Getting STUNG with Just Alex

We're getting stung in 5, 4—

Yeah, yeah. Where did you drive through?

I drove through M5. You know what, I don't have a clue. My direction—

Your geography is terrible.

I'm just about getting the hang of knowing my way around Bristol.

So here we are.

Wow.

This is it.

This is your multicoloured beehive.

Yeah, so they don't actually have any bees in them.

Oh, there's no bees in these? Okay.

And there's a part— no one's worked this out yet when I do the pictures of it, which is you can't actually go up to a beehive and lift the whole— oh no, look, I've screwed them in.

Oh wow, I was gonna say the storms we had.

No, you can't take the lids off. They're just dummy hives.

Are they actually? They're not real?

No, they're all screwed in and occasionally I'll pop— the idea is to pop a real one on the end.

Let's see.

Just so it looks nice.

What do you call this place? The Black Mountain Honey HQ or?

Yeah, I guess it is Black Mountain Honey HQ, isn't it? Or like, I just call it the forest. Should we go up to the forest?

Forest.

I should probably talk a bit to the camera. So if you're wondering what's going on, Alex is coming up here for a day. We're gonna cook some pizzas, we're gonna make some toast, we're gonna have some tea. We are just gonna have fun. That is it. That's the last of the YouTube voice. We're going back to Lao.

Who is the, um, the graffiti artist here?

Oh, Zabu. You need to go and meet Zaino Zabu. She's so nice.

Okay, she does all the—

She did all of this. Yeah, she came, like, she planned it all. She did it. What she specializes in, yeah, is, uh, faces, but then she did the bee stuff for me. And I said, I just, I want color. I just want it crazy colorful.

It's incredible. Wow, it's cool, isn't it? It's a giant Honeybee.

So it's one of my queens as well.

Really?

So we took— I had a macro photographer come along.

Oh, I think I saw the photo of them.

And then she made it into that. Should we go make a tea?

Oh, I'd love a tea. I actually have started drinking more tea. I didn't drink tea much, and then one of my old housemates, she would always offer me a tea, and then now I've got into tea drinking.

Nice.

So yes, I would like to.

There we go. Sweet. Right, have a fire. Do you want to make the fire? Do you want to make the fire, Alex?

Cool. Yeah, no worries.

Yeah, you can do that.

I do enjoy fire making.

I'll get us some water. Make a tea?

For scorching hives, I have a very small blowtorch. Yeah. I saw you using a massive great big one.

Got the big one. Yeah. So you get like a pre-light.

Oh!

Gosh, do you want to light the fire with this, Alex? You're more than welcome.

I feel like that's a bit overkill, to be honest.

So I did a little video the other day melting old beeswax frames, just chucking like black beeswax frames in here and then getting the wood wool and just mixing the two together. You see how much gunk is in it, and they don't look very good, but they are incredibly flammable. So if you, if you like get your little—

I'll give that a go. Tell you what they look like, you know owls, they like, they puke out Little balls of stuff. Looks like one of the owl puke.

Only Alex would know what a little like ball of owl puke looks like.

Oh, there we go.

So yeah, feel free. You can use you can use everything that's in there because it all needs burning.

That went up easy.

Yeah, they're cool.

I'm gonna try that in the future. I see some of those hives. They all say Lyson on it, and it's something I haven't quite understood. What— Abello and Lyson, are they the same company, or is Lyson a sub-brand of Abello?

Sorry, am I— Yeah, it's the other way around actually. So Lyson is the big Polish company, and then Abello is their UK supplier.

Oh.

But it's weird, isn't it? Because you see, you don't often see the hives with Lyson on like that.

Well, yeah, all the other ones say Abello.

Abello, yeah. So these ones are, they're 9-frame Langstroth.

I was going to say they didn't look like empty Langstroth.

But yeah, Abello is the sub-UK supplier for Lyle's. They called you like my camouflage.

It's very cool, I could barely see it.

I thought I could paint a good beehive until Zabu came up here and she did all of her work. You like the colours?

Yeah, yeah.

It's cool, isn't it? And just little things like where she took it around the corner. Zane helped, well, Zane came and filmed it as well, but it was amazing watching her work. She kept on doing this, which I find weird. If you look at it here, It doesn't look that good. And she kept on like running back and getting this little drawing out, and then like she reviewed it from back here.

Okay.

And I think the further you go away from it, like almost the more—

Oh yeah.

The more real it looks, innit? It's cool.

It's mega.

Yeah.

Wow. Is there a video of it happening?

No. This is how far behind we are on videos.

Okay, there will be though.

Yeah, so we're about 18 months behind on videos. It's really bad.

18 months?

No. And it's me because I overloaded the editors so much with 14 Day Beekeeper. Zane's looking at me there saying, yeah, yeah. But we overloaded them too much, so we've done this year 300 videos.

How many videos are there now on the 14-Day Beekeeper Course?

So about 270.

270?

270.

I've got so, so many to watch.

So many more to watch, yeah.

I've done maybe, uh, gosh, I did maybe an 8th of the course.

Yeah, and that's a lot of information, an 8th of the course.

I've done that in 2 months.

Yeah, well, yeah, yeah.

What inspired the whole 14 Day Beekeeper thing? Because it's a mammoth project.

