End of Season - Question and Answer Session

Hello, can everyone hear me okay? So I can see, I can see some comments there. If someone can just say they can hear me, then I can, I can get on, make a start. I'm a little bit early. All very good. Okay, nice. So I've tried to go for a real, like, atmosphere today with the lights behind me that just don't work, and I'll put the fire on and it is so hot, like, I'm sweating in here already. So I might have to go and open a window at some point and turn that light off. I did try and set this up on my phone, so I had my phone all set up there and it was all really good quality. And it's not working. So I don't know why my phone's not working, but you have to put up with some grainy webcam footage. As always, I'm not looking into the camera, so the camera's there, but my setup just doesn't, doesn't work like that. So you have to bear with me kind of looking at myself on the screen. But yeah, that's it. So another live stream. I've had so many people ask me to do another live stream. I thought 4 hours of questions last time, they would be no more questions. And to be honest, I've not had that many questions through, so the rule is going to be if I run out of questions, I'm going to end the stream. So any questions, just fire them away in there in the comments. Uh, oh, hi from Canada! I'm seeing comments coming through in chat, so I'm just going to say hello to everyone first. So Rob Sprock, you were the first one here, congratulations. Uh, John Begree, Brooklyn's Honeybees, Wildways Farm, Richard Thompson, Josh Trower, Jim Cooper, Wildways Farm. Oh, sorry, I don't know how to pronounce your name. I'm gonna have a go though. Tautvidas Vakionus, good name. And Chili's Bees-Canada. So hello everyone. I'm not sure, I've got 20, 24 people here and we start in 2 minutes. So it'll be great if you want to share it on any of your social media as well, see if we can get more people here. That would be good. And check this out. So that is a pumpkin, in case you didn't know. And with that pumpkin, you could win a Thorn Empire smoker. So I'm gonna wait for more people to come, obviously, but I will tell you, I'll tell you what that's about. So I weighed that pumpkin before, went out pumpkin picking yesterday. And I've weighed that pumpkin, uh, so it's like— I nearly, I nearly told you how much it weighed then. So you need to guess the weight of the pumpkin, uh, and the, the closest person— I'm with one caveat, that is UK mainland only. I'm so sorry to everyone else, but it's just sending stuff outside the UK is impossible at the moment. Um, but yeah, are you the closest one on this stream at the end of tonight? And we will cut off by kind of midnight at the latest. There's no way we're going to get to midnight again, but midnight at the latest, and I will pick a winner. So the closest person to that pumpkin size. So I'll bring it up at various points throughout just for new people who are joining the stream and telling people about it. So you're probably going to hear about that loads. So I'll bring it up again. Oh yeah, so it's going to be in grams. So I know we're in a new world of Brexit, but I don't do imperial. imperial weights apart from when I'm selling honey, I guess. It's weird, we do, we do kind of a bit of a mixture in the UK, don't we? So it's in grams, no decimal places, so you just need to guess kind of in grams how big this pumpkin is. I'll give you a clue, it's big, big, big pumpkin. And you can win this smoker. So Thorn Beekeeping. I always call them Thorns. Does anyone else do that? Thorns Beekeeping. It's not— I get told off by the director there. She said it's not Thorns, Thorn. Thorn Beekeeping. She gave me the smoker. I've done a video on this recently and it is absolutely quality smoker. Obviously I have to say that, don't I? But genuine, genuinely is a good smoker. I know people get funny with the reviews. I would never— I'd never say anything was good if I didn't think it was good. Um, but you can win that smoker. So just from watching this stream, it's about £70, that smoker. It's a pretty, pretty expensive smoker. Comes with like the cage inside. People who are channel members, you'd have seen this because I have done the— I have done the video on it already. Let's try and get the cage out. Got like a cage inside as well, like the Rouch Boy. Really, really good smoker though. So yeah, so I see Peter Sabs had to go already. 11 kilograms 500. So just— I'm not going to give it away. So yeah, anybody who's doing it in pounds, don't do it in pounds because I'm not going to be able to convert it quick enough. So convert it yourself to grams. See what Jim Cooper's done there? Spot on. Do it in grams like that because I've got a number written down, down here. Um, and I'll do it. Yeah, so there we go. Right, so my question, how heavy is your pumpkin? Yeah, that is the question. I'm just looking through some of the posts as well just to make sure I've not missed anything. But we will start. Right, first question, this is, this is getting us going. What happened to the hive with the queen with a broken leg? Right, we're going to answer that one first. If I miss your question on here and you think I've gone, I've gone past it, then just, just put it on the chat again and I'll get it. So Jim, Jim got a question there, I'll answer that as well. Right, let's go back, I'll start answering questions then. So I've only got about 6 questions that have come in. So do ask me questions on the chat and I will answer them. And just as per the last video stream, feel free to ask me stuff that's nothing to do with bees. It's always, always good fun. Right, what happened to the hive with the queen with a broken leg? So you might think you're not going to tell us this because you're going to give away your next video, and the fact is I got really annoyed and I didn't video the next video. That's the first time I've got to an apiary and thought, oh bloody hell, really annoyed. So I went back there the day after that video, and for anybody who's not seen that video, have a watch because it's, it's interesting. But I effectively left a colony with a broken leg with a queen in the cage for 3 weeks that was being robbed, and I tried to move them to somewhere else within the apiary. And I'll give it away, I went back there the next day and they'd gone, and the queen was dead. So they'd absconded because they just could not handle the that intense level of robbing, and the queen was dead in the cage. So I told you, I'll always give you the videos of when stuff goes wrong as well, and that just, that kind of sequence of videos couldn't have gone more wrong, just constantly going wrong the whole time. You may have seen a paw come in the video over there, it's my dog. He'll definitely make an appearance later on. He is a very lazy dog. So yeah, so what is a rubbish end to that story about the, the queen with a broken leg? Because I was— what I thought would happen is that they were going to accept her, and I think without the robbing, they would have, they would have accepted her. Because the queen with a broken leg, why wouldn't they accept her? Because they'll just use her for a bit and then supersede her. And I genuinely thought it'd be a really interesting video to see how long it would take them to supersede her. And my guess would have been kind of either late this year, so around now, and I wouldn't have noticed, or early next year. But I thought that would have been a good video, but they didn't. She didn't even make it out of the cage. Right. So yeah, forty forty-four people watching. Guess how big the pumpkin is, and you can win a prize. But I'm not going to do that again for at least forty-five minutes. Right. I'm going to try and do the videos in order. Right. Jim Cooper. So this is James Anderson. Jim Anderton, I forget how you say it, he asked a very similar question. It is Jim, isn't it? Have you done a video of your method of cleaning up your extraction equipment yet? So no, and the reason I'm holding back on doing any more videos in the honey extraction room is I have run out of space, completely run out of space in there. I bought a wax, a wax capping spinner that's massive. I bought another 200-liter creamer So now the tanks that I've got in there, I've got a 200-liter creamer, a 200-liter tank, 100-liter creamer, 100-liter tank, a full uncapping kind of frame extractor thing, my extractor, a honey loosener, 2 bottling machines in a, in a like 4-meter by 3.5-meter log cabin. So you just can't move in there. So every time I think, oh, I'm going to go and do a video in there, It just becomes too big a job. So we're looking to move and we're trying to buy a farm and we just can't, can't find a farm anywhere. So as soon as we find a farm, I'm going to go and properly kit out a big expensive extraction room and have loads of space in there. I'm going to be able to do loads of cool videos, and at the moment it's just too difficult to do it. So have you done a video of your method for cleaning your extraction equipment yet? No, um, because I literally cannot get in the room. So sorry about that. Uh, right, I'm trying to work down in order. How many nucs do you sell a year? Uh, it really does vary, around kind of 150 to 200. We've got 200 nucs this year, uh, and we've already sold half of them, which is quite good. So I reckon we won't try and go more than that because I think once you get to like 200 nucs, it's a huge amount of work getting them up to where you need them to be and then going around and doing the constant checks on them and making sure they don't swarm, uh, and giving them feed and just make— and getting them through through, and then you get losses on that as well. But then also the, the whole logistics of sending them out to people and having people come and collect them— like, you can only do really like 30 or 40 in a weekend, or like a day of a weekend. So it just takes out a lot of my time. So I don't want to get to the point where it's anything more than 200. Um, I'm happy at 200. Right, Aaron Cornish. Hello, Aaron, how you doing? Uh, what was the most important lesson the bees taught you this year? So this is another one that Jim's asked, because it's not the same question that you've asked, Jim, but it's kind of the same answer in that I'm trying to ramp down the number of bees that I keep, but my wife laughs at me and she's just like, what are you doing managing so many bees and all of the stuff you do and all the YouTube stuff in addition to another job? So I'm really doing my very best to reduce the amount of bees that I keep and targeting the, the areas that I enjoy and targeting the areas that I get the biggest payback and not just trying to keep as many bees as I possibly can and extract as much honey as I possibly can. Because even when it gets to honey extraction now, I take a week off work and I struggle to get it done in that week. So this year I had to take 2 weeks off work, 2 separate weeks, one to do the normal honey extraction and then one to do the heather honey extraction, and it just took too long. So It's a really roundabout answer to that, but the bees have kind of taught me that it's, it's not all about expanding them as much as you can. I'm trying to get some time for me and my family, um, because I just get completely obsessed with things. And you'll notice that so many people say this to me, how do you do so many YouTube videos? And it's just because I'm just obsessed with, with everything that I do that's kind of bees, um, and I can't just go out and film video. I'll go and film like 7 videos at once. And this is, this is why we have the channel membership. Honestly, that is not a plug for being a channel member, but if I went out and just did 7 videos, even, even when I released 2 videos on like a Sunday night— I did it, um, earlier this year with the hide hives ones because I was just getting so far behind and things were becoming irrelevant— I released 2 videos at once and the views weren't even half of what you'd get on a normal video. because I did them together. It's weird, the YouTube algorithm does not like you uploading loads of videos all at once, so I drip feed them on, and then I give people the option if they want to be channel members. And the channel members will see this, that you'll get like 6 videos kind of over the course of a weekend and then nothing for a while, um, whereas everyone else just sees a steady, steady stream of videos coming through. So yeah, biggest important lesson is, is that I spend too much time on the bees and they take up too much of my life, and I need to take a little bit of a step back in terms of what I'm doing. Cool, right, so loads of weights coming through, good weights. Right, Richard Bellis, what have you— why have you the confidence to go from hobby beekeeping to semi-commercial? Did it feel like a massive leap of faith, or was it something you'd always hoped to do? Right, definitely not something I always hoped to do, and it stems from my answer to that previous question, is I just get obsessed with everything. Can't do anything kind of by half, so it didn't— it just started off like I kept some bees I love my food. Anyone who knows me knows I love food. So like, I keep chickens so I can get the eggs, and I keep bees so I can get the honey. That's how it started. And then it's just, you, you get a colony of bees, and you, you all know this, you're all beekeepers here. You get a colony of bees, you'll get some honey from them, you'll see them through the winter, and you say you get a buzz. It's a terrible pun, but you do. You get, you get excited by it, and it's, it's fun. And you think, you know what, I can, I can get my colony here and take a queen and turn it into 2 colonies, or do some queen rearing, turn it into 3 or 4 colonies, and it just gets out of hand, doesn't it? So next year I'm going to do a cool video. Next year I'm going to take one colony and I'm going to see how many splits I can make it into, which goes completely against what I just said, wasn't it, which was trying to reduce the number down. But I'll just split them out into nucs at the end and I'll sell them. So I'm going to do, I'm going to do a video and maybe I'll do a competition to see how many, how many we get through, but I'm going to target 50. So I'm going to go from 1 colony to 50 colonies in a year. I saw, I saw a PDF, I don't know who did it, they did 1 colony to 1,000 colonies in 2 years. Genuinely, Roz. And you can see how you can do it with mated queens because you can make the splits really quickly, but it'll be interesting to see that. I might, I might speak to some other beekeepers and see If they want to do that, I've got a tea bag with a tea in it and nowhere to put my tea bag. I'm just going to rest that there. The other thing I was going to say as well is that if you're not part of the Facebook group, the No Nonsense Beekeeping Facebook group, you can join that because what you can also do on the top of that group is request videos. So if you have any videos that you want me to do, I have a list of 170 videos to do. I'm working my way through them. And there's so many duplicates, it's funny. Like, I just scroll down, it's the same video 9 times in a row. I've got a big long list, but I'm always open to ideas. So if you want to put it on the chat here, I will stick it on my list to do. I'll look back at it at the end. But also on that Facebook group, you can have a look and you can, you can request videos there. Right, next question down. What is your— what is my favourite recipe using my honey? It's weird because I'm, I'm not a massive one for like recipes with honey. Like, I do, I do love honey a lot. I just, I just think eating on toast, that's my favorite way of doing it. Obviously, like, my hot fire honey on pizzas is pretty good as well. I don't know about all the rest of you, Rwill91 retracted his message, and I want to know what it— I want to know what that message said. But yeah, favorite recipe, I just quite enjoy it on toast. My favorite honey is like a set honey though. I'm not sure I've ever had honey on toast. I much prefer like a set honey over, over a runny honey. And I've just— we've just put new honeys on the website as well, so I've expanded the range. So now we do like a soft set like we've always done, we do a natural set, and now we're doing a set borage as well, which is my new number one favorite honey. And we're doing like a heather blend set as well, so expanding my range of nice set honeys. Right, I'm just reading through the rest of the questions. Okay, yeah. Do you ever have to deal with wasp attacks on your hives? What strategy do you use? So no, I've not had a single attack of wasps this year, not one. And I do— I've got— there is a video coming on showing about the wasp traps that I use. But what I did have this year, and this is just a nightmare, and this goes back to the fact that I do not have a suitable extracting facility in terms of the size of the facility, So what I do is I go around and get all my honey crop and I bring it back, and I can get about 30 supers in the back of the truck at once. So I go around and I could probably fit like about 100 supers or something in the extraction room, clear everything out, stack them all up. They're on these really nice drip-proof trays. I put the heaters on in the room, I keep it nice and warm. I put a dehumidifier on in there as well just to keep the moisture level down, and then I call it a day because going and collecting that many supers, um, using clearer boards, nothing else, uh, is, is time-consuming. Uh, and then, yeah, I went back. So I left it overnight, and then I thought I'll leave it for a few days, you know, because I'm doing other stuff. And I went back there on like Saturday morning to start a 2-hour marathon extraction session, and you should have seen the amount of wasps. You've never seen so many wasps, and they just got in through a crack. and they were just, they were just all over everything, battling, trying to get this, get all of my honey crop. And I used these wasp traps, and I've done, I've done the video. I didn't do the video on that because it was just too much of a mad panic. I just thought, I can't bear to film this because they're just eating everything. But I did a bit of a summary video showing how effective the different traps were, and I'll just give it away now, in that the Bee Equipment hornet traps Just amazing. They caught as many, if not more, than the waspbanes, and they cost about £2 each. So I've bought loads of them, about 10 of them now, and I just put them— they're just in the back of my truck, and I'll keep kind of like a few soda bottle things in there, like a jar of jam, and then you've just got like an instant perfect wasp killing method. So all I would do, if you do have a beehive that is under attack from wasps or a nuc, is just keep one of those in the back of the truck And then move the nuc, take the nuc, close it up, put it somewhere else. You can just close the nuc up, just don't— there'll be wasps in there, don't worry about that. Close it up, take it somewhere else, and just replace it with a wasp trap, and you'll catch thousands and thousands of wasps. It works really, really well. I caught so many, like I had to empty a bottle. I'd gone all the way up to the top of the bottle that they were just going in and getting out again, full to the brim with wasps. Uh, need to get, need to get a bigger hut. Yeah. When do I feed fondants? Interesting that when do I feed fondant because normally I don't even think about topping up colonies with fondant until I get to like after I've done apibioxyl treatment early December, and I tend to go around here kind of like any time in December. I just think with the polyashworth feeder, I get it on early and just forget about it. I was going around the other day to strap down all of my colonies when. This, when this nuc tried to swarm. Bloody nucs. And so there's a lot of light colonies out there, and I've run out of syrup, so a lot of them are going into winter a lot lighter than— a lot lighter than I would normally like them to go into winter. And it's good, they're big strong colonies, but I'm going to go around kind of back end of November before I do any oxalic vaping and stick a big slab of fondant on loads of them just to keep them So I'll go six kilograms on pretty much every every hive, just as a bit of insurance. Peter Sam, I'm going to start beekeeping next year. Is there a time of year I could go on holiday, bearing in mind I will only have a couple of hives at most? Yeah, you go on holiday. It's just like you just have you run the risk, don't you, of losing the swarm? I would say best time of year to go on holiday is go somewhere nice in like January or February. That's the best time to go away. If you can get away, go to like Costa Rica or Mexico, somewhere nice at that time of year. But realistically, though, if you're going to go like into Europe, just go in April. April's nice in Europe. As soon as you get into like back end of April, May, June, July, they're going to swarm. Like they can swarm any of those times. September's nice as well. I say to my wife, we're going to go away, we'll go away in April or September, and if some of them swarm then, then just can't do much about it. Do you ever get part-time staff to help manage operation? I do, yeah. So I have 2 nephews that do loads of work. They're well and truly in the background, and they're well and truly too young to work. They're not really, it's like 12 or 13, and he's good. They're both really keen to kind of get more on the bees, but I'm really reluctant to let them out onto the bees just yet, um, because he's a little bit scared, uh, when he gets like a bee or a wasp around him during like the honey extraction room, and there's like a bee, he's like, oh, there's a bee, and I really don't want him to get stung badly, um, and then for him to— for it to put him off permanently. So I do, I do get a bit of help. And I've said this before, when we move house and we have like a proper full setup and a farm and all that good stuff, then we will— I'll employ someone. I'll probably employ someone full-time to be like a beekeeper slash bee farmer slash go and do markets and all that good stuff. So if you're in the Northwest and you want a job, give me a shout. Right, Paul Chase, demerary split. You put the— I'd say I like the technical bit questions coming in now. You put me on the spot. The videos, I'm so well prepared and I'll go and Google it first and pretend I know what I'm talking about. You'll see the real answers now. You put the original brood box on top and then you— and then use as a super. What about the previous year's varroa mite treatment in our super frames? Really good point. So you need to be careful and you can't do it that way. So Apivar, it's got a 3-year cycle on it, so anything that's had Apivar strips in it you can't use as a super for the the next 3 years, so you just need to have some sort of system to mark it. So what we do is we go with a spray can. Anytime you put Apivar in anything, you spray it, give it like a touch of like blue or orange paint. You'll see some little dabs of orange paint on some of the boxes, and then you can't use that. And we just say you can't use it until you melt down the frames and put new foundation in. It's a bit of a pain, but it's just the way that Apivar works, is that it contaminates wax, and they say you can't use it for supers. Wildways Farm, how many times do you get stung per inspection? Now that— this is going to sound like the biggest plug for BB Wear, and if BB Wear are watching, they'll love this. But well, I say though, I say they'll love it, they might not love it actually. Their original suits, you know, the, the classic BB Wear suits, I used to get stung through them quite a bit and used to get stung a lot on my wrists. Really badly on my wrists, like to the point where you'd count them at the end and you— and I like, some of my bees are horrible bees and you get like 200 stings in a session, like kind of like a 6-hour session, and your arms would swell up. Not like bad, like allergic swelling up, but like swelling up as in like there's definitely— that's too many stings. And then I moved over to the Ultra Suit and I still used to get stings through the— through like on my wrists, because the way the Ultra Suit's designed, they cut it down to— you can't really see that very well— they cut it down to about there, and then they've got like this fabric bit here. So I used to still get stung through the fabric bit, and I said, it's really annoying because I bought the Ultra Suit and like they cannot get through the Ultra fabric. It's just amazing. But that little bit just drove me mad, so I bought another one and I got a custom fit. And I say this to everyone now, if you're going to buy an suit, get them to custom fit it, and get— I get it like down to like here in ultra fabric, and then like a tiny, like an inch of normal fabric. And you'll see my suit look like a Michelin Man, like it's way oversized. But since I've done that, I have not taken a single sting through the suit. I get stung in the face all the time when I'm doing stupid YouTube videos, um, but apart from that, no, I don't get stung through it, so it's pretty good. What's my other job? I'm a project manager in the construction industry, which really is fantastic. What was your favourite year for honey production and why? 2018, pretty good. It was weird, 2018 was good but the heather wasn't like amazing. This year has been by far and away my best year at the heather and it's properly weird because it did not feel like it was going to be good. And I know with the heather you don't need 6 weeks of good weather and wet ground at the heather to get a good crop. You need like a week, you need a week of perfect conditions and you'll get a really good crop, and that's what we got this year. So we averaged about £60 per colony at the heather at the good site. The other site didn't do quite as well, about £45. But to get £60 of heather like per colony and having like 20 colonies up there it was pretty good. We harvested about 1,500 pounds of heather, and I know I jump in between metric and imperial, but I was really happy with that. But 2018 was the easiest beekeeping year just in general, not just from honey production, because it just didn't rain. And in Wales, it's weird because in the south, like, I think when it didn't— when it doesn't rain in the south, you do struggle a little bit with like nectar-yielding plants. And I see all the bee farmers saying that they're praying for rain. I'm like, what are you doing, praying for rain? Like, and then it comes and it rains for like a week and they're all happy, and then it goes back to full honey production for them, and then we're just like kind of jumping around in puddles for the rest of the year. But we do really well up here when it, when it doesn't rain. In 2018, it just didn't rain. You get loads of honey and all your queens get mated, and it was just the best year ever. Yeah, all right, let's have a look. Uh, so yeah, Hyphen Devon, yeah, I'm project manager. I get asked that a lot. Do I watch other beekeepers' YouTubers? If, if yes, what can you recommend? Right, Ian Stepler got 3 million views last month. 