Full Apiary Inspection On The Hottest Day Of The YEAR

We are back for another Black Mountain Honey live apiary stream and the weather is superb. I'm hot, I'm sweaty, but you will never ever hear me complaining about the weather in the UK because it is an absolutely whopping 24 degrees Celsius. And yeah, okay, it does feel a little bit warm. I've not got my vented suit on today, but I really do love the warm weather. And you know what? The bees love the warm weather as well. Now, you might think this is like a style statement wearing my hat on backwards or a shout out to all of my American fans on YouTube. And, you know, hats off to all of the American people who watch this. I love everyone who watches my channel, and I do like the hat. It is a pretty cool hat given to me by Cowan Manufacturing. No paid plugs or anything like that, they gave me a free hat, so I've got to give them a shout out and wear their hats in the video, haven't I? But it is beautiful here today. We've had 3 or 4 days of summer, and it's due to be thunderstorms tomorrow, but the bees are taking— really taking advantage of it, and I really do love it so much. Why can't we just have like 3 or 4 months Of summer, like everyone else seems to get. I guess what there is some positives. We do get the rain, and the grass is green, and the cattle are fed, and there are some positives for the rain. But I'm kind of grasping a little bit here. Today we're going to go through every single one of my colonies in this apiary here. They are so so happy today because of the weather. We've got F1 Buckfast, we've got Caucasian, we've got Lagustica, we've got VSH. I've added loads of German mated breeder queen stock Buckfast into this apiary as well that we'll go into. I've got some laying workers in here as well, and I'll show. Show you what I'm going to do with my laying workers. And if you don't want to stay until the end of the video, I'll give it away now. I'm going to do nothing. I'm changing my strategy with laying workers because my previous advice was go and shake the bees out, go and shake them out. And I've just come to the conclusion now that shaking them out can potentially do more damage in your apiary than not shaking them out. And the laying workers, you know, the, the textbook says go 30 or 40 meters away, Shake out all of the bees and the laying workers can't get back to the hive. It's nonsense. They definitely can get back to the hive. And why would they not be able to get back to the hive? It's not really young bees that are turning into laying workers, it's the older bees that have orientated to that spot anyway. I've done it in this apiary. I didn't do a video on it. I went away. I think I actually included it on one of the live streams. I shook all of the bees out, they went into the colony next door, and now that colony is laying workers as well. And that colony had a perfectly good queen in there. And now all I've got in there is drone brood. So I'll give it away, what I'm going to do with my laying worker colony is keep an eye on them. That's all I'm going to do going forward is I'm just going to keep an eye on them, knowing that they're going to dwindle, knowing that they're going to turn anything I give them into drone brood, so I'm just not giving them any nice new frames. And then once they get to an easy point in the year where they're collapsing on their own anyway, I'm just going to close the colony up and I will Destroy all of the frames. Not destroy in terms of like chuck them away because if it's a disease risk, it's not, it's just laying workers, but I'll melt them down and recycle all of the frames, reuse the hive, torch the hive, you know, not in a Black Mountain Honey burning it style, but in a scorching it light brown. People think that I maybe go a little bit too far on the scorching, but it does look worse on camera, I have to say that. I'm standing in front of this colony here and they're just like, what are you doing? You're standing like right in the way of our entrance. So I'll just let Some of those bees go through there. There we go, they're piling back in. I've also got my Nucchi hive in this apiary now as well, and the Nucchi hive is brilliant. And people say, come on, enough with the plugs, people giving you stuff and you're just shouting them out. Do you know the one reason that I really love my Nucchi hive? Because I can kind of perch on it like this. I've got a bench and I've got a table in my apiary. So I could have just put a bench and I could have just put a table in the apiary and I would have got just as much benefit. But I do, I do like my Nucchi hive. It looks cool, it looks nice. I'm going to go in there today and take a look at the colony that's in there as well. But it's the little things, isn't it? Like having just a fully flat bench in your apiary and a table to, to use. And for me, that's, that's invaluable because, you know, I like to sit down and stuff. But more importantly than that, I like to do, you know, I do videos in the apiary showing stuff, and I always struggle to have a space to do that. And now I've got my Nucchi hive. Shouldn't bang, shouldn't bang the top of the hives like that, should I? No. A couple of supersedures in this apiary here with older bees that are superseding queens. I've let a couple of them go and they've been mated, which is good. In terms of mating, the weather has really turned, and I know it doesn't seem like it has in the last 4 weeks. It still seems that it's a bit grim, but with matings you only need a few hours of like 20, 21 degrees with no wind and the bees will go out and get mated. So we're seeing like way better matings at the moment, and I think because that season, our season has shifted a little bit, so we've not had the early Season swarming. We've not had the early season matings. I think that whole part of the beekeeping season has shifted out a bit to the right, so we're expecting to get good matings late into August this year. I think there'll be plenty of drones around. Some of the colonies here, you can see there's a good amount of drones. Not in a bad way, not in a they're turning drone laying, but in a just they're building up nicely and they're starting to focus their attention on putting some good drones into the air. What else have I been doing recently? I've just, I've been, I've been taking loads of pictures. I've been taking loads of pictures of my queens, trying to get the website sorted, and I've just been letting the bees get on with it really. It's quite nice at this time of the year, especially when it starts getting sunny like this and you think there's not a huge amount left to do. You just got to go in, quick inspection of the bees, let them build up whatever honey they're going to get, and then you start thinking about, right, is my honey extraction room ready? Have I got enough supers to kind of keep up with the bees? Because some of them in some of the other apiaries are going full throttle now. And I hear a lot of people that I've sold nucs to and sold queens to saying, We're getting a super a week or two supers a week, and we cannot keep up. So keep the good feedback coming. I do like hearing good feedback about the bees. It feels—it does feel a little bit weird wearing a hat, and I did have a haircut as well for anyone who was wondering. I did need a haircut, so I went and got that trimmed, and that's cooled me down. But I do—I do like a backward cap when it's warm, and it's probably better for the videos as well because if I put my cap forward, bit shady, and I suppose I should get the badge in for Cowan. There we go. Cowan Manufacturing wearing the hat backwards. American badge on there. Live streams. We're going to go inside. How many colonies we got up here now? We've got five, nine, eleven. Like I say, twelve and a half because there's one colony up here that's not got anything in, and there's one colony that's a laying worker. But I've got some brilliant German buckfast up here, like some absolutely fantastic German buckfast, and I'm just really happy that summer's here. You can probably tell I've got a spring in my step today. So that was six minutes of nonsense. Sorry, you can if you're if you're bored already. Sorry about that. I'm going to get into some beekeeping now. I'll do every single one. I've only got one. Camera today because the problem with the warm weather is that my cameras get like 20 minutes in and they're just like, yeah, nah, it's too hot. We're just, you know, we're