I Came SO CLOSE To Giving Up On THIS!

So I'm here today with Liam Dillon, the owner of the boat and star of Great British Menu. I hear you've got a problem finding one of your queens. We are going to get in there and I guarantee you, Liam, we're going to find your queen today. Just quickly though, tell me about your bees. Why did you start beekeeping and what are you up to?

I always wanted bees on the land because we've started to grow our own vegetables and extend the land here. And I got let down badly by a beekeeper who wouldn't put bees on the land. So I thought, sod it, I'm quite stubborn, I'll do it myself. So that's where it started and that's what we're up to.

Very good. I'm so excited that you've invited me down here today because like I'm a beekeeper first, but I'm very much a foodie second. So I'm so excited with your restaurant and seeing your chickens and your pigs and everything. And I understand you're going to make me a little bit of food later on as well. So I'm excited. Right, should we go and have a look at your beehives then and try and find this queen?

Awesome. Question mark.

Yeah, question mark.

I've never found the queens in these.

So should we start at this side?

Yes, do it.

I'll be on it. I'll work my way in. I generally don't use a hive tool if I can get away with it. So we've got some capped brood on this one, but nothing on that side. I just want to kind of go through and try and find first where the brood is and try and see eggs. That's always my first thing. If I see eggs, then that's like 90% of it done.

Yeah.

So this is what I'd always try and look for, a bit of capped brood, some eggs. And then once I find that frame, I'll have a look through and see if I can find the queen. Now I expect the queen on this one here, like, it's well mated. So you can see, like, it's a nice pattern. It's not like all spotty all over the place. So pretty decent queen in here.

Well, that's the thing as well. They're just, they're going mental. The queens are strong. I don't know if it's just, but it scared me in the middle of the year when it was just, there were Swarm in, the pack there was. I didn't want to go into it because how bad it was. I was trying to clean it up every time I went into it.

So when they swarmed, they were obviously chucking out loads of virgin queens and the queens have gone out. But the queen here, you'll have one queen in here now and she's definitely mated. You can see from the brood pattern. You'll find with swarms you can get issues where they don't mate and then you'll have lots of drone brood and you'll have issues. But this is a healthy colony with good brood. You'll be able to get this one through the winter. Definitely got to find this queen though, haven't we?

I've been trying for a while.

I do like finding queens. I take it personally, so we could be here for hours trying to find this queen.

I just want to see it, to be honest, because it, you know, if it is a— I don't know what type of bees they are or what, you know, if the queen looks very similar size.

So the queen's, yeah, maybe like 25% bigger. You'll see when she's marked, it'll be a lot easier.

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure we'll find her though, because they're not too runny, these bees, at all. Sometimes you pick them up and they're just impossible to see anything because they're running so quickly over the frame. These are pretty chilled out bees. We've got to find the queen.

I've never seen them in these 5 boxes. I've never seen—

I can easily spend like 30, 40 minutes looking for a queen, because sometimes when you're doing your swarm management, you need to find her. There's no other option, so you just have to take your time. And sometimes it's— you have to put everything back together again and give it 5 or 10 minutes and then just come back.

Really?

Yeah, it can take so much of your time. Sometimes I like to jump a frame. Like, see, we've not pulled this frame out here yet, so she could Just be hiding on this frame by the wall.

Is that the front of the old top? Is it this side?

On that side?

No, no, no. Just saw the bum go over the over the edge.

Yeah. If you have you got a spare brood? Is that an empty hive over there?

No, no, it's not.

You got any brood boxes? Empty brood boxes?

I don't know. Okay.

I'm going to show you a little trick you could use if you had one empty brood box. You can shake them all through and it's.

Right, okay.

And then it's pretty much—

Sorry, I do have a brood box.

Oh, you do?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, we could do this. That'd be quite a good one to do.

Where are we going?

Your side.

Over here.

Okay, cool. So what we're going to do is we are going to take— what we need is some brood. We're going to put some brood down there with no bees in there.

Yeah.

And then we're going to lift up every single frame and we're going to shake them through the queen excluder. So what that means is that every single bee is going to want to go down back to where all of the brood is, but the queen can't get through the excluder. So it's a really kind of like a pretty much a foolproof way of finding where your queen is. Right, so the way you need to do it is, so we want to find some open brood. So that'll do. So I'm just going to shake off the bees.

Mm-hmm.

Into there. You need to get every single bee off. And you can see in there we've got some eggs, we've got some larva. I'm gonna put that in that box there, and that one would be a good one as well. Have you done this before, Lewis?

I have watched one of Laurence's videos when he did— when he's done this before. I did have a go, I got myself in a right mess, so I, um, just had to call in the pro to do it.

