In this No Nonsense Beekeeping episode, Laurence Edwards demonstrates a method to extend bee‑smoker burn time to four‑plus hours. He begins by reviewing his standard hessian‑sacking technique, which reliably yields 90 minutes‑2 hours of smoke, and explains why a longer burn is needed for extensive apiary work. Edwards introduces a commercially available slow‑burn wood briquette made from wood off‑cuts, noting its solid construction and central airflow hole. He details a step‑by‑step packing process: ensure proper ventilation in the smoker, lay a base of cardboard (or newspaper) to create a hot ember, add a modest amount of hessian for cool smoke, then break the briquettes into small pieces (using a hammer/chisel) and gradually introduce them while puffing to build a strong, continuous fire. He emphasizes the importance of airflow, avoiding over‑packing, and achieving a roaring ember before adding larger briquette chunks. A timed test shows that after 2.5 hours only about 25 % of the fuel was consumed, indicating a potential 4‑5 hour burn. Edwards notes downsides: the pine‑based briquettes produce resin‑y smoke requiring more frequent cleaning, and the fuel’s weight makes the smoker heavy. He also shares a personal anecdote of a broken smoker, reinforcing the need for robust equipment. Finally, he discusses practical apiary logistics—using one or two smokers per day can provide up to ten hours of smoke, sufficient for most inspections—and encourages viewers to try the method, while reminding them to subscribe.
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Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. As always, please check out honeybeebay.co.uk, an online beekeeping marketplace connecting buyers and sellers. Right, in today's video then, I'm going to show you how to get the longest possible burn time from your smokers. So you may have seen previous videos where I've showed you how to get a really good burn time using hessian sacking, and I really do like hessian sacking. It's a great material to put into your burners. Gives you a nice cool smoke and gives you a long burn time. However, I get through quite a lot of it, so I've been doing some experiments over the winter to see if I can combine hessian sacking, matting, with one other key ingredient to give me a super long burn time in my smokers. So before I go any further, what I think is important to say is if you've only got a few hives, hessian sacking is definitely my recommendation. Anything up to maybe 90 minutes to 2 hours burn time. you can get away with using hessian sacking. Start it off with some cardboard matting and that's really good. This video though is trying to get that absolute maximum length of burn time. So what I'm gonna do in this video is I'm gonna show you how to get this smoker started using the matting and I'll use a bit of hessian sacking with this new product that I've got here. It's readily available in the shops and most importantly it's cheap. I'll show you how to get the smoker started. I'll get it up, I'll puff it a few times and I'm gonna leave it in the background while I do all of my videos for today. Doing 8 videos in a row today, and I'm going to come back and I'm going to show you how long that smoker has burnt for. We're going to hope to get about 4 hours burn time out of it. Right, so you're all thinking now, what is this mystery product that's going to give us 4 hours burn time? I've kind of given it away, but it is a slow-burning wood briquette. So this is made from offcuts and dust from wood manufacturing facilities. They've Push it all together into a really solid clump, and I mean this is absolutely solid, and then there's a big hole down the middle to allow airflow. So I've done lots of experiments with this. I started off by trying to put some firelighters, some nice natural firelighters down the middle to try and do a slow release burn, and that didn't work because it blocked off all the airflow. I tried putting it in and getting it going with the smoker, that didn't work. And I have to say, I was really close to saying I've tried this product and it doesn't work, and I'm not going to use it as a smoker fuel. And as a last-minute exercise, I just tried something a little bit different, and that's what I'm going to show you in this video. And I tell you what, it works so well. I can't quite believe how well this mixture works in the smoker and just quite how long it lasts. So let's get going. I'm going to show you how to pack the smoker out and how to get this into a usable form to get it into your smoker to get it burning well. So the first thing you need to do is make sure that your smoker is set up correctly. Now I've just gone and bought myself a brand new Dadant and I've gone and bought myself a Rouchboy smoker as well, so I've got 2 high-end premium smokers on the way and I'll do the reviews of those in due course. But first thing to say with this is just make sure that you've got the air ventilation system in place. This one is just a cheap piece of metal, it comes out and it goes all over the place. You need to make sure that it's sitting properly at the bottom of the smoker to allow free movement of air. And then what you want to do is take some cardboard matting or anything, some newspaper would work here. What you're trying to do is build a fire at the base. This just gets everything going. You need a lot of heat to work these briquettes to get them up to the point where you can leave them. So what we're trying to do, build a really big strong fire at the bottom, let it go down a little bit, and then we'll start breaking the bits in. Just be wary when you're stuffing it in, you need to allow plenty of airflow in there, so you don't want to stuff it in too much because it just takes too long. So just put a little bit in like that. Get your blowers. So you just want to get that to a point where it's really smoking well like that, and then you can leave it and you can leave those embers to burn down and get nice and hot. Now when I showed you the hessian sacking video, we put a huge amount in there. We pretty much filled that up to the to the brim with hessian sacking. This one I'm just using a couple of pieces because it can be quite expensive, this, especially if you're using it once or twice a week doing numerous colonies. So then you just pop that into the smoker and that's where you want to get it. That is really hot and nice now, and that's going to burn whatever we put in there well. So don't try and start burning this briquette, it doesn't work. I've