How Can You Improve Your Beekeeping

I've done some really, really cringe things on my YouTube channel, terrible beekeeping, but every single year I like to think I get a little tiny bit better. In this video, we're going to talk about how to improve your beekeeping, and specifically we're going to talk about how Richard can improve his beekeeping. So Richard's kind of like up here, top quality professional beekeeper, but there's always things that we can do to improve. Isn't that right, Richard?

I think definitely, yes. You know, and every, every, if every day is not a learning time for you, there's something definitely wrong. I mean, my biggest thing for next year is pre-planning to date rather than just where I think I should be within the season and just running with it. Other than that, I'm not going to change anything.

Right, so Richard has reached 99% perfect. He's got 1% to go. Let's cycle it back a little bit though. So let's pretend this is 15 years ago. And your beekeeping in a certain way. Talk me through some of the things that you did wrong and like kind of how you fixed them and how you moved through that beekeeping journey.

God, there was loads wrong. So trying to produce a wage and have to pay a mortgage was the key driver. Probably not everybody's key driver and everybody wouldn't think that's right, but it was because it was my living. To reduce your winter losses was major, and the biggest single thing that I've done is hygiene. I read a few books on Brother Adams, Buckfast Bees, and the amount that they did, and I thought, well, if I can just adopt a little bit of that, I'm going to be halfway there. I'm not all the way there, but I don't have the force that Brother Adams had to work with. So I do what I feel is necessary. Just doing the bits I've done, it's made a massive difference to what I look at each day.

So we know now Richard is like very fussy when it comes to cleaning. You see everything's perfectly clean, everything's dipped, nothing gets used twice. I'm guessing that wasn't always the case?

No, no, no, for sure. I mean, I didn't have the knowledge and I didn't have the equipment to do it. Yeah, I mean, perhaps I just didn't have to deal with that, but I did have AFB and that sort of gave me the sort of kickstart really to go down the cleaning route. And since then we've never had a case.

And how long ago was that?

That was about 14 years ago, I want to say. Probably less actually, 12.

So go on, tell me about the AFB then. What happened? How did you identify it? How did you deal with it?

So I had AFB not that long after I really started commercial beekeeping. Bought some equipment, didn't sterilise it, bred it myself. I sort of knew something wasn't right with the colonies, just the way the bees didn't sort of go on and produce, not honey, but just other bees. And then obviously we were found by the bee inspectors. And that year actually was a big headache because it had come to the end of— no, it had come to the start of May. We should be putting the supers on. And the bee inspector at the time, Frank, he said to me, he said, you can't put them supers on the hives. He said, 'cause you don't know where they've been, the risks are high. So we had to dip the whole lot. So we melted them all out, dipped the whole lot, put them back on the hives, which point it was too late. And most hives swarmed that year.

Hmm.

Honey production was really poor. So I thought, really, I've shot myself in the foot here. Lucky I was employed at the time. But from that year on, the sort of pluses have just been tremendous. Just starting with new stuff, I mean, you might think at the time it's a lot of hassle to do all that work. The more you go on and look back, you just know it's the right decision.

And you're seeing kind of like the benefits of that now. Obviously the colonies here look fantastic, and you directly link the two?

Oh, 100%. Yeah, you know, and if you read Brother Adam's books, I mean, they even went to the extreme. Whatever the bees weren't covering in a brood box in the spring, they took out, they stripped out, they put new back in, and you can see probably why their beekeeping was so easy.

And then in terms of like your management, how, how has that evolved over the years? Has it always been the same, or, or do you think you're a better beekeeper now, and do you see the benefits from being a better beekeeper? Like, how's that transitioned throughout the years?

I don't really know how you judge a better beekeeper. I spend most of my time on my own. I can read a hive better than I ever used to, probably without doing the inspections I used to. So I would never inspect a hive on 7-day intervals unless I thought there was a swarm problem, because I think the more inspections you do within a hive, the more it disturbs them.

Okay.