I told you before, innit, I have this unhealthy thing where I start lots of different new projects and I think, oh, that sounds good, I'll start that project. And then I cannot not finish a project. So whatever I've started, I just like have to finish it. And it grew arms and legs. And it's funny because you say that you've only seen it up until a certain point because we got a certain way through 14 Day Beekeeper and I realised I had to make a lot of changes. I changed the way that I did my editing and reviewing. I changed the videographer. The editing team are the only ones who stayed the same. And I had tons of people come and help me. And there's no way that I'd have done it without them. It just got too big. And that's the only reason that I think I'm going to get to the end of it, is that there's no way that I couldn't get to the end of it.

So it started off as like a nice dream, a nice idea, and then you slowly realized how much work it was going to be, but you needed to finish it.

Have to finish it. And it was kind of born of the fact that people struggle with bees. You know, beekeeping is difficult, and there's a lot of information out there. And I just thought it'd be nice to condense it all down and give people something that they can watch.

There's something to be said for following a course education sort of system, which allows you to be given the right information.

Definitely, and you see it in the course. You might not have got to that bit. I say to people though, test the boundaries and challenge it. If there's something that I'm doing or that I'm saying that you think, oh, I could do it a different way, go for it and try it out. There's no better way of learning than failing a bit.

Absolutely. I think though, the good thing about the course is that the fundamentals are there. A bee space. That's like a very—

Bee space.

A pretty solid rule, as it were, within beekeeping, that if you follow, then you can't go too far wrong.

What I like about it, it's a perfect example, bee space though, because if you talk to someone about bee space, it kind of makes sense. If you read it in a book, you're like, is it 6mm? Is it 9mm? Is it double bee space? Like, I find reading quite difficult and absorbing that information. So we try and make it a bit fun and a bit animated. And you see it on the videos where it's really clear. It's kind of speaking to, not to like be condescending, but speaking to a 6-year-old a 7-year-old, and it's deliberately done like that to make it very accessible to people. So they don't say, oh, I don't understand bee space. They say, oh yeah, bee space is easy.

Yeah.

And you don't miss out any of those gaps. Me and John, my friend, we built this bench and we just thought it'd be a nice place to come and sit. I think I might put some bees on this one. I'm not sure whether they'd just be too in your face.

Flying through?

I kind of like the idea of them flying through.

It would be very cool, but I could see where the problems may arise.

Yeah, but definitely facing the other way, I think, could be nice.

Oh yeah.

And just sitting here, you know, the sound is lovely, isn't it?

You'd be standing out there looking through and the bees would all be flying off. I think that'd be lovely.

It catches the sun on a certain time of day. It's interesting because you come up here and you start to know that that spot over there is good at 9 in the morning and then this spot at 11. But this spot here particularly, after about 2 or 3 PM on a Saturday— only on a Saturday— on a summer's day, the sun's kind of over there and it comes back.

It's really nice. It's quite nice that you've got so many different possible film backgrounds. Back home or in my old place, In my house share, I would have my bedroom desk and that would be where I'd film everything. But this is cool, you've got many possible film studios. You've almost got like 10 different studios all in one.

I remember you saying something which was like, you're never in competition with someone if you kind of do it your own way. Yeah, that's really good advice because I'm naturally very competitive. And it made me think, well, yeah, no, not in competition with Alex because it is very different. what we do. And I don't know if you've seen it, but I've really doubled down on education since then.

Oh yeah, and I think that's so good. That's what your channel already had.

That's what you said to me, and it's like, that's where you go to learn.

The more you've gone down that route, the more it's kind of worked, I think.

Exactly.

Because if I want to now revise something about beekeeping, I know exactly where to go. You're the person to go to. If you want to remember how to do a Demerara split, you watch the video. It's in-depth and And it's really detailed and clear.

It's nice of you to say that, and it makes it feel— makes like my decision to do that feel like it's a good choice for me to do it. But what it does is it makes like my life as a YouTuber so easy, because all I've got to do now is just do educational videos. I'm not going to try and shock anyone with, you won't believe this thing or that thing.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's great that you have come to that conclusion because you've obviously tried lots of different ways of Making films. You've tried more clickbaity stuff and you've tried educational stuff and you've learnt from the process of doing what kind of works and what feels best for you. And I think you can see as a viewer from the outside looking in that you're doing great.

Absolutely. Nice things from Alex. Right, I'm gonna get some water and we'll make our tea. So, copper pan. Do you want to pour? Do the honours, Alex?

Oh, tea. I've only got into tea recently. I never used to have it. I used to just like coffee.

I like coffee as well.

But coffee and tea, I think it's a great way to start the day and also end the day and also do multiple times through the day.

I'm very, very good at planning stuff though, so I planned all of this here today. I got the fire, I've got the tea bags, and I forgot the milk. We were just agreeing that we both like herbal tea, so even though I forgot the milk and we can't have the normal tea, I've got some herbals with me.

Oh, cinnamon rosehip.

Cinnamon rice.

And ginseng. Yeah, I'm not sure what that is.

What I tend to do with these, this is because I'm a simple person, yeah, on the front it says, um, like what it is. So you've got energize me, revive me, there's like a happy one, and I choose. Yeah, okay, energize. I'm gonna go with energize.

