I REGRET This SO Much! - Top 10 Beekeeping Regrets and What I Would Do Instead

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about my top 10 beekeeping regrets. Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I did top 10 beekeeping mistakes. People seem to like that video, so I'm going to change it up a bit and I'm going to do my top 10 beekeeping regrets. Things that are very specific to me, things that I've done wrong, and how I've moved forward and When I was writing the stuff down for this video, I was kicking myself over and over again. I was just thinking, why did I do that? That was so, so stupid. I'm gonna pass that advice on to you, tell you why I regret it. Hopefully you don't make the same mistake as well. Now, my first regret was not moving apiaries often enough. I covered this in the 10 beekeeping mistakes video, saying don't keep bees in your garden. But the first thing that I did is when I got them out of my garden, I moved them into some apiaries I've got 6 apiaries all around the local area for me, and I had them there for say 2 or 3 years. And there were some apiaries that were just fantastic, and there were some that were really not very good for various reasons. Some to do with access, some to do with people walking past, some to do with the fact that you just didn't get much honey from them. And I just wish early on I'd cut my losses and said, you know what, that apiary is no good, I'm going to move on. Because landowners are so willing to give you that space to put bees on their land, and I just think you need to realize when to cut your losses. I've started to do that now. I've moved on a lot of those early apiaries, and I've come down and I've found this apiary here. So this river apiary, this definitely wasn't one of my first 10 apiaries, probably kind of in the 10 to 15 bracket, and I've moved on from a lot of the other ones. And this apiary here is just superb, like you could not ask for a better apiary, and I wish I'd moved here kind of 4 or 5 years ago. So my regret is that I didn't move on soon enough to go and find the better apiaries And I'm constantly on the lookout to improve things. Right, my next beekeeping regret is buying a Suyenti polyhive. Oh my God, that is my biggest, biggest regret. How has that not got to number one? The Suyenti polyhive really, really drives me mad because it's just a really poor design. And I ordered, say, 20 of them to start off with, and they were fine. And people said that there were issues with them. I didn't really listen because I thought, well, you know what, my bees are doing okay in them. Not really seeing the issues that you're talking about. And then it got to a point where I had to do this big jump from 20 hives up to 100 hives. Had to make a decision which hive type to go with, and I was weighing up the Suyenti and the Abello. And I went with the Suyenti because they were so much cheaper. And I just look back at that decision now and I just think, what a stupid, stupid decision that was. This isn't like buying a car where every maybe 2 or 3 years or 5 or 10 years, depending how long you keep your car, you just go out and you get a new one. This is a lifelong investment. Like, I've seen them last 30 or 40 years, and I think the Suyenti hives are probably going to last me close to maybe 20 or 30 years. But I've stuck with them, and I just think back and I look at the price increases of poly hives and beekeeping equipment in general, and what I saved by going with the inferior hive has given me so much problem in the future. And I just wish I'd spent the money at the time, made the investment in the decent quality equipment, 'Cause it makes your beekeeping so much easier. So my regret is that I looked at the money before looking at the quality of the equipment, and I'm left with an inferior product that I have to use for a long, long time. My next regret, and everyone will fall into this trap, so it doesn't matter that you're watching this video and I'm saying, well, this is one of my regrets, you'll do it as well. Everyone does this. Trying to expand bees too fast, trying to expand your business or your hobby or the number of colonies that you own. Everyone does it, and bees are fantastic at multiplying in numbers. You start off with one hive, you soon realize you probably should have started off with 2. You then have 2, you see how easy that split is, and then the next year you think, well, I'll go up to 6 now. And then your target is 6, you end up with 10, and you think, wow, this is really, really easy to get the numbers up. And before you know it, you've got 30 or 40 hives if you've got the space. And I look back and I kind of think, well, I had 30 or 40 hives within a couple of years of starting beekeeping, Definitely didn't know what I was doing, made lots and lots of silly mistakes. I kind of think back to the time where I had about 120 hives and I took them all back to a central apiary at 950 feet to feed them all because I didn't want to go around separately feeding them all. And that was my driver for that decision. And I think I had 120 hives then, and that was the most foolish decision in the world. And that was all driven from