3 million views. So he's definitely doing something right. Um, I do watch him. I don't, I don't watch a huge amount of YouTube. But I like Ian Stepler. I like Cayman Reynolds. I like Bob Binney. I like. I'm just scrolling up to make sure I get his name right. You know, you know what I'm talking about. What's he got? Name's Andy. Brooklyn's Honeybees. Definitely like him. What I was going to do as well today, I just couldn't get the software to work. Was I've got a new intro. Channel members will know. Will see this. I've got a new intro. And it was interesting, I saw your video pop up today, Andy, saying about your new intro, and I thought, oh, everyone's getting new intros, this is cool. I like your intro, very good. But yeah, so I, if I, if I had to say a favorite, I would say Ian Stepler. I do, I do think he's good, and I like his approach to beekeeping, and I like the fact that he doesn't take himself too seriously. Um, so yeah, he's definitely my favorite. Right, 2 questions there. Have you had a go at making mead with your honey? So yeah, I have, I have made mead with my honey. I've made cider as well, if it's even still called that, which is like apple juice mixed with honey. I used to really, I used to really enjoy home brewing, but I haven't got any, any time to do that anymore. And what I did find with the mead is it took, it took so much longer. Like, even cider took like kind of like 6 to 12 months to make it taste half decent, whereas the mead, it just took ages, took like 2 years. And it was nice after 2 years, but I'm not a massive fan of mead. I'm not, I'm not a big drinker. Here's another competition: you guess the last time I had a drink. But I haven't got a prize for that, so I will just tell you, uh, it was about 6 years ago. That was the last time I had an alcoholic beverage. Right, so it's probably, it's probably time for me to do this again. So there is, there is a competition today, and you have to guess the size of this pumpkin. And I know this can be really difficult, isn't it, for you to kind of gauge. There you go, look, guess the size of this pumpkin in grams and you can win this Thorne smoker, brand new, never been used, provided by— I called them Thorns again— Thorne smoker. It's their large Empire stainless smoker which they gave me for free to do some videos on, and I've got too many smokers, so I'm going to give it away to someone tonight. So have a guess. Have you thought about doing a no-nonsense beekeeping introduction day? So I was speaking to my— I just, before I came out here today, I had my dinner and I was with— I took my dog for a walk. I was speaking to my wife saying, when we get a house, we need to make sure we've got enough space to do like introduction days or like taster days for people, because I can't believe the amount of people that want to do that. So yeah, we would definitely do it. I can't do it in my back garden at the moment though because there's just not enough space, although you all would get a very nice pizza to finish it off. So it would— I would do it a little bit different, I think. I would do it as a kind of introduction to beekeeping slash I'm going to cook you some pizzas day, a little— my little personal spin on beekeeping introduction. Right, next one down. Well, have you got a video on how to make soft-set honey? So, so I did, I did one on the dice method, but I'm going to reshoot a video on making soft set honey when I get my new honey room, or I have a really good— like, I move stuff out because there's just not enough space in there to do it. But I've moved away from the dice method now, and I know people— it's not that it's not a good method, it's just it's a little bit unreliable, I find, and you need really good temperature control to get it to work well. So if anyone doesn't know, the dice method is you effectively take 10% seed honey. You can get that seed honey from anywhere, and then you heat your honey up until it dissolves all of the crystals, which is kind of like 45 degrees is what we roughly go for. And then you stir in the dice honey, and then you just keep on stirring it over, over like a few days and a few weeks. And you can use a drill, you can do anyway, and it works, but sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes it goes a bit grainy, and I've— I'm really not a massive fan. When's when When soft-set honey goes grainy, I'm not a fan of it, so I like soft-set to be perfectly smooth. So I just— the way I do soft-set honey now is we've got one, a guy probably about 10 miles away from here, he's got about 40 or 50 acres of oilseed rape, so I take some bees there now and I'm going to do some videos there next year. I've got to clear it with him first because he's a little bit funny with access and stuff like that. But all we do with that is we just put— we just take the crop off, put it in the creamer, push the button on the creamer, and that's it. Soft set honey done. And it's— it is the best way of doing soft set, just using pure oilseed rape honey. Really, really good. So that's what I would recommend. Uh, how have your Jolanta colonies— or Jolanta, I got told off for calling Jolanta, it's Jolanta colonies— done compared to your Buckfast this year? Um, they're pretty similar. There's not— I don't, I don't— I'm really bad with records, but kind of just anecdotally, pretty similar. Um, the main difference on the website this year when you're buying queens between those 2 is that the Yelantis UK mated, which some people are dead keen on. The Buckfast is, is not. It's imported from the EU, which some people don't mind about, and they're a lot cheaper. Next year I'm doing some I'm going to do some UK-mated queens. God knows how many I'll be able to do, but I've just bought 70 mating nucs, so I reckon there'll be a couple hundred available. Um, and I got my little 8-frame hide hives one as well, so there will be some, some UK-mated Buckfast available as well in addition to the Atlanta ones. And they're from a very, very good breeder queen, so watch this space. In a couple of your videos, you mentioned a controversial method of clearing your supers. Can you give us a hint of what that method is? I can. I used a petrol blower, like an air blower, to blow them out. And it is, it is what I use. That is how I clear my supers, and it works fine. But I made a very foolish choice to send that one out to all the Facebook groups, which I'm sure you're all members of, and it must really annoy you when I do promote the occasional video on there because you'll just see it pop up like 40 times in your, in your feeds. I got a huge amount of abuse on And I tried— I started off trying to defend the video, and then it just— it's bad, you know. You can see how, like, online abuse is born on social media, because on some pages no one said anything, and then on other pages one person would say something, and then that's it, everyone gets the license to jump in and say it. So I deleted it, that video, for a while. It is actually back on the channel. I think now. So if you Google kind of like clearing supers on the channel, you can see the video that caused so much controversy, which was me blowing them out with a super— so blowing them out with like a petrol blower out of the super and then showing how they all get back into the hive afterwards, which I thought was pretty non-controversial. But people did not like that method, which everyone's entitled to their opinion on. I wasn't trying to say to people, oh, you're wrong, I know best. It was just like, this This is the way that I do it, and I tried to, I tried to give the rounded view to show the bees all going back, showing that there was no leftover nurse bees on the floor, but yeah, they didn't like that. I see John's doing me a fine favour here of answering some questions for me, thank you. So, do you insulate your hives for winter? So, except having the poly Ashworth feeder on the whole time and that they're poly hives anyway, I don't do any other insulation in there, but if you are on a wooden hive, I would definitely put some top insulation in there. There is a— there's a video on the channel talking about top insulation. There's a couple of videos at the moment I've done on that. I do think it's the most important thing. The single most important thing you can do for your colonies is get some top insulation on them, whether they're on poly or wood. It's— if you don't want to go and buy a poly ashworth feeder, that's fine. But for the sake of a kind of 45 centimeter by 45 centimeter piece of cellophane that you can definitely get for free in a skip, it's like a great upgrade, and your bees, your bees will be very happy that you've done it. Is it worth wrapping hives with insulation for winter? I live in Mid Devon. I have four hives, three in polyhives, one in a double BS honey nook. Thanks for your videos. No problem. I've never wrapped hives, and I've never. I never really got the whole wrapping thing because, like, I don't know, I just, I don't, I don't really get it. Like, you're wrapping them to protect them, I guess, from the elements in terms of rain, but I see the wrap, it's not got like massive amounts of insulation in it. I know it gives you the insulation values, but you're not going to get a huge amount of insulation on it. And then if you did wrap them and didn't put top insulation in there You may be making that top, like, crown board surface less insulated than the rest of the hive, which would mean that the condensation isn't going to go on the walls and just drip out the floor. It's going to go on top of the cluster. But I see a lot of people do it, and I, I've never, I've never done it. I bought, I bought some of the wrap from Simon the Beekeeper, um, which is a company I really like. Uh, I saw the thing about him the other day, like, he got a new heart. Anyone else see that? That was, that was amazing. So he was gonna like gonna die, or none of his family had lived past 50, and then he identified it and then he got a new heart, which I thought was quite, quite moving. But everything I've had from them has been pretty good. So I do have kind of some wrap here, but then I went, I went to go and do a video and I kind of thought, what am I doing? I'm just, I'm just doing a video on wrapping them. What am I going to say? Because I'm not— why am I doing it? So I didn't, I didn't do it. If you wrap your hives, I know Adam, who I speak to quite a bit, who's going to help me reach out to some of the younger crowd, you wrap yours, don't you? Because you said that on one of the comments, and so maybe we could have a chat about wrapping hives, but it's not, it's not something I do because polyhives are waterproof, so they're fine in terms of insulation on the sides, they're fine in terms of water ingress on the sides, so I don't see any need. need, and I'm all for doing stuff, as you know, with no nonsense beekeeping, doing it just as easy as it can possibly be. Julian's saying, use a Sentinel Pro 2 from Castle Farm Hives, never been stung wearing it. I've heard a lot of people say good things about that suit, actually. You say you have some horrible bees, do you find that they produce more than your gentle bees? Definitely horrible bees are good, and that's the only reason they get kept. If they if they were horrible bees and they didn't produce any honey, they would they would be getting squished straight away without without a shout. I'm saying that as I read something else. So yeah, yeah, I think they do produce more. He got three million views, but was his honey better? You'll never ever hear me kind of say anything bad about anybody else's honey because I'm quite a nice person, believe it or not. But I do think like we've got, we've got a much bigger battle in the UK and across the world trying to fight each other for people who, you know, produce good honey because you see it on their videos and you know they've got bees and you know they've got extraction rooms versus people importing 1,000 tons of syrup across the world in a tanker. and then selling it at Lidl for 50p a pound, using back into imperial again. Um, so now I think, I think he's got very nice honey, as, as do all of the other beekeepers in the UK. Say this to everyone all the time. I said, whenever I speak to people about honey, I say, don't— this isn't a case of just buy my honey. Just if you're going to buy honey, buy it from local beekeepers. Always the way. Barnyard Bees do some videos. Yeah, they do. like Vineyard Bees as well, and again, it's kind of like simple, no-nonsense, uh, it's good. No mention for Richard Knoll? No, a lot of time for Richard as well, uh, I think he's very good at what he does, very good queen, uh, rearer and breeder as well. Where am I from? You definitely don't have a Welsh accent, more southern to me. Construction manager. Hey, I'm a scaffolder myself. Right, if you're a scaffolder, you'll be Proper fit. All scaffolders are like the fittest people in the world. Um, and oh yeah, we did this one last time on the stream. You can have a guess. What do you think? It's not Welsh. I'm not Welsh. I was— I watched you extracting heather honey and you used the loosener. Does it destroy the frames? So no, that loosener is amazing, works so, so well, and the whole reason that I use it is so it doesn't destroy the frames. And I'm lucky with kind of the beekeeping business because I don't need to look at it like if I was paying— if the beekeeping business was my only job, I don't think I'd have a header loosener now, and I don't think I'd have half the honey extraction equipment I do have because I don't need to take any wages out of the business. So any money that kind of I earn through YouTube and through selling honey and selling nucs and stuff I buy shiny new equipment. I speak to bee farmers and they laugh some of the time. They kind of think, why are you buying a £5,000 heather loosener to extract like, what, £1,000 worth of heather honey? You're much better off just cutting it out, pressing it, and just going again next year. And they have a point. But then saying that, the cost, the increase in beekeeping equipment It's probably quite a shrewd investment, isn't it? I could sell some of my equipment now that's like three years old for more than I bought it for. It's going just going through the roof, and it's not going to stop. Beekeeping equipment is going to get more and more and more expensive. It's it's a pain, isn't it? How expensive things are. Aaron Aaron manning the pizza oven. Definitely. I've seen this man. He is like a master baker. So yeah, Aaron is on the pizza oven. any beekeeping introduction days. What would I do with a weak hive now? Oh, it is difficult to know with a weak hive now. I feel like there's— what can you do? But it depends how weak. So I'm thinking a weak hive now, maybe over like 3 or 4 frames, I would just dummy them down. I don't think there's much more that you can do, and it's difficult this time of year. It's difficult because previously, like early on in the year, I'd say we'll just combine them with something else, kill the queen, combine them, and make one of your average size. That's my dog, this is Jasper. Jasper, Jasper, that's Jasper. I told you he'd make an appearance. So yeah, I would, I would just dummy them down and just try and get them through, but it's a difficult one because I hate this. The most annoying way that they die is when they're not big enough, and you see it because you kind of go and check on them and you see like it's a really small cluster, and then you go back and it's just a really small dead cluster and they just can't generate the heat to keep them through. And that does happen, uh, when the queens aren't mated properly. So if you've got any queen mating issues, you will end up with that as well. But yeah, that's the best thing you can do is dummy them down and just try and concentrate on the good colonies, because you can split those colonies out and make as many as you want going, going forward, as long as you've got a few colonies. Uh, yeah, pumpkin guesses in grams. Oh, John, you're, you're moderator on the, uh, the Facebook group. You're moderating the chat very well, so thank you. Well, what's your personal experience, opinion about Amitraz? I don't know the other ones. I know Fluvalale, that's for like fleas, isn't it? I've not used the bottom 2. I've heard of Fluval, Fluvalate, so that's like for like sheep. I don't know. But personal experience with Amitraz is very good. I've not had any issues with Amitraz other than you need to be on top of it in terms of monitoring what frames it's been in contact with, but it is effective. It is such an effective treatment for us. There's no signs of any resistance, and again, that's anecdotally, that's not me doing any testing. I don't have any time to do testing, but all I know is that I use Amitraz, I get the bees into the spring, And I don't have any issues with Varroa. No holes in the cappings, no deformed wing virus, no issues with them growing and expanding. So I don't have any issues with it whatsoever. Now, whether that's going to change in the future, I don't know. I'd suspect that if you used it year after year after year, you would get issues with it. I'm going to use something different next year because I've done that 3 years in a row with Apivar strips, and it's got— it's gone well. kind of think it's always good to maybe change things up a little bit before you start to get an issue with it, so I'm going to use thymovar next year. Thymovar, and I'll do my, I'll do my apivaroxone as well, and I might do that a little bit more just to compensate depending on what the weather's like. But when I use thymovar, I did a whole apiary last year on thymovar, and they were fine. They were just as good. So I haven't done the testing, but I will change it up next year. Right, so will you do a video on using a mating nuc? Yeah, definitely. So I bought 70, bought 70 of the Bee Equipment ones, and I knew they were going to be cheap, cheap and cheerful, but they were £7.50 each. And then obviously you knock the VAT off as well, and they had the plastic foundation in them. So I know I do, I do feel sorry, and I apologize again for anybody who had the Abello ones, because at the time I just thought I have not got the time to do this, and we could get into next year and I've just not got the time again, and end up selling my— the ones I just bought. But I have bought 70, and I'm going to do more of that next year, as opposed to kind of like trying to do 100, 150 production colonies and do all the extraction and do all the inspections and stuff on it. I'm going to do, um, I'm going to do more queen mating because I've got a really, really good site to do it on and like 3 queens that I think are going to be good to kind of rear some queens from. So I'll do that. Uh, I've got, I've got a problem with 3 hives. 