You do, don't you? It's all in the marketing, all in the COVID Why are we here today? From your, like, perspective, What do we want to achieve today?

So I kind of forgot the reason why we initially decided to meet, but then I did realise it is because of 14 Day Beekeeper. But for today, for me, it's dead simple. We're just gonna have a cup of tea and we're gonna make some toast on this fire and we're gonna have a pizza and we're gonna chat a little bit about 14 Day Beekeeper and get some pictures.

Nice. Well, it's interesting because I guess for me we have some similar interests, like we're beekeepers. We also make films. And for me, I saw it as a lovely opportunity to to spend time with someone who has those similar hobbies and interests, because I don't have many friends who make films or— I don't know anyone except Alex, no. Yeah, I think it's very valuable for people. I mean, like you said, you must spend a lot of time working on your own. Myself, I'm like a self-employed filmmaker, so I'm on my own pretty much every day. So I find it really valuable to like spend the day with someone chatting and sharing ideas, because a lot of the time you're stuck with your own Thoughts. You're really into coffee. Not always great, is it? We must make our tea.

We must make our tea. It's worth shouting out, loads of people said this, and this isn't a plug for a brand, they're definitely not paying me to say this, but loads of people asked where did I get my fire pit. So it is a Solo Stove fire pit. I forget which one, I think it's called the Bonfire. And we're in like a little hut, and you can see there's not much smoke. It is very, very cool. I love my stove. Right, let's get the water off. Let's do yours first, Alex. Nice.

Thank you.

Leave that on, yeah. Cheers.

Cheers. I'm not gonna sip it straight away because I will burn myself.

It was quite hot, wasn't it? Right, so Alex, you've got some questions.

I have. Yeah, soft-set honey. Soft-set honey is something I have just got my grips with. Not got— no, I haven't got to grips with it. I am in the process of trying to work out how to do it well. I, in fact, I learned most of this stuff from your videos again. But a few people have told me now the key to getting consistent results is firstly the honey, the actual honey that you start with.

Definitely.

It can be very beneficial to start with a high glucose honey.

Again, I always forget fructose, glucose.

It's so cool. I only know because I've been researching it like the last few days, but Oilseed rape, for example, high glucose, low fructose.

And borage, the opposite.

Borage is the opposite, so that stays. Exactly. Does it ever crystallise? It must do eventually.

It does. I've got crystallised borage, but I've also got buckets of borage that have been in a bucket in a garage for 4 or 5 years.

Are you serious?

Perfectly fine.

So ideally, if you were, say you had your little farm shop and you were selling your different honey, you would, your shelf life, for example, of I mean, the shelf life of honey is maybe like forever, but your shelf appeal life, you'd ideally have oilseed rape honey for your soft set, and then you'd have borage for your runny honey.

100%.

Because it stays that way. Because I was thinking back in the summer, when I sell my honey, do I sell my summer honey as runny honey? And then I realised that's a really bad idea because it doesn't stay runny forever.

It doesn't stay runny. And unfortunately, in the UK, people want runny honey.

Yeah.

If you get a jar, there's a jar of honey knocking around the house here, you get a jar of honey like that on the shelf, people think it's gone off, and we're like, it's not gone off, it's just really good honey with bits of pollen and stuff like that in there.

Yeah.

But it's a good shout. Yeah, I actually do call mine runny still, but I wish I'd gone with wildflower because it's nicer.

No, but I guess the way to get around that would be, like, before you send— before you say you've got like 10 orders or so, you then warm up 10 jars of honey, liquidise it, send it in the post. They receive it and it is liquid, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you can do that, just like gently warm it back up and that's the easiest way to do it.

A question about the decrystallising of honey, because this is a subject which I see mixed answers on. Honey decrystallises, from what I understand, at about 38 degrees?

It does, very slowly.

Very slowly. When I've looked at articles about how to make soft set honey, you've obviously got your big batch of spring honey, say, which is crystallised.

Yeah.

They say put it in a 50-degree warming cabinet, heat it up for 24, 36 hours, it'll be all runny.

Yeah.

Is that good advice? Because I looked at the HMF sort of things and yeah, if you don't leave it at 50 degrees for ages, then it's going to be fine. I think yeasts and stuff are destroyed at higher temperatures. But yeah, that's the sort of technique that I've been using to get my honey to liquid again, as long as it's not there for ages at that temperature.

Yeah, so it's fine at that temperature. You rightly said about 38°C it starts to melt. The challenge with soft set is you want to get it as hot as you possibly can to completely reset the crystal structure and as cool as you can to preserve all the benefits of the honey. I find like 43°C, 44°C for 24 hours is almost perfect, but there's nothing more annoying than going back after 24 hours and there just being that little bit of stuff that's still crystallised. Because if you've got that, you've not reset it.

Yeah.