And you can create swarming, I think, via that. A lot of people would disagree, but you have to think, if I took the roof off your house, would you like it every 7 days?

So it's, it's minimal intervention, kind of outside of the main swarming period?

Yes, but you still must check for the key points, you know, disease, queen right, stores, because you'll still lose colonies. But then you have to question how long you spend in that hive. We know they're queen right if we can find eggs. Do we actually need to find the queen, go back and forward, find, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, I would say sort of 5 minutes is plenty.

Yeah.

You know, unless there is a job that really needs doing and you have to spend longer at that point. But just remember, as soon as you took off the hive, the lid off the hive, That bees, it's not a natural state to be in.

Yeah. What are you like at finding queens?

No good.

I tell you what, I shook swarmed a whole apiary and Richard came and helped me, and we were looking for queens and finding queens, and Richard's laughing here, and my job was to hold the frames whilst the queen was being found. So we found the queen, and then Richard would do the shaking, and then he'd say, right, give me the queen. And I think it happened at least 3 or 4 times, didn't it, where I had the frame with the queen on it and then we lost her. And like, I can't even like keep a queen on a single frame. And that colony did get through with the one that we never found that queen on. So your eyesight's going, is that a problem?

Yeah, you need glasses.

Need glasses. And you see through the veil okay?

Yeah, no, it's all fine.

Yeah. And then what advice would you give to kind of like maybe like a new beekeeper, 1 or 2 years, like a little bit of your wisdom in terms of how they should manage their colonies to maybe make it easier or better or better honey production? Like what What little nuggets have you got?

I think it's learning to read the bees and always being one step ahead. If you've got a hive of bees in the spring that's got 7 sealed brood frames or 8 sealed brood frames, you know within the next 14 days, or probably less, 10 days, that that colony is going to double. So at that point you think, well, do I need a super? And it's no good the afterthought because it's too late and they've already gone out the front. So it's just being ahead enough, but not being too far ahead.

It's really good advice, and I guess it kind of goes in tandem with having the equipment next to it. So you're not kind of looking at that and thinking, right, I've got 8 sealed brood frames, so I need to get some boxes on. And then you think, right, where's the glue? I'm going to start making up some boxes.

Well, you'll never ring Thorns in the middle of June and want to get your kit because they either, one, will have a backlog, and number two, they might not have it anyway because everybody's been and done it before.

Right, so in terms of things that you see other people doing that you cringe at, and I know you cringe at some of the things that I do.

I always—

I'm not doing those things anymore, but go on, what's some really bad beekeeping practices that you think we should avoid?

Well, I don't think I should say because the only other beekeeper I have much to do with is you.

You must see it though. You hear people talk about doing different things. I see a lot of stuff in terms of real low intervention beekeeping, you know, put a nuc in a beehive and don't go back for 3 years.

I don't think that should happen. I don't think that should be allowed. It is allowed and people do it. I think you're just a big risk to everybody around you. Yeah, no, there's no way I would even consider that.

Well, I've just had about 5 minutes brainstorming with Richard there on things that he could do to improve. And like I say, Richard is definitely way up there already. So Richard is doing all of these things already. There is tons for me to improve on though. I do, I look back on some of the videos and I think that was really bad practice or that was really bad management of my bees. What I would recommend to everyone though is go and find yourself your very own Richard. Find someone who you can talk openly with and someone who's not like completely set in their ways. Richard's a very strong character and he's got a strong opinion, but he's happy to discuss different and alternative ways of doing things and is a real good like sounding board in terms of like new processes or new procedures or different inventive ways of doing things. And he'll never say like, oh no, definitely don't do that, that won't work. He's very much of the, oh, give it a try and see how they go. So if you can find yourself your very own Richard, it will really, really improve your beekeeping because that's how it works, isn't it? People absorb knowledge and they build knowledge. Richard's got 3 generations of beekeeping knowledge that's been passed down to him, and now hopefully he's passing a little bit of that knowledge down to me as well.