So see there? Yeah, that, that is just classic where she'll be, where she could be hiding.

Do you want to pull that off?

Yeah. You need to get it off. If we get that in there again, just don't want to damage her if she is in there. You can see there, like, that is just classic where she would be. So again, I'm just going to just shake those off, just shake the bees out of there.

To be fair, there's There's been different times in the year where they were pinging the—

Oh yeah.

You know, but I don't know whether it's the queen that changed or swarmed and the next one that's kind of been mated is calmer or, you know, but—

So you get the period where there's no queen in there and then it is that period where they become like a little bit aggressive. They can become really aggressive. So that's the final one I'm going to shake through.

Okay.

I'm just going to shake that off. So again, you can see you've got open brood down there. So you set that up.

I'll put that just on a lid if that's what you want to do.

Yeah, lid's fine. All I'm going to do, I'm just going to put one of these queen excluders underneath, then the queen can't get out.

Yeah. Then do you want a super?

Just need, yeah, a super would be perfect. So then what you need to do is you need to shake every single bee from that colony over there into this box here, and it's like chaos. And after about like kind of maybe 5 or 10 minutes, you should find the queen. And then we put it all back together again. Like some colonies you would never do this on because they're just too aggressive, but these are really chilled. And it's worth just still having a little look to see if you can see the queen. But you just want to make sure you're getting them all in. Again, what's so important here is just making sure that there's no place for the queen to kind of hide out on any of these frames. But you'll see if you go in there now, you see what the bees are doing, they're all frantically trying to get kind of down into the dark and they're being attracted down to that brood. So keep an eye on that there because you might— she might become like a parent quite quickly. Right, so then you can hear the roar still over here, but you can't hear the roar over here, so I think she's still over here somewhere. And at this point, you just need to kind of try and get them all in. And what I like to do is just make sure there's— you're not going to get any crushed bees on here. I just like to pick the box up off the floor, not shake it in, but just put it in like that. And then I'll have a look. If you have a look on the floor, she could be on there. They do like to hide out on floors.

It's turning into a challenge for you, Laurence, is it?

It is a real challenge, isn't it? Yeah, I'm gonna be gutted if we can't find her. Sometimes though, you— there's no queen in there. Sometimes you just genuinely can't find her. I've never done this and not found her, so— Famous last words. Yeah, just have a little double check, make sure she's not— there's nothing weird on there. So I can't see her on here. I'm going to shake this in as well.

See, they'll always— the queen will always be the same size depending on what breed, or will it be— it could be the coloration that makes it hard to find, or just the—

Yeah, you can get different size queens, you get different coloration. They're just quite shy. They don't like— you think inside a beehive it's pitch black. Yeah, so they like to be like in a dark place. So you'll probably find that they're like under the bottom of one of these bits here, and it's like a bit of a game of cat and mouse. See how they're going down now? They see if we keep on doing the wall. See how yeah, like there's hardly any bees now on the wall, is there? Because they're thinking, right, we can't cluster up on the wall. We're just going to try and get down. And then as they go through the queen excluder, the easier it becomes to find her.

There you go, there you go, there you go. She's there.

Yeah.

Hey.

Liam's found it. Right, there you go. Eagle-eyed Liam. Quickly, if you hold this, because what happens— I've done this so many times before where you find her and then you lose her again. Right, so paint.

What do you think about her?

So nice. She's a really dark little queen. She is just there.

So you can see why she's hard to find.

Yeah, so very similar to the rest of them. You can see just a slightly longer abdomen. Just want to make sure she doesn't go away.

She's got her head down.

Right, so all I ever do with marking queens is I make sure the pen's not leaking loads of paint out, and I'll just pin her down there. Got a nice little white dot on there like that.

Lovely.

And that's it, we found our queen. So if you just take that pen, what we'll do is we'll set this brood box back up. Where's she gone? There she is.

Yeah.

So the easiest way to do it is if I lift this up and you put the brood box underneath back on, I'll just pop the queen back in and then all the bees will go back in them.

Right.

Wow, it's so heavy. You can see underneath all the bees clustering up underneath there.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Just going to pick her up, pop her back in there.

She's in.

And then you'll see, bloody hell, got all the bees. So they've all wanted to go underneath like that.

Awesome.

So Liam massively saved the day there, saved my blushes. That could have been very embarrassing, couldn't it? I guess the good thing there is that it proves that that method does work. Like, the bees are attracted down. You saw they all went down into that queen excluder. They want to get through it, and only the queen cannot get through. I spent the rest of the day with Liam at the boat uncapping frames, extracting honey, and tasting some incredible food. If you want to watch these videos, head over to Liam's YouTube channel now. The link is in the description of this video.