tried it. You need to build a good fire before you start burning the briquette. So in my experiments, what I did with this is I just broke this in half It's strange, it comes apart really easily. And all I did is I popped that in thinking this is going to give me the best burn time in the world, and it didn't work at all. It took me ages to try and get it going, but then worse than that, it just kept on going out. So it was a nice idea, I thought it would be quick, but it doesn't work unfortunately. So what I started doing is I started breaking it up, and it can be a little bit difficult to break up. You can use a knife or something, but all you want to do is just get something in there and just start breaking it up and putting pieces into there. You need to start breaking this up first, otherwise it won't catch. So this is what you're trying to do. You're trying to break it up into little pieces like that. It's quite difficult to break up. So I recommend a hammer and a chisel and just get yourself a good bag of these. Smoke pellets would work well as well. Right. So once you've broken up all of the little bits in there, you need to puff it and get it going. And this is where I went a little bit wrong on the other one, is that it didn't get going at all. So immediately there you can see the wood starting to catch and that's what you need. You need to build a really big, strong ember before we move on to the next step. So once you get it to the point where it's burning continuously like that, the matting has burnt down, the hessian sack's still there, but more importantly, all of that broken up wood has turned into a big glowing ember. You can start to put big chunks of this in, and that's what's going to give you the incredibly long burn time because it's so So dense and so slow to burn, it gives you an extended burn time. But you need to do this step first to get it into a roaring hot fire that's going to be able to burn this wood sufficiently and get it going to give you that long burn time. So give it a last few puffs, get that flame really nice and strong, and then you can start popping these bits in. Just make sure they fit. I'd pop the smaller one in first. And then the bigger one, and you want to get it so it comes right up to the top. And then again, we're back to puffing. Give this a good 30 seconds to 1 minute's worth of puffing. So what's so good about these blocks is that they come with the hole pre-drilled, but also they're just the right diameter to allow a small amount of air to circulate up the sides as well. So you can see that that's probably caught already. I'll give that a few more puffs and I'll get it going. And no matter where I put this, it's just coming towards the camera, so I do apologize for that. We'll get it going, and then what I'll do is I'll go away. I'm going to do all of my 8 videos, and then I come back later, and I reckon we're going to get 3 hours burn time out of this. So I'll give it a few more puffs, I'll come back in 3 hours, and I'll show you what's left. Right, so it's 2 and a half hours later now since I started off this video. And as you can see, the smoker's still going. It's got plenty of life left in it. I have actually broken the smoker today. So this smoker has lasted less than a year. My other Daden smoker lasted about 5 years before I ran it over with a pickup truck. This one, just for general use, has actually broken on me. So I'm gutted. Ordered the new ones already. But yeah, this is going in the bin after today. But as you can see, it's still firing on all cylinders in terms of the fuel that's inside it. And I'll show you inside in a minute. And it's not even started to really get through the fuel yet. It's probably gone through an absolute maximum about 25% of the fuel. So really impressive. So like I said, we've probably gone through about 25% of the fuel there. The rivet's broken on this now, so it doesn't sit properly, and it means that the bellows don't sit correctly where they should. I'm not going to bother fixing it. I could probably drill a hole and fix it together with some screws. Definitely not going to try and weld it. It's just not worth it for 15 quid. I'll just get myself another smoker. But for the purpose of this video, you can see that's worked really, really well. That's 2.5 hours and I've only used 25% of the fuel. So I finished my videos for the day. I've done 8 videos in that time, believe it or not, only short ones. But I've got to go home now because the battery's dead on all of my phones and the smoker has outlasted all of the phones and all of the videos. So I'm confident that you would get between 4 and 5 hours using that method and using the wooden blocks. But make sure you go through the method properly. Cardboard at the bottom, bit of hessian sack, break them all up, get a really good solid hot fire going, and then pop in that big piece of fire log. And then you'll get this amazing smoke. And it does, really does just go on and on and on. So I'm just going to get that smoker out of the way to finish the video off. Few things to say about that method though is that there are a couple of downsides to it. So one is you're burning— it is, is a pine-based wood, so it is a little bit resin-y, a little bit hard work on the smoker, means that you will need to clean it a little bit more regularly than if you were to use, I don't know, hay or something that's not as resinous. And the other one is that it can be quite heavy. It's already a big smoker and you're putting a big log inside of it, so it is a big heavy smoker. Especially once it's filled to the top like that. But if you're happy with both of those caveats, then you've got yourself a method there that can keep the smoker going for between 4 and 5 hours at a time. And if you're going from apiary to apiary and you're using something like the Abello Smoke Box or any sort of ammunition box to put the smoker in to transport it between apiary to apiary, you're only really going to need to go through at least one Maximum of two smokers a day. Two smokers a day will give you about ten hours of burn time, and I think that's plenty enough for anybody in any country. After ten hours of inspecting the bees, you're going to want to go home, put your feet up, and do something, anything else that isn't bee related. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. I hope it's useful for you, and I hope you'll try out some of the techniques at home. As always, please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. And I'll see you next time. Bye.