the fact that I was doing it without having enough experience. I was trying to expand way too fast. So my advice to anyone else is just try and take it slow. The skill in beekeeping is where you learn the skills in beekeeping is trying to get through year by year keeping the hive numbers constant. Doesn't matter whether it's 2 hives, 3 hives, 10 hives, or 100 hives. If you can keep that number constant year on year, limit your losses going into winter, and then limit the amount of splits that you make, you massively boost your honey production. and you learn that really important swarm control technique, which is what beekeeping is all about. My next regret, and it kind of stems from the previous one, is focusing too much on honey production. I had it in my mind that I was going to move away from my permanent job, I was going to have 400 or 500 colonies, I was going to get loads of honey. Doing all the sums in my head— everyone will do this, bee maths is the best maths in the world— but you're kind of thinking, well, I've got a colony that's produced 60 pounds of honey. So if I have 100 colonies, guess how much honey that's going to produce for me? And you extrapolate these figures and you work them out in your head and you think, wow, there's good money to be made in beekeeping. But you don't really think about the actual logistics of it in terms of where you're going to get rid of that honey, how much honey you're going to lose when the bees swarm. And I just focused so much on trying to ramp up the numbers as much as possible, but focusing so much on getting as much honey as I possibly could. So the first couple of years I did this rapid expansion and said, right, no honey whatsoever, want to get my numbers up. Got up to like 120 colonies and then really focused on this massive honey production. And I just didn't factor in the time that it was going to take for me to extract all of that honey, to jar all of that honey, to sell all of that honey. My ambitions were kind of way too big for the time that I had available for it, and my focus was too much on the honey side of things. Where really, in terms of a hobby, in terms of my enjoyment and what I look back on now, it's that overall variety that I just find really, really amazing. Now I'm just looking behind the camera there because I've just seen a deer running past the camera. That was pretty cool. I can't believe that. Absolutely amazing. Right, another regret, and I did touch on this one in the beekeeping mistakes, is not future-proofing my operation. So I spoke in the top 10 mistakes video about buying an extractor that's bigger than the size that you need, because when you expand, You don't want to have to go out and buy it twice. But I'm going to expand that in terms of a regret for my own personal beekeeping. I've had numerous opportunities to go and buy a farm over the past 4 or 5 years, and I've not taken those opportunities as they have arisen because I haven't seen the business getting as big as it's actually got at the moment. My previous point was talking about the focus on honey, so I was thinking, well, I've got the place to extract the honey, it's a little bit small, but I can extract as much honey as I want and I can store it. I've quickly run out of space there, but as the business has evolved, I'm thinking, well, actually what I want to be doing more of now is I want to be employing people, so I need to have my own space. I want to be doing queen mating, so I'd like to have that closer to home. I want to be doing beekeeping experience days, and at the moment I don't have the land to be able to do it. So it's just trying to think ahead. My business plan wasn't as robust as it needed to be, and I didn't future-proof the operation across the whole board, and I really wish I had. My next one, and this is a very, very specific one, not buying cheap beekeeping jackets. Oh my God, the BB Wear Ultra Jacket is absolutely amazing, especially the version 2 that I've got. When I've got the Ultra Suit right down to the wrists there, limited amount of fabric at the end, I enjoy my beekeeping so much more now that I'm protected from the bees. I do have a follow-up point to this as well, but now that I'm not getting stung all the time, it does make inspecting the bees so much better. But I'm going to rewind a little bit further back than that. When I bought the cheap suits, they just didn't live up to the life of a regular user like a bee farmer. The zips broke, the seams came away, I was constantly getting bees in the veil, the veil would come up against my face. It really, really was an absolute nightmare. So I think when you're looking at beekeeping, looking at areas to spend money, to save money, one of the best things you can buy is a good top-quality bee suit. Protect yourself from beekeeping stings in the early days while you're learning how to keep bees properly, just so it remains a really enjoyable experience and you're not taking hundreds of stings every time you inspect your bees. So I said we're going to link onto the next one here, not focusing on stock improvement. And this is probably the biggest one I've got in here. I should have focused on this a long