And you're set on that crystal size there. So it all being liquid is very, very important. What I like to do now, I use a completely different approach now. So I use the dice method and it's very good, the dice method. So I will, I'll get myself like 10 out of 10 soft set honey. And then all you need to do is mix that 10 out of 10, as in like perfect, the smoothest, creamiest soft set, At a ratio of 10 to 1. So just 1 part soft set and then 9 parts runny honey that's been decrystallised. And then you want to slowly churn that around 14°C-ish, that's the optimum temperature. And all you're doing there, you don't want to whip anything in, no air, but you just want to emulsify, get it all together. And then it goes straight into the jar after that, and then it crystallises in the jar. And you said, right, if you want to warm the jars, you can stop the frosting around the edge. But I find that method is so much more repeatable and you end up getting exactly the same texture on every single jar.

Okay.

Whereas if you just get buckets of raw seed rape honey and try and churn them and cream them, you can get a good result. You can also get quite a coarse result, especially if you're not resetting the crystal or that structure. So that's my process now, right? And you can do it on bigger batches as well. So that 10% seed is a minimum. If you do it with a 50% seed, It's super quick. So my creamer, I've got a big 200-litre creamer, it's full at the moment of like really nice soft set. It's like set so I can't bottle it at the moment, so what I do is I warm it back up to about 32, 33 degrees, couple of little spins, get it liquid again. I'll decant half of it out into jars and leave half of it in there, you know, it just stays in there. It's in like a perfectly sealed stainless steel bucket, and then the next time I want to do some more honey, I'll go and get another batch of oilseed rape, Bring it all up to the right temperature, completely decrystallise it, put it in so it's 50/50 mix. Couple of days of spinning, it's good to go again.

Okay.

You never have to clean the creamer out.

That's the best thing ever. I've seen some videos of that and it looks like a really good method. I wanted to tell you how I made mine and see if you're gonna be like, you did it all wrong. But the result— I wish I brought you a jar actually, because the result is a very smooth honey. Very smooth, very nice. The texture of soft-set honey is just— it changes everything. It fills your mouth, you can bite into it almost. There's no crystal structure, but you can bite through the— it's like fudge almost.

So we were just talking about soft-set with Alex there, and I had to go and get all of the butter and the toast. We're gonna cook some toast around the campfire and have some lovely honey. Right, we keep on saying, right, do you want a cup of tea? And he's like, yeah, I'd love a cup of tea. And then how long did it take for us to get a cup of tea in the end? Maybe a good hour.

Yeah.

There's a prong.

Oh, cheers.

So help yourself. I like the idea of this one here. What was this? This bread here is like a festive one with spice and cinnamon and berries and stuff. I like a bit of that.

Borage honey is like almost white. Yeah, it's very clear. It's so clear. I've spent so much time over the past few weeks with my mixer on the end of my drill just drilling honey, and I don't know, I'm kind of fed up of it.

Yeah.

And I was seriously considering investing in a creamer. Because I thought— I looked at, I think it was the Lyson one, the 100-litre.

Nice.

It has— it can be doubled up as a warmer, so you can warm up the honey so that then you can jar it. You can jar it straight from the creamer.

It's very good.

And it can be a settling tank. And if you can warm it up, it means that it will allow bubbles to rise. It just made sense that I could double it up as a multi-use tool in my honey room.

It was exactly the reason that I got one. You're thinking about getting one, I know. The one thing that I want them to add on to it, yeah, that would make it perfect is some way of taking off the top and being able to pour honey in through a sieve. That's the only thing it's missing.

If it had that, oh, it's really, really good. Yeah, because otherwise you have, you have to filter it into a bucket, then pour it in.

Yeah, but there'd be a way of doing it because it has a little Perspex screen that comes up. There should just be something like a sieve that just clamps on there, and then when you're pouring your honey in, you're pouring it through the sieve, and that would just be Perfect system. You get all those 4 uses on it.

So another method which has been advised to me, which gets apparently good results, is taking obviously the rapeseed honey and simply putting it in the creamer and mixing it for like a long time. And just keep the mixing, continues and continues, and apparently it's the mechanical process breaking down the— what do you think of that? Because I heard from someone that it was the most consistent method of making it.

It's interesting. So I don't want to kind of say anyone's wrong. I'd never say that. Everyone's got difference of opinion, but I struggle with that, and I've done that because I thought that's a lot easier than messing around with dice method and seed and stuff like that. I much prefer to take the oilseed rape honey, warm it up as much as it needs it, put it in the cream and just leave it to it.

Yeah.

And I found it was really inconsistent. Sometimes it was perfect and it was like, wow, this is brilliant.

Yeah.

And like I said before, innit, you do it once, you're like, right, that's it, I found the method, I've solved it. And then you do it again next time and it didn't, didn't work at all.

Okay, so that, that's really funny because it's like I've heard now both things from 2 different people.

But with that, it could be as simple as this year, which is The guy, the other guy who told you nailed the temperature.

Yeah.

And when I've done it, I've just got the temperature out by 2 or 3 degrees, and for him it's perfect, and for me it didn't work.

Yeah.

It's just those little minute differences.

I think the wonderful thing that I've found about soft-set honey, or any honey, is that it's all edible. However it ends up, as long as it hasn't fermented, it's edible. I mean, even if it has, it's probably still edible.

Yeah.

So that's the great thing about working with a product like honey, is it's always got value there.

Oh, definitely. I can't believe I've forgotten to do this as well. Wait there one sec, you're not— don't put any honey on that toast.

Okay.