2 of them superseded a few weeks back, the other had a newly mated queen. All 3 have no brood or eggs. Tried a frame of eggs in each, but none drew queen cells. Any advice, please? If they're not drawing queen cells, then just leave them. It's like, I've not been into my bees for— apart from the YouTube videos, I've not been into a single colony since April, since since April, since August, middle of August, when I took, when I took out all of the honey and I put my Apivar strips in. I've not gone into them because I did a clean sweep of all of them. They all had queens, they were all fine, and I think when you get a few colonies you can just kind of say just, just leave them to it. So I've probably had some supersede as well. I'll probably add some supersede that aren't going to make it through, but if you, if you think they superseded and then they're not taking a new kind of frame of eggs to do anything with, then what can you do? Like, you've got 2 options there. Either you've got a successfully mated queen in there, or you've got a virgin running around that might go out and mate. And looking at the temperature, highly unlikely. But are you gonna— are you gonna go through all of the frames and try and find a virgin kind of at this time of year? And if you do find a virgin, what are you going to do? So it's, it's a difficult one. One, because my advice, if it was me, I wouldn't do anything. I just leave them to it, and I wouldn't even know that I had that issue because I'd say kind of not, not sure what's going on. Will the new queens be from your F0? Yeah, so that's what I'm going to run kind of 90% of those queens from, is that F0 artificially inseminated queen that I've got. Um, and it is, it's, it's a really good queen. And again, channel members will see what the temperament of that colony's like now, 6 or 7 weeks after the new queen went in there, uh, and I've seen how much honey they can produce. So they will be, they will be true UK mated F1 queens, and they'll be very limited. The queen is going great guns. That's good to hear. So when you weigh your hive, do you have a recommended weight of stores to overwinter? So again, this, this is a video that's sitting there on the channel ready to come out. And I do, I do apologize to people because it might seem that my videos are like a little bit late because I do that kind of— I just got to try and squeeze it into my life. I can't do like a video every week. And I tell you what, if you like get me to the point where I'm getting 3 million views a month, I'll definitely give up my job and do a video every day, and I'll just kind of like flood you with videos all the time. But that video is on the channel. And it does talk about target weights for different colonies, and it talks about the fact that it's completely dependent on what system you're on, what format you're on, whether you're on wood and poly. But I think the recommended, what people say, is like 40 pounds of stores. So for a national deep, it's 40 pounds of stores, and then you need to work out how much the colony's weighing and how much your frames are weighing and how much the beehive's weighing. And when I do it with my national deeps, I go for around 40 kilograms, like all in, in terms of the poly hive and everything. It will depend on like what system and what format you're using, so it's kind of, it's kind of there or thereabouts. But if you're weighing your whole hive, regardless of whether it's wood, poly, or whatever, and it's on a single deep with a roof and a floor, and it's around 40 kilograms, you're probably there or thereabouts. Good to see that Andy's putting insulation in his roof. Does the polyashforth feeder fit the 12-frame Abello? That is a good question. The one that I've got does, and it's funny, I spoke, I spoke to Damien, I speak to Damien from Abello quite a lot because I do, I post some stuff on their social media for them, so I speak to him a lot, and I said to him, you need to do a Polly Ashworth feeder for your 12-frame polyhive because it is that— I know I sat on the fence before, didn't I, about which, which was the best polyhive on the market. I've had that one for a year now and that is definitely the best polyhive on the market by a long, long way, I reckon. But he needs a Polly Ashworth feeder and I said to him, you need to get a Polly Ashworth feeder because your one doesn't fit and the 12 frames top bee space and the Polly Ashworth Feeder that Abello sell have the rim in, but it's bottom bee space. So if you put it on, even though this— it's kind of— you get like this in-out effect, it would work, but you end up with a double bee space. And anybody knows double bee space underneath a feeder is asking for trouble because they just, they fill it with brace comb and stores, and you just get a complete mess. So Damian's going to do a polyaswath feeder for the 12-frame Abello. But it's going to take a while and it's not going to be cheap for him, for the moulds, or for the actual people buying it. So I'll let you in on a little secret: if you buy the Suyenti Poly feeder and don't build rims out on the bottom, it works perfectly. It is like the perfect fit for it, and it's the perfect in-beespace because the Suyenti Poly Ashworth feeder doesn't have a rim underneath. It was designed for a top-beespace system. And then the 12-frame bellows atop the space system as well, and it just it worked perfectly. So I said, I said, so I said to Damien, you don't need to, you don't need to build one. Just just use the Suenti one. Just sell the Suenti one, and he didn't want to do that. So it will come out at some point. I'm just reading through. See one from Melanie there. Do I keep the bottom boards? So Euan's saying, do I keep my bottom boards in all the time? So no, I've taken them out, you know, and this is something where I chop and change each year, and sometimes I think, oh no, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna put bottom boards in, and sometimes I don't have them in. And I think I'm pretty much set now on polyashworth feeder the whole time and then no boards in at all. That's what I do, so they're kind of open to the elements underneath and then cozy all the way around. So no, I don't keep them in. at all, ever. I just, just reading through the comments and it jumps down a bit. Well, there's lots, there's lots of comments on there. I'm just reading. I like the fact that he names, he names all of his queens. It's great. Brenda, amazing name. No, it's a little bit further south than Basildon. Saying the amount of time and money I spend on my 20 colonies will probably equate to a salary of £2 I love my hobby. Would your rate be above the minimum wage? It's interesting, you know, because if you— like, the first year, would it be above the minimum wage? No, it would be massively negative number. Uh, the second year, the same. The third year, the same. The fourth year, the same. Probably— I don't think I've broken even yet in terms of beekeeping investment. But the turnover is pretty good, good turnover. So it's it's promising, and and this is why I still have a full-time job. But yeah, like I say, I do. It's heading it's heading in the right direction. Richard thinks I'm from Leicester. Well, you know what? Anybody who watched the previous chat would hope that I'm not from Leicester after Arsenal's mighty performance today. So I'm, I'm a die-hard Arsenal fan and, uh, we are so rubbish, but we're actually pretty good. Last few games were not too bad. So that— I won't bore you, um, with any more football talk, although I see someone on here, Peter, he's a Chelsea fan. Definitely going to win the league, right? Do you ever attend the V shows? If so, what's your favorite? If not, why? Um, so I've never been to a V show, not once, and I would— I'd like— I'd I will go to some, inevitably will go to some in the future. But my question, and I've said this to a few people recently, is why, why are they all in the south? Why are they all in the south? They're all in the south. There's nothing kind of north of Coventry, I don't think, is there? Um, and if anyone knows of a bee show north of Coventry, let me know, because it takes like— even to get to Coventry, it's 3 hours for me. So for Bee Trade X, and it'll be interesting to see how many people go to Bee Trade X. This year in terms of people and in terms of sellers. Uh, but I, from speaking to people, I think B-Traders is probably people's favorite show. And again, that is my dog going crazy. That's just me, from what I've heard from people. And I, I know from talking to people who have sold there as well, they say very, very popular. But I just think, why not have one in the north? Why not have one kind of Manchester or Liverpool way, or like central in the north, like, I don't know, because I think a lot of people don't go to the shows because it's a little bit too far. Like, I can't— I'm not going to travel down to Cornwall or somewhere to— or Sandown Park to go to a show. Um, but I'd really like to go to a show, so if I do, I'll let you know. And I'd love to kind of just go down and talk to people about bees because it is good fun. So I will do— I will go to— I'll make this commitment, I'll go to a beekeeping show next year. I don't know which one though, probably the most furthest north. Do you do the BBKA module exams? No, I've never done any of them, but I do quite like— I like exams. I quite enjoy learning stuff. The BBKA gets a bad rap, doesn't it? Like, you hear so many people on it. Like, I'll let you into a little secret, I recently rejoined the beekeeping forum after quitting because— I'd say because of getting bullied. I wasn't getting bullied, I was just getting fed up with people being assholes. But I rejoined it again recently, and I do read the beekeeping forum a lot because I think it's a really good kind of useful place for people to share information. And I think the vast, vast majority of the information on there is Really, really good. There's in fact, I think it's all I think it's all good. I'm not I'm not saying anything bad about the information that's on there, but I do read their comments about the BBKA, and I know they're not massive fans of the BBKA, and I just I get snippets like I'm not like fully up to speed with all of the stuff. But you hear people talking about various different things like with matchsticks and top ventilation and and just things that. I don't think really got that much place in beekeeping, but that's just my personal opinion. But also, like, beekeeping is so varied, you're never going to get everyone to agree, and you're always going to get personality clashes. And I don't know, you get terms like master beekeeper, and does that mean that— does that mean they know better than you because they're a master beekeeper because they've done some exams, or because they've had kind of 3 colonies. And I'm just, I'm just talking randomly. I'm not— this is not specifically about anyone at all, but someone who's kept kind of like 2 or 3 colonies for 20 years versus someone who spent like maybe 3 summers working with like a bee farmer in New Zealand who's got 5,000 colonies. Because I know who I'd probably prefer to take the advice from. I think you learn a bit more like that. And I do think Bees will survive so well. You can do so much, like, to bees and they'll just kind of get on with it. But to know how to get to the point where you're managing them perfectly, you can't get to that point. So I just think you always need to be open to new ideas. But do I do, do I do the BBK module exams? No, and I definitely won't ever do them because I've not got enough time for other stuff that's kind of like high our priority list. Well, have I swapped from 2:1 to fondant yet? So I did my last massive top-ups on all my colonies with 2:1, and I won't feed fondant until kind of early this year, so November-ish time, but it's coming up. At what point do you do your winter oxalic acid treatment, and how would you do such as a BS poly nuc with only a small entrance hole? So it gets earlier and earlier, and You're never going to get this right without going in and taking out every single frame and saying, right, they are broodless, so I can do one treatment. So you just have to have a little bit of a guess to try and get them roughly when they're at their broodless point, and they might not be broodless. You get colonies, some colonies that don't go broodless at all, and it depends where you are in the country as well. So for us, we kind of go early, early December, somewhere around there. I definitely— I think anywhere in the UK, I think if you're doing it after, say, the 15th of December, the chances of them being broodless then is going to start falling a bit. What I find, they tend to go broodless right now, um, be quite, quite a good time to do oxalic acid treatment now. But with the entrance hole, it's, it's again depends how you're doing it. So we use a Sovlamox, uh, which is like a ProVap similar similar system. It fires it in through the hole. So all we do with the BS Poly Nukes is just open them up and just fire it in through the hole. I don't close the floor, give them a real big dose of it, and they just— they get completely covered. Uh, if you're doing it with a Varrox, you, you'll need to set up some sort of floor and try and do it through the OMF. Might not be as effective though. Um, and then the other way to do it is you can build yourself a little eke. That's quite— if you're gonna— if you've got a Sublimox, you can go in at the top as well, build an eke. I do that on some of them, and I'm probably going to do that again on my colonies this year. Just build an eke, take the polyash forth feeder off, put the eke on, oxalic acid, and then take the eke off and then put the fondant on, because you're going in to do the fondant anyway. It's quite a good way doing it from the top like that. Always seem to have trouble introducing a Buckfast queen into a dark colony. Even when hopelessly queenless, I've seen queen introduction frames. Give you any experience with these? So I, I've heard of that as well. I've never ever had an issue introducing queens since I've kind of gone down the route of like— you, I'm sure you've all seen how I introduce queens, and it's a comment I get all the time from people, which is like, that's, that is proper overkill for introducing a queen, but it kind of works for me. So I've introduced like Buckfast queens, like proper ginger ones, into ridiculously dark colonies and never, never had an issue. I don't think the queen introduction frames would give you— they might do, they might give you a little bit more benefit, but I've not used the ones I've got. I've got 2 from Abello and they're on my list of videos to do, so I've not used them. And I use the pushing ones a bit. I did start using the pushing ones, and I did not like the pushing ones because they burrow underneath them. They get underneath them so easily. And they— the ones where they got underneath them, they didn't kill the queen, but they got underneath them. So I just thought, what's the point in going to the effort of taking the queen out, putting her underneath the cage, and then they can just get in anyway? Uh, but if you're having issues with very dark colonies, not introducing well-to-buckfast queens, it's probably worth giving the cages a go, um, because it will give you that really nice kind of slow release. You just need to make sure the frames you take out are really close to emerging. You don't want to leave that queen on their own for a while. Can you ask Payne's to produce a deep roof for their nucs like Maysmore and also get rid of that dark side feeder and produce an 8-frame nuc? No, that they produce a top feeder, right? Julian's definitely been sneaking into the channel membership section and watching the videos. Uh, so Payne's— if it'd be great if Payne's did a deep roof like the Maysmore one, it would get— I tell you what, that's all I'd get. They're so good. But they don't. They've got the shallow ones, and it's— I just— yeah, they're not good, the shallow ones, because they're, they're They warp and they're thin, and I don't like the side feeder. So I've done a video; it's coming out shortly, and I said I was going to do this for ages. I've done the video of how to chop out the feeder and then how to put the top feeder on because I do think once you chop out that feeder and you put a top feeder on it, it's a really good nuke. Really is quite good. So yeah, I I can ask pains. They probably won't know who I am. But I can ask them and say, can you please do this? I would just suggest with anything like that is just, just ask them, send them an email. Pains are good, they get back to your emails, and I'm sure they're always up for it. The only thing I'd say about them though is that have they ever modified their NUC in however many years that NUC's been available? Not been modded once, and I don't think they will mod it because I know how much it costs to do the modding. And are they going to get the payback? Not sure. And you see the price of poly, I can't believe how much the price of poly's gone up. I remember I was looking at this the other day, I remember I used to buy some Maysmore stuff, so it was some old Maysmore kit, and I bought 10 of their hives in the sale. So it was a roof, 2 supers, crown board, queen excluder, brood box, and a floor. Okay, £57 something including the VAT, and that was 5 years ago, so it wasn't like that long ago. And I look at them now and they're like £120. You just think that's, that's quite a big increase. And so the cost of poly is just getting— going through the roof. And I know BS Honeybees are really struggling with it and like getting kind of increase upon increase upon increase. And I know Paynes have put their prices up 20% after their sale. So I think— so I bought a pallet off them for next year's nucs because I didn't have enough. And I can't remember what the price was, like £35, wherever it was, the trade price that they do for it. And then you look at it next year and it's going up to like £46. It's like, if you're buying it off the website, or more than that, like it's gonna be— it's gonna be easily gonna be £50 a nuc, I think, going forward. which is the price that— nearly the price I was paying for a full hive with 2 supers. So the price of the poly is getting a little bit silly. Right, regarding your queen mating, what's your plans for getting the quality of good genetic drones? Right, that's a good question. So I've picked— I've got the— it's the River apiary where I'm going to do it next year, and the reason I'm going to do it is that is by far and away the lowest apiary that I've got, so that is only about like 200 feet above sea level, where a lot of the rest of them are like 700 or 800 feet. So we know that we get excellent flows down there because of all the weather, but you get— it's just a little bit more settled down there. And then the topography is just perfect. So it's in, it's in like a field, and then all around the field kind of slopes up like that. So this is the apiary in here, and then all, literally all the way around it, it's slopes up with big, big mature trees, so it's kind of like a real good catchment zone for them. So I know you're never going to get it perfect, but it's as good as you can really get, like, in, in kind of inland Wales, um, to keep as many of the drones there. So I'll be taking down all my breeder queens there, so I'll be taking down the F0 colony that I'm going to breed from, but I will— I'll put 2 frames of drone foundation in that colony. So I'll be using the old— their own drones in there as well when I use my other queens, because I'm going to graft off different ones in there as well. And then the other breeder queens that I've got down there that aren't F0 but they're island mated, I'm going to use those. So I'm going to load those up with drones, and then I'm going to take down the best 2 colonies from each of my apiaries down there as well. So I'm not going to be really like controlling the drones too much, but I'm going to know that's That's going to give them good ability to produce honey. So it's not going to be hugely scientific. It's going to be a case of taking my best colonies down there, taking down all of my breeder queens down there, pumping them full of drone foundation, and then just let them get on with it. Right, I'm just looking— there's some more here, people saying about the pumpkin. So I'm going to get it back out. Get my pumpkin back out. It's so hot in here, I'm gonna have to turn the fire off in a bit. Right, so here is pumpkin. You have to guess the weight of the pumpkin, and the closest to it— and I should have probably said this before. Oh no, I don't, I don't think this is going to cut. It's not going to be like a tiebreaker, is it? I'll just say the closest to it. I was going to say without going over or changing the rules in between. So the closest to it wins this smoker from Thorn Beekeeping. They gave me that. I'm going to give it to someone on this stream. Right, next question. How much fondant would you put on your colonies after November? So I always go 6 kilos. We get like a big— opening up a can of worms talking about fondant, aren't we? And HMF again. But I read the— there was a thread on the Beekeeping Forum which I'm sure you've all read, but it was probably the best forum thread I've ever read. It was amazing. And it was started off by Patrick from Beer Equipment, who's getting so much stick on that forum. Like, it is just like— I'd say amazing, it's not amazing because it's a little bit harsh, because like, I don't think he's doing anything wrong. But with the best will in the world, he's kind of started talking about the fact that Baco fondant doesn't have his HMF tested, whereas the fondant that's available from his shop does have the HMF tested. you should buy it from him. And I kind of— I like— I love that thread. I was gutted when they locked that thread down because I thought it was really heading in a good direction. But I just thought it was very, very amusing. I did enjoy it. So it depends where you're gonna buy your fondant from. So for me, Bakho fondant, no problem with it whatsoever. I do not know how much HMF is in my Bakho fondant, but I know that I've used it for 7 years and the bees seem all right, and any bee farmer that I've spoken to has used it, and the fact that Murray MacGregor was on, on that thread kind of like piping up saying, well, I've used it for 50 years and it's fine, I found it was quite amusing. So I use Beco Fondant, which comes in a 12.5 kilogram slab, and I tend to just chop it in half with a spade, so it's like 6.25 kilograms, and then I just peel back Peel back the plastic and I just slap that directly onto the contact with the cluster. So have to bear with me, like I'm getting a bit of a sore throat talking. I did this last time, so we've— I've been on air for like, what, an hour now? 4 hours last time and I couldn't speak the next day. So I've got, I've got tea in a cup that I've been nursing and I've also got a flask of tea and I've got a bottle of Ribena. So bear with me. Right, there's some good, there's some good guesses coming in on the pumpkins in terms of some good close guesses. Right, black bees versus Buckfast. I find the Buckfast are not bothered with wasps coming in and going stealing food. Black bees are on a wasp in seconds of it being, uh, on or near the hive entrance. Yeah, I've not, I've not really noticed that. I do notice like some colonies not fussed at all with wasps going in, and I guess they're kind of like if there's 2 or 3 wasps going in, who really cares? They're just buckfast, they're just too focused, aren't they, on just going out and like getting as much honey as possible. But yeah, it's interesting, I've not noticed that between the different colours. I'm looking forward to the off-season winter vids. It's interesting because I'm not overly keen on the off-season winter vids. Like I do them, and I did loads last year. Spent loads of money like buying equipment to review, to like build up the channel. And I speak to manufacturers and I say, "Look, I'll do I'll do some videos and just put them on there." And I'll say again, I'm not one. If someone if someone gives me a product and says, "Do a video on this product," but you have to say nice things about it, and we'll pay you for it. it. Like, I'd never do that because I kind of got my credibility there, and I know people would pick me up on it straight away and say, that's crap, that's a rubbish product, and you just said it was amazing. So then no one would ever, would ever believe me again, would they? Um, but it's surprising, bee manufacturers are not that interested. And I kind of, I kind of think now the channel is like, it's doing all right, got like a decent following. I reckon we're gonna hit— I'm gonna hit 10,000 followers. I was hoping for Christmas, actually, but I don't think we're gonna hit that anymore. So I think by January we hit 10,000 followers and we're averaging like kind of 100,000 views a month. So I thought it was pretty good for beekeepers to give me free stuff to review, and some of them are good. Like, I'm not moaning, you know, Hyde Hives are good, they send me stuff to review. Um, but I thought, yeah, I thought I'd get some more. So I'm not gonna— I'm not gonna go and just buy stuff this