not, we're not set up for working in the sun. So I'm trying to fix that as well, but I've just got the one camera today, the camera that I'm talking to now. So I will bring the, the frames up and show you kind of anything important up there. But yeah, let's get on with it. I'm doing that like I, uh, like I was going to cut the edit there and I forgot that it's a live one so I can't cut it out. So I better fix my hat. Right, let's get going. Quite glad that in my quite extended preamble there, none of the bees decided to sting me, which is nice. All right, let's give you a close-up of the Nucchi Hive then. So I think the bees are liking the Nucchi Hive. I've been speaking to the owner of Nucchi Hive and giving him feedback and saying what's good about the Nucchi Hive, what's not good about it. One of the things that he's improved is he's put these kind of foam bungs on here to stop any water ingress. He's improved the windows to improve again the water ingress. These removable slats here, we're talking about putting a rebated edge in, so you lose a little bit of flexibility, but you gain a bit in the ability for them to kind of go in straight and for them to not get knocked. I do love the fact that it's got the clear polycarbonate, but don't worry, this isn't an advertorial. We're not talking all about Nucchi Hive. I just want to show you the colony that's in here. I think you think we say that bees are doing all right on that one. F1 Buckfast queen on that side. She's looking pretty good, isn't she? She's laying an egg as we speak. It's great. I've gone into loads of colonies doing these videos today. I don't know. I don't know if you can see that on there. You probably can still. She's still laying it. I've been doing loads of videos to try and get some stills to try and update the website listings for she's still laying it for next year, and I've been going through videoing the queens, and so many of them are just. She's dead. No, she's not dead, she's just laying an egg. And there we go, she's kind of coming out. But the sun, the sunshine does that, the incoming nectar does that as well. And like you can see there, she is just carrying on. Very nice. So that colony is looking good. I've got another colony that's going to come up to this half The other half of the Nucchi hive. But these are on 6 frames now, so I'm not giving them that much space. And what I like about the flexible nature of the containers or the dividers at the moment is that once I get them to a point where they're ready to overwinter, I can just kind of give them that amount of space. But I'm happy with it, and I'm mostly happy about it because it gives me a seat. Brilliant, isn't it? If you want a seat in your apiary, Nucchi hive is the one. Right, let's crack on with some normal inspections then. So you can see we've got more hives here than we did last time. So all of these ones here, 14 by 12s, it's not full of bees, don't worry. I've been like taking boxes, probably talk this side and not trip over. I've been taking boxes, scorching boxes, making up brand new frames, filling them with foundation, and then I like to come and put them kind of in the apiary. The apiary is my clean zone, it's my hygienic zone. I don't want to store them in a room where I've got boxes that I haven't cleaned, so it's a cross-contamination thing So these 2 boxes up here full with just frames and foundation, then I've got a polyashworth feeder that's closed, and then I've just double brooded some of these 14x12s. It's a little bit lazy because I just don't want to— I don't want to have to come back and do such thorough inspections. And that's not saying that I'm not doing my weekly inspections, but I just want to make sure that this 14x12 box down here has got sufficient space, that they're not going to swarm due to a lack of space for meat when I'm coming and doing my inspection. So they've got another box to play around with. And then we'll see what we'll do with that other box later on. We might make a split, National Deep and a 14x12, and just split them into 2 if they've expanded. I think what's more likely is that that's just going to end up being an additional brood box. They'll put some stores in it and I'll overwinter those on double brood. And then we've got like the branded up Lyson ones as well. So let's get on with it. Let's open up some beehives. Some people don't like the sunshine, do they? They would be at this point hot and sticky and moaning, and you, you will never, you will never hear me say that. I am hot, I am sticky, and I promise you I'm not moaning. I'm really not, because I finish, I'm going to be finished in a couple of hours, and I can just go home and cool off then. I could take way hotter than this, and 20, 24 degrees isn't really hot, is it? People in America and elsewhere in the world would be laughing, saying, what are you talking about? we get 40°C or 100-something degrees Fahrenheit. Right, first colony. I had a bit of a nightmare with this colony. I came up here 2 weeks ago and I found loads of emergency cells, and I can't remember the last time that I came up to a colony and found just random emergency cells. I just saw a squished bee there, I thought it might be the queen. So I must have killed the queen. It's very, very rare. If you ever go to a colony randomly and you find emergency cells, The only explanation for me really is that you've killed the queen. The bees wouldn't kill the queen and then let the emergency response kind of take place. They would just supersede the queen, so you'd see proper supersedure cells as opposed to emergency cells like this. So I'm sorry, sorry, Mr. or Mrs. Queen, I should say, not Mr. Queen. Sorry, Mrs. Queen, but I've killed this one. But luckily I have requeened them a couple of weeks ago. So we'll go in there today and see if we can find that queen. Hopefully you can see there, we've got a box pretty much full up of bees now. So a lot of these colonies really coming on nicely. I have to say, if I could rewind to 4 weeks ago, I would make a change in this apiary, in that I wouldn't have been as lazy and done exactly what I just said I've done here, put the box on to ensure that they've had space. We've had that up and down weather and it's meant that overnight it's got cooler, And I think I probably set some of the colonies back by giving them too much space. I wish I'd put the crown board down here, let them build up 80%, and then put the additional box on. Some of them, I've definitely knocked them back a little bit by doing that. But let's get inside, see what the bees are looking like. So loads and loads of nectar coming in. You're going to get bored of the— you're going to get bored of me coming up to the front and showing you frames of nectar and stores, so I will limit that one. So nice frames of brood. Bees are in a very, very good mood today as well. Some people are ringing up and saying their bees are a bit cranky at the moment, and I think if they're sitting on like a big honey crop and then the flow stops for whatever reason, then you might You might get to a point where the bees start to become a little bit cranky. Right, I found my queen. I'll have a little wander around the front, show you this queen. So that one there was a successful introduction, and you can see there I'd missed an emergency cell on the back as well, and they'd started to take that one down. So that was before I'd introduced the queen, so maybe there was a virgin in there as well. I can't really remember. It's too hot for that. No, I'm not moaning, but there you go, there's the queen. I'm pretty sure I missed the emergency cell afterwards, but the queen was already out, so we're all good. Eggs, eggs on that frame as well, so we're all set in that colony there, and they are basically covering the entire bottom brood box there now, which is really good to see. So that one there has not suffered at all through me adding an additional box on top. You've got a queen laying, a box full of bees, there's probably 4 or 5 frames of brood in there, Langstroth frames of brood, and then they're already up in that top box there and they have, yeah, they have started drawing out the adjacent frames as well. So I'll just do a little bit of checkerboarding, not loads, but I just want to get them where they've already started, kind of working that top box as quickly as I possibly can, or as quickly as they can. Yeah, a lot of those frames, they've started doing like 10-20% drawing