So it's really easy to get carried away and just sit there eating toast the whole time and talking to Alex, but I did want to do a little bit of uncapping. This video here of me uncapping with a fork has got a lot of views, so I thought I'd embed it here and give some of the honey to Alex. Now this frame is a little bit crystallised, but I quite like— I don't know about you, I quite like Crystallised honey.

Sometimes the texture is really nice, it's almost crunchy.

Like crunchy, yeah. And some people, some of my customers say, I only want the crunchy stuff, give me the crunchiest one you've got. It's much easier to do this when the frames are nicely warmed off the hive. I'm just gonna scrape a bit of honey off there. I like it when it goes crystallised like that.

Oh, look at that.

Oh, you got it?

There we go.

It's quite viscous.

Whoa, that's really viscous. So where's this stuff from?

So this would be from round here. This is like Welsh. Mmm. And that crunch. Nice?

Mm-hmm.

I do like it with a bit of wax in. Mmm.

Wonderful.

So I'm going to show Alex around the Forest Apiary. I've said that about 4 times now. We keep on getting distracted and like going in the making tea and eating toast and stuff like that. But it's really, really exciting. We'll have a full tour of the forest. So this, all of this here yesterday, this was literally done 24 hours ago.

Oh wow.

He came in and scraped everything down. And the idea up here is that there's a lot of, like, it's quite a big slope, just goes down that way. So all the water comes down and it was pooling here.

I see.

So he's put this up here. You'll like this. The idea here, Alex, what we're going to do is we're going to get loads of little plug plants, little herbs and—

Oh, lovely.

Like rewild it in a very—

That'd be great. You could, yeah, get a really nice bank of plants.

And then how cool, like imagine— oh, I'm just going to sit down, but imagine sitting there like that. You've not got to sit down, but with it all growing up. Be a nice little video.

Oh, absolutely.

And then here the idea is going to be I'm just going to have some pallets on the floor and I'm going to stack all my beehives, like supers and stuff, so that they're kept out of the rain, but they'll be secure and everything as well. But then when the cold comes and gets them, kills all the wax moth, Lovely. So that's the idea there and then yeah, we just—

That just reminds me of another question about wax moth.

Go on, next question about wax moth.

The process I currently use is I store my supers wet.

Yeah, I love wet supers.

And then I wrap them in cling film. It's a nightmare wrapping them up. It just takes ages and it's really awkward. But I realized if there's even one wax moth in there, wax moths thrive When there's no airflow. Yeah, they thrive like mad. No airflow, they thrive. And I've noticed that even wrapping them up after wet, there's still going to be wax moth in there and they're still going to chew through. I don't know whether I should have maybe stored them with airflow and not wrapped them up.

So all you need to do with that, and I've got some that are exactly the same as that, is just take overnight. Yeah, when you get a nice sharp frost, is just take them outside overnight. And that's why I built my thing outside. So then you get a sharp frost and it just kills everything. So it kills the adult wax moth, it kills the eggs, it kills any larvae, it kills everything.

Okay. So it doesn't necessarily need to be -20 or—

No, no, it just needs to be like -1, -2. And you can leave them out. If you've got somewhere like that where you can just leave them out for a few nights early on in the year, it makes a big difference. Yeah, I'll show you this. You'll like this one here. Have you seen the HiveWatch monitor that I got?

Oh! I've briefly seen.

It's pretty cool.

What's going on?

Well, I won't open it up. We've got a hive scale.

Oh, there's bees in there?

There's bees in there. Hive scale, got a little rainwater gauge. There's a solar panel. And then what I can do is I can go on the app and I can see how heavy it is.

Oh, can we look at the graph in a minute?

10 days ago it was on 36.3 kilos, and then 10 days later it was on 34.

What's going on here? Is it feeding?

Feeding. So you get like temperature going up and— sorry, you get A little bit of nectar coming in, a little bit of nectar going out in the summer for bits like that.

Okay.

Or they're eating something. But generally this time of the year, those little ones there, it's just rain. So it's only like— each one of those spikes there is like 100 grams. I've had so many people saying, do you recommend me to get something like that? And I say, well, it's like £1,000.

Yeah, every one of your hives.

Yeah, on every one of your hives. But to have one, if you've got 24 hives, really, really useful because you can see, you can track that temperature, you can track— the interesting thing we were talking about varroa, weren't we? If we go over here, we'll talk. We're talking about that Varroa and when's the best time to get your natural brood break. So I've just done a post recently where I track the coldest night of the year, the first one, generally around like back end of November or something. And then I fast forward 3 weeks and then that gives me the most likely point when I've got a natural brood break. The idea being that when you get that real cold snap at the beginning that I measure on the HiveWatch over there, It triggers to the queen, it triggers to the colony, like, right, we're stopping laying any eggs now. And then if you count 3 weeks on after that, and if she's still stopped, you've got your brood break. So coincidentally for us this year, it's the 12th to the 19th of December is ideal brood break.

Oh, great.

Sounds good for you, innit? It's tomorrow. I know, I know. Yeah, good timing.

Not bad. Yeah, that's— it's really interesting you doing these tests because obviously not everyone wants to. Lots of people don't have the time to do this stuff, so it's very useful. I mean, that's fascinating. I'm tempted looking at being able to look at a graft. And can you monitor that from anywhere?

