and they and they just, they move it anyway because it's not been capped. So it works really well, and as long as you time all of that towards the end of the year, then all of the honey above the queen excluder in non-Athivar frames is good to go. So Joe says, yeah, he agrees with the bycatch issue, but the guard apis ones are designed only to catch Asian hornets and nothing else on the south coast. That'd be good. I'm really interested to see, like, and this, like I say, there's gonna be winners and losers, and you can see the people trying to gear themselves up for winning at the moment, which are going to be the trap manufacturers. Make a killing, aren't they? They're doing like traps at £20, £30 a pop, and you need 10 in an apiary, and everyone needs them. But I hope they work, and I hope trapping is the right thing to do. I just, I really, I don't like know what to suggest because I'm seeing people kind of like arguing and saying this is the way to do it, and other people saying that's definitely not the way to do it, what you're doing is causing a much greater problem. And I don't know what the real right answer is, and this kind of, I feel a bit powerless to know what to do for my own bees. And luckily we're not at the coalface at the moment, but we will be very soon within the next few years. Joe says he can't get to the apiaries regularly to monitor, so he'll check this Asian hornet-specific trap once a week. If it's caught, if he catches one, he'll contact the MBU for track and tracing. Yeah, let's hope you don't catch too many. Mohammed says, have you ever done honey wine? So I did. I've done. I could like mead. Um, I'm not a big— I'm not a big drinker. I really don't drink that much at all. Like, I drink anything. Um, but I used to make quite a lot of it, but I didn't like it. It was, it was just— it was either too strong or too sweet. It just wasn't, wasn't for me. But again, I'd like to do a video like making mead, but I just— I need to find someone who can, who can make it. But I have, and I didn't particularly like it. Uh, JK again, any advice for selling honey at the Xmas market? Tips and tricks? So I've got a great tip in terms of Christmas markets, yeah, and it's like the most basic tip in the world. Don't do them midweek. Like, it's easy to fall into these traps. You think, oh, it's the Christmas light turn-on, it's Tuesday night, and you just think, okay, and then you get there and there's just no one there, or everyone's just there for the light turn on. So Christmas markets, you can make a really good amount of money. Um, but just so we only ever do them on a Saturday or a Sunday, Saturday or a Sunday in the day. And I know you can't plan or prepare for this, but it needs to be good weather. So it either needs to be like beautiful dry sunshine or a bit of snow, that always helps. Um, Other, other tips, make sure that you've got like a card machine, make sure that you've got backup to your card machine, and then all you need to do apart from that is just like have a good, have a good product, have a good product, make sure you're stacking up. You'll see, you know, you see people online doing good market stalls, you've got to make it look pretty. But then the biggest one, biggest tip by far and away, is you've got to have tasters, have tasters of your honey there And like shout people in to taste the honey because they'll just walk past and they'll go, hello. And you say, would you like to taste some honey? And they say, oh, okay. And then they taste it, so, oh, that's nice. And then you're in, kind of halfway to selling them a jar. And then have gift sets pre-made. Don't make your gift sets on the day. So that, that's a killer, especially if you're doing it on your own. If it's going to be somewhere busy, try and rope someone in to help you. It really does help having a son, a daughter, a nephew, someone there to kind of like complete the transactions while you get the next person. Because I found it so much, you're there on your own and there'll be like no one there for a bit, and then all of a sudden there's like 6 people, and then you lose a lot of customers that way. So there you go, there's a few, a few tips and tricks for you there. I would say the biggest one out of all of those, apart from The card reader one though is, is samples. And get some nice like, um, wooden sticks, so like little lolly sticks, and then get a bin that says used sticks. You'll be— oh, the amount of times, you know, before I used to have a bin that said used sticks, the people would come up when you're not looking, pick up a stick from the used sticks bin that's like sticky and covered in honey, start dunking it in the honey. And then you've got little kids who just double dip. So you've got to be on, on top of them with the double dipping, um, or like sneezing into the jars. It can get a little bit grim, but don't, don't let that put you off with the tasters. Definitely do honey tasters. You'll be amazed how much, uh, how much honey you sell. They certainly are, certainly are going to make a killing. Is, is a bit of a sad state of affairs, isn't it? So Joe says trapping workers won't stop nests. That's true. I swear tracking and tracing is better, but trapping queens February, April, and September onwards definitely stops nests being created. So I'm gonna have to get this guy on here because there is a guy on the beekeeping forum who goes by the name of Carol who has patented a number of wasp traps, and he is like up there. He knows what he's talking about when it comes to all things wasps and all things hornets. And he is absolutely adamant that trapping queens in the spring is really bad for Asian— sorry, really bad for like preventing Asian hornets. And I'll have to go back and like fully understand again what he's saying. Every time I start reading the threads, I get like a little bit depressed. I think I can't, I can't be dealing with this now. But he's adamant that trapping the queens in February and April, Asian hornet queens, Um, it is potentially damaging if you're getting collateral bycatch with that as well. So that because you're trapping the queens, you're trapping, um, like the, the wasp queens and the, the hornet queens as well, European hornet queens. It's, it's all a little bit too detailed, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna try my best to get him on a live stream because his views kind of seem to go against absolutely everything that everybody's And if there was anybody who could design and market a trap and make a lot of money from it, it's him. But he's purposely not doing it because I don't know. Go round and round in circles with this one. I understand your logic, and I kind of tend to agree with it. Like surely, if you're stopping the queen, you're stopping the primary nests. But he seems to think that there's a bit of an issue with it. So let me let me contact him, see if he'll come on do a live stream. He would be a great person to do it. Cheers, Andy. I'm glad you've enjoyed it. I am getting towards the end of the stream now. So thanks, Joe, for always being here, always asking questions. I