out anyway. So really happy with that one. That one's going to get to a point where it might produce some honey later on. We've still got— what's the date today? It's like the 19th, 20th of July. Up here, still got 4 weeks of my honey crop season, so I'm going to take all the honey off middle of August. Could extend it out to the back end of August, but I've spoken about it so many times in the past why I don't like doing that. And that strap on. So for 4 weeks is a huge amount of time for the bees not only to fill that box, but also to fill that box with honey for me. So what I might do is I might come back on with the queen excluders and slip some queen excluders in once those top boxes are full. Don't like to do it before that because it slows down the growth, but definitely do it once all of the boxes are full. It's warm. Carniolan queen in this one. So this one here is a classic example of the bees trying to supersede a good queen. She's come in, Carniolan queen, laid up tons of brood, and the bees have completely superseded her. Did it about 2 or 3 times, kept on taking down the cells, they kept on doing it again, and then I came back the last time about a week ago now and they killed her. And it is just one of those things where you're trying to go from like Buckfast to Carniolan or Buckfast to AMM or AMM to Buckfast or any of these kind of mixed breeds, sometimes the bees just say no, we're not doing that. So sorry about that. Carniolan queen, she was a beautiful queen as well, really good, lovely. Like the brood that you're going to see in here is Carniolan brood, but unfortunately they killed her and they left behind their best choice of a supercedure cell. So I just, I took, I took that supercedure Cell out, and I added in an F1 Buckfast queen. And again, that acceptance has gone well. So she is in here. I found her in here earlier today. But you can see there's nothing wrong with that Carniolan brood there. All of that brood is Carniolan brood. I'll come around and show you that at the front. Nice frames. These are the ones at the top as well. I'll inspect this colony from the front, and then it means I can show you stuff a little bit easier. So you can see loads of nectar going in. Just tweak that camera around a bit. But I think you, you'll be able to see if you watch the previous videos that There's growth in a lot of these colonies. They're all like up in the top boxes now, doing stuff up in the top boxes. That's Carniolan as well. You can see she started to do a bit of drone as well. So it was a well-developed Carniolan queen, and the bees just did not like that mix of genetics. We didn't get to the point where we had like that mass emergence of all of the Carniolan. You can start to see the Carniolan bees in there now. If I, if I go in close, you can see just the odd one. Loads darker, a little bit greyer. So it's a shame. I'm going to have to get another Carniolan queen and try it with another colony. I might go from AMM to Carniolan and see if the bees respond a little bit better to it that way round. I've still got my introduction cage in there, but I have seen the queen in here. Let me just get that out. So give myself a little bit of space to work. You can see all the way over to the edge, they've drawn out all the frames in there now. So these colonies are primed to go boom. There is tons of brood in them now. You see loads of pollen, bees on all of the frames. So this one here, the bottom brood box is full. And that top brood box there is like 70%, 60 or 70% full. Got eggs all through the bottom there, so it looks like they're going to be happier with this F1 Buckfast queen. So I'm happy with that. Just going to have a quick look at this queen. So all of that brood there, the capped brood, is that— that's the Carniolan. And then in the middle, that's going to be my Buckfast. Now what I definitely should have done is got my drink out of the car before I started doing this live stream because it's quite a lot of talking, isn't it? Said I'd never moan. You can't moan, but I can definitely admit to my mistakes for not keeping myself cool, and I should have got the bottle out. So I might, might take a little 5-minute break in the middle and get Some water. I bought myself a Yeti cold water bottle, like a big one, and I got this huge— it's not an ice machine, but like an ice tray at home that produces the biggest ice cubes you've ever seen, and they fit in my Yeti water cooler, and it is well good. I love it. There we go, frames of stores. So I can't see the queen, but I'm not gonna— I'm not gonna keep on looking for the queen. No need to look for her. I'm going to take that perfectly nice drawn-out frame there and put that closer to the middle, get the queen laying in that one. And that colony there is looking good. So I can feel even in that little bit of weight, a little bit of heaviness in the stores. That's really, really good to see. I've just realized that I didn't do the 14 by 12. Why did I not do that? It's like I just kind of forgot that it was even there. Let's go inside and have a look at the 14x12. So all of these 14x12 hives that I've got here have been on the plastic frames and feeders frames, so I didn't want to just like chuck my frames away. So I'm just going to run these as production colonies because most of the frames are pretty well drawn out now and the colonies are looking pretty good in them. It's taken a while. Definitely taken a while to get to that point, but I'm quite happy with them now that they've been drawn out. But as I've said before, I wouldn't— if people said plastic or wood, I would go wood every single time. And I think that's one of the nuances of like UK beekeeping and people watching beekeeping in the UK and maybe watching like American beekeeping. And I think people in America probably get away with using it. You get good consistent weather, you'll get days like this, And on a day like this, the bees would definitely like completely draw out and use plastic frames, but not, not in the UK, not in the UK's weather, no way. Right, so let's open up this colony here. One job that I've not done yet and I really do need to do as soon as possible is deburr the top of the frames and feeders frames and the bottom of these national frames now, because This is what's happening. You see how they're getting stuck? And the bee space is correct, but it's just got a little bit of kind of burr comb at the bottom. So I just need to— oh, I desperately need to kind of tidy that up because nothing's sitting right in here. You can see how that happens. See how the frames go like that? I don't know if you can see it on that camera there. It's frustrating and it shouldn't be doing that. And that is just as a result of Not my laziness, but— Frames and feeders, frames. They love drawing the burr comb on them. Right, so let's try and organize this one out a little bit better, take it apart without killing anything. So lots of lovely eggs on that frame there. So, so this colony here was half 14x12 and then half national deeps. If you're wondering why there's so much action upstairs, it's because of that. So I'm just going to rearrange stuff just so I can get that out properly, and then we'll go downstairs and have a look at some of the 14x12 frames, and you'll see what I mean about the burr comb. There we go, we've got it off. So some nice 14x12 frames, wooden frames there. And these have probably been in about a week now, and they're just toying with me now, aren't they? Going to start messing around and not drawing out wax frames properly either. There we go, nice queen. I'll just show you that one there. And I've said this on a couple of videos, I've not, I've not released them yet, but if they did that on every single frame in the frames and feeders frames, I'd be delighted. I wouldn't use anything else. That's brilliant. Perfect brood pattern, really nice amount of pollen stores around the edge. Where's that queen? Queen in the bottom corner down there. Very, very happy with that as a pattern, and there's like, in terms of the amount of frame that they've used, really, really good. And again, really nice. For anybody who's not seen these frames before, maybe in America, these are called 14 by 12 frames, just like 14 inches by 12 inches. It's a variant of the UK national, basically a national frame that's just a little bit deeper. But what you can see on there is a lot of brood, and a lot of brood that is definitely going to emerge soon. So as we move towards the edge there, you can see not quite as much has been drawn out, but you can see in this corner down here it's nice and white, so they've been drawing that out. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to flip that round, put the unused half facing into that cluster there. Not going to checkerboard, because if you checkerboard, say you get this frame here and you think, well, I'll be smart and just put that in the middle, what they will do is they will neglect the plastic. They won't finish off the plastic, they'll just go for the wax. So I'm deliberately not checkerboarding this one here with the hope that they just finish drawing those out. And this top box, wow, that's, that's got a really good amount of weight in it, that top box there. So very happy with that. Job for the weekend is deburring, and of course I'll do a video on deburring as well. It is pretty simple. And someone messaged me the other day saying, I'm not sure, I've not got enough space to keep all of my kind of used or unused supers. And this is a perfectly acceptable place to keep unused supers, whether they're drawn out or brand new, as long as it's completely sealed. And I know it's not completely sealed. I wouldn't put used ones in there, but I'll seal all of that up before winter. And if you've not got the space kind of in your apiaries or in your houses to store stuff, you can just store stuff on top of your bees like that. Even over winter, that would be fine. Like I say, make sure it's sealed because they will go and rob it all out if there's anything decent in there. I'm gonna go get a drink. Well, that was very nearly end of stream then because I thought I'd left my bottle at home and I hadn't brought the one that I thought. I bought a thermos, but luckily I've got some water. So we can continue. Continental Gold Star, this is one of the ones where I've definitely set them back a bit by putting the brood box on. They're underway, they're getting going now, but there's not quite as many bees in here. And like flashing back to the previous videos, they weren't as strong. So you can see, just not even touched that top box yet. But I'm at the point now where looking in here now, I'd put the top box on. So I'm not going to take it I'm not going to take it off, excuse me, but I definitely would have changed what I had done if I had a time machine and I could go back in time for about 3 or 4 weeks. But you can see we've still got frames of foundation in there that are not fully drawn out. I think that is like the only one that's like that. Lovely frame of stores on the side there, and yeah, a lot of heavy frames now. And I'm sure a lot of people are going to be seeing this across their apiaries— big heavy frames of stores. Now obviously do what you would normally do, shift the frames of stores out as far as they can go, and if the queen really is running out of space downstairs, then you can just start inserting frames of foundation and lifting up frames of stores. That one there, lovely frame, fully drawn out, fully covered in eggs, absolutely full to the brim. Lagustica queens, all they know how to do is raise brood, but you can see you've got a frame full of stores in there, so they're not kind of masochistic in the term, or in the sense that they just want to kill themselves, even if that is what masochism is. My wife tells me off all the time for using phrases incorrectly. I said once, oh, don't worry, I've got plenty of lions in the fire. Apparently that was wrong. I know the correct term now. What was the one I said the other day? I was trying to say antithesis. Oh, that's the antithesis of that, and I said anaesthetist. So I was just— I had pain relief on the mind. So masochist probably wasn't the right word. Right, I'll stop embarrassing myself there. Where's that queen gone? There she is. She— there we go. She's on that corner up there. Continental Gold Star Lagustica. We do have some Boreal Gold Star as well, which are produced in Finland. They're still Italian queens, they're still Lagustica queens, but these— that particular line, the BGS, is raised in Finland and selected in Finland. So it all gets a little bit confusing, but lovely frame of brood there. We will be splitting that line up next year, so when you You'll be able to order the Gustica queens either Continental Gold Star Italian raised in Italy or Boreal, however you say it, Gold Star raised and selected in Finland. They are still mated in Italy coincidentally because that's how it works with queen breeders. They just get the stock and then they raise them in their own country, but they are selected where the original breeder is. So lovely frame of brood there. We'll be adding some different Buckfast lines on there as well, some much darker Buckfast lines. If you're receiving Buckfast queens on the 18th or 19th of July, you might look at them and you might think, that is pitch black, and that is actually a Norwegian Buckfast line that is highly selected and very, very special, and they don't normally get sent out. We we had a batch come in, and they are buckfast even though they look pitch black. But they are really really good queens. We'll be selling them separately next year as like a selectable line. So I think we got about eight or nine, ten if you include our UK F1 buckfast queens at the moment. But in terms of what we bring in, we've got eight queens, eight different types of queens that we bring in from Melita Bees. Lovely heavy frame of stores. There. Next year we'll be going up to about 12 with the different lines that we've got. So really happy with that. That's 3 or 4 big heavy frames of stores. Queen is there. I'm not going to do any checkerboarding or anything like that because they have set themselves up really, really nicely. And at this time of the year, I'm not too fussed about what these bees are doing. I'm not making any further splits from them. I'm not trying to manipulate them in a certain way to get more honey. I'm just saying, you know what, bees, do your thing. Definitely not doing demeray splits at this time of the year. Too late, I think, for a demeray split, and it can just leave you in a really awkward configuration. So demeray splits early on in the year, I love them. You know they're my favorite thing in the world. But once we get past the solstice, I'd give it probably four weeks after the solstice, and I would say that is about it. Certainly not with the Stop-start nature of the weather we've got at the moment. If bees are running out of space, I would just add additional space up in the supers, and if you can replace any really drawn-out combs or sorry honeybound combs in the brood box, then that would be the best way to do it. Right, got some special queens on this line here. Really nice ones. Carpathian, Carpathian, however you want to say it. Caucasian is this one here. VSH Buckfire. And then we have my favorite queen of all time, Splodge. I've had a few splodges this year, but basically it's the temperature in Malta at the moment when they're doing the paint, like the enamel that goes on it. It's just so hot that it's taking too long to dry, and then the queen moves and gets it on her wing. So I've been personally adopting all of them myself, and it's got Splodge over there now. I will show you Splodge. She's just a very poorly mated queen. I'm not sure if you can see her. Beautiful F1 Buckfast queen. I'm gonna catch my breath again. It is warm. It's the one day I kind of think, oh, I should have worn my ultra bee suit. Next year though, you can see, I probably don't even need a bee suit. The bees are just so chilled out, and I see people in America with just like a veil and some gloves and shorts and a t-shirt. I'm definitely going to do that. Don't really— many people sell that over here, but I'm going to have a look. Because it would be really nice today to do it in shorts and a t-shirt. Definitely going to have a go at that. Is there anyone else who drinks through their veil or is that just me? I've always drank through my veil, can't be taking it down to put it back up again. Right, Carpathian Queens, Carpathian, I say Carpathian I think is the way. What I'm doing this year, as I said before, is I'm going in, I'm making sure that I've got a number of these queens to take through winter. I want to get used to them, I want to get my own experience of them so I can kind of relay that experience to you. What I'm doing at the moment is just going on the trust of the