year to do it. I've done all the hives, I've done all the nucs. Um, I'm not gonna go and like buy hive tools and be like, oh, this is a really good hive tool. But there are some things that I will go and buy. I've got like a beehive scale, that was something I got recently. I wanted to do a video on a beehive scale and it's literally out there behind, not that window, I'm doing it the wrong way, not that window but the other one, one over there, and like over the last 7 days I've lost 4 432 kilograms in weight. Yeah, so it started off at about 37 kilograms and it's currently at about minus 450 kilograms. So they're not doing very well, uh, and I'm speaking to the manufacturer at the moment trying to say I don't think your hive scale is working very well. Uh, but I will do, I will do some videos. I'll do some off-season videos. But what I do do, anybody who's seen these videos before, these live streams, like, I I'm so anal with YouTube, like looking at the analytics and stuff and looking at what videos do well. So I will— I do look at the videos and I do see which ones people like and I do see which ones people don't like, and I do try and replicate the ones that have done well. So like making splits, people, people really do seem to like videos, different methods of making splits. But also what people seem to like is me, me or people building stuff. So like making beehives, making floors, making different things like beekeeping hacks, just different stuff. So I think that's what I'm going to focus on more this winter. And again, if you've got any ideas, go on the Facebook group and stick it up there and I will add it to my list. Um, but I'm going to do some more making stuff videos this winter, I think. Right, if I make a split, what is the chance of introducing a Welsh black queen? Would they accept? Because I've seen a few YouTubers saying they will not. I, I've never had a queen not be successfully introduced based on kind of like genetics. If you get them properly, properly hopelessly queenless until there's no chance of them kind of having anything to create their own queen, and then you give them the time and then you don't go back in and look while they're introducing her, you'll get them introduced, I would say. So go for it. Saying off-season videos I find so hard. Yeah, so, so I think, I think what I'm going to definitely Is like, I'm gonna get some YouTube streaming software and I'm gonna do lots of more interviews with people. So I do— I've been pimping myself out to all the Americans and the Canadians saying, let's do a collaboration video, like I'll interview you or whatever. And no one's got back to me, so I can't do that. But I'm well up for ideas. So Andy, if you want to do that, we do like a little collaboration video. Yeah, I'd love to. Let's let's do it and have some fun. Jack saying, "Are Welsh blacks the same as Devon blacks? I.e. European." Like, don't know any any black bees. They're just a bit darker, aren't they? I say that about my Welsh blacks. I say they're not like they're not a specific bee. They're just like mongrel bees that I've got that are really dark. I see Adam. Adam's come here. Hi, Adam. How you doing? You got a shout out earlier on talking about your hive wraps. Let's talk about those. Full-sized hives on your underfloor entrances, have you modified them to allow a bottom board to be fitted for OA VAPs? So no, I've not modified mine, because what I do with mine is I either go in from the top with an eek or one of my multi-purpose clearer boards and leave the floor open. And the fact that the vapor's warm kind of congregates at the top. They get a little bit coming out, but they get covered. Or I just got like these Correx boards that I made, which is just Correx and then pinned with wood all the way around to give you a bee space on either side. I just lift the whole hive up to plonk it on one of those, and then it's sealed. But I'm going to do— I'm going to do an updated underfloor entrance video because people like that video, and I'm going to update it just to put some runners on and make it so that you can put a bottom board in to close them up, because people mention that all the time. So Pete— yeah, Pete, Eltham. Yeah, that's where I'm from, Eltham. So Pete got it right last time. Oh, that's jumped off where we want to now. I love, I love that there's like so many people across the world watching this. I've got like south of Sweden, Hi from the south of Sweden. It's nice over there. Got Illinois. Cool. I find it very interesting all the people watch me chatting. Right, Richard. I've got a BS honeybees poly nuc with a maze more super on top. It feels like the bee space isn't right. Do you cut the rims off your six frame maze more poly super? Yes, I did a video on that. So if you've got a BS honey, I'm going to get this wrong now, aren't I? If you've got BS honeybees poly Nuc, which is top bee space, and the Maysmoor Super is bottom bee space. So you end up with a double bee space in the middle. So on all of the Maysmoor Supers, all of them, all the Maysmoor brood boxes, you need to chisel off the plastic runner. It kind of goes up like that, that bit there. You just chisel it off and then you convert it to bottom bee space and then it works. So, and that is the only way to do it. So BS, don't produce a super and they don't produce a brood box either, but that would definitely change. So when I've spoken to them before, they said, look, we've got all the moulds and everything, we've just got nowhere to store it. And I know they've bought loads of land at the moment, so I reckon they're going to whip up a massive container and get loads of them on order, which would be good because I think the double brood, the double brood box nucs is such a good way of overwintering colonies. You can get them through and build them up like that, and they're on 6, kind of double, like 6 over 6. My dog over there. It's a really, really good format for getting them through winter because they're big, they're effectively bigger than a national deep, so over 12 frames, and they start at the bottom, so you end up with all your brood at the bottom and your honey on top, and they just work up, so you don't have to open them, you don't have to feed them fondant, And they're pretty much good to go, and then they're huge, and then that you don't— you're not in such a rush to get them out of the nucs in the spring into hives because they can— you can just work back down again and onto 12 frames. So I really like that as a, as a kind of system for getting the nucs through. So Tim's saying the forum has good content but seems to rebel against any authority figures or organization is true. And this is why I like to read it and kind of sit there and not contribute at all. How much syrup do you get through? I try and limit the amount of syrup. I overordered syrup like massively one year, bought like 3 IBCs full. They call them totes in America, don't they? I don't see that now, the day. A tote. But yeah, IBCs. But this invert's fine, you know, because it sits there, it doesn't go off, just doesn't go off at all. Uh, but how much syrup do I get through? I try and limit it as much as I basically can. I start off on 1:1. So you, if you watch the videos, I do that and get through a lot of 1:1. I mix that up myself. So I buy sugar by like a pallet, kind of like a ton of sugar, and then just mix that up in drums and that mixes up so easy, 1:1. Pump that into all the containers that I've got, and then I feed that all the way up until whenever it was, middle of October. And then this year I bought like a one— I, I actually bought it in smaller containers this year. I bought a pallet, so it was 60, like 10 litres, so maybe like 600 litres of 2:1, and it wasn't enough. So I'm gonna do double that next year. So I reckon it's probably around 1,000 litres of 2:1 as like a top-up feed, but I probably got through like another 2,000 litres of 1:1 before that that I've made. My dog Jasper— wait, Jasper! He's a cat chaser and he would have heard a cat there, uh, and he's gonna just gonna be a pest now until the cat goes. Jazz! Right, next question then. So how much syrup would you recommend Apivar strips this time of year? No, it's too— it's too late, I think, for Apivar strips this time of year. If you, if you've not treated your colonies yet for varroa, then it's, it's really, really late. And the only method that I would recommend now is Apibioxal, or the cheaper oxalic acid, but I definitely wouldn't recommend And then doing it at 5-day intervals. So do your treatment, wait 5 days, do another treatment, and then keep on doing that. Because if you've not treated them and it's like November now, you're going to have a really, really high varroa load and you're going to have issues. So you need to— you're probably going to need like 6 or 7 treatments, so it's going to take you a month to get them back to where they need to be. And you're gonna— it's gonna— it'll cost cause you an issue because it's the winter bees that are already going to be kind of affected by those diseases that Varroa carry. So no, I wouldn't put Apivar in now. I would go, I'd go something else. What's your opinion on 2:1 versus 3:2 end of winter feeding? I don't get too caught up on the ratios like that. The difference between 2:1 and 3:2 is minimal. I would, I would go 2:1 Personally, at the very end, and I go 1:1 all the way up to there. But you could just go 2:1 all the way through. You could probably go 3:2 all the way through. I honestly don't think there's a huge amount in it. Jack's enjoying the fire. It's too hot. Like, I watched all these videos about how to do a livestream and like put like a nice cool light here. Like, this is supposed to be all like nice different colors, and all I can see is just white. and then have like a cool fire in the background, and it's just too hot, like it is too hot. I'm gonna go and open a window, so I'm glad, I'm glad it looks nice. It's definitely not right for me though. Do you have any heather honey left to sell? Yes, I've got lots of heather honey, 1,500 pounds we produced this year. Do you treat in the spring? So no, our setup is you do, we do an autumn treatment is Apivar, and next year we're going to use Thymovar. We do a winter treatment kind of early December, just apibioxal, and then we don't treat in the spring. We don't need to. I've seen some stuff for treatments in the spring, so like, you— the guys in America, you don't know how lucky you are being able to use oxalic acid without calling it a silly name and adding 20% sugar to it, but also being able to use it with the supers on. So the that your government or your institutions or whoever it is who said that's kind of legal and done the testing. I wish, I wish the UK would do that. We are so far behind other countries with this. And where's our Brexit bonus? Because if you can do that in America, why can't we do that over here? And oxalic acid treatment kind of in the spring, doing that like 2 or 3 times would be a great treatment. Doing it with the supers on would be a great treatment, but I definitely don't recommend it because it is illegal. But I wish you could. But so we don't treat them, so we treat those 2 times because that means we don't have to treat in the spring. At what point do you go in and start to feed to build up after winter? So we don't really. We started doing that. It's difficult when you start beekeeping, you see so much information. I do appreciate how complicated it is, and you've seen the videos, I don't get it right a lot of the time. But you see, like, you need to feed in the spring to build them up, you need to put your pollen patties on because there's not natural pollen, and it just depends where you are in the country. And I've kind of come to the conclusion now, don't need to feed in the spring, the colonies build up fine. The problem that we had in North Wales was that The camera's going off. When I was on double brood, we had a real issue because they overwintered really well on double brood. What always ended up happening was that they'd end up in the top brood box, and then I'd leave them on kind of double brood, let them build up, let them build up, let them build up, and they wouldn't really fill that double brood box until the back end of the spring flow. So then you'd get to the back end of the spring flow, you put your your queen excluder on, you put the super on, and you'd be pretty much done, and all of your honey would be in the brood box. So it's really annoying. That was the main reason I moved over to 14 by 12, and it's like the one benefit that I get from 14 by 12, along with all of the other disadvantages of it. Uh, but yeah, so, so in terms of spring buildup now on a 14 by 12, we find it works, it works really well. We don't do any pollen patty feeding, we don't do any syrup feeding, We leave the fondant on as long as we possibly can, and if you'd have seen the videos previously, you get to this point where it's like, do you take all of that fondant off if there's any left on, scrape it all off, put the queen excluder on, put a super on, and kind of gamble, or do you leave that on as long as you possibly can and let the colony use it to build up? And it's different every year, and you kind of balance it as best you possibly can, but I find we don't need to add pollen patties, we definitely don't need to feed any syrup. We just leave the fondant on. Right, that tea is very cold. I'm gonna finish this tea. Yeah, that's true, Jack. Jack's gone for an 85 kilogram pumpkin. It is a big pumpkin, but it's not 85 kilograms. So that, that's going to be my only clue that it is less than 85 kilograms. Right, loads of good guesses coming in though. I'm gonna have to go through the whole chat at the end and see who came closest. I might not get it right, I might have to declare the winner tomorrow. Tea with honey. If the dog is still there, turn around. My lab used to sleep like that. Was he? Oh, can you— oh, he's— yeah, no, he's gone. Yeah, he's He's too hot, he's like me, so probably I might go and open the window in a sec. I've been told that a virgin queen will always outfly the drones from its own apiary. Do you believe that theory? Thanks, Kai. No, definitely not. It'd probably avoid its drones from the own hive, but there's definitely— they definitely go in their own apiary. I know some will go to drone congregation sites, but I can't tell you either way whether it happens. I don't think it's true. I think they'll definitely go in their own apiary, and the own apiary could be like this site that I've got. It's huge, like the field's like 7 or 8 acres, and then it's covered in woodland all the way around. So if they went like a mile away, they'd still be going with the same drones. But I see how other people do it as well. Like, I know someone who lives like by the the coast. And then what he does is— and this is really good, the idea of doing it— is he has like his central apiary where he does all the grafting and everything, and where he keeps the queens for going out and mating. And then he has like a semicircle all the way around them to cover the coast about a mile away, so like satellite apiaries. And that's where he does the drone flooding. Um, and again, like, I'd, I'd probably do something like that if I had the time. He's a full-time beekeeper. I just flood them all the way around. And if you're on a coast or if you're near an island, you're restricting the amount of other drones that are coming in. And if you can get that correct wind flow as well, so you've not got other drones like kind of coming in on the wind, you do everything you can to restrict the other drones mating with your queens. But I think even with local drones, like when we've bred from F0s before, you get, you get really good F1s. You do get, you do get variation because it's an F1, but they come, they get a lot of traits from their mother. And even, even if they're diluting those traits like under 50%, 60%, then you get very good queens. Right, next question. That's a lot. There's a lot. There's a lot of questions on there. Right. What is your favorite queen bee breed? And you, punking is obviously. Oh, punking. 13.4. Okay. Yeah. Buckfast. Buckfast. Definitely my favorite. I know the the Atlantis. Atlantis is not really a breed of queen. Like there's loads of different genetics that go into there. The Atlanta queens. are very, very good, but there's, there's different varieties in there. But yeah, I don't think you can go wrong with a very good quality European bread. Buckfast, definitely my favorite. Saying off-season stuff, just purchased the Bee House from Omlet, um, looking forward to trying it. Have you ever used one? No, I tried to get them to give me a free one, didn't get back to my videos, didn't get back, so I haven't got one yet. And it's, it's a difficult one because you think kind of like with the, with the Hyde Hive stuff, like they give us those for free. It's quite a lot of work to do the videos, and then it's, it's not really the system that I'm using in terms of like honey production. I don't think you get much— you don't get anywhere near as much honey from like a Hyde Hive, like a long hive, because it's not the same system that you're using. Um, I don't want— I was going to let my dog out. You don't want to let too many You don't want to have too many different hives and trying to just kind of manage them just for the purpose of videos. But I like the look of the Omlet hives. They do look cool. Right, I'm gonna let my dog out. Come on. Window open. Amazing. Right, so from Sweden, I have a few hives, 19 this fall, and I'll put some of the small ones in a root cellar over the winter. Now there are any black bees, Apis mellifera mellifera, I let go of Buckfast. Interesting. What is a root cellar? Like a cellar under your house? That's interesting. I've seen people do that. I've seen some Canadians do some stuff like that, and it's cool. Yeah, I bought— I hope he's not watching— a guy called Peter, I won't say his surname, but he bought a lot of nucs off me last year, and he's an experienced beekeeper, and he put like 40 colonies in a greenhouse to give them the— I don't know I did it. I listened. I just kind of— as soon as he said he put his colonies in a greenhouse, I just thought, oh my God, he put 40 colonies in a greenhouse and they all died. Um, so don't put your colonies in greenhouses. They're in a cellar. I've seen people do that in terms of like kind of maintaining the temperature, and obviously like Sweden's very different in terms of the temperature. So it'd be interesting if that is what you mean, a root— I've never heard it called a root cellar. Interesting. Okay, so Andy's Andy's basically fogged me off. Cheers, Andy. Fogged me off saying doesn't want to do a collaboration. That is I don't feel too bad because that is pretty much what everyone else did. So that's all right. If you if you ever get to the point where you've got a second, we could do a collaboration. I'm only I'm only winding you up. Ben saying, did you do a harvest video this season? So I can't remember. Did I do a harvest video? That time of the year is really. Really difficult for me because I'm trying to do a million and one things and I just don't have the time to do it. So you're trying to do all the videos, you're trying to do all of your honey harvesting, and then you're trying to do all of your extraction at the same time and have a full-time job and have a family and not kind of collapse. Like, it is difficult. So that time of the year, I struggle a bit, like, doing kind of videos What I did do is I put together a little— I did a little heather honey harvest video. I know that I did that, and that's coming out on the channel soon. Just a little kind of quick 4-minute video, I think it was, just showing the process of heather harvesting. But again, I just— I've not got the space in that room to get a camera in there and to kind of do a decent video, so struggling a bit. Did you ever use those red plastic frames? No, I looked— I found those the other day. They're at the bottom of a stack of like brood boxes where I keep them in storage, so I didn't use them. I reckon there's loads of things like that where I've kind of said I've got them, had a look at them, and then said I'm going to use these, and then I didn't. Yeah, so we'll do— I've heard really good things about them, and I heard really bad things about them as well. People saying like they're amazing, and then other people saying they, they go to kind of do like a steam clean on them, and you need to be able to do some sort of harsh heat treatment on them and they're warping. So what you do if you buy all the frames and they just warp, then they're not going to be very good and they're not cheap. So no, I've not used them yet. You watched me and Ainsley Harriott today? Yeah, if anyone's not seen that, I thought I'd put that video out there. It was quite fun. That was great fun doing that with Ainsley Harriott. going to see, see what other TV chefs we can entice to come to our house for pizzas. Swarm traps, poly nucs, or national brood, what do you recommend? I'd say national brood's probably a better size. They do like poly traps though. More important though is to just make it used, so like used and dirty with bee stuff and propolis and wax. They love it. I got into a really big argument with someone on YouTube before, uh, about whether they should have a floor. Um, I blocked him. So I do, I do block people on YouTube. If you're still here and you've not been blocked, congratulations, I've not, I've not been offended. Um, but he properly caused an argument saying, you do not know what you're talking about, all of my swarm traps don't have floors and they've been fine. And I just said, well, I've never ever caught one when they've had an open mesh floor. Um, so we fell out. But yeah, so I don't think it makes a massive difference in terms of the material. I think I've done a video on this. I think size is really important, so around 40 litres-ish doesn't matter. Poly nucs do work, caught loads in poly nucs, but you're never going to catch like a big, big prime swarm in a poly nuc because it's not going to fit. But they do like the size, but the most important thing is to make sure that it's been used by bees. Black comb is the best. My dog, let me close the window. Jasper, come here. Greyhounds, right? But yeah, trapping bait hives. I didn't do any bait hives last year, not a single one, so I caught some just in boxes, stacks of boxes. But I put loads out the year before, and I think I might do some more swarm traps this year because catching swarms is loads of fun. I also see it on YouTube as well, like that. You've got to, you've got to go and do some swarm catches, haven't you? You see them on YouTube. That's how people get millions of views. So if anyone's got any ideas on how I can go viral on YouTube, you've got to let me know. I've been thinking about going and like just putting loads of nucs in like really ridiculous places. And then letting them thrive there, and then going along and harvesting them and pretending you know that they were just like a colony there, like in a washing machine or in a fridge or something. Not saying anyone on YouTube does that because they definitely they definitely don't. It seems to get good views, doesn't it? But I see some of them like I I'm so competitive. I just ridiculously competitive, and I see like Ian Stepler getting three million views, and I. think I want 3 million views. And I see Yappy Bee Man getting like 15 million views on like a swarm capture video. I think I want 15 million views on a swarm capture video. Um, so I might do some more swarm captures. I'm gonna do some more bait boxes as well. How is invert syrup made? Good question. I don't know. Uh, I know there's a couple of ways of doing