do appreciate it. Nicholas is saying Tasters is the best. Sold all his honey this week on a market. Next, he will bring. More than 200 jars. Yeah, that's bloody hell, that's a good tip as well. Don't— like, I, I see this a lot at markets, and I always, I'm always so smug at the end of a market, like when people are, are packing away their cakes that they baked the night before, or their cheeses that going off, I don't know, in a few days' time, and all this like food that they made specifically, like a quiche or something like that, and they've not sold it all. And I'm like smugly packing away my honey that never goes off. So don't, don't go to the market and not bring enough honey. Just bring like all the honey you've got and just think, okay, just if I don't sell it, I'll just pack it away, take it to the next market. Uh, Joe says, do you know why Ultra Bee is no longer sold in the UK? Can't seem to find the protein to make your own protein patties anywhere now. Yeah, it's strange, isn't it? I don't know why. was only Bee Equipment that really did Ultra Bee or the Bee Pro, but I just, I really can't see a time in the UK where you'd really need to use any sort of pollen substitute like that. It's, uh, no, even like last year where it just rained and rained and rained and rained, there was enough pollen for the bees to get by, so it's not a great loss. I don't think that nobody sells it anymore, and, and I certainly wouldn't use it for my own bees. But it is strange that it's just gone off the market. You still get it in America. Um, so John, yeah, so I did, I did look at it, but, and, and it looked good. She sent me an email as well. Um, but I just, I can't like validate the information. Like, I hate to, to recommend anything and say, oh, you should do this, you should do that. And I kind of maybe got caught up in that a little bit when the first nests were being found, and I just thought, the last thing I want to do is like recommend the wrong thing and be the cause of it being any worse. But it looked good, and it— I like, like the, the, um, the graphics showing like the development and when you're supposed to do certain traps and stuff. It like, it looked good, but I don't I just don't know with all of it what the right answer is, so I'm just a bit reluctant to kind of share anything. Uh, Andy's saying, watched the video today about the Hiverlife fondant, do I still use it? Um, that was the fondant that I couldn't stop eating. Like me, it was nice. Uh, probably not very good for you, but no, I never, I never really used it on a, on a great scale. It's really expensive, the Hiverlife fondant. I was just given some for free. Free, and I used it and the bees really liked it, but it— I don't think it does anything over and above like a normal baker's fondant, uh, other than, than tastes quite nice. Uh, so Joe's saying about, yeah, Asian hornet trap specific. Um, it's— yeah, it's all very scary, isn't it? Right, a couple more questions then, and then I will go and have my dinner. Um, so says, just curious on how to deal with air bubbles when you're using the lysine creamer. I find there is too much foam after using the creamer for a couple of days. So it is annoying, the foam, isn't it? So the foam comes about like— you'll always get like a little bit of foam using the creamer, but I found the way to minimize it is that like just don't use any heat. Never use the heat setting at all when you're making the soft set. Because it just seems to whip it up more if you've got more heat in there for some reason. So no heat whatsoever. And then once you've heated up your honey— so I, so like, I heat the honey up in the buckets and I pour it into the creamer, and then I don't use any heat. And then you've got to leave the honey. So if you put the honey in, it's like fully liquid honey. If you start churning it at that point, you beat loads of air into it, whereas if you let it start setting Like, you almost want to kind of get it just to just before it sets, and then you start churning it. So churning it when it's too liquid, you get more froth. And then the speed in which you churn definitely correlates to the amount of froth that you get. So I just churn it at the absolute lowest speed. My machine never goes above 25%, ever. Not once. The machine goes way too fast. It doesn't need to go that fast. I almost wish that there was a mode below 25%, like a really like super slow mode. And then if you do all of those things, you, you'll get like minimal froth. But then what I do with mine, this is, this is the way that I deal with the froth on mine, is that because I use it as like a settling tank as well, so I let it churn and then, um, once it's— I let it set back again in the creaming machine, and then all you do is you just open it up and get a spoon, and you can just spoon the froth off because the froth remains kind of like quite airy and frothy, and then all the honey sets like pretty much rock hard again. So you can just like take all of the froth off, and then when you heat it back up again, there's no froth left, and you get pretty much every last bit into the jar with no frothy head. So that's how I do that. Uh, Joe says he agrees, although if he does find a small colony, a protein patty is a good way to turn them around and increase the population for winter. So, but possibly, um, yeah, you could, you could get them going a little bit more. That's not a bad shot. That would be, that would be quite a good use for it. Yeah, I agree. Joe says, would I ever travel to Canada, shoot a video with Ian? So Ian, Ian wouldn't know who I am, um, definitely wouldn't respond to messages. I would, yeah. Uh, John says, hopefully BBKA, SBA, BBS can collaborate to get a national guide in place. Yeah, I, I— someone definitely needs to collaborate to get a national guide in place. I agree. Um, I don't think there will be a sequel to that talk. Wouldn't have thought so. I, I'm not sure if Richard or Griff are going. I assume, I assume they are. I don't know, I haven't spoken to them. But I don't think they'll do— I don't think there will be a same Q&A. They might be doing different things, I don't know. But there will, there will be a live stream on something a little bit more interactive and fun, which would be good. Hopefully not at the very, very end like last time, but it was good fun. But there we go, no live stream for 6 months and I've done an hour and 46 minutes, and I can notice it because my throat is here. So the next time I do the live stream, I don't think I would have had a haircut, so it would be even more perm-like. But I do, again, I apologize. Sorry it's taken so long. Uh, I, I'll always answer questions if people have like urgent questions. You can always email me blackmountainhoney@gmail.com and I will, I will just answer your question. If it's a little bit short, like, don't worry, I'm not trying to be rude. I just, I'd get loads of messages on there, so I'll try and answer it if you've got like a burning issue. Um, but thank you for, for logging in and watching, and I hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you all next time.