breeder, and he told me the F1 Buckfast queens were great, and that was 4 years ago, and I think, I think we can agree he knows what he's talking about. And he said all of these are great as well. And from my experience so far, I've been very, very happy with what I've seen. So I've done a bit of checkerboarding in this colony. This is, I would say, the strongest colony that we've got here, maybe on a par with that, the first or second one that we did. We've got frame after frame fully drawn out full of eggs, and then we have got a huge, huge amount of capped brood in here as well. Like, even on the top box There's lots of capped brood, mature capped brood. So once all of that emerges, we are going to be, we're going to be filling these boxes out. And what I'll end up doing with the colonies up here is I'll just be sharing out some of that brood to relieve the space on this colony and then boost maybe like that Continental Gold Star one, give them a little helping hand just to balance them and get them ready for winter. See what I mean? Carpathian Queens. And it's really nice to start seeing them, them coming out now as well, and like being able to see the difference. Like very, very different colour again, quite fluffy, quite light, quite grey, different from the orangey Buckfast that I've got. Lots of nice stores on that frame there as well. 36 minutes in. We are, we are going to go for a record, I think, today. The longest live inspection video going. I have started turning some of these live inspections just into like full videos. YouTube seems to like it a little bit better like that. And, and the, the benefit for me is that I can film it in 4K and show you it in 4K, as opposed to— I have to do— I still have to do 720p. I can't do the live stream in anything else than that because the bitrate's not right. Not going to bore everyone with bitrates, but it's better in the, the live format. It's exactly the same for you anyway. So lots of nice frames of pollen there, and you can see really nice colony here, beautifully calm. I'm very excited to see what these bees are going to do next year. Because they have got some serious frames of brood on them, expanding really, really nicely. I do love what the sun does to bees. It just makes beekeeping— and for the beekeeper, I guess— it just makes it so much more enjoyable. The bees are out, like half the bees are out foraging, so you just get a really nice easy inspection. The queens go into overdrive laying because of all the nectar that's coming in. Gives you like really nice problems to have. And I do get a bit jealous when I see people in other countries with really predictable seasons. And I thought the summer had kind of come to stay now, and then I look at the weather tomorrow, it is just storms all day, proper thunderstorms. But At least the grass will grow. So there we go, didn't see the Carpathian Queen there, but I know she was in there because I saw her earlier on today and she was looking very good. I do find if you go into a colony kind of like an hour after going into a colony, you're never as likely to find the queen, and I find that quite regularly, that it's almost like they know. So as soon as you open up for the second time, they're like, yeah, no chance. We're not falling for that again. I went to go back to get some close-up shots. I put like the macro converter on one of these cameras, so I wanted to get some mega close-up shots and went back in and just couldn't find any of them. I found most of them first time round. Right, VSH Buckfast. This one here was with the queen that fainted. Very funny queen that fainted. Super orange bees, these ones. And it looks like when you kind of open up this top box here that there's nothing in it, but they've got 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe 6 frames fully drawn out with stores up on that top, and you can feel good weight in there as well. But most of the business, most of the brood is downstairs on this one. See if we can find the queen in here. She's a beauty, this queen. Very nice young orange bees. Wonderful frames of brood. Look at that, really nice. What am I looking for at this time of the year? Not really looking for anything other than just making sure they've got enough space. And in these apiaries here, it's pretty easy because I've just given them a ton of space. But in my, like, production apiaries that I've not— I just can't get— they're a bit further away and I just can't seem to get around to filming in any of them at the moment. But what I'm looking for in those apiaries at the moment is just, do they have enough space in the supers? I go to some of them, I don't even bother even looking in the brood box at the moment because there's nothing that I would do. What's the point in inspecting in there if you're not going to do anything? I'm not doing demarais, I'm not doing any sort of double brooding at this point in the year. I'm just adding the space on in the supers. So there we go, VSH queen. Sold a lot of VSH queens this year, proven really, really popular. We're going to split that line as well because there are 2 different or 3 different VSH lines that come from Melita Queens. So next year they've said that we can split those lines out. We do have to give them kind of like forward warning of orders, but I think we've got enough data to be able to, to do that now. What I'm also thinking of adding on there next year is like a lucky dip. So in order to balance the requirements, I need to give the people at Melitta Bees forward notice of the queens that we want, and I can't give them— I can't say we need 12 of those and 6 of those and 3 of those 3 months in advance because obviously that's just going to be impossible. So what I'm thinking of doing is doing like a reduced lucky dip, and then people can just order a lucky dip to arrive on a certain day and get a nice discount on it. And obviously, you know, all of our queens are good. You're going to end up with a good queen. They could be quite fun, or do like a lucky dip mix, so you order like 5 queens and you just get 5 different queens, something like that. We'll have some fun with that next year. VSH lines though, really popular, doing very well here. I can't wait to show you Splodge. I'm quite excited about Splodge. Splodge is in this one here. We'll do the Caucasian first though. That's probably our second best seller this year after Buckfast. And I think the reason is, is because they're very dark, very dark black bees, so blend in, blend in with your association bees. Shouldn't, shouldn't say that out loud, that's just, that was just my thoughts coming out there. It is crazy how warm that is there. It's good, it's an insulated roof, so it's poly underneath, it won't be that hot under— underneath, but on the top you could, you could probably poach an egg. On that. I wouldn't say you could fry an egg on it. Right, let's get inside this Caucasian one. So I went back in this one before and couldn't find the queen. So let me be nice and gentle, see if we can find the Caucasian queen, because she was wonderfully beautiful. Really nice big long black queen. And again, starting to see her offspring coming out now. And I've been very, very happy with what I've seen. Let me give you a close-up of that frame there, cuz that is probably like 50/50 Buckfast and Caucasian, and like noticeably different. Now you're not going to fully get away with keeping these and telling people they're AMM, um, because they're quite clearly banded still, as opposed to where the AMM, you don't get quite as many bands, you don't get the same kind of color But they're not orange. They're not like as noticeably orange as the Buckfast queens that we have. And one of the side traits that you get with a Caucasian queen, and this is what I'm really looking forward to seeing next year and kind of like testing out myself, is huge amounts of propolis. Some people don't like propolis. Some people are big, big fans of propolis. And obviously, if you're like trapping propolis as well. You're going to like that as a trait within your colonies. But I'm interested to see how these bees kind of take onto that. Lots of young emerged and emerging Caucasian bees on there. You can see very light, very fluffy, very grey looking. Some lovely frames of brood down here. Now I noticed myself on camera the other day doing this, in that I think if I've got National Bees, I'll kind of like inspect them like that, but because of the small