time ago. I've had some colonies that are horrible. And they produce so much honey. And because I've been focusing on the honey, I've thought, well, I don't want to kill that queen. I don't want to take that line away because they're sometimes producing like 100 pounds of honey. Well, I've got gentler colonies that are producing 20 or 30 pounds. And putting the correlation between those 2 things was really the bad thing to do. You can have gentle bees who produce lots of honey that are healthy. Doesn't matter whether they're ginger, doesn't matter whether they're orange, doesn't matter whether they're black. I never select for colour, and I just haven't really selected enough. So this year I'm really moving forward on this one, and I wish I'd done it previously because it would have made my life in a lot of instances so much easier. Focusing on that iterative year-in, year-out stock improvement, bringing in new genetics, good selected genetics to increase the diversity and the temperament and the excellence of your stock so that you've got Happy, friendly, healthy, prolific bees that make beekeeping a much nicer experience for everyone. You'll hear me rattle on about this one all the time, but it's not trying new things. Nothing annoys me more than when people say, don't do that, that's a stupid thing to do, or keep it simple, you're trying to tinker too much. And I just think, well, hang on, the first person who started to use thymol on their bees, They would have been in the same situation. They would have said, "Well, why are you using thymol? That's a really strange chemical to be putting onto your bees to fight varroa. Keep it simple. Let's use something else." But unless you innovate, unless you try different things, you never move forward. You never get that step change in what everybody's doing. So I just always say to everybody, don't dismiss anything because someone tells you it doesn't work. Try it for yourself. Learn from the experience. Enjoy and embrace that experience. And then when you can talk. Confidently about it from your own experiences, enlighten everybody else about it and let them go away and make a judgment on that for themselves. And then my final one kind of links into the last one as well, is not challenging the status quo. And you get this across so many beekeeping associations. I see it all the time. You see these pockets and they're so fixed on their views, and anybody else who's doing something different, they don't like it. So you quickly fall in line with everybody else's expectations. whether it's not treating for varroa, not bringing in imported queens, looking for that dark bee, all of your bees must be dark or you're not welcome here. I just wish everybody would challenge that status quo because it's so fixed in people's mindsets. And I just think some people do it without really understanding why they're doing it or what the drivers are for doing it. And I've made my point really clear previously on treatment-free. I think what people are doing with treatment-free bees is really, really good. And I do look at them and I think what you're doing is for the greater good of everybody. And I understand if everybody did it, that we could move forward towards hopefully a treatment-free bee where you don't have to put chemicals, harsh chemicals into the hive to treat for varroa. But some of the stuff about darker bees, I just don't really buy into it too much like that. I look at what they're doing on the continent. I look in Germany and what they're doing in Italy, and they just have such good quality bees and they're hybrids. And what you have over here is a dark bee. It's not a species of bee. It's not something that needs to be protected. It's a hybrid of a bee that's quite dark. So you're never going to get to a point where you're 100% pure. And I see a lot of these beekeeping organizations, they send it off for testing and they say, wow, my bees are 98% pure bee. And I think that's fantastic, but that's all you're really chasing here. Is it a good honey producer? Is it a healthy bee? Does it have a nice temperament? They seem to just be selecting to try and get as close as possible to this 100% pure bee. that doesn't exist, that you cannot exist because of all of the imports that have happened throughout the years. So it's just going back to challenging that status quo, understanding why people are doing something, and trying to work out for yourself whether that's something that you are interested in doing. This one personally is not really a regret for me because I very early on thought, I'm not going down this line. Local beekeeping association wants to do one thing. I've tried it, I've tried their queens. I'm not massive fans of them 'cause I didn't think they were prolific enough for producing as much honey as I wanted. So I went down the Buckfast route. And I found the Buckfast root considerably better in terms of that honey production. So not so much of a regret, but an observation of what's happened over the past few years. So that's it, that's my top 10 beekeeping regrets. Hopefully you found some useful information in there. 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.