it, isn't there? There's like a chemical way of doing it I'm not going to lie, I don't know the science behind how invert sugar is made. Sorry. Joseph saying, yesterday my nuc hive left their box. I caught them again. They had left the hive leaving 2 full frames of open and closed brood behind in the box with no bees or queen cells. Why would they do that? Almost certainly varroa. You get that a lot, you know, if you've not treated them for varroa and they're absconding in November kind of November in like 3 hours, probably varroa, and they just can't handle the varroa load that's on them, so they're just thinking we need to get out, or they're swarming, or there's something else wrong with them. It's almost certainly going to be varroa that month. He wants to come back in. 2 seconds, he'll be all right now. Look, Jasper. So this is Jasper. He did— he wanted to win. He'll be all right now. So, MMB, yeah, so the Enzi Harriet thing was so much fun. He was here for about six hours, and I didn't obviously see what they were going to put on the video. They just kind of filmed for six hours and then go away, and I just can't believe they put me getting stung in the face on as like the opening bit. Like they knew that they were just gonna they were gonna do that just to wind me up because I gave it the big one. I kind of thought, ah, I can I can keep bees without a veil, as I've done on other videos as well. Always get stung. And I was doing it for absolutely ages. I wasn't doing it, I wasn't trying to give it the big one, I just thought it would look a lot better on camera if I could do it without a veil. So I went and chose like the most gentle colony in the apiary, and it was a lovely day, and I— we probably filmed that bit for 20 minutes. So I was inspecting that colony for 20 minutes, and like 2 seconds before the end, it stung me in the face, got me right there, and I just thought I'm gonna have to be like brave and pretend it's not hurting, and it really hurts. And they put it in, they decided to edit that bit in, so thanks ITV. But that was good, I got lots of orders from it and it was good. Ainsley was great fun and he is also a die-hard Arsenal fan, which was good to talk about. Right, Ryan, which beekeeping gloves do you find give the best sting protection? Some bees get me through the stitch line with gauntlets. So I've not found gloves like— I've done a video with the Ultra Bee kind of gauntlets and they were good, but I just— it's really lazy beekeeping. So I've just come to the conclusion now that they will sting you through the gloves. But the ones that I use, so you see everyone else here, they use like a blue— I don't even know what they're called, like sterile gloves, and they're great, absolutely fine, but they don't fit me. I can't get one to fit me, so even the extra extra large ones, I can get them down to there and then like I get like my wrist becomes exposed. So they do long sleeve ones and they just ride up on me, so I use— they're like kitchen gloves. I get them from Viking Direct and they're really, really good gloves, very, very good. And then I wear them all day and I kind of wash them in between apiaries. Bucket of soda, but they're really good. So they're the best gloves, but you do get you do get occasionally get stung through them. A little bit thicker, kind of like a marigold. That's my favorite gloves. Richard, save me some heather honey. I'll collect it with the bees in spring. No problem. There will definitely be some heather honey there in spring. I'll see you when you come to collect your nuc. So John saying my bees and. Both nucs only had small pockets of capped brood 10th of October and don't know if they've started again. Do you think they will have adequate winter bees? So they might not have started the winter bees yet, John. Like I say, I don't, I don't even look in mine because I kind of think if, if the colony is looking good middle of August and I've had a big crop of honey from them, then it's a good queen, good colony. All that I can do is treat them for varroa, get that varroa down before they start their winter bees. And make sure they've got enough food, and everything else is kind of in the hand of the gods. So I don't even look. So some colonies— I have so many people ring me up between, like, in October really. People ring me up in October saying, I desperately need some queens, can you get me some queens? And I say it to everyone, I say, why do you want queens? And they say, because I've looked inside my colony and there's no— I can't see the queen and I can't see any brood. And it's probably fine. I'd say 90% of the time there's no issue that, and because they do, they just have a, they have a break. Just because you can't find your queen doesn't mean there's no queen in there. So I say to them, if you do a test frame if you want, but I would just, I would just leave them personally. So do I think they'll have adequate winter bees? They might just start doing the winter bees now. They sometimes do it late, sometimes do it early, but it's— I went into some colonies recently and I know I know I told you not to go into colonies, but I do sometimes do it for videos, and they're just like 6 or 7 massive 14 by 12 frames of brood, like tons of brood in them. So some of them are on winter bees now, some of them would have been done, some of them will be in November. It all depends on the colony. Oh, Jim, that's a good question. If you could do it all again now with what you have learned, what would you do different? So that's a great question. I was speaking to my wife earlier and we were talking and I couldn't hear what she said because I used to do like DJing, drum and bass DJing, as you can imagine, and my hearing's just gone. I'm 36, 35, 35 or 36, one of those. I just can't hear anything and she said, would you do it again? Would you do your drum and bass DJing again if If you knew what you knew now about your hearing? And I said, definitely not, no way. So with beekeeping, if you could do it all again with what you have learned, what would you do differently? I would have started YouTube a lot longer, way before I did, and I would have started it kind of like a vlog, not because I try and do it like as an instructional thing. I know it must come across bad, you know, he thinks he knows it all. I don't mean, I don't mean to do it like that. Like, I try and target the keyword research. So it's like, how to split your beehive. What do people search for on YouTube? They search how to split your beehive. So I'll do a video on how to split your beehive. It's not me saying that the way I split my beehive is the best. It's just targeting the search engines on YouTube, simple as that. But I look at the other YouTubes and I just think, whoa, they've got like years and years and years on me. All of the videos, they still get loads of views. So I would have started it ages ago. And I would have bought a farm. So we've had loads of chances to go and move and buy farms. I would have definitely done that. In terms of like that, yeah, I would have tried to not let it take over my life as much as it has. But I think something else would have probably taken over my life. if it wasn't the bees. Like, I'm always, always doing something, and I used to have like loads of hobbies and loads of projects. Like, I used to play loads of golf, I used to do loads of gardening and grow loads of veg and do loads of homebrew. I used to play cricket 4 days a week, I used to play rugby 2 or 3 days a week, I used to play football, used to watch a lot of football. I used to do so much other stuff that I just don't do any of now because every single thing I do now is bees. But knowing what I know now in terms of what I enjoy, like when I started off my beekeeping journey, I kind of thought, well yeah, like I'm gonna quit my job at some point and become like a full-time bee farmer and have like 500 colonies of bees, and I think that would be a really nice life. And I couldn't think of anything worse, you know, now after living for the last however many years with all of my bees, like that actual numbers game and doing that on my own. And I know a few beekeepers that do this, and I think around 400 or 500 colonies, because your bees are always fluctuating numbers. Doing that as a job, it's got its good sides and it's got its really lonely sides as well, um, and it's backbreaking hard work. And then if you're at that point as well, you're just selling it in a bucket to someone. You're not going you're not going to sell it all yourself, so you're not making that much money. Like, you don't get many rich beekeepers. So it kind of seems like a little bit of a dream, where I think now, like, there's, there's other elements of it that I enjoy so much more than just trying to maximize the amount of honey that I'm producing and getting to the point where I'm a bee farmer. And YouTube is by far and away the, the thing that I enjoy the most. I love YouTube. I love, I love doing the videos. I love I kind of like sitting there editing the videos, engaging with people, like talking to people, having a community. Like, who'd have thought that I'd be sitting here with kind of like 88 people just listening to me talk to myself on a Saturday night? It is cool, and I do like it, and I'm very grateful to everyone. So thank you. So I've not— I've not answered your question at all there, have I? So if I could do it all again, what would I have learned? I would— I'd have started YouTube a lot earlier, um, and I would have limited the amount of money that I'd spent on kit in terms of expanding those numbers, and I would have tried to slow my growth as much as I possibly could. There you go. Oh, hello from Northern Illinois! I love it, Northern Illinois. Where's that, like, on a scale? Because I always find America— yeah, it's just mad how big America is. So like, some of it's the same as like Iceland, and some of it's the same as like Africa. So where are you, Illinois? I'll have to Google it. So do I ever take my dog to visit the apiaries? So no, oh, he— so we used to have the bees in the back garden, like kind of top of the garden, and you start off, you think, well, my bees are chilled out, they're not going to hurt anyone. So I used to do inspections and he used to sit up there and He was sitting up there one day and the gardens— oh, we've got a weird garden. It's like 6 meters wide, it's 100 meters long, a really odd garden. And the bees were right at the tops, 100 meters away from the house. And he started to get stung. And as you know, with bees, you get a couple of stings and then they all just start getting you. And he got battered, absolutely battered by these bees. And he ran all the way down 100 meters into the house, all the way through the house. And we used to have like a crate for him because he was only a puppy, he was only like 16 weeks old, and he just went into his crate and he was just cowering in the crate like picking these kind of stings out. And every single time I come back from keeping the bees now, he gets— he's like a little bit scared but like comes to like sniff them and he thinks that I've been like injured by the bees because obviously he can smell the stings on me. Um, but he's, he's a great dog, he is a very good dog. Although he does not like cats, he is not a fan of cats. Oh, Andy's saying you get your gloves from a company in Australia called Humblebee. Very interesting. Frank's saying hello from Limerick. Mike's saying thanks for the videos. No problem. Robert's saying, do you do any hands-on beekeeping training? So no, we don't, and I find it a bit difficult to do like hands-on beekeeping training. Um, I don't know, I don't know. I'm definitely gonna do it when we move to a farm. I'm gonna do kind of like introduction days, and I'll do my own spin on it, and I'll just do it as a kind of meet people and come and have pizzas, and Aaron will be there bashing out the pizzas. But I'm definitely not going to do it kind of like in a formal way. Like, I'm not going to be able to sit there in front of a whiteboard and start talking you through the various cycles of— because I just don't think that's— I don't think you need to sit in a classroom to do that. I could probably do some more videos on that because I do think they'd go down quite well, um, from some— by some people. I think you could just Google a lot of that stuff, but I do think like hands-on, let's try out some bees before I kind of commit to getting bees, is probably a good thing. And I could do it like, here are some nice tame bees that you can get, and here are some horrible bees that you can get, and here's like a big colony, you know, so like it's not just a 6-frame nuc, here's a, here's a 7-foot-high stack of bees. Do you want to have a go in it? Please sign this disclaimer before you go into them. Um, because I think that's quite useful for people, because I think it would put some people off. I had one person turn up— didn't turn up last year to get a nuc, and I'd sent out the night before— if any of you bought nucs from me, you'd have seen this— I sent out a video just kind of saying like, here's a video showing you introduce your nuc to your beehive. And I had a message from a lady saying, I didn't know this is what I signed up for. I thought I was just coming to buy some comb honey, some honeycomb. I'm not coming tomorrow. So I didn't refund her deposit because I thought it was a little bit late in the day considering it was 6 months after, and I was left in the lurch a little bit. But I reckon she'd watched that video and just thought, Oh, you know what? I don't want that, or I don't want those kind of bees in my garden, or bees in my garden, which is fine. I think beekeeping is definitely not for everyone. It's it can yeah, it has its ups and its downs, definitely. And Andy saying his two his two dogs are going mad. I think I'm a bit behind, aren't I, on the on the things here. Ben saying who won the Abello swarm catch video? So it was a guy. called— I can't remember his name— Liam? I don't know, I'm so bad with names. It was on there though, Abello put it out, and it was a good video. I don't think everyone got the idea of what they were supposed to do. I know yours was good, Ben, but some of them were just like 10 seconds, and I had so many people kind of messaging me just a picture of a swan And then saying this swarm is for a bellow. So I spoke to Damien; he's gonna he's gonna do it again next year. But I think I think we do it a little bit different next time. Okay, but I Ian Steplet would definitely know how invert syrup is made, and that is why he gets that is why he gets so many views. Right, so Robert's saying, do you watch any other YouTube? YouTubers? If so, who do you recommend? Oh, it's Richard Null, Banyo Reads, Cameron Lewis, and obviously you. So yeah, we spoke about this earlier. They're pretty much the main ones. Ian Stepler. Ian Stepler is probably my favorite one to watch on there just because of his size, and he pumps out a lot of good videos. I like Bob Binney as well. I just like the way he approaches stuff, and it's pretty good. So I do like him. Jim, uh, Jim's saying you need to do a bee beard live to get your views up. So that is going on the list of bee beard. Excellent. I know Paul Horton has got that as his profile picture, isn't he? Uh, and he seems to do all right. Yeah, so I think, you know, it's bad, isn't it? Because like, that's— I didn't start the channel off to kind of like chase the views, and I do find myself thinking of more and more videos to try and get the views up. But the thing is, it's good for everyone, me getting the views up. Like, it's weird, yeah, because when people say to me, when are you going full-time as a beekeeper? And I just— when I started off, I genuinely had the intention. I thought, you know, maybe like 5 to 10 years, I'll build the business up and I'll become a full-time bee farmer. 500 colonies, that's my maximum. One-man band, and that's going to be my job. I'll pack in project management. Um, and I, within a couple of years, I realized I didn't want to do that, um, because I didn't think my back could take it. And I also like, you know, beekeeping in winter is pretty grim. Like, it's not, it's not fun. I much prefer being in the office. Um, and I quite like my job, like project management. I do like project management. Um, and I like construction as well. I work on a good— I can't say what it is, but good construction project. So I like it, but when I see the people on YouTube like getting that, those amount of views, and I think if you ever— and you are the people who will do it— if you ever get me to the point where I'm getting millions of views a month, I'd definitely quit my job and do YouTube because I really enjoy doing the videos and I really enjoy the autonomy that I get from doing them, and I enjoy the editing. I enjoy like I've Trying to do different intros now and doing different thumbnails. I enjoy every single element of it, and I enjoy the community as well. Like I know I've had to ban a couple of people, and the bigger you grow, the more trolls you're going to get. I know that, so I've had to thicken my skin a little bit. But if I ever get there, I will quit my job, and if I quit my job, you'll see so many videos on YouTube. So it's good for everyone. Right? Yes, I'm definitely behind. So the dog, the dog is well and truly in now. He's there. That's how he sits. Chaz, crazy dog, he is well lazy. All right, so he won't be causing any further issues, the dog. All right, so going back to swarm traps, if you like me only have the frame supplied by you and nucs collected in the spring, can you purchase drawn comb from anywhere? Funny you should say that. So we did swarm traps last year and we sold so many swarm traps. unbelievable amount of swarm traps. So I think you can still get them on our website, which is just comb, old black comb. So instead of us melting it down, we send it out. And I'm not sure if I'm going to do that again next year because I do— there's not a disease— there is obviously a disease risk there, but the way I see it is every single colony has been fully inspected. We've never had foul brood. But if something was to get out, I don't know. So I might stop doing that. Maybe a little bit irresponsible of me. So Mark saying, are you a Cockney being an Arsenal fan? Yeah, so it's Southeast London, that's where I'm from. Right, PR1M8, why did you switch over to 14 by 12? Does it cause an issue when making up nukes to sell in national deep frames? So this is the big issue, and I, I started doing a video the other day which was titled Why I regret moving over to 14 by 12, and it started raining, so I stopped it. But I'm going to do that. That is a video that I'm going to do, and I do regret the move over to 14 by 12, and and that's the biggest reason why because it's an absolute nightmare when it comes to making up nukes. So the reason I switched over was because I was on double national brood because the colonies that I keep are really really big. I needed them on doubles. To make it usable and workable. I didn't want to go brood and a half because it gives me the same issue that I have with 14 by 12 in a national deep, and then they wouldn't build up quick enough to hit the spring flows. So I moved over to 14 by 12 in order to negate that, and it fixed that problem. So now they build up and I get a really good spring crop here. If anything, our spring crop is bigger than our summer crop if you get the weather right, which, which isn't the same most of the other places in UK. I'm just reading one of the questions, I can't wait to tell you that one. So yeah, so that's— that was the reason I switched. If I was going to go back, I wouldn't switch. I would stick on national deeps and I would have tried to make it work on a single national deep system. That's what I think I would have done, and I think I could have probably made it work, and it would have made my life so much easier. Really would. What was your DJ name? Best question of the night so far. So my DJ name was DJ Rex because my middle name is Rex, Lawrence Rex Edwards. Uh, James saying your enjoyment in making the videos definitely comes across. Thank you. No problem, my pleasure. So I really do enjoy the videos, and what, what I like about it as well as going back and watching like the early videos I couldn't believe it the other day, we've nearly hit 400 videos. I say we, it's me, isn't it? It's not anyone else. I've nearly hit 400 videos on the channel, and I watched some of the early ones, and I've not got my high on Laurence Edwards and Batman's in Honey anywhere near good enough to the level that it needs to be. So I do think— I like to think the delivery's improved a little bit and the editing's improved a little bit, which is the next question, which is what editing suite do you use for your videos? So I use Premiere Pro. I started off not editing them, which you could probably tell, just kind of whacked it on the mobile and then just uploaded it and thought job was done. And then I started using Premiere Rush, which was okay, which is nice and easy to use Premiere Rush, but it was pretty simple. And now I use Premiere Pro and I've just bought loads of new plugins which I've just gone way over the top with. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to find this happy medium place where it looks professional But it doesn't look like a 13-year-old's kind of IT homework. So yeah, that's cool. Uh, recent videos on Breedy Queens— will you be selling your own queens? Will you be selling Murray's next year? So next year I'm going to be selling imported F1 Buckfast from Europe, and then I'll be selling my own UK-mated Buckfast queens from those breeders, and I'll be selling Murray's, the, the Atlanta ones as well, because we sold absolutely tons of those last year and The feedback has been phenomenal from people, so we will do all three of those next year. Maurice says, "Hi, I'm in Wicklow with three hives. How would you go about breeding a couple of replacement queens next spring? Love your YouTube channel." Thanks, Maurice. I've got family in Wicklow. I forget where they are in Wicklow. Greystones. There you go. Greystones. Loads of family there. So this is a video. This is a video that was requested on. Lot of people. So it was upvoted by a lot of people on the Facebook thing, which is how do you do kind of like replacement queens, like queen rearing on a small scale? Because I think my previous one I did queen rearing kind of like on a larger scale. So I'm going to do 2 videos next year. I'm going to do an updated queen rearing video because the other one was a bit rubbish with the audio, and then I'm going to do some small-scale stuff as well. So I'll do— I'm not sure what method I'm going to do. There's a couple of other methods a couple of different methods for kind of smaller scale if you just want like 2 or 3 queens. So I'll have a play around with it and I'll come up with a video about how to do it. I really do like Michael Palmer's method though, and I think if you've got, if you've got 3 hives, I would, I would do the Michael Palmer method still, which is 10 over 10. So you're effectively like combining 2 hives, making them so it's just an absolute brood monster, and then get as many queens as you want out of it. So if you're using it as a starter, you can get probably like 100 queens out of it. If you're doing it as a starter— so if you're doing it as a starter, you get like maybe like one round, like, so like 30 queens. Doing it as a starter finisher, you can get 100 queens. But you can do it for just like kind of 4 queens or whatever you want to do, depends how good your grafting is. But then you just split the colonies back out again. So I think I'll do that video just to show how if you've got like 2 or 3 hives, you can still use that method, slightly adapt it, because that method I find gives you like superb queens. They just feed them so, so well, and that is the key. It's all in the nutrition, as Richard Noah will tell you. It's all about feeding those queens, getting them nice and fat. So I'll do, I'll do a video on that one showing you how I would do it. Right, MMB, best tip, Lawrence? I use builder's gloves, rubber with Velcro wrist straps, Physiotype. Way easier than Beagle, but so hard to put on. Love is a win-win. Okay, send me a link, I'll have a look. Oh, do you know, I'm nearly down at the bottom, so I'm nearly out of stuff to talk about. We're 2 hours in and I'm nearly done, so I might have to finish. But if you keep on asking questions, I will go on for at least another hour until we work out who's going to win that smoker. So there's the pumpkin again. Guess the weight. Smoker provided by Thorn Beekeeping. That's £70. That's my gorilla basket. Oh wow. Right, so Paul's on Facebook. Very good. Right, so James saying, when you find your farm of your dreams, would you go in a similar line like Griff and further diversify your channels? No, no. So I started off doing that, didn't I, with kind of like how to make a salami and how to smoke cold salmon and all that. And they both get really good views, but I just, I think you need to keep your channel to beekeeping. Because if I go and make, uh, if I like— I love doing food stuff, and I think if I was going to do it, I'd do another channel on like food and probably get more views as well. But say, say I kind of do like a video, and I know I released one the other day, but like how to cook pizzas. Get Aaron around here and he'll whip me up a good pizza with some broccoli stems on it, which was nice by the way, thanks for the broccoli stems. And then someone subscribes to that channel on the basis that I've done a really good video on how to cook pizza, and then the next week I'm telling them this is how you apply Apivar to your colony to kind of kill varroa mites, the first thing they're going to do is just click unsubscribe. So no, I'm not going to do any other— I'm not going to diversify the channel any further. If anything, I'm going to focus down more on beekeeping and my particular niche. So yeah, you're not going to see me farming or anything, although I do— I like growing Griff. A lot of time for Griff and his channel and like the things he does. But yeah, I'm not gonna do that. Right, so Andy, you're a call handler for the police, and although it's an interesting role, my hope is in the next few years to go part-time as long as the YouTube and bees keep going in the right direction. Very good. That is an interesting job, call handler for the police. Ben saying John Beeman Saunders does some really nice YouTube videos, big fan of him. I'm not seen that. Inside the Hive TV is also a source of technical YouTube videos. Very good. 14 by 12, can you not checkerboard 14 by 12 on national frames so you can remove them to make up a nuc, then repeat? You can, but it's where do you get the national frames from? Like, you're at all the different apiaries. That was the beauty of everything being on national deep, is that everything's always there. You can just keep a big stack of boxes all same size. You need to be so organized when you, when you get to the situation where I am, where you've got 14 by 12, national deep, national shallow, and you need to kind of think ahead or go out, work out what's going on, come back and get the stuff. And my apiaries are like miles away from each other, and I've got half a day to do it a week. Um, so it struggles with that. But it's interesting, that word checkerboard. So I had a live Zoom call with like a beekeeping group about 2 weeks ago, probably 2 weeks ago, and not like a— not like a— it wasn't streamed or anything, it was just someone approached me saying they've got this system of checkerboarding and it means you don't have to do any inspections and your bees won't swarm. And you know me, I'm not judgmental, I thought that sounds amazing, so they've sent me their little booklet, and it's something that I'm gonna try, see how it goes, see if the bees swarm. So it's all about the— I don't fully understand how it works. It's all about putting either natural, so like drawn comb or foundation, in between stores. So you've got your bees in a box, and then always you've got a box above that's kind of like stores Interspersed with frames of foundation or drawn comb, and you're always one box ahead. And I said, surely it's just— you can just do like one box ahead with foundation. And they said, no, it needs to be one box ahead checkerboarded above with stores and foundation, um, kind of alternate. And then you don't need to do inspections at all, you just leave them, and then you just keep on putting the boxes on top. And they've gone 3 years and never lost a swarm. So I just think Great, what a good video. I'm going to give it a go. I'll put a little cam on them and I'll see if they swarm. I don't know, will they swarm? What do you think? I think they probably will swarm, won't they? I'm going to do it on one or two colonies, see how I get on, and I'll do it as like a little kind of series. But then another thing they were saying as well is they use small cell foundation and it means they don't need to treat for varroa. And again, I'm not judgmental on people for those practices or not treating, and I quite admire people who don't treat and go through the pain of not treating to get their bees to a point where they can tolerate varroa. Whether they're going to perform as well as a colony that's been treated for varroa, I'm not sure, but I'm well up for trying it. So he's going to give me a nuc as well, a small cell nuc with small bees, and we'll see, and we'll just leave, we'll just leave them, and we won't treat them and we'll see how long it takes them to die. And that sounds pretty harsh, doesn't it, letting my bees die? But it's all in the name of science, and I thought it'd be a cool video. So there's 2 videos that are coming up next year. Oh, Richard Oliver, ever thought of doing a road trip and visiting your viewers' apiaries and passing your knowledge on? So not so— yeah, not so much in like passing the knowledge on, because I just, I don't see much like— I just kind of see myself as beekeeper that can keep bees. I don't, I don't see myself as like a know-it-all. I definitely don't know it all. Um, I see so many people online and at different things and beekeeping forums, they know it all. They definitely, definitely would know how you make invert sugar syrup. Um, but I thought as a cool video, it would be good to meet people and go out and do it. And I'd love to go and do like an American road trip and go and meet all the YouTubers. And I think like If so, if someone, I don't know, other YouTubers said they want to come and meet me and do like a collaboration video, I'd be all over that. Absolutely love it. So I might, I might do that. But again, it's work, isn't it? Like, I struggle to do all of the things that I want to do at the moment, um, and something like that is probably like a nice to have, um, but get me to 3 million views a month and I've got, it'll be my full-time job and I'll do loads like that. Do I ever enter honey shows? No, definitely, definitely don't enter honey shows. Not that I've got anything against it, but it's just not something that I'm interested in doing and I've not got the time to do it because it's not about like how good your honey is either. I like this, I see someone advertised like No Nonsense Beekeeping, like a black jar honey competition. And I like, I like the idea of that, which is it's not about the 17 different grades of filter to get your honey perfectly against this color in this class, and if you use the wrong lid or you put a smudge on it, you're eliminated. Because the honey shows just aren't about honey, is that— they're just about the process of getting it perfectly clear, which which is fine. Like, it's a bit of fun, isn't it? And people like that, and it's all like, it's all good fun. Not something I'm interested in though, but I would be interested in like black jar competitions, which is you just, you send in like your jar, your best honey that you've got, they stick it in a black jar, and then they just taste it, and then they work out whose is the nicest. Um, because I think that's quite interesting and a lot less work, which I'm a big fan of. A lot less work. Well, what are my thoughts on apiary setup and layout? I've not got massive thoughts on that, Peter. I just kind of go and stick them anywhere. The big one, the big change that I'm making next year is I'm taking out every single hive that is under trees, because I really did— I started off putting them under trees to keep them out of sight, to keep them out of the way, and it's just caused me so many issues. I don't think they do as well under trees, and the trees just collapse on them and crush my beehives, and it really annoys me. But in terms of like setup or layout, I just, I just slap them down, stick them on a pallet. They seem to work it out. So I don't ever— yeah, I don't mind a little bit of drifting. It's fine. Right, Ryan saying plants, trees, nectar and pollen sources. I think appeals to people's interest and what you people can do or plant. Yeah, again, like I'd like to do more videos on that. Um, But it's not something— it's difficult to do. Some videos like that are difficult to get them to a point where you need to go and get like some nice B-roll footage of like bees working those plants and like somewhere that's got them, or go and buy the plants or grow the plants, and it becomes like a little bit, a little bit difficult. Um, but I do— it would be an interesting video, right? Have you ever used essential oils for varroa control and to make Make a Honeybee Healthy. So no, I've not, and I'm really, really wary for a number of reasons for a lot of the things that I put onto YouTube now. So like, you won't hear me making up concoctions and doing things myself, um, because believe it or not, there's people who don't like me watching a lot of this stuff, making notes, and going and telling people that have a lot of influence. So I have to be cleaner than clean and whiter than white in everything that I do and everything that I tell people. So my advice, you know, like with apibioxal, I genuinely do use apibioxal because it's— I can't run the risk of not using it. And the same with kind of like my Apivar strips and everything. You need to be on the ball with your treatments because the VMD are onto people, and especially onto people who sit there in front of a camera and tell everyone what what they're doing all the time, because it's like, well, you told everyone on the camera you're doing this, so can we, can we have some of your honey so we can kind of test for organophosphates? And you don't really— you can't really say no. Um, so yeah, have to be— there's no, there's no homemade concoctions or anything like that. Everything's bought, everything's legal. That's what I have to do. What do you think the risk of importing SHB or Tropiocolops. I never can pronounce that. I watched a program on that the other day, or like a YouTube thing, where diseases enter UK a bit like varroa came in. So we imported so many queens last year, and it's getting such a bad rap at the moment. Like, queens have been imported for years, for decades. The chances of bringing small hive beetle in on a queen, I just can't see it happening. Like, the controls that are in place on the queens is incredible. It really is. So like when we get queens, they get— you get a health certificate. So it means that in Europe, someone who knows what they're doing has to go and sign them off. So someone from wherever we get our queens from, from their veterinary directorate, have to go out, sign everything off, do a health certificate saying there is nothing wrong with any of these queens. And they're not going to sign on to it if there is something wrong with them or they find any, I don't know, like small hive bee or legs or anything. And then they get flown over here, and then we have to keep them until the bee inspector comes out. And then the bee inspector goes through every single cage one by one, and they don't have— they don't always come out, but for us, every single shipment we've had, they have come out. They go through the cage, every single cage one by one, and they inspect it, and they say, that one's fine, that one's fine, that one's fine. All right, we've been through all 200 queens, we're happy with every single one. And then you've got to take the queen out of that cage, just the queen, and put it into a cage with your own bees in, and then we send it out. So what are the chances of small hive beetle getting through that process? I would say very, very slim compared to them just coming over like a crate of fruit and then just finding their way into a beehive. I don't know, I'd say the odds are pretty similar. I, I can't— I think we're going to get small hive beetle over here at some point. I think we'd be very, very lucky not to, and it'd be interesting to see how they actually get in. Um, it'd be crap though, won't it? When we get small hive beetle, it's gonna— it's gonna change the game completely in terms of everything that we do, but it will give me loads of content as to how I fail to keep them out under control. It's interesting you say that. It's the one thing that I watch quite a lot of videos on, small hive beetle, because as soon as they come over here, I want to be kind of like ready to go. So I look at all the different traps and the different oils and the different mechanisms of trying to keep them out or manage them, but I don't want to have to deal with them. I think like, you think like other countries, they don't have to deal with varroa. How good would that be, not having to deal with varroa? But those countries kind of have to deal with like poisonous spiders as well, so I'm thinking maybe it's a small price to pay. My opinion on small cell foundation? So Ben, I don't, I don't, I don't have an opinion on it because I've never experienced it myself, and I've said that on so many videos. Like, it'd be so easy for me to say, you know what, I've seen loads of people slating that on the beekeeping forum, and I've seen loads of people online slating it, saying it doesn't work. But then I was chatting to another guy the other day and he said that's all he does. He's not treated for 10 years and he thinks it's because he put all of his bees on small cell foundation. So who do I believe? Do I believe the 100 people who say it doesn't work with no evidence, or the one person who said, I've done that for the last 10 years and I don't treat for a full hour? So I don't have an opinion on it. Like, I've got— if I had to have a guess, I'd say I don't think it works, but I don't, I don't know. So I'm going to give it a go and see because it might be great. Um, we'll see what happens. Uh, Steve's saying, I have a double brood Abello 6-frame nuc. Should I block off the vents at the top for winter? Definitely, definitely block them off. Keep it— keep— you don't even need to keep them open at the bottom, but any ventilation just at the bottom. Keep them nice and snug at the top, I would. And if they've taken all their feed and they're heavy, I'd take out the little mini Ashworth feeder and I would put in some insulation up there. If you consistently blast your colonies with OA, would that not eliminate varroa? Definitely, 100%. It's such an effective way of doing it, but you only get the phoretic mites, so you do need to consistently do it. 5-day intervals is the best to go. against their reproductive system or their kind of cycle, so they're not kind of like dipping in and out of the cells. I know a lot of beekeepers that just use that as a system and it's very, very effective. If you get them broodless, you only need to do it once, that'll give you a really good drop, like really kind of like high 80s. If you do it consistently, do it every 5 days certain times of the year, and you'll get the varroa really, really low. Very good. Oh, Ben, that is a very good offer. Thanks very much. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to do a little round robin on there, maybe take like a weekend off and just go and see some people. But thank you, thank you for the invite. Better than, better than being fobbed off by Andy, I have to say. Uh, have you ever tried the Nikko queen rearing system rather than manual grafting? I have, I have used the Nikko one. It's, it's good. And I know a really very well-respected breeder, in fact it's the breeder I got my queen from who exclusively uses that and swears by it. I struggled a bit with mine, so like I just found it was a bit hit and miss with the queen actually laying it up, and I don't know what I was doing wrong. So I'm going to do some videos on that. That's a good— that is a really good one to put on my list, um, because there's a good few videos in that, and I've got the system. Don't buy the cheap crappy Chinese ones because the systems don't fit together. So I'll give you give you that for free. But no, I think, I think it's a, I think it's a good system. If you can't, if you can't graft and you can get the queen to lay in it, then it's ideal because you can just jump straight to kind of your starters and putting the cells in there. Once you can get a grafted larva into a cell, that's the hard bit. Said that before, that, that is the difficult bit. So you're done then. Right, MMB saying blasting with OA continuously would mean varroa become resistant? So no, it's different to chemical treatments. So with chemical treatments, they— you can build up resistance, but oxalic acid is like a mechanical issue with them. So it's like, again, don't know the mechanics, but no, it's like it attacks them in a way that's mechanical as opposed to chemical. So it'd be very, very difficult for them to build resistance up to it. Um, so, so I'm going to leave. But no, I don't think they can build resistance with it. So on the question of apiary layout, would you like to keep the area well-strimmed on hard sanding or gravel, etc.? Right, go and have a look at my My First Nuclear series, which I do need to finish at some point on episode like 26, because so many of my apiaries just get out of control. That is something I need to get better at. I need to do like 3 strims a year as opposed to just thinking I can just do 1 strim a year. So I think is if you can get away, yeah, hard standing or gravel, perfect if you can find an apiary like that. For us, we can't find apiaries like that, it's always, always just kind of grass and it always gets out of hand in terms of the strimming. So I think it is nice to keep them strimmed, it makes things easier, it means you're not tripping over dropping boxes everywhere, which would be good for some outtakes if I ever filmed them. But definitely, yeah, keep the apiaries tidy with the Good. Saying hi from New Zealand, mate. Many thanks for the great vids, keep them coming. We do appreciate the time and effort you put into making them. Thanks very much. I'm quarter Kiwi myself, so yeah, I'll be rooting for the Kiwis tomorrow when they play India in the cricket. I'll be absolutely over the moon if New Zealand beat India in the cricket tomorrow. It's like the best sporting weekend ever. Oh, I've got people leaving now. Quarter past, quarter past 10, people leaving. Another go at the pumpkin, 6336. Some good guesses. I have a beehive trying to supersede over the last 2 months. I blocked queen cells after finding the queen. My question is, will the hive stop producing queen cells with the temperature dropping, or am I in trouble? So that's probably what I would do if they're trying to supersede. The problem is, yeah, if they're trying to supersede, there's something wrong with the queen. They're not just superseding at this time of year for fun. Um, but like, if, if I find any colony superseding at this time of year, I just leave them to it. I really do leave them to it because you, you'll often get them trying to supersede and you'll just— they'll run through the whole winter with 2 queens. Like, I know bees sometimes do seem a little bit stupid, and a lot of the time they are, um, but they do, they do know what they're doing and they will only supersede for a for a reason, which is the queen's running out of juice or something wrong with her. So I just leave them to it. If they're superseding and it's like one cell or maximum 2 cells and I see it this time of year, I just leave them. It's actually quite a desirable trait for a colony to supersede, especially late in the season, if it is just like an aging queen as opposed to there being something wrong with the queen. You can get a colony or like a strain of bees that will just supersede themselves every 3 years. and not swarm, then that is a very good colony of bees. And so I'll just leave them to it. So, hi, can you trickle feed through the year to boost numbers, do splits, and increase the number of colonies? So you definitely can. So trickle feeding through the year, this is what I'm going to do on my column, my video next year, in terms of like how many colonies I can make from one. So how many splits I can make from a single colony. Um, but obviously you can't if you're doing any sort of honey, you can't you can't, you can't put the feeders anywhere near them. So if you're just— if you want to cut all your losses and say, I'm going to go for as many colonies, pardon me, as I can possibly get, then trickle feeding throughout the year is the best possible way to do it, because you just like get the queens to pump out as many cells and as many eggs and larvae as they possibly can. Tires the queens out doing it though, um, but for making splits it's great, really, really good. But just don't do it if you're feeding. I finally got my invite to Andy in the next six years, so I'll see you in six years, Andy. I'm just oh yeah, do you know we're nearly done? So Mark's oh Mark's just up the road in Liverpool. Very good. That's it. We're up to date with questions. So I'll talk for a little bit about stuff. I've not really got much planned, but I've got the pumpkin, so don't forget about the pumpkin. So what I'm going to do, you have to think if there's any last-minute questions before I announce who's won the smoker. I'm going to spend this time going through the comments and working out who's the closest, and you have to screenshot it if you think you're closer. Then Tell me, but I'm just gonna before we finish. But I'll carry on talking. So I've kind of penciled into eleven. I'm just looking through at the moment though and seeing who's come closest on the numbers. Oh, there's a few. There's a few of you close, you know. Let me see if there's any more questions going. Have you had any entertaining moments while beekeeping? Oh wait, there's loads of questions. Ben saying you could try and advert in the BBKA News to boost your viewers, or are you thinking more worldwide? I don't know, I've thought about advertising on like YouTube, what better way to advertise, but I think it's a bit like desperate, isn't it? Please, please come and view my channel. So I think just focus on doing good videos and build it, and they will come. But yeah, no, I'm not full about advertising. I could could do BBKA. I'll probably do some adverts for Queens. That's probably where I'll advertise it. Darren said, "Have you considered trying the OTS system for max increase strategy for next year?" No. What's that? Is that the one that I was talking about where he goes from one to a thousand? Send that to me. I'll have a look if that. If there's a system for like maximum, I've not seen that, uh, other than the 1 to 1,000 one, but I'll follow, I'll follow a