lugs, I find myself dropping the Langstroth more. So I find myself inspecting Langstroth almost like that way round, and then I find myself a little bit less likely to drop them, but I don't think either way is particularly good for my back. But it was weird, I'd only really noticed that by watching myself back on a video. So I can't find that Caucasian queen again. Interesting, she's gone into hiding. I might just have a quick look up in this top box. I really hope I don't come back next week and emergency sales. I've only got one Caucasian colony. Let's have a quick look back through. I would really like to see her again. I'm aware that I've just done a completely different style there of pulling out the frame. Quite like that one as well, though, pulling it out in the middle and then just like a little spin round like that. Quite a nice way of doing it. When I was filming these queens earlier, my hands were real— my arms even more were hurting so much because I was just holding these frames out like this to try and keep them still. And I've, I've seen this on loads of videos as well where I'm looking for queens and then it's like a pantomime, people saying, she's behind you, and I've not seen her. Lovely frame of stores there. I think she's hanging out on a wall somewhere, this one, because I definitely put her back in well. Often find them hanging out on walls, just like tucked down on the final wall. I can't see her there. Nope, she's well and truly gone into hiding, that queen. That is like four passes across the whole box, and I've not seen her. So she has gone somewhere. Hope she finds her way back in. The one of the Lagustica queens over there, big strong Lagustica colony, and I I was videoing the queen and being really awkward with her and saying. You know, you can't walk off the frame like that. And, uh, excuse the top of the non-painted hive there. And she flew off, and she only flew down to the floor. I just picked her up and thought, oh right, you're getting clipped. I'd only touched her a couple of times just to stop her going off into the shadow so I could take a picture of her, and she, uh, she wasn't very happy about it. Right, Caucasian, let's meet Splodge. I am doing a separate video about Splodge. Probably watched the separate video already, but this was a drone laying colony. I'm doing another. This this video, this colony here features in in loads of videos. I'm very hot. It's a drone laying queen that got replaced with splodge. So this one here way far behind, like not touch that top box at all. But they're coming on quite nicely, and there's still like loads of drone brood. Because drone brood takes quite a long time to emerge, and when you've got a colony that is struggling with drone brood like this one here was, you get a bit of drone— chilled drone brood at the edges as well. So it almost never emerges until the colony gets to a point where it's strong enough to clear out the dead chilled brood. So it sometimes looks like the colonies aren't coming back, but I can see kind of like interspersed within that one there now you can start to see like capped worker brood, whereas before there was nothing, it was just drone brood. So Splodge is doing her job. Not much to show you on that frame, just more of the same, bit of drone brood still. And again, lots of eggs and larvae on that one that will turn into nice capped worker brood. There we go, we found splodge. What do you think? Beauty, isn't she? Where's she gone? Middle of the frame. Would you be happy if you got sent a queen like that? She's a good queen. I'll keep Sploge going as long as they don't try and supersede her, but they do. Bees, they kind of put up with us, don't they really, and our shocking what we do. But they are coming back from that. She's doing her job. What I will do and what I have done with this colony here is the makeup and the configuration of that colony is not quite right. There's too many drones, there's too many older bees, and there's too much Drone brood. So to give them a hand, what they need is they need more young bees, but there's only so many bees in the colony to tend to all of those eggs and the larvae. So they need like a boost, they need a couple of frames of emerging brood, and I didn't want to give it to them when they were young. Oh wow, do you know I said that I couldn't find that Caucasian queen? Look at this, I knew I dropped her on the floor. Unbelievable. But how incredibly lucky, because that is the only one I've got. And look at that! What were you thinking? So what happened is I took off the roof. I'd taken off the roof, and she must have been underneath the roof, and then I put it on this strap. But I tell you what, I wouldn't have seen her unless all of those bees Had gone and caught her and kind of come and tended to her. That was a mega close call, so that explains why that queen was not there. Can't believe it. Gonna have to just quickly do like a little short on that one. I think some of the channel members will get bored of me doing shorts in the middle of a video, but we do we do have to do this one. So just excuse me for two seconds while I film a little reel for Instagram. Let me get my phone out. Getting pretty good at getting pretty good at doing them quite quick. Doing one a day is the challenge at the moment. I was inspecting this colony here, and I I was inspecting this colony here, and then I couldn't find the queen later on, and it turns out I had dropped her onto a blue strap on the floor. Caucasian queen, lucky I found her. Time to put her back. In the colony now. So how am I going to do this? First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to pick up the queen. I'm not going to do anything else without picking up the queen, and I'm going to leave myself a mega challenge. This is like Houdini, how to unstrap a hive one-handed. But the reason I didn't do that any other way was that I think any vibrations on that strap would have resulted in this queen Not making it. So let me try and get this camera off as well, give you a little close-up of this. So there she is in my hand. There she goes. So that was good fun, wasn't it? I told you I was going to make loads of mistakes on all of my live streams. I'm so over the moon that I found that Caucasian queen because she was a beauty, and I knew something was up when I couldn't find her there. And it was only by chance I was like, oh yeah, you can— what's she doing down there on the strap? And what I'd done is I'd lifted this up and put it on something like that. Those are straps underneath. And when I couldn't find it the first time, I thought She might be on like one of those straps. So I took it up and there were loads of bees underneath her. I thought, oh, but I looked everywhere, I couldn't find her, but she'd obviously toddled off somewhere and got out of the way. How good's that? Caught on camera. Laurence Edwards, shocking beekeeper as, as normal. Right, so how many colonies in? We are 8, no, 9 colonies in, and we've probably got 4 left to do. We will continue. I'm definitely going to get some more water because it is warm, said in the most positive of manners possible. Right, so these colonies here, these are both German Buckfast colonies, island mated and artificially inseminated. I've got a mix, and what's interesting with these is that there's kind of almost nowhere near as much Brood as you— there's, sorry, there's more brood than you would expect for the number of bees. So they look like quite small colonies at the moment, but they're just going to go bang and be absolutely huge, which I'm very, very excited about. Right, make it to the end with my drinking. Right, let's get inside this one first. So we're on 14 by 12. 