Anywhere. But there's more. So it's got the weight, it's got the internal temperature, the external temperature, internal humidity, external humidity, rain, and then it gives you all the wind and stuff.

Is it a kit of stuff which would be easy enough for Anyone to do if they wanted. If anyone wanted to invest in it, they could, and they could— it wouldn't spend like— they don't have to make anything or do any wiring themselves.

There's a little bit, but it's pretty like— I'm terrible at stuff like that, Alex, and I managed to do it, so I think everyone else is safe.

Okay, that's super interesting. What have you noticed with regards to food stores in the hive going down in like relation to The weather, with the temperature.

So what I've noticed is it's just a really slow, gradual decline, but the danger months when it comes to feeding is March. Yeah, because I find when the colony's like it is now, there's hardly any brood at all, and then when they start rearing the brood, you get this curve go up of the amount of stores being consumed because of all the brood that's there. And you can go in in the middle of March and see a perfect colony, you heft it, there's loads of weight, you go back a week later and they are dead. So I think it's going to come into its own in March when I see this rapid drop. And I can say to people though, this is what I'm experiencing on my hive. So I think you should go and look at yours as opposed to going and buying it for yourself. But it's interesting because you said to me last time we met, we spoke about not being in competition. I know we spoke about this before, but I really took that on board in terms of doubling down on what I can do and what I can do well.

Yeah.

And setting up something like that and giving people an insight into something that they wouldn't necessarily want to risk on their own bees. I did it with them. I did a whole season without the queen at Sklooter.

Oh nice.

And most people wouldn't want to do that with their bees.

Yeah.

I thought if I do it and show people the pros and the cons and just educate and add value, then that can be, that can be my bit, innit?

As I said to you before, like, I always see the value in your videos as them being educational. It's where I went to when I didn't know anything about beekeeping. It's like everything that I know about beekeeping came from your instructional videos. So it's quite cool to hear that you have doubled down and you're now doing even more of that.

Yeah.

Because it's really It makes it accessible for people who are just starting. Yeah, very useful stuff.

You all know what it's like when you're producing your videos though, like you want to give people something new every time, a new experience or a new way of doing it, and I realized that I wasn't very good at that and I couldn't add in that kind of razzmatazz and that drama every time because beekeeping, it's not that dramatic, is it? It's not that dramatic really. Unless you get stung.

But you get in the face. Yeah, but I think you, you work out what you were really good at and you're doing more of that now.

Yeah, forward the same.

That's great.

I'll work on my thumbnails though, because that's another thing where I look at your, your thumbnails are so nice and I— it's a horrible word, I want to say plain, but they are. They're simple and plain and effective.

Um, there's nothing clickbaity about them.

Nope.

That it's simply showing a picture which describes what will be seen in the video without giving away too much.

Yeah, yeah.

It doesn't need to be crazy. I've realized that like there's been— YouTube has seen crazy amounts of overdramatized, over, um, sensationalized content and thumbnails and whatever. And people, a lot of people, I don't think, uh, a bit bored of it, puts them off it. Yeah.

And maybe, maybe the same with the AI. Like I'm very much kind of into my AI and stuff, and it, it makes people feel a little bit sick, I think, when you see an AI Lawrence that's just not quite right.

I'd much rather talk to a real Lawrence.

Well, yeah, I would as well. Should we go and open— not open a colony, but can I see where your bees—

where your— are there bees in there?

There's bees in all of these.

There's bees in those ones as well. A few Langstroths. And what's this?

That's like a little mini mating—

There's bees in there?

Yeah, I'll tell you what, if I jump in here, we can have a sneaky peek. Why not? So a bit of syrup left over. This is nice. So it's a mini mating nuc on a National Plus system with the clickable frames. I'm not going to go like wild and I'll just see if they're—

Getting stung in 5, 4. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I'll tell you what, one's just flown out. Oh yeah, I didn't— I wasn't going to break the seal if it was really, really stuck down, but it's not too bad. Listen, you can hear Oh, hello.

You know what, they are covering up. They're not super tight. Then they're not—

okay, that's not too bad. There we go.

I guess it's not.

You get a lot of people say, oh, you should never open your bees in the winter, and I agree, you should never open your bees in the winter. But say you needed to get in there to do something, you forgot to do your Apivar strip or something, opening it up like that, that's not done any harm to the bees. I've got one, one bee that's flown out, and then the temperature will come back up within minutes. So there's no— it's one of those things, people say you should never do it, and you shouldn't really ever do it. It's not as bad as people make out.

I'm yet to try any other strains of honeybee. I've always just used either naturally mated ones or the Buckfast ones that I've got from you.

Nice. How was the one that got on from the one you have from Richard?

Really good. Yeah, until I lost it.

Swarmed?

Swarmed.

It happens, doesn't it?

I don't know, it's so annoying because I had, well, I had the whole of the first season and most of the second season.

That's good.

But the queen that I now have in there is one of her babies.

And are they a little bit feistier or same chilled?

I couldn't tell you, it's all a blur from looking in the hives. But nothing crazy, like most of them are all requeened with your 20 25 Buckfast queens.

Are you going to be on for bumper honey crops then next year?

Yeah.