system. That'd be cool. Have you had any entertaining moments while beekeeping? Um, other than getting like stung in the face all the time, not really. I'd say like my highlights are obviously James Martin. That was pretty cool going on his program, and, um, and Ainsley Harriott. kind of as a result of beekeeping as opposed to being in beekeeping. There'll be a repeat of the England— the final in New Zealand and England. Oh, that'd be beautiful, wouldn't it? Super over all over again. Oh, James, do you know what? I've not— I've not read any of the questions out. Merch, let's talk merch. Let me just look at the questions first. Right, there are a few questions I've got on my phone that I need to answer as well. All right, so merchandise, I will do some merchandise. I just, I, I don't want to be embarrassed and it's just me and you, James, wearing the Hot Fire Honey hats. Um, but I will do it like as a bit of fun. If someone wants a No Nonsense Beekeeping fleece or something, I'll stick it up as an available thing, and the hats and, and whatever. Um, We need 10,000 subscribers to do it, so I will do it, but I don't expect any of you to buy it, so don't worry if you're looking at it and thinking, what's this? Rob's saying, have you ever done a double queen hive? No, that's a really good one to do, a double queen hive. I've seen people do that, so next year there's a video I'm going to do which is like the Demeray but the requeening of the Demeray, and then that runs into like a double queen hive, so the queen at the top with at the bottom, but I've never kind of artificially introduced that and said, right, I'm going to split a colony vertically and then put another queen at the top and then run it as a double. I know a lot of people do that on the heather. A number of beekeepers use that as their system for a heather. Um, so yeah, I'm just looking at comments here. Have I retired all of my old Under Armour hats? I still wear them. I've got my hats up here. Especially for you, man. So it's been retired as much as it's a bit ripped. Like, I don't know, the other ones I think fit me a bit better. So I do wear them. My wife laughs at me so much. Like, you— I, I'm so sad. All I ever wear is my Black Mountain Honey gear. Black Mountain Honey hats, Hot Fire Honey hats, jackets, fleeces, everything. I I have no clothes that don't have my brand on them. I got asked to go for a meal the other day with like someone quite high up in my business, and I just thought, I've got suits, I've also got suits and shirts and shoes and Black Mountain. And then so someone says to me smart casual, I'm screwed. I have nothing in the middle between Black Mountain Honey t-shirts and suits. I've never been one for Fashion. I'm so— I haven't even worn my Black Mountain Honey t-shirts, and I'm just in a black t-shirt. But it pays to advertise, it does. Do you know what, I've made some good sales kind of wearing my Black Mountain Honey t-shirts to like farm shops and stuff, and they're like, oh, you're a beekeeper? And you're like, oh yeah. And they're like, oh, we need, we need a honey supplier. And then you get into some of these big shops and it's pretty good. But yeah, I've retired them for the videos just just because of the advertising, because of all the hot fire honey that we sell absolutely flying out at the moment. I think I did a total of about three bottles last month. I think all of those were Jim. So thanks, Jim. Oh, Richard will buy Richard will buy fleece as well. So that's good to know. It's funny you say that, John. So I'm going to speak to BB Wear and get them to do like a custom made. Because my ultra suit's very different to the ultra suit that you can buy. So I've got 2 ultra suits now, and the second one, if you notice, if you look back at the videos, the first one, much smaller pockets, and obviously like the arms are nowhere near as long. And then all of them are fully zipped, so all of the pockets have got zips underneath the Velcro. So I said to them, why don't you do it as like a Black Mountain Honey special? I think they might do it, you know, it's not a bad idea. It's certainly an improvement on on the suits. The suits are great, but it drives me mad when you can't put the phone in the pocket, and it drives me mad when the Velcro comes open and everything falls out. So I think the zips are really good. But yeah, so Ben's saying, I think more competitions where people win merch would be good to boost views. Yeah, I tried it with competitions, you know, it doesn't— it doesn't really generate a huge amount of interest, like giving away like a, like even like a smoker or something, you get, you might get an extra couple of hundred views or something. Um, it needs, it needs to be at a point where it's kind of like warrants me going and like buying something to give it away, because otherwise it's just a massive loss leader. I don't think it generates the views. I think in terms of YouTube, I just need to keep on doing like good, good videos, and then hopefully that's, that will generate interest. Fingers crossed. All right, Steve's saying, what do you use to reduce the sting effect? Um, nothing. I keep, um, I forget what it's called now, like Piraton, Piraton in the car, but I don't use it anymore. I used to use it a bit when it was like when I used to get like hundreds of stings in a day, but I don't use it anymore. And I've just realized I've got a cup of tea. How good is that? I'm gonna have a cup of tea. Um, but I do think some people are allergic to it, and I know people that have like Taken a lot of stings and then become allergic, which is, which is quite scary because I take a lot of stings, um, and it'd just be a nightmare becoming allergic to bees. Game over. So I don't do, I don't do anything now in terms of kind of keeping them down. I just, I'm quite lucky in that I don't really react to them. Right, so MMB Sam Lawrence question: What queens do you get from breeder queens? Adding her eggs. I'm not sure what that means. Depends depends which one we use. Like F zero is. I had someone commenting on this the other day saying, "Oh, there's no such thing as an F zero queen." And when I say F zero, all I mean is that it's like a pure queen in terms of they know the male side in terms of the drone semen. And then over the female side, it's like put together into a pure queen. It's not saying it's like a pure race of bees. And then obviously, as soon as you move down that kind of finial line, when you're not controlling the drones, you become F1, F2, F3. But it's as simple as that. Oh, Al, thanks very much, Al. Yeah, no, you had the honey. Right, I'm going to read out some of these questions on here because there were some on here. Right, so Jim, we spoke about downsizing the operation, so I am doing that. I'm going to target like kind of 50 colonies, I think, because I just, I just can't cope doing it all and I want to spend more time. I want to be able to do enough videos, so I kind of target I do 4 videos a week, which is quite a lot. So I do a Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Um, so I need enough time to do videos. I want to do more queens, definitely want to rear more queens. So I want to get my production colonies down to about 50, um, and then do some more queens. But I also want to spend more time with my family, and that's the big driver for it. Like, this year, not, not too bad towards the end, but like the last 3 years, I spend like all my time doing the bees, like all, all weekend, all Saturday, all Sunday, all of the evenings. I don't have any time for my family. My little girl's 3, she's just over 3 now, and she's great fun, and I want to spend more time with her. So that is the reason. Oh, John's saying about the Hot Fire Honey discount code. Yeah, you can buy Hot Fire Honey 20% off, YouTube20, if you, if you want it. It is nice. I'm not going to push you to buy it. Um, Right, I think that's, I think that's answered all of them. Uh, no, I've got one, I've got one question from Ollie's Bees. I haven't seen Ollie up here today. Ollie's coming to buy some nucs from me, so he said, what 3 things would you recommend to me as a new beekeeper to do and maintain throughout my journey? And I've not prepared it, I've not prepared any answers for that, Ollie, so let me think. I'll speak to you in more detail when you come and collect your nuc. Um, the first one, great, you bought 2 nucs, So definitely start with 2 nucs. It makes things so much easier starting with 2 because you always end up with more than 2 or more anyway, so you might as well do it from the beginning. The next one is just try your very best not to tamper with them, not to go in, not to over-inspect them. It's so easy to do, and I do it. Like, you channel members will know, like, I was in my hives the other day going in Probably unnecessarily, but you do, you get carried away with it. And I remember my first, I remember my first year as a beekeeper, my bees swarmed, so I went and bought a queen. I went and bought a queen from BS Honeybees actually, because it wasn't that far away from me then. So I drove down to wherever they were, Gloucestershire I think, isn't it, and got a queen. So hour there, got a queen, come back, put the queen in the hive about midday, something like that. Opened the tab straight away, of course, didn't do anything else. And there were probably virgins running around. And then at 4 o'clock, I went back in to check to see if everything was okay, and they hadn't started to eat the fondant. So I just opened the cage and the queen flew off. I was just like, oh, so annoyed. So I went and bought another queen, went back down that same day or the next. I went back and got another queen from— remember driving down there again and he was like, oh, you're back again. like his best customer. And I took it back and I did it again, same day, lost 2 queens, or like over 2 days. And I just think back now, I just think I didn't know what I was doing. And you're just trying to do stuff, you're trying to kind of like throw money at things, throw money at problems to solve them. And bees are pretty much left just kind of to it, to get on with it. Do your 7-day inspections, and just keep it as simple as possible. 7-day inspections, treat for varroa, make sure they're well fed for winter, kind of like get them up to weight for winter, and just kind of enjoy them. Yeah, I think that's good advice. Okay, so you're talking about kind of you bought 2 purebred Buckfast queens. So when you say you bought 2 purebred Buckfast queens, did you buy 2 artificially inseminated Buckfast queens or just 2 Buckfast F1 Buckfast queens, because if you're buying them at F1, you're only really getting like up to a maximum of 50% of the mother's genes. So at F1 down to F2, they can be fine. I've had Buckfast down to kind of F3, F4, and they're fine. Some are fine, some go horrible, they do. But I don't think that's necessarily anything to do with the Buckfast, it's more to do with like the local drones in the area. Um, but I would— I wouldn't read— I wouldn't read too much into it. Again, that, that is a myth that is peddled a lot, which is, oh, don't buy— don't buy Buckfast queens because the further generations become aggressive. And it's like I could say, well, don't buy Black queens because further generations might become aggressive. I think both of those statements are probably true. Um, and you could conversely say, well, they could become nicer if the drones are nicer as well. So you're, you're attributing a negative trait to something that you're not— that's not really in your control, which is the local population of drones. Um, so I've, I've experienced both of that, which is got an F1 Buckfast queen, so kind of like an open-mated Buckfast, which was a nice colony, and then bred some queens off it, um, through grafting because I didn't always use breeder queens, and some of them were nice and some of them vicious. So you get both, um, but I don't think it's hard and fast. So you'll have some hives to sell? Um, yeah, we'll probably, probably sell them as nucs. It's weird, you know, like we do it as hives. So I do— like, people always— like, you get it a lot. One of the biggest things people come at, it's like, I can't believe how much you're selling those nucs for, you must be making an absolute killing. And it's like, well, Do you know how much money I spent? But also the difference between the cost of a nuc— so we're selling like nucs at £300 at the moment— and then the cost of a full hive, which we had for £450, which I'll probably do a deal on if people said they want it, like buy like a few of them. When you take into account the fact that you're probably getting like 2 nucs in a full colony, you could easily split them from day one. You've got 2 nucs and a queen, and you're getting a whole hive with it as well. I thought they would fly out the door. They've been on the site for ages. I think we sold 2, 2, something like that. But yeah, I'm gonna sell some hives. I've got loads of boxes because I've probably got like 50 beehives that have not got bees in them at the moment as well. Um, so yeah. So did I watch the Wales versus the All Blacks match? No, I didn't watch the Wales versus the All Blacks match because I've Watched so much sport today, my wife's killed me. So I watched the Arsenal game, and then I watched a little bit of the Man United game, which was a bit—I wanted a draw—and I watched cricket as well. So I watched England absolutely batter Australia, which was good. But in terms of the Wales versus All Blacks match, no, I didn't watch it. But I'd probably don't tell anyone. I'd probably support New Zealand in that one because whenever it's white, whenever it's England in anything, all of the Welsh hate the English. So I can't. different. I am actually kind of quarter Kiwi, so I will support just my grandfather's team. 3 rules of beekeeping: patience, patience, and patience. It's so true. You do, you need so much patience. And it's weird because it's like, if you— it's that stand-back approach is so good when it comes to beekeeping. It works wonders, and you get to the end of the season and you just see how many, how much honey you've got and stuff. It's mad. So Ben, that's a good question. F0, does it have to be AI? Yeah, it does, because although island mated, I don't think it's— it's not guaranteed, is it? You're not selecting the drones. You're still saying we're still kind of like open mated, although you're restricting that as much as you possibly can. You're not selecting it from like a specific hive They'll just have like one hive worth of drones on there. So we, we do breed from island-mated queens if they're good, and you'll get variation as you would in an F1 anyway. But I think to be a true F0, I do think it does need to be AI. Will you be selling any Welsh black bees in 2022? No, not doing any more Welsh black bees, um, because A number of reasons really. One is that it's difficult to keep kind of like both of them going in terms of like the number that's available. So like next year, 200 nucs, how many black ones do I make? Do I do 50 blacks and 150 Buckfast? That means I have to kind of guess. But also I just think— I know you bought the black ones— I think the Buckfast are better and Not in terms of— it depends what you want. Some people just want a really dark bee, and that's where we started selling the Welsh Blacks, because it's like, well, I've got some bees, they're mongrels, and they're dark Welsh Blacks. And that is all the Welsh Black is. Anyone who sells you Welsh Blacks is saying, I've got some bees and they're dark and they're from Wales. There's not— it's not like in Ireland where they've got like a pocket, or that I believe they do have a pocket of like a pure race of AMM. It's not like that in Wales, like there's no one's kidding anyone, it's just a dark mongrel. And basically it's a bit difficult to keep them, and then I find kind of like building them up and doing stuff with them is, it's just a little bit more difficult to work with. So I'm just trying to, I'm trying, my goal for next year is to improve the temperament of all of my bees. So any of the horrible ones are going to be getting squished. And I'm going to be requeening them with really nice gentle queens, and I'm just going to try and do it iteratively year on year, just get them as calm as I can possibly get them, because I'm transitioning now away from trying to produce as much honey for each colony as possible to selling nucs, breeding queens. I'd prefer just to kind of have gentler queens, makes my life easier. So unfortunately not going to sell any more Welsh black bees. Queens from CEPA UK, not sure what the F1, etc., is. Own hives and purchased some swarms, um, did own splits, so drones various. What queen quality? So, so CEPA, they won't be, um, how much? Oh, sorry, asking questions. How much you pay for them? I, I know they do do breeder queens at CEPA. And they're good queens, good queens from them. But I reckon you've probably got F1s from them, so I reckon down at F2 you've got no problem at all. Darren, for OTS system, look up OTS Queen Marine System. Okay, yeah, no, I will do that. That sounds good. I'm gonna have a look at that and see it for a series. I'm gonna try and reduce the number of series I do next year. I'm gonna do that because This year, like I thought, just pump out as many videos as I possibly can, keep the series going, uh, and, and then people will have to follow them. But I do appreciate some of them became a little bit repetitive and some of them, um, a bit, a bit duplicaty because you've got certain things at the same time of the year. So you've got like preparing colonies for winter and making splits for over winter. It's like just doing the same thing twice, once on one of the colonies. So I will, I will try and merge as many as I can into videos because I do think they— I think they do better if you have like, this is how you rear queens, and then just do it like a half an hour video showing from beginning to end. And I think the feedback that I've got from people is they much prefer those videos. It will mean there won't be as many videos and I have to think of other stuff to do, but I can just go and catch some swarms or do something a bit more fun. Um, But yeah, I would definitely have a look at that though, because I'm gonna do that one. Probably will turn into a bit of a series, but I might do it as like a little mini-series. So yeah, I'll have a look at that. That's cool. Charles saying he enjoys this chat. Thanks very much. It's weird, isn't it? It's like a one-way chat, but I want to be able to do it so you can do it like two ways, because I'd love for people to be able to— I don't know how to do it so they can talk. We can talk, we could do like a, I don't know, like a Zoom call or something. Be good. Um, oh, I missed a question. Do you use any gas heater for, uh, mic foggers, and if so, would you recommend one? So again, I've never used them, but I do understand that they don't work, uh, and, and that it's not the same as sublimation. So I've seen a few people saying that now, uh, people that I trust as well. So it's not, it's not one that I would look at in terms of a fogger, a fogger where you're mixing it kind of with alcohol or glycerin, whatever it is, and then like heating it up. I do think you need to sublimate it. I've seen the ones, you've seen the ones that Murray uses, and I think, who's the other beekeeper that uses them? There's a few people that have got them now, they're like a couple of grand and they're like absolutely mega. So I might have a look at those, see, and see how they go. Uh, Julian said, on the queen front, people talk about F2 aggression. Is this an actual thing or does it depend on the drones in the area? Yeah, exactly that what I said before. I think, I think it does, it does occur, but it's just completely down to the drones in the local area. Can you post your queens to Northern Ireland? Uh, unfortunately not. Like, which I, I had loads of them, they were pretty much at the post office sending them down there, and then Googling it, and you have to see like health certificates and all sorts. So unfortunately we cannot send them to Northern Ireland. Ben, your message was held for review, so I'm going to show that now. I think it's because you said virgins. Definitely can't say virgins. Right, to get the best of both worlds, how about buying Buckfast virgins and then getting them mated locally? For me or for you? Because I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't buy virgins, um, because they like cost me a few pence to make virgins. Making virgin queens is like the easiest thing in the world. Also, introducing virgins, they need to be so fresh, like within hours of them emerging, or the colonies get really a bit of an issue with them. So having virgins sent to you and then you're trying to do stuff with them would just be a nightmare. So I'll, I'll be, I'll be producing my own F0, F1 virgin queens and then mating them locally for UK Buckfast queens. So we'll have loads of those next year. How many hives would you recommend before getting a breeder queen? Currently running 30 hives, breeding from my best hive which was from you. Oh, very nice. I'd say 30 queens, get a breeder queen, definitely. Breeder queens aren't that expensive, um, you can kind of shop around. But even getting, like Ben said before, even getting like an island-mated queen, you— it's not that the island-mated queen would be better than what you can buy kind of from me or from other people in the UK, but it just gives you that level of consistency when you're breeding down from it. If you've got 30 hives, like, you've got a decent amount of genetic diversity there, but I just bring them in. So what we do, we have 5 breeder queens a year. That's what I've set myself as a target, and that's what we've done for the past couple of years, getting it from different areas, different locations all across the world, some island mated, some artificially inseminated. And every time you bring a new breeder queen into your apiary, boosting the good drones that are there— that's the big thing, is that you're— it's that iterative cycle of improving your stock. Every time you bring in a breeder queen, you not only get the abilities to graft off it, but you get the ability for those drones to go into your apiary to mate with all of your other queens when they're superceduren or when they're swarming, just constantly building it up. And then if you can take all of the best of the best with your breeder queens, take them to a single apiary, and then use that as your kind of zone for mating, you should get some really, really good queens. So I would say 30 colonies, I'd have a go at a breeder queen, be good. Hi from Ireland, love my AMM. Yeah, I'd like to I'd like to see some of them in action. Um, I've heard good things. Right, hello everyone. Right, purchased queens from 4 different suppliers, Atlantic Queens came out on top. Very good. I didn't pay Jamie to say that. I'm glad, I'm glad they did well for you. Um, Charles saying people are very caught up on this, is it pure honey? And of course you don't want to feed sugar water when the super is on, but do you think the bees access just as much soda cans and such as they do flowers? definitely not in Wales. Like, it is just fields and sheep around here. It's not like, um, kind of cities. But even in cities, I wouldn't have thought a huge amount. Like, you see the one, like, the M&M factory, you see that pop up on Facebook all the time, don't you? Same, like, with the blue sugar coloring or whatever they've gone to get. But you don't want to feed them— you don't want to feed them sugar syrup just to get them built out. Like, it's That's yeah, don't want to do that. So I don't think you need to feed these at all, kind of throughout the season. So as soon as they as soon as they get going in the spring, take off all the feeders and then you're good to go. Rodney Rodney Middleton, sorry I'm late. Been applying OA treatments today. Rodney is like the number one YouTube fan I think I've ever met. Like you you comment on. Every single channel. Every time I watch anybody's videos, I always go down and have a look at the comments, and you're just there. You're just ever-present. So thanks very much for coming to my stream, much appreciated. I know— I don't think you are in the UK. I think you're like US, aren't you? But you can still have a guess how big this pumpkin is. How big do you think? Because we're doing guess how big it is in grams, and then you can win a smoker. Have a go. Oh, I need to go back and look and see who's winning. Right, who's next? Ben saying, your videos are fantastic, very well put together, and having a new one every other day or so is great. You do repeat yourself quite a bit though. Thanks, Ben. I know I Definitely repeat myself a bit, but it's it's it's the nature of YouTube, isn't it? Is that some people will watch kind of oh, there's mud along here. Some people will watch every video, and then some people will watch one video. And who was it? Someone had a go at me the other day, like earlier this year about like a demo. So it was like part of a series. I don't know. I'd mentioned the word demo in it, and I just kind of said it casually and said. Oh, so this is a previous, like, demurrer split or something. I've gone on and talked about something else, and he really— it was like, you need to, you need to explain what a demurrer is. And saying that every time I say any kind of word that some people don't know, I should kind of stop and explain it, put it up on the screen and stuff. I'm thinking it would get a bit boring, wouldn't it? So I do— I take your feedback on board, Ben. I do, I do try to not repeat myself that much. I also just try and kind of pitch it at the level for the video, for the respective video. Right, Richard's saying, why not organize a meet-and-greet chat next year? That way you can have a 2-way chat. How'd you do a meet-and-greet chat? Was like a, like on, on YouTube? I don't know, I don't know how to do that. Not like, I'm alright with IT, but I'm a little bit behind, I think. Like Adam was telling me about this thing the other day, I can't even remember what it is, something like an something server where you don't just— I said to him, oh yeah, we've got a Facebook group, and he laughed in my face and mocked me and said, what are you, some sort of old man? Yeah, I guess I'm getting a bit old. Sorry, Adam. But yeah, meet and greet chat, it'd be cool. Like, I do think this format is, is good. I enjoy doing these streams because it is good, and I do think it's good to interact with people on a live live basis, but I do think they might get a bit like— you can only ask, you can only ask so many questions, can't you? So I'll have a think about something different. Maybe I'll definitely do some live streams next year at the Bee's because that would be good. And I think this is, this is what's fun about the series. Yeah, I say this is that you've got nowhere to hide on the series. So like, I've done videos before where— and it's like the videos you see, you see the final cut you see like the polished end bit and you see it look like it stitches together right and nothing goes wrong apart from when the queen dies. But sometimes I do videos and I don't post them. Like I did a video, did a video on like secondhand beekeeping equipment, like some of the stuff I said was just wrong. So I was kind of editing it, I was thinking, oh shit, that's not actually right. So some of the stuff you can cut it out. Sometimes you do a video, you just think, I can't do that. Whereas a series, like, I leave you at the end, don't I? I say, well, that's the end of the video, come back next week. And then you've got to follow on. So if I say, okay, well, I've done this split and there's a queen cell in there, and we're going to come back in 3 weeks and see if she's mated, like the Demeray split one that I did, I'm thinking, if this queen doesn't get mated, I've just shot like hours of this video and I've not really got anywhere to go with it. So in a series, you've got nowhere to And so I do think there is a good thing for some series. All right, let's have a look. All right, During the OA vapor treatments, found a hive that was almost starved, so I reduced them to a nuc with a feeder and a frame of pollen. Very good, I hope they get through. Kept saying I have island-mated queens. Cool. Going to try swapping a queen with another NMB member next year. Have you ever used a fogger using mineral oil? Met a bee from the EU, popular treatment there. Any thoughts? As OAB needs all the protection equipment, mineral oil is safer. Yeah, I don't think it works. Like I said, I'm not, I'm not one, I'm not like a scientific beekeeper. I'm not at the time. I'd love to do this, I've not got the time to kind of like test stuff like that side by side and count the drops and do all that kind of stuff. I've just not got the time to do it, but from what what I— from what I've heard, people who I do trust, um, when they've used foggers, it's saying it's not— it's nowhere near as effective as sublimation. Um, someone used it. So Good idea putting videos together. I find they're coming over too quick with the shorter ones. Take that as a positive. Loving my double hide hives. How are yours doing? Um, they're doing good. They're doing good, the hide hives. I really like the hide hives and I love the way they're built, but the one thing that I struggle, really do struggle with on them, and it's probably because of the way that I'm just used to like standing behind the bees in like a warm way, is that they're— you're effectively managing them like the cold way. You're not, it's just where you've got to stand, but like you have to twist, and I do struggle a little bit on my hives like that. They're good. I do like them. I think if you just want to keep kind of like a couple of hives in the garden, you're not that fussed about taking loads and loads of honey out of them. I do think they're really, really nice. They're easy to use, they look amazing, they're well built. So I do like them. If you want to expand on YouTube, get yourself the farm and do more lifestyle content. Get the wife and kids involved in a few chickens. Check out White House on the Hill. See, I do— they it's, it's a nice idea, but it could go wrong. And I tried doing like— I did one video, started doing little bits of that, didn't we? Like, I'm like foraging and stuff. I think I'd put a lot of you off if I started doing videos like that. A few of you might stay, but I think the majority— Rodney definitely wouldn't be here. He's beekeeping, that's it. That's all he wants to know. If I started doing kind of like keeping chickens and keeping Because the route that I'd go down is like keeping cows and keeping pigs and like taking them to slaughter and making salami, um, and eating it, doing stuff like that. And I know that would appeal to some people, but I think the majority of the people who follow this channel, subscribe to it, I don't think they'd be too interested in that. And I'd probably open up a new demographic of people that would be interested. I do feel like I'm too far down the road with beekeeping now, so if I was going to do it I'd start a new channel and I'd run both channels concurrently. That would be the way that I would do it. Right, Ben saying if you can remember MySpace then you're apparently old. So I can remember MySpace, so definitely old. But it's weird, you know, like I think this now, I think you look at Facebook, Facebook is definitely dying, isn't it? It's getting a bit old. Old and a bit— everyone's Instagram. And even now Instagram's getting a bit old, everyone's TikTok. And I started doing a bit of TikTok stuff, and it's difficult, isn't it? Because everyone's just— you just need like big fat eyebrows and lipstick and stuff to do well on TikTok. But I worry about YouTube. I worry about kind of like putting all my eggs in one basket. And I think, what's gonna knock YouTube off its perch? But then you'd have thought that 10 years ago. what's gonna knock Facebook off its perch, and something else will come along. So be interested in that one. Ever seen a queen knocked out by a marker pen? Someone else said that to me. Yeah, I've not, I've not had that, but I've seen plenty of people do it where they kind of just like faint or like play dead, and then they kind of give them like a little tickle on their tummy and they come back to life. It's never happened to me. I've seen some videos on that now. John saying, Bibi, do a live at the Hive videos, and hilarious when the tech fails, but you need others to work the camera, controlling the chat. Yeah, see, that, that's something else I would do as well. Like, if it ever went like big on YouTube, you'd get like better edited videos and you'd get someone else on there. You get like a real team, wouldn't you, if it was that big? But it would be good fun. I would like to do it. John's still on his AOL email address. Very good. I've been saying, watch something interesting on using apple cider vinegar for helping with deformed wing virus. Any experience? I think the logic is the change in pH kills the virus. I don't know, they like make sense in it, but I just, I think my view on that is just don't let them get deformed wing virus by keeping them for rower load really low. That's— and if you do that, then why do you need to worry about treating deformed wing virus? Kind of like solve the problem further up the line. I can see a Black Mountain Farming channel in the future. I would love it. It is good fun. It's great, kind of like dabble in the bits that you enjoy. How many years have you kept bees and how fast did you build up the numbers? So about 8 years. It's not that long. It's funny because I speak to people and they're like, oh, I've been keeping bees way longer than you. But yeah, 8 years or so, but an incredibly tense, intense 8 years. And how fast did you build up? It's funny, like, it went— I started first year, I had 4, 4 or 5 into winter, and then the next year I was on like 50. Like, it went from 4 to 50, and then it dropped back a bit. I had a really bad year that second year, um, and I lost like 40% of my colonies. I made such stupid mistakes. There's a vid— there is a video on this. So I like— and I think back now to these mistakes, I think, what was I doing? Like, there's such stupid amateur mistakes, but you don't know, you don't know any better. You think it makes sense when you're in the moment. And, and I do, I do things for stupid reasons, which is I wanted to like limit the amount of time that it was going to take me to do stuff. So I, um, I, I took, I took all the colonies back to like a central location where I film the majority of the winter videos. It's like kind of like headquarters. And I took 100 colonies back there and fed them all there. So I took them all back kind of in August, 100 colonies, loads of nucs as well, and fed them all there. And loads of them died. like at least like kind of 40% of them died over the winter, really, really died badly. And it was— I was just thinking, what was I doing? How stupid was that to do that, to take them all back there? It's like the perfect opportunity for them just to spread disease. But that wasn't what killed them. It was the fact that they just— the land couldn't tolerate that many bees. That's what I put it down to. I'd made loads of preemptive splits as well. The colonies weren't big, they weren't strong, there wasn't enough pollen to sustain them. The weather was poor. It was 950 feet above sea level, and they'd all been down like at 300 feet. So they were just thinking, bloody hell, it's cold up here, and it's raining a lot. Like it was just perfect storm to kill all the colonies. So so yeah, made mistakes. But yeah, so there and then so dropped back down to 50, and then I kind of just like got them back up again pretty quick, and then I've hovered around 100. For a while now. Um, I think managing 100 colonies, you, you tend to learn it. You tend to learn things pretty quick when you're managing that many colonies because you see all of the different things. You see what works well, you see what doesn't work well. You build your style pretty quickly. Um, and then, and then the challenge is keeping it down, keeping it down to kind of— because once you're at 100 colonies, like, you could go, you could go to 1,000 next year easy. Easy to go from 100 to 1,000 in a year if you had the time and the kind of inclination and the money. But the bigger challenge than that is keeping them at 100. That's what's difficult, because they try and swarm, and they try— and then you think, well, how do I, how do I manage swarming without just splitting them? Because up until then it was so easy. Any colony that swarmed, I just did a split, and then you're kind of breeding this genetic swarm me kind of bee. And I think I bit the bullet about 4 years ago and I said, right, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm going to keep it 100. I'm going to buy genetics in and I'm going to see swarming as a negative trait. And my honey yields have gone through the roof since I did that. It really has made a massive difference. And I'm trying to get down to the point where I can keep 50 colonies and still get around a similar amount of honey than I get at the moment. And some of my apiaries this year is so good. Like, North Wales is— you're not going to get bumper crops in North Wales, you never are. But some of them average kind of 120-130 pounds across like spring and summer crop, which is mad. Like, that's massive amounts for North Wales. And that's a good year though, so I don't think you get that every year. If I can get between, if I can get 60 pounds average across all of my colonies everywhere, I'll be well happy with that. Right, let's see the next one. Andy saying, "I think you'll find a lot of people who carry on watching." I respect a lot of people here, but we enjoy your videos and the way you do it. Thank you, Andy. Do you have a rule of thumb how many colonies nucs per apiary? So not not really, but. I definitely put too many there previously, so I would say I'd like to limit it now to kind of like 16. I think 16's a target number because it's 4 pallets worth and it's like a really small plot space, so you can get them anywhere. And I do find that's probably about where we are in terms of like diminishing returns. I started off thinking, I get 50 there, 50 there, and they'll all produce the same. I just not experienced that, so I'm trying to keep them a bit lower. I do think they do a bit better. So yeah, 16. Kenny kicks house on the hill. It's like the family and chaps seem to have angry bees all the time. Does my head doing so hectic? Sounds like my bees. Ben's and the Bush Bee Man is quite funny. I think he has a second channel about nursery rhymes. Interesting. Richard happy to be on your tech team. You need to send me an email, blackmountainhoney@gmail.com. You are hired as the first member of my tech team, definitely. Are they that bad, Richard? I look on some of my videos, you know. So you're saying you are there with your eyebrows? I look on them and I'm like, bloody hell, my eyebrows, I've got proper slug balancer. They're pretty thick, aren't they? Uh, North Shore Island Farming Channel would be great. Bees and farming are my passions, a 21-year-old. See, what would be good with a farming channel, yeah, is that it would be like a proper vlog. It would be because I've got a clue about farming, not a clue other than that I like to eat meat. It'd be very similar to like Jeremy Clarkson's one, which is just like— is really good, isn't it? Jeremy Clarkson's one. Um, but it would be a different video. It would be like I do the beekeeping. I told you I do it as a kind of like to hit the the YouTube searches for different things because it's a massively searched subject, beekeeping. And I do try and do it as like a bit of an educational thing for stuff that I know about. But farming, I don't know anything about it, like literally nothing. So it would be— it would just be like a compilation of me making loads of mistakes and then killing animals. It's a bit— yeah, it sounds a bit grim. Maybe I won't do that. Maybe I'll do like a gardening one. That's a bit nice. But I do think it would be good if I, if I ever went for— you know what, before I do a farming one, I'd do a food one. I would do a food one because I love my food, and I would do kind of like making pizzas and going to like different places and watching them make stuff. Um, I watched loads of foodie stuff on YouTube, and it's— I enjoy it, I do. And I think I'll make some good videos on that. and it would get good views. So maybe I'll do that one first. I make most of my hives and it's damn hard work. I like to make my hobby pay for itself. Yeah, I, I want to do more DIY stuff like that. I'm not very good at carpentry. Like, I love it, I love a bit of woodwork, I'm not very good at it. And we've got a joiner that comes and does loads of work in the house, and I just like how he cut stuff at 90 degrees. I just sit there in awe because whenever I try and do it, like, I get to like the 4th cut and I'm out and I'm like, and then I end up just slapping loads of glue and screwing it together and saying that'll do, and then doing a YouTube video on it and then people mocking me for my poor woodwork. But I do enjoy it. John, what John putting you down for product testing or for food. Okay, you have to sign it, you have to sign a disclaimer on that as well. Yeah, do a collaboration with Clarkson. Yeah, it'd be good, wouldn't it? Just imagine trying to get hold of Jeremy Clarkson. Like, I spam everyone trying to do collaborations, and beekeeping manufacturers and sellers and everything, I'm just getting fed up of me now. But it would be good, wouldn't it? It would be good. I know, I know a bee farmer that knows another bee farmer Who does all the beekeeping stuff with Jeremy Clarkson? I think he's onto he's onto a bit of a winner, isn't he? Anything Jeremy Clarkson is going to do well. Right, I've answered all the questions, so I will I will keep on answering questions. But I'm gonna I'm gonna award this pumpkin to someone because I am up to date with it. So let me get. I tell you what, I'm going to do this in a different way. I'm going to tell you. How much it weighs, and then I'm going to try and find it. And if someone can prove to me that I've awarded it to the wrong person, then I will do it. Right, so this pumpkin weighs 7,658 grams. 7,658 grams. So who's the winner? So I'm gonna have a look through and see if we can find who the winner is. So you can be above or below. I don't think there's going to be like a— so Julia Martin, 7788. That's, that's pretty close. You're within like 130 grams of it. I can't go any higher. This is a bit of an issue. Shit, how's that? Oh no. Oh, there we go. How bad would that have been if I'd have just deleted all the messages about live chat? Don't tell me you lose all them. Is that it? Can someone tell me at the bottom if there's like a way of— do I— tech team, I need, I need to know, I need to see all of the messages. I can only see like the top, however many there are. Right, I'm gonna have to work out how to get through the chat. There must be a way of finding out what all that chat is. I can see like the top 600, but at the moment Julian, you're winning, I think. Can someone just do me a favor, just kind of scroll through the chat and see if it only just goes up to me? James said 7,500. Um, I think, I think I think Julian's winning at the moment. Oh no, how many— Julian, how many goes have you had? Have you just kept on spamming me with loads of different ones? Oh, this has not gone well. I'm gonna have to sit here and watch it all again. Right, right, I will, I will announce I will announce the winner, I'll work out who it is, and I'll just have to try and find you somehow. That's a bit crap, right? I think we're done. I think we're done. 3 hours. So unless anyone else has any questions, I will, I will call it a day there. But thanks everyone for coming and watching. We nearly peaked at 100 people. Which is great. I can't believe that many people come and kind of come for a little bit of a chat. It's good. I'm going to work out how to do something a little bit different next time though. So I'll either interview someone or work out a way that we can collaborate with people talking, because I do think it would be good. And even if, even if it's just— I think, I think I could do it, you know, if we just have the chat and then I just kind of like quickly go in and like talk to different people and put you up on the screen. I think that would work. But yeah, I'm gonna have to go back and have a look through everything. So thanks, like Peter Sabah, you were here from the beginning. Andy, you were pretty much here from the beginning. You always get a shout out, no worries. And yeah, I can only get back at 30 minutes in the chat as well. Spotify blogs, good idea, no problem. I do— I, again, I I appreciate all of you coming, listening to me talk, but also like supporting that, supporting the channel. I would just say join the Facebook group. We'll build something better than that as well. But send me any messages for videos. I'm always, always open to doing new videos and collaborating, doing something different. So the weight, Robert, was 7,658 grams. But I've just realized I can only go a certain distance up with the chat. So there must be a way when I finish it that you can go through and look at it, because I know when you, when you see the streams, you can see it, it pops up in the chat, so it'll be recorded somewhere. Um, yeah, Zoom or StreamYard and stream it live on YouTube at the same time. I don't know what that means, but I'm definitely going to look into it. I think it will work well. Um, Robert's asking DIY Beekeepers asking questions. I can carry on talking. How much money of your own did you invest to get 150 hives? So I've invested about a quarter of a million pounds, I reckon, in our business. Huge, huge amount of money. It goes too quickly because you just spend it. Um, so it really, it really does get kind of quite silly. Um, that doesn't take into account all the money you earn back from it, which is kind of nothing. And that's not just spent on beehives, that's spent on vehicles and honey extraction machinery and all that good stuff. But yeah, I think that's it. I'm quite tired, but so thanks everyone. I will, I will go through and I will check that chat. And just finally, kind of, I know they didn't supply this smoker for it, but thanks to Thorns. They're really good. They're one of the companies along with Abello that do provide me with quite a bit of stuff to, to show you. Um, so I thought I would do them a favor and give that smoker away on there, and it is a good— it is a good smoker as well. Just checking new questions coming up. Did you produce a video on secondhand beekeeping equipment in the end? I think I did. I can't remember if it went out or not. I'm gonna— I'm gonna go back and have a look because if I didn't, it's a good one to do because there's quite a lot to talk about with secondhand beekeeping equipment. But yeah, I think that's it. So I'm done. Thanks everyone for coming in. I'll call it a day and I will post on my Facebook and Twitter and maybe Instagram as well and YouTube the winner, and I'll pick your name out on here. So if you think you're close to that number, check on my social media kind of like tomorrow and I will announce the winner. But good night everyone. I'll see you soon. All right, bye-bye.