12 frames and feeders frames again. So this is good to see, they weren't doing this. Oh, so again I need to sort out the burr comb in here, but they are— wow, that's like 2 days ago and they weren't even touching that. So that's really, really positive. When you get burr comb like this, the only way The way you need to like get it is just to kind of turn the boxes and it breaks it all at the same point. But you'll see, I'll show you all the burr comb. You can see on the bottom of that one, you can definitely see it up there. I just, I brought the, um, my hive tool set with me today to, to give it a good cleanup. I need to have a proper good cleanup. I just got loads of sweat in my eye there. Let's close this down so you can see. So lots of Bercom, and you'll notice again I've not checkerboarded because I just want them to finish drawing out all of those frames. But I will, I will turn that frame around. Just messed the camera up a little bit again, a bit close I think. But these are lovely colonies, really, really nice colonies, completely drawn out. A little bit to go still on that side there, a bit on both sides to be honest. I'm not going to flip that one round. Definitely going to fix all of that burr comb. So you can see how they've definitely taken to some of these frames now, now that we've got the flow on. And now that I've got enough bees in here and that I've compressed them and condensed them down long enough, they are taking to them a bit better and they are filling them out. Lovely frame of brood there, same on that side. Just got to be careful with Um, burr comb like that, that when you put it back together you're not squishing anything, especially the queens. Lovely frame again, not quite finished those bottom frames. And I have to say, now that I've mixed these with wax, they're probably not going to draw out those bottom frames, I don't think. So I might just go ahead and do some checkerboarding on these. Really nice to see all the pollen coming in though. We're way past the worry of colonies starving in the middle of the summer or even in the spring. You can see what I'm talking about— lots and lots of nice frames of bees, tons of brood. What I'm always concerned about with these colonies is putting, putting them back together again without seeing the queen because I don't know where she is, and then I don't want to I don't want to squish her, but again, beautiful frame of brood. So I will, I will checkerboard a little bit here. I'll just checkerboard one in like that, and I'll start to just put them all back together again. Really don't like it. When I come in and do that video removing the Bercom, I'm going to give them a seriously good cleanup, I think. Put the queen off to one side, pin her down. Just just have a check up here. She might be running around up here like newly drawn out wax. See if the queen's up there. They mean business though. I do I do love going in and seeing bees when they're like freshly drawing stuff out. They're on a mission. And if we had this weather last all week, this box would be full by the end of the week, easily full of stores. It's like 4 frames up here, 4 frames full of bees, and then maybe like 4 and a bit, 4 and a half maybe. So they will work on that. Just checking bottom down there, making sure the queen's not on there again. I can't make 2 huge mistakes in one video. It's funny, people talk to me about like the different Abello boxes and saying, oh, I don't like the 12-frame one because it's not got a rebate, and get the, get the shallow roof, or get the long one with the— they do loads of different variations, don't they? But this one here is the shallow roof with the 11-frame variant, and it's probably my least favorite. I do like the dark, the, the deep roof. Deep roof is nice. But the 12 frames, by far and away my favorite. I just, I don't seem to kill bees when I rebate, but you don't get this kind of like shakiness. See how that roof doesn't fit? And I know I'm chopping and changing with wood as well, but it's— yeah, I'm not a fan of the slipperiness of the fact that the frames— sorry, the boxes aren't rebated. I much prefer them to be rebated. But that's why beekeeping is so much fun. Everyone gets a choice. Everyone gets their own little mini format. We are nearly an hour in of non-stop beekeeping in the scorching Welsh 24 degrees. Got to be, got to be warmer than 24 degrees, I'm calling that now. I reckon it's 24.5, maybe 25, but it is lovely. I've not shown these, I made these ages ago. I'll see if I can get this one off without pulling out all the frames. Again, covered in burr comb, very annoying. I made these like multi-purpose crown boards where you just like take off a bit of ply there, then you can flip them over. They're quite cool. You can buy them like Bee Equipment and places do them, but they're mega expensive, like £20. I think I made them for about £3 or £4 each quite a while ago, and they're good. Got bee space underneath so you can use it as a crown board And then obviously you can just put a feeder in there as well, put insulation in there. You can use it as a top entrance, really multi-purpose. It's good. So this one here, similar German. This one's a little bit further behind though, but still looking good. Slightly darker buckfast, this one. All looking good though. This one here, you can see that I've not double brooded this one because they've not, not yet drawn out the frames, and that would just be way too aggressive trying to double brood a colony like this. They need a little bit of nurturing, a little bit of love, so no checkerboarding, no double brooding. I'll be happy with this one if we just get it through until the winter. Just checking for eggs there. All looking good though. I do like these German Buckfast, and you might wonder why, why are you buying German Buckfast if you're selling Melitta bees, you know, Italian queens? But we like to go from different lines and get different inseminated queens, different island queens, and we're using all of them to kind of like flood our apiaries and flood Richard's apiaries with really good top-quality calm genetics. Melitta Bees do send me a number of lines of artificially inseminated queens, but we like to go and get our own lines as well, just to have that genetic diversity that we know is key to kind of consistently producing nice calm UK-mated F1 Buckfast queens that we use to produce our Buckfast colonies overwintered. Overwinter Buckfast colonies— going a little bit delirious there now. Right, so this one here is marked green, but she is also a German island-mated Buckfast. Where's she gone? She flown off, has she? I do this so much, go and show the camera. There she is, this, this side up here. I'm not going to point, but she is up there. But her, her disc, her disc fell off, so she got like a funky double-colored mark instead. You can see she's like a greeny blue, so she got a green mark for 2024. Green and blue. And then she's got a blue to kind of denote her as something slightly different. So they're all looking really, really nice. Close that one all back together. No double brood on that one. The next one is my funky Osmo hive that I'm really proud of. It's, it's so funny, yeah, my wife gets me on this all the time. Like, I'll be telling her something and she says, you're literally like a 6-year-old boy who needs praise or wants to tell someone that you got like a gold star at school, and I totally am. And, and like the Osmo Hive that I'm about to show you now is, is prime example. So when people say on social media, oh, that looks really good, I like it, I feel like a 6-year-old. I feel like, oh, thanks, I'm really quite proud of myself that I produced a thing. So the thing— let me just level the camera there— is this cool beehive here. Somebody called it spunky, and I like to think that, you know, if you're someone who's got good character and you're quite fun to be around, some people might say, oh, he's a bit spunky. I think that's the use of the terminology. I can't think of what else you possibly meant, but I really enjoy doing this, and I quite like the look of it as well. So I think I might expand the spunky beehive as a national standard of style for my beehives. Apologies if I offended anyone there, but there was no, no malice intended. So this colony here is the laying worker. So if you remember, that way there was a colony that I thought was a drone layer. So I shook that drone-laying colony out. It was a nice big strong drone-laying colony, shook it out, and all of the bees came here. I know they came here because there was a big massive swarm underneath. It wasn't a swarm, but it looked like a swarm, a collection of bees underneath this hive here. And I thought, well, you know what, just let's just let them go in because there's a queen-right hive in there. If they all go in, there's a drone-laying queen that I killed or I couldn't find, that will kill— they will kill the drone-laying queen. I am, I am getting a bit hot. And, and everything will be good. But my original F1 Buckfast mated queen, Green, is still in here. And let's have a look inside. It's a mess. It is an absolute mess. Really bad drone-laying laying worker colony here. Oh, that was very heavy. Right, so let's readjust that camera. So it's on double brood, but it definitely doesn't need to be on double brood. And I'm a bit gutted, you know, I'm really frustrated by this because every time I go in now I'm like, come on, need to see a bit of like worker brood or something. Give me a sign, give me a sign that everything's all right, all right. And every time I go in, I see nicely laid eggs, single eggs, nice pattern. I'm thinking, yes, we've got that queen back up and running. And then I find a frame that's just full of millions of eggs everywhere. So There we go, classic laying worker pattern. Could be a drone layer as well, that one, but I know it's not because I know the queen that's in here, she was good, she was laying good capped worker brood before I shook out the laying workers next to it. And I just don't think you'll be able to see in that camera there, but there is a number of cells with multiple eggs halfway up the cell wall, and for me that's just the straightforward Classic laying worker. There is still a good few frames with a nice amount of eggs, like the eggs look decent, but you know, look at that brood. Not doing anything with that brood, are we? And as the days go by and they're not reproducing the younger bees, this just becomes a lost cause. So what could I do? I could shake them out and let them all go into the colony next door, but they're just, they're going to wreck That colony as well, are they? So I think my new advice is I'm just going to leave them. I'm just going to let them dwindle, and before they get to the point where they can't protect themselves from robbing, I'll just close up the entrance. And then I'm not— there's no disease risk, there's no varroa bomb risk, there's no any risk really, because the bees are just going to be inside, they're going to be dead. I know that sounds a bit harsh and a bit horrible, but We're not saving any bees here. This is— stung on the finger there, first sting of the day. This is just a horrible laying worker colony that is just going to dwindle away to nothing anyway. So all I'm doing is just protecting my livestock by not allowing them to come and rob a potential disease risk. And it's only a potential disease risk, but you do— with disease and apiary hygiene, you just have to treat every colony like Is diseased, and if you do that, then you shouldn't really ever get problems with disease because of your good apiary hygiene. Caught a bit there, but I'm really happy with the hive, not happy with the colony. Right, so we've got 2 colonies left to go. I'm looking forward to finishing, I'm not going to lie. We've got a good, a good amount of footage there. I think we're up to like an hour and 10 minutes. I will get a quick drink. I don't want to pass out on camera. Oh, there we go. I will show you at the end how ridiculously sweaty I am. For, for people that want to see it. You're all thinking, no, we're all right, thanks. So there we go, 3 left, but that one on the end is just empty boxes and it's sealed, so we've got 2 colonies. So this is definitely the strongest colony of the apiary, really good strong colony, this one. This is a, a Continental Gold style Lagustica with some stuff stacked on the top. There we go. And these were on a double 14 by 12 configuration, like a 6 over 6 configuration, and then I've given them an additional box and they've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, so they've drawn out 6 frames on that top box now. Whoa, you can see that that one wasn't very well secured. Look at that, that could have gone horribly wrong. We'll fix that on the next one, but you can hopefully see in this one here, really, really nice colony. This one, this is the one with the lagustica that flew off, so it is on 11 frames, 14 by 12, and I would say most of these frames are 90% drawn out, looking pretty good. Happy with this one. Some really, really nice frames of brood in this one. Trying to get the sun on it a little bit so you can see it. So I'd be disappointed if we didn't fill up that top box with kind of like bees and brood. I'll probably time that one. You can see they've finished drawing out that frame there, and there's my flighty Ligustica there in the middle. But I would be disappointed if they didn't finish that top box, fill it up with brood. And what I'll do is kind of like maybe 4 weeks from the end of the season, I'll go back into that one. I'll I'll stick a queen excluder in between. I'll make sure that the queen is downstairs, queen excluder, and then we'll turn this box here into a super. And we'll get ourselves a nice deep super of honey from this colony. And a deep super, you can get like 30 to 35, sometimes 40 pounds from a deep super like that. I'd say realistically you're looking at like 25 to 35 pounds from a deep super. But get the conditions right, they'll do that in a week easy. And the conditions today are right. Tomorrow not so good. But I am, compared to what I was 6 weeks ago, I'm, I'm pretty optimistic that some people can get a decent crop for 2024 summer season. I think the spring wasn't particularly good for most. Just lining up that frame a bit better. What was going on with this colony here? This wasn't strapped down because I'd left it open previously, that's why. Right, we're on to the last colony of the day and we are an hour and 10 minutes in, so let's get this one lined up. Here we go. Right, so this one again, double brood. This was a smaller colony, this one, so I'm not expecting them to have done much. Oh, there's a bit of like brace comb, but nice, nice 14 by 12 colony again. I did some checkerboarding. That there is a checkerboarded frame that was in about a week ago. It's looking pretty nice. So they've responded really well to that checkerboarding, so I will take out the unused ones and I'll continue to checkerboard. Always got to do that when the bees show you that something's working, double down on it. Right, so this one here is the island-mated German. Let me get around there. There we go, island-mated German Buckfast queen. That is a heavy frame. You can see me like trembling there. Super, super nice queen, that one. Really good, nice brood pattern. Definitely not rushing now to finish. You can see tons of syrup coming in there as well. Not syrup, so tons of nectar. Looks a bit like syrup. That's a Lovely brood pattern. I do— it's one of the things I really like towards the end of the year is the kind of when you get this pattern on a 14 by 12 frame. You get a bit of pollen, nice central bit of brood, stores around the edge. It is nice, and it just shows the bees are getting ready for winter, that when they start kind of like reducing stuff down in the brood nest like that. Right, let's put this one all back together and I'll show you how messy I've got. Oh, I know I've been joking, but you— I will, I will not moan about the heat. I long for the heat, and the 11 months of the year when it's raining, I dream for warm sunny days. And when we get warm sunny days, I don't, I don't moan about it. Like, I would take every single day like this, and I would just prepare myself a bit more suitably for it. It's like in, in, uh, like Northern European countries when it snows, they're prepared for the snow. In, in the UK when it's warm, I don't think we're very well prepared for the warmth. I've got like my winter beekeeping suit on, um, because I've got a big rip in my BB Wear one as well now. It's annoying. I can't even wear it because of the exposure. There we go, that is us done. We're finished. 73 minutes. 50 seconds and I've inspected all of my colonies here. Don't need to do any more work. I need to clear up the burr comb. I'm really, really happy with how this apiary is coming along. I'm really happy that I've just got this apiary as well. It's a brilliant, brilliant apiary site. The farmer's been so good and continues to be good for kind of like putting different things in here for me. Right in the way of the laying worker colony here, so I'll finish up before I get stung. Thank you to anyone who made it this far. It's a long video. I hope they're enjoyable. I'll definitely continue to do more. I'm going to find some new beekeepers close to me as well, and we'll do this style, going into people's apiaries, seeing what they've got, seeing how they're getting on, seeing what their bees are like, and then we'll take it from there. So I hope you've all got really nice sunny weather where you are as well, and I hope you have a very good weekend.