There's not a huge amount more to show. One of the things that I struggled with up here is we didn't have any water, so now we've got a huge roof and this is just full. It's really handy when it comes to rendering beeswax or cleaning poly boxes, just to have a big thing of water. And it fills up, that fills up in about 24 hours.

Really? You've got quite a bit of roof space.

It is a big roof. Yeah, all the way up to the top, isn't it?

And I guess you could drink it? If you needed to?

I wouldn't drink it, no. And then my favourite bit in it, we've got a little bar. We're going to do some pizzas. You like pizzas?

I love pizzas.

What's your favourite pizza topping?

My— well, oh gosh, my favourite pizza topping— I do love just a simple mozzarella and tomato sauce. Like, it's— if you go to Naples, the land of pizza, that is the classic one, and it's just Then you get to really taste the base. The base is a big part of a pizza, but I think a lot of the time people sacrifice a good base and then load it full of like too many toppings. But yeah, just normal mozzarella and tomato sauce. But I mean anything. I mean, if I'm making them myself at home, I'll definitely put tomato sauce, mozzarella, hot honey, chorizo.

Yeah.

Any sort of charcuterie product on top.

My favourite, we've got some pepperoni here. My favourite charcuterie to go on it is 'nduja.

'Nduja? I've never heard of this.

So it's 50% chillies, 50% pork and fat blended up.

Wow.

It's like the inside of a spicy chorizo, a spreadable salami. You just have these little dots of it.

Sounds incredible.

Are you hungry?

I'm really hungry. Well, I've really enjoyed today, by the way, because before all of this we were making— we were filming Stuff about. Yeah, I was basically just asking you a ton of questions about beekeeping, and I've really learned a lot about bees and beekeeping. So I'm glad that now we can eat some food.

Yeah, well, we did eat quite a lot of food when we did that as well.

We've just been eating today.

We've eaten all day. I love that this is my job. Right, I've prepared some dough, so we're going to make some pizzas.

It's risen up. When did how how and when did you make all this?

So I say made it. Yeah, I took these dough balls out of the freezer this morning. No, yesterday. Nice. I tried making dough balls, yeah, and Aaron Cornish, who will be watching this, who's a channel member who is like exceptional at making pizzas, will probably curse and say, come on, you can do better than frozen dough balls. But I'm a bit rubbish. But I took them out, defrosted them, and then I put them in the right place so they puffed up nice.

Nice.

Okay, I think the best way to do it is if we just both make our own pizza at the same time. I'm gonna get another—

Do you have another board?

I do, it's over here. So you were saying about your favourite pizza topping. Go on, tell me, or just tell me about your ideal pizza.

I mean—

That was a bit classy.

I think my favourite— I mean, it's got to have mozzarella on, it's got to have tomato sauce, and then something sweet or spicy. So like a jam or honey.

Really? You've had jam on pizza? I've never heard of that.

I've had like a pineapple jam just sprinkled on top. And it was so good. But like honey does a similar thing in that it's a sweet thing to go with the saltiness of the cheese. How is the dough?

The dough is good. The getting out of the dough is not good.

Nice. Well, we got it out. Not bad. My turn.

So every time I do pizzas, Joe, I see people and they say, and I know I've butchered that out there, but they say you've got to preserve the air. And every time I do it, it just turns into like a big slug pizza. But I'm going to try it. But then what I end up doing is giving up and using the rolling pin. It is good dough.

Oh, it's nice and fluffy. Yeah. It's that you can feel the air.

Like flinging it up.

Right, do you want to get some? Um, some spinning.

Can you spin it?

Can you actually— If I had more space.

Oh wow, that's pretty easy.

I need more space to— but there we go.

See, I do a bit of that, just stretching.

Oh yeah, no, that's probably the best way. Throwing it is like theatre, but I think it does the same thing, you know. But it's always best to stretch it more than you think. That's what I've learned, is that You can never really have it thin enough because you don't want it to be like a pie.

Right, so I go au naturel with the tomatoes, but San Marzano.

Lovely.

Straight out of Italy.

Are they chopped tomatoes?

No, it's a plum.

Oh wow.

Good amount of salt.

How are you gonna mix? Are you gonna just mash it up?

Just fork it up a bit.

Oh, I see. I haven't seen this done before.

Yeah, and it's just, it takes a little time to do it. But there's no mess.

Yeah, do it all in there.

So Alex came up here to do a day of filming and got here at 9 o'clock, and he drove all the way from Bristol. Yeah, absolute madman. Was it 4 hours?

Yeah, just under 4 hours. But you said, like, come up for the day, we can talk about bees, we can eat pizza. So like, that sold it to me.

It's quite a good day out. It goes quick. Me and Zane say this, you come up here, you start filming, And then before you know it, it's like 3. It's like, where's that day gone?

I think when you're spending time outdoors in a nice place, like, especially if you're with someone else as well, time flies by.

Right, so let's put that over there. I mushed up my tomatoes. We've got San Marzano tomatoes here, very nice. I just put some salt in and then I'm just gonna chuck it on. I nearly went into like cook mode there as if I knew what I was doing, innit?

As if you were presenting a cooking show. Which you are.

Kind of. Badly. So that's all I— that's what I do. I got, um, actually, let me just smudge it around a bit. It comes out surprisingly well though, doesn't it, for a sauce?

Yeah, it's a— normally what I do is I, I would do this, put some garlic in a pan, cook it down a bit, and then blend it with a blender.

That would be good.

But I mean, this works. It's good to see another—

Lazy method.

Another method, yeah, which I'm sure will work great.

So this is the bit where you reckon people get it wrong with pizzas.

What do you mean?

Well, because I know I get it wrong at this point by putting way too much on.

Oh, too much. I think so, but it kind of depends on, you know, how good the base is. If it's not a good base, then you're going to want to load up the toppings. But this base looks good.

It's a good base.

But also, I think when you make the pizza too heavy, it can then not slide on the peel very well.

Oh, that's true as well. Yeah, it gets sticky.

Oh yeah, yeah. Do you like cooking, Laurence?

I live for cooking, and it's one of those really sad things, yeah, where life's got a bit busy at the moment and I can't do the simple— I gave myself a break the other day. I took a break, and you know what I did during my break from work?

What?

I painted a wall, and that was my break, and I really enjoyed it because it just meant I could stop for a bit. And that's what I like with cooking, that you get to slow down and stop for a bit, innit?

If I can, the clock hits about 5 o'clock.

Yeah.

And if I have time, I will just switch off and just make food all evening, and then suddenly it's 10 o'clock and it's time for bed.

We got so much in common like that. So I was saying to Helen, my ideal day now would be something like going to like a market or something and saying, right, we're gonna cook this today. We're gonna do some steamed Chinese dim sum or something. I mean, go to a market and get the right meat and get the right sauces and come back home and like make it, and that's just that's the day. Well, mate, you're always welcome up here to come and just cook stuff.

Do you want me to help pull it?

It should be alright. It's a new peel. I lost my one. He broke it. Sorry, I lost my one. I had to get this from my neighbor.

Once it's look at that. How? No. Now I'm wondering how you're going to get it. Are you going round? Yeah.

Oh. Yes, first one.

He's done that one before. Yeah, I distract.

That was easy. That was so sabotage, wasn't it? But anyway, I burnt mine because Alex were talking about high.

I was asking Lawrence some questions to distract him from the fact he had a pizza in the oven, and he's gone and done it. He's burnt it.

Well, I'll hand the peel over to you, sir, and you can do your one.

Don't distract me.

No distraction. Oh, he's a put on nice. Wow! I've never I've never done it like that.

That was a that's a technique I've been refining. The knee pizza hold. I've seen pizza people do this. They put it on the thing and then they stretch it out. Give it a little. Nice. Oh, not quite as smooth as yours.

It's off though, isn't it? That's the thing. It's getting off the paddles the difficult.

Oh gosh! Look at that. One of— I've got like a massive— look how quickly it's expanding. Look at the big ball. There's a big air bubble trapped.

Shows you got the air in there though, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, this is hot. Yeah, that's how you want it. Oh wow, it is wild how you need that heat to—

To puff it.

Puff it. Yeah.

Nice.

There we go.

Yeah, there's not much competition there, is there? Alex is quite clearly the winner.

If I am the winner, then I don't know how or by how much, because look at it.

So it's quite clear that Alex has won here. Look at that, he's got his much more rounder than mine. And nobody sabotaged half of his pizza.

I don't know.

You go like this.

I don't know if we can really say either of them have won. I mean, how is a pizza? A pizza is meant to be round, right? I don't. Neither of these are round.

All right. What's more important is what they taste like. So I know Zane's not going to want hot honey on his. So if you want to put honey on yours, why not hot honey? Yeah. Good for hot honey.

Yeah. What goes into this? Okay. Apple cider vinegar, dried chili powder. And Welsh honey.

Welsh honey, yeah.

97% Welsh honey.

It's so funny the things you've got to have on the label like that, but it is, it's just, it's nice Welsh wildflower honey, Scotch bonnet chilli powder, really nice fruity apple cider vinegar. So I gave you a bottle of this, didn't I, a year ago?

It's all gone. It was so good. Like, I tried to make pizzas once or twice a week throughout the summer.

Friends like it?

Yeah, friends love it. I lived with some very hungry housemates. Last year. Did you want something? No, we don't. Sorry, non-honey one, non-honey one, and honey.

I think we should test Alex's first.

Oh, look at that! Yeah, go for it.

Let's go.

It's going to be hot, you're going to burn yourself.

I like it hot. I'm very happy with that. That is so thin, your middle.

Yeah, it's not bad. It's, um, quite, quite thin. The honey brings it from like Average to really good.

I agree. Anything with cheese.

Yeah, I think that's my favorite way to eat honey actually is dunked in cheese, dunked in honey.

I'm a big fan of cheese as well. Right, Zane, put the cameras down. Come on, you can have some pizza.

You haven't appreciated how good yours is though.

Yeah, no, because it is good. I'd eat it.

It's not bad.

Yeah. So we were getting to the point where I was just about to finish off by saying, look how much of my pizza is left and look how much of Alex's pizza is left. And it's quite clear who the winner was. It's quite clear who's got the most skills. So we bow down to Alex. So normally I end my videos talking about 14 Day Beekeeper or my queens or my nucs, but not today. There's no call to action. I